Role of Universities in IT Education in India

In the wake of the information technology (IT) revolution, the paper describes the changing role of universities to promote IT education in India to generate qualitative and competitive manpower in the face of the mushrooming of private institutions in the field of IT. The rapid growth of private teaching initiatives reflects inadequacies of the public educational system to the needs of the emerging IT environment, especially considering the high prices charged by private training. It is pointed out that the emerging knowledge society and the economy are not going to be based on IT alone, but will depend on the development of both IT and basic research in domain areas. Any policy on IT education should ensure that basic disciplines are not ignored. Universities should develop new and innovative programmes for students from different basic disciplines to give training for high-end jobs. To promote IT education a new innovative concept of earning while learning has recently been introduced. Some of the initiatives started by Delhi University to modify/improve course programmes for IT education are highlighted, looking at the needs of the industry.     

Networks of Science and Technology in India: The Elite and the Subaltern Streams

The paper investigates the structure and functioning of the science and technology (S&T) system in India as it has evolved in the post-independence period (1947 onwards). The networks of entities involved in S&T actions, the paper argues, can be categorised, in terms of adopted approaches to agenda and priority setting and accounting for actions, into two streams. The origins and expansion of the two streams are traced. One, the ‘Elite’ stream (high profile and visibility linked to big industry), adopting what the paper has generically termed the ‘Nehruvian’ model of development, is shown to have emerged as a dominant network. The other socially powerful ‘Subaltern’ stream (less visible, closer to ground realities and linked to village and cottage industry), adopting the ‘Gandhian’ model of development, still remains dispersed and outside the consideration of high-level decision-making bodies. The paper stresses the importance of moving the support and attention from the dominant stream to efforts that attempt a synthesis between the dominant and the subaltern.     

Driving Force for Sustainable Development: Principles of Harmony and Balance

This research focuses on the driving forces of technology development and the interactive relationships between technology and the factors that promote economic development and social progress. It aims at presenting a basic theory for sustainable development, as well as a foundation for decision-makers for drawing up an integrative strategy. As such it is an attempt at how to create harmonious relations between human progress, technology, economy, and society.     

Learning Organisations: The Process of Innovation and Technological Change

In the present scenario of globalisation, knowledge has become the prime factor of production for competitive advantage. This calls for acquisition and utilisation of knowledge for innovation and technical change on a constant basis, which is only possible in a ‘learning organisation’. Innovative activities of a learning organisation are influenced by three main factors: (1) internal learning; (2) external learning; and (3) the innovation strategies decided upon by the enterprise management. An assumption has been made that, particularly in developing countries, absorption and adaptation of technologies, i.e. indigenisation, take place through a process of ‘learning by doing’. Taking this into consideration, this paper focuses on a few case studies carried out at NISTADS, New Delhi, India, on small enterprises in the formal as well as traditional sectors, highlighting the learning process in an organisational context and how it brings in innovation and technological change at enterprise level. The study demonstrates that the learning environment in an organisational context is an indispensable process to be innovative and building up capabilities for technological change. This in turn also calls for strong networking of the enterprises with academia, R&D institutions and other enterprises, to create knowledge clusters. This builds up a strong case for a network approach of learning organisations not only at the regional level but also at the cross-cultural level for constant innovation and technical change.     

Entrepreneurial Innovations in Gujarat

Gujarat has been identified as an enterpreneurial hub of India, primarily due to the innovative behaviour of Gujarati entrepreneurs. This has led Gujarat to become known as a model of enterpreneurial innovations. This model of enterpreneurial innovations has been developed from a study of entrepreneurs in a variety of industries from the region and several industrial clusters of enterprises in Gujarat. The study points to the transformation of many communities, particularly the Patel community, which was traditionally an agricultural community, into a manufacturing class and a new emergent in Gujarat’s industrial scenario.     

Entrepreneurial Spirit of the Indian Farmer

The paper highlights entrepreneurial skills of Indian farmers, informal channels of communications in the socio-cultural setting of the village, tacit knowledge and factors responsible for the adoption of floriculture in open field conditions. It illustrates that the diffusion of new technology in a farming community is dependent on culture-based communication and the tacit knowledge-driven entrepreneurial spirit of a few.     

