By Devirupa Mitra, IANS
Bogota : Colombia will soon have a sophisticated software programme to prepare, implement and monitor its national budget, thanks to an Indian software company.
From his office inside the finance ministry building opposite the Colombian Presidential Palace in Bogota, Subramanian Ravishankar is leading a global team of 350 Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) employees working exclusively on this major government project.
“It will be the most sophisticated budgetary system to be installed in the world,” Ravishankar told a visiting IANS correspondent, explaining that it will eliminate “90 percent” of paperwork in the ministry.
TCS, one of India’s leading IT firms, bagged the project in 2005.
“In terms of actual cost, the order is not the largest but it will certainly be the most complex system executed by an Indian IT company,” said 33-year-old Ravishankar, who relocated to Bogotá from Minnesota two months ago.
His team is not just multinational, including 40 Colombians, 70 Uruguayans and 25 Argentinians, but also based across time zones from Chennai to Montevideo and Bogotá.
The system would be more than just automate tasks for the ministry. Its most important job would be managing the national budget.
“The current system in the ministry is only 15 percent automated, which allows tracking, but not planning, forecasting and presenting the budget,” he said.
Funded by the UN Development Programme and World Bank, the implementation of the project is a major government priority, which considers it another major step in combating corruption and bringing transparency in the system.
In 2001, Transparency International (TI) termed Colombia the seventh most corrupt country in the world.
Since then, the country has steadily improved its ranking and the 2007 corruption perception index of TI considers it less corrupt than Brazil, China and India.
The system, once fully implemented, will automatically allocate the budgets of difference ministries and departments based on a series of rules that had been decided in the Colombian parliament.
“So, if say, the ministry of defence is not utilising its allocation, then it can be automatically monitored and corrected from the finance ministry online,” Ravishankar said.
The Indian software engineer, of course, has to deal with several challenges, even as he keeps to the delivery deadline of Jan 1, 2009.
“In such a major project, there are so many stakeholders within the government. So, extracting information on any problem is a major test.”
Just two months since arriving in the mountain-ringed Colombian capital, Ravishankar has to also cope with a language handicap, having to cope with a translator along his side all the time. “My Spanish is slowly improving,” he said.
Though the Colombian government was among its first clients, two-year-old TCS Colombia has an impressive list of clients from the private sector, including the country’s biggest telecommunications operator Telefónica, largest coalmine Cerrejón and principal commercial bank Bancolombia.
Reciting the name of the clients certainly brings a gleam into the eye of TCS Colombia’s country manager Gonzalo Rodriguez, who was the first employee of the newborn firm in 2005.
“For one year, I ran the company from my home, before we got this new office,” he said.
Situated in a commercial tower, TCS’ office is only a reception area, a couple of cubicles, a conference room and a few enclosed rooms – certainly not reflecting that it has nearly 400 employees.
“We don’t need the space, as our engineers are mostly servicing our clients on the field,” Rodriguez said, adding that nearly half of them are based in Uruguay and India.
With an experience of over 35 years of working in technology firms in IBM, Rodriguez was fulsome in his praise for the skills of Indian engineers.
“See, Colombians are really hard-working, but the way the Indians work is amazing. They do not seem to have any problem working overtime or on holidays.”
The Colombian firm is part of TCS Iberoamerica business unit, which has a presence in 14 countries in South and Central America, as well as Spain and Portugal.
“Our plans are to enter the BPO (business process outsourcing) market, consolidate our presence in banking and telecommunications sectors and to keep pace with TCS’ global growth rate of 40 percent,” said Rodriguez.
Interestingly, Rodriguez has never travelled to India, but hangs a large political map of the country situated 15,000 km on the other side of the globe on the wall of his Bogotá office.
“I look at it and think about the country. I like to look at the name of the cities and think about the hundreds of people who are working with us.”
(Devirupa Mitra can be contacted at [email protected])