What’s the new objective of the CSI?
CSI was formed in 1965 with the objective of promoting the use
of IT in business. We also want to create a knowledge society. CSI
wants to focus on education/knowledge and society. The community
has grown and is highly technical. So we have to consider how to
use technology to address the challenges faced by society. Today we
have 40,000 members and are expecting this count to reach 70,000
this year. We have 66 chapters.
What platform will you use to disseminate and share
information among CSI’s members and in society?
We need to look at collaboration and networking through seminars
and conferences. One option is to partner with institutions like
IIT, C-DAC and even IT vendors. If you compare our conferences with
those of vendors you will observe that they are product focused and
linear.
But we have what I call a ‘matrix focus.’ Our
conferences are multi-dimensional, addressing various aspects of a
technical topic. When you come to our conference you will find
Google, Microsoft, IBM and other vendors on the same platform. Over
the course of time, we have developed a certain loyalty among our
members.
What is CSI doing to prepare students to work in the
industry?
We will take a holistic approach to bring the industry together
and will announce an Industry Academy Interaction Forum. The
industry should step forward to help the academia. How many
companies are going to colleges and sharing what is happening in
the industry?
Vendors like Cisco, Microsoft and others can provide faculty
enhancement or empowerment programs. We can together create
industry-specific courses for topics such as software estimate,
project management and open source—at very nominal costs.
My vision is to start a CSI Institute of Higher Learning in
Chennai. The other approaches are industry certifications,
workshops, seminars and collaborations with international bodies
like the British Computer Society, Singapore Computer Society,
Australian Computer Society, IEEE, BMI, ACM, C-DAC and
others. We’ll also consider a franchisee model and work
with third parties for workshops. In fact this is already
operational in Mumbai.
The research community is doing some excellent work, but
how is this reaching your members?
We can bring the research community together and ask them to
compile reports and create a knowledge base. This will then be
accessible to our members via our knowledge portal. Recently we did
the IFIP Networking 2010 conference in Chennai. Four months ago we
organized India IT 2020. Through such conferences CSI is trying to
identify emerging technologies and how our nation will benefit from
these technologies and solutions.
CSI once had a research journal and we are trying to reintroduce
it. There is a call for research papers on the CSI Knowledge
Management Portal. Researchers can post abstracts of their work on
this portal.
To take this forward we will appoint research directors in
different regions. We just appointed a knowledge officer. If we are
able to provide a good platform, I am sure many will come forward
to contribute their research. A Special Interest Group (SIG) is
another way to promote research. And we have started a number of
SIGs.