Constructivist Management of Knowledge,Communication and Enterprise Innovation: Lessons from Indian Experience

Prime movers of enterprise innovation are inside the organisation. The enterprise NIIT, studied in this paper, tells us how elicitation and recognition of knowledge and its contents set an enterprise on the move. Recognised knowledge is actionable. Each act of recognition is an addition to knowledge content, and such additions took place in NIIT through acts of communications and self-searching. These contents form a large collage that cannot be strewn into a single novelistic episode. Perspectives and context, motives and suggestions render to each member of the enterprise different disjoint appearances of knowledge. There are thus many knowledge systems and multiple narrations, each with small episode-like finality. Enterprise innovation is achieved not through any grand episodic integration of all knowledge contents, but by constructively eliciting further new contents of knowledge, and encouraging acts of communications and discourses on this new knowledge. Constructive management of knowledge and communication towards enterprise innovation has thus been defined. Through such constructive management, NIIT enabled itself innovationally and empowered its members in eliciting knowledge and acting communicatively. A critical feature of knowledge work is that it requires multidisciplinary expertise and mutual learning in order to achieve a complex synthesis of highly specialised state-of-the-art technologies and knowledge domains. A convivial work culture and a culture of communicative acts enable sharing of the non-informatised yet recognised contents of knowledge.     

Regional Specialisation for Technological Innovation in R&D Laboratories: A Strategic Perspective

The present paper attempts to highlight the strategy of regional specialisation for technological innovation in R&D laboratories. The paper makes a proposition that regional specialisation should be recognised as a strategic initiative for technology development in R&D laboratories. The rationale for this strategic initiative has been substantiated with the help of illustrations from the cases of technology development efforts taken up in different laboratories in the country under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India. In this direction, CSIR and other centres of excellence have played a pioneering role in the development of various industrial clusters and artisan concentrations in different parts of the country. The implications of adoption or otherwise of this strategy initiative for technological innovation in R&D laboratories have been discussed.     

Negotiating and Understanding Information Systems Requirements: The Use of Set Diagrams

A major contributor to the failure of information technology-based systems is the problem of understanding user or customer requirements in the initial analysis and requirements identification stage of development. This paper identifies and describes an approach to help overcome some of these problems, particularly the mismatch or understanding gap between the customer and the developer. The approach is intended to be used at the early stages of requirement determination and introduces techniques from operational research into the process. In particular set theory and Venn diagrams are used as a way of graphically representing the relationships and gaps in understanding that may exist. The benefit obtained from the use of the technique is partly in the graphical representations themselves but mainly in the dialogue and negotiation that result from the construction of the diagrams. The technique has been developed in a research study of retail organisations’ use of information technology in the UK and an example case study from the sector is used to illustrate and discuss the technique.     

There’s More to Information Systems Development than Structured Approaches: Information Requirements Analysis as a Socially Mediated Process

Information systems (IS) development approaches are considered with particular reference to those aspects of the process most concerned with the determination of information requirements. The majority can be classified as adopting a unitary, objective perspective. This perspective fails to recognise the interpretative, inter-subjective nature of information and the importance of informal as well as formal data-processing systems. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion on socio-technical and soft approaches to IS development by providing a contrasting perspective on information requirements analysis as a process which is socially mediated. A framework is developed which places information requirements analysis in the context of strategic IS development. This locates social communication networks centrally in this process and raises implications for the practice of IS development, and of information requirements analysis.     

VSE: formal methods meet industrial needs

The Verification Support Environment (VSE) is a tool to formally specify and verify complex systems. It provides the means to structure specifications and supports the development process from the specification of a system to the automatic generation of code. Formal developments following the VSE method are stored and maintained in an administration system that guides the user and maintains a consistent state of development. An integrated deduction system provides proof support for the deduction problems arising during the development process. We describe the application of VSE to an industrial case study and give an overview of the enhanced VSE system and the VSE methodology.     

Linguistic Problems with Requirements and Knowledge Elicitation

Human and conversational aspects of requirements and knowledge identification are employed to show that requirements ‘engineering’ is not the same as civil engineering or scientific problem solving. Not only can requirements not be made fully explicit at the start of a project, they cannot be made fully explicit at all. A need is identified to enhance computer-based information systems (CBIS) development methods to accommodate: plurality of incommensurable perspectives, languages and agendas; dynamic representations of system features that can be experienced rather than abstracted and forced into an abstract paper-based representation; recognition that CBIS development is in general a continuous process where users changing their minds is a natural and necessary indication or organisational vitality.  It is suggested that prototyping and rapid application development go some way to addressing these requirements but that they require further development in the light of the theoretical light thrown on the nature of the problem.     

A Tool to Support Collaborative Software Requirements Management

The system requirements specification (SRS) is a highly dynamic document that grows and evolves throughout a software development project, and it is critical that it be carefully engineered and managed. Because the SRS fulfils many roles and is of interest to a diversity of stakeholders, its management should be a collaborative process supported by an automated tool. Commercial requirements management tools are at present insufficiently versatile to support collaboration between a multidisciplinary and potentially distributed team of stakeholders. The requirements for such a collaborative tool are herein presented, alongside the design of a prototype and the findings of its application in a case study.     

