eGovernance and SaaS

There have been various initiatives around the world on e-Governance over the last 15 odd years. Some extremely successful and some not so successful. It would be interesting to analyze the reasons of lack of success of of e-Governance projects. Before we attempt to do that lets understand what a successful e-Governance project would be..

The challenges for the Central and State Government to implement a e-Governance project are multiple. Some of the these are -

1. Processes are not uniform across the districts and hence no one application can fit the bill: this argument has been given since the beginning of computerization.. the truth is that processes will never be uniform unless there is a backbone holding them together.

2. Its prohibitively expensive to build, deploy, maintain and service an eGovernance application more so because the basic infrastructure is also not there.

3. States have a fairly high level of autonomy and also widely varying levels of maturity.

At the same time there is a very clear trend towards increased use of online processes for G2C (Government to Citizen) services. While the traditional solutions of building applications and deploying them through Data Centers or through a desk top based application are being tried out there are some advantages which are offered by Web applications.

Cost to Deploy : When we compare the cost of building, deploying and maintaining applications through an on-premise setup with the cost of doing the same with an intelligence mix of Web and Desktop based application there are significant differences. I am careful to not advocate a Web only scenario because the reliability of internet connectivity is still not very high in a country like India (more so for remote locations).

Public Private Partnership - Any agency which works with the Government to provide e-Governance services should work on a PPP model. The investment made by the Government and the agency should be equitable and the rewards also in line.Web based SaaS type of e-Governance solution are designed to be multi-tenant and scalable. This allows for the partner agency to control their costs and provide scalability to the application as the usage grows.

Managing Upgrades - No e-Governance process will work if it is not flexible. There are many reasons why processes change and only the applications which are able to manage these changes without disturbing the regular flow would be successful. Since SaaS applications have a centralized database and application instance the process of implementing changes and providing rapid releases is managed in a much more smoother manner.

Selling a Concept to Indian SME

Being a SaaS startup in India one of the biggest challenge EazeWork faces is to sell the concept of Software as a Service to Indian businesses. Like any business being built on a new concept we are also aware of the possible risks and challenges this bring about.

There can be various sales approaches and given that SaaS itself is a web centric business model its very tempting to start depending upon web as the chosen medium to carry out the message. However we believe that the average Indian business owner is very different than the urban youth or the metro based office goer and his average internet usage is not more than 30 minutes and that too on alternate days. Having taken this stand we are left with the more traditional medium which are not so glamorous but maybe more effective in targeting this audience.

In our view one of the strongest vehicle to help making this concept selling process easier is going to be the local chapters of industry associations. A brief 30 minute session highlighting the power of SaaS based applications and benefits which a business can reap from them would be a good enough teaser.

As we start the process of taking our beta versions of the applications to market we will be testing out the efficacy of various medium in their ability to reach the target customer and maybe will have a status update in couple of months.

Chintan Tyagi