Extending the Unified Modeling Language for ontology development

There is rapidly growing momentum for web enabled agents that reason about and dynamically integrate the appropriate knowledge and services at run-time. The dynamic integration of knowledge and services depends on the existence of explicit declarative semantic models (ontologies). We have been building tools for ontology development based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). This allows the many mature UML tools, models and expertise to be applied to knowledge representation systems, not only for visualizing complex ontologies but also for managing the ontology development process. UML has many features, such as profiles, global modularity and extension mechanisms that are not generally available in most ontology languages. However, ontology languages have some features that UML does not support. Our paper identifies the similarities and differences (with examples) between UML and the ontology languages RDF and DAML+OIL. To reconcile these differences, we propose a modification to the UML metamodel to address some of the most problematic differences. One of these is the ontological concept variously called a property, relation or predicate. This notion corresponds to the UML concepts of association and attribute. In ontology languages properties are first-class modeling elements, but UML associations and attributes are not first-class. Our proposal is backward-compatible with existing UML models while enhancing its viability for ontology modeling. While we have focused on RDF and DAML+OIL in our research and development activities, the same issues apply to many of the knowledge representation languages. This is especially the case for semantic network and concept graph approaches to knowledge representations. Initial sbmission: 16 February 2002 / Revised submission: 15 October 2002 Published online: 2 December 2002     

A Framework for Integrating Non-Functional Requirements into Conceptual Models

The development of complex information systems calls for conceptual models that describe aspects beyond entities and activities. In particular, recent research has pointed out that conceptual models need to model goals, in order to capture the intentions which underlie complex situations within an organisational context. This paper focuses on one class of goals, namely non-functional requirements (NFR), which need to be captured and analysed from the very early phases of the software development process. The paper presents a framework for integrating NFRs into the ER and OO models. This framework has been validated by two case studies, one of which is very large. The results of the case studies suggest that goal modelling during early phases can lead to a more productive and complete modelling activity.       

Rationale-Based Use Case Specification

The requirements specification – as outcome of the requirements engineering process – falls short of capturing other useful information generated during this process, such as the justification for selected requirements, trade-offs negotiated by stakeholders and alternative requirements that were discarded. In the context of evolving systems and distributed development, this information is essential. Rationale methods focus on capturing and structuring this missing information. In this paper, we propose an integrated process with dedicated guidance for capturing requirements and their rationale, discuss its tool support and describe the experiences we made during several case studies with students. Although the idea of integrating rationale methods with requirements engineering is not new, few research projects so far have focused on smooth integration, dedicated tool support and detailed guidance for such methods.     

Broadband Cellular Radio Telecommunication Technologies in Distance Learning: A Human Factors Field Study

This paper presents a virtual classroom field experiment utilising broadband cellular radio telecommunication technologies and involving real users. The aim of the investigation was to experiment in the field cellular broadband systems in realising virtual classroom situations. In particular, we investigated learners’ performance and usability aspects of the multimedia tele-education system including ease of use, usefulness, telepresence and users’ satisfaction about the system. Results confirmed the effectiveness of the multimedia system in terms of both technical and psychological features. Some operational results and practical solutions were obtained as well. They included the basic features of multimedia systems used in virtual classroom and the correct procedures for training teachers and learners in the equipment use.     

Specifications in Context: Stakeholders, Systems and Modelling of Conflict

This paper looks from an ethnographic viewpoint at the case of two information systems in a multinational engineering consultancy. It proposes using the rich findings from ethnographic analysis during requirements discovery. The paper shows how context – organisational and social – can be taken into account during an information system development process. Socio-technical approaches are holistic in nature and provide opportunities to produce information systems utilising social science insights, computer science technical competence and psychological approaches. These approaches provide fact-finding methods that are appropriate to system participants’ and organisational stakeholders’ needs.  The paper recommends a method of modelling that results in a computerised information system data model that reflects the conflicting and competing data and multiple perspectives of participants and stakeholders, and that improves interactivity and conflict management.     

Healthcare Modelling through Role Activity Diagrams for Process-Based Information Systems Development

The aim of this paper is to introduce the socio-technical Role Activity Diagram modelling language to National Health Service (NHS) information systems requirements engineering using a process approach. Most requirements engineering in the NHS is done using data-driven methods such as data flow diagrams. Role Activity Diagrams provide not only a socio-technical method for analysing a particular systems development problem, but they also offer a process-based approach for capturing workflows and their associated information flows, and facilitate communication between analysts and users in an intuitive fashion. In particular, they elicit the important roles in a process and the interaction and collaboration required to achieve the goals of the process. The process approach has been applied in business information systems development. It is introduced here as a potential for systems development in the NHS.