Project Management

In the 1980s, BSNL was among

the first to computerize some
of its operations. But with
systems added over time, this
strength was turning it into a
mess. Here’s how they called

Sign
on subscriber signatures to fix
their problems.

of The Times
B y K u n a l N . Ta l g e r i

As a cricket-crazed teenager in
Dwarahak, a town in the Almora district of Uttar Pradesh,
Rajkumar Upadhyay never had it easy as an autograph
hunter. The big names were hard to come by even in
uptown Kanpur, where he once made it
into a squad of 30 youngsters in a cricket Reader ROI:
academy. That was in 1977. On a different
The team’s immediate objective was to scan each signature.
The tedious effort would enable a faster and more seamless
IT-powered mechanism for officials in BSNL’s customer
service centers (CSC). It would allow them to trace and check
a customer’s details on the run.
“It took us not less than three months,”
says Upadhyay, deputy general manager-

wicket, almost 30 years later, his luck with
signatures changed as his IT team combed
through more than 10 lakh subscriber
signatures in BSNL’s Bangalore Telecom
District’s Oracle 7 systems.
How to develop an integrated
solution with legacy systems
The case for in-house IT
development
An alternative to achieving
user buy-in
Illustrat ion by an il t
IT at Bangalore Telecom District. “Most of
my time was spent in fetching signatures
from past files, which was made harder
because of old hardware. Oracle 7 does not
store as many signatures as Oracle 9 or

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Project Management
10. The newer versions store signatures as a part of a record.
However, Oracle 7 would store a signature as an individual
file. This made fetching signatures difficult,” he recalls.
It was the most mind-numbing aspect of Project Falcon,
designed to deliver BSNL services through a single window.
But the signature-campaign of sorts has made all the
difference. For customers in Bangalore, the application has
reduced a month-long verification process to get a new line to
less than a day. For CSC officials, the signature-driven feature
of the Web-based application entails access to 12 area servers
that store customer information, thus empowering them to
authorize customer requests at a faster clip. “The clerk has
suddenly become empowered in a sense. He only has to
check for the signature on the database. It will come with all
Photo by Sr ivatsa S ha ndilya
corresponding details,” notes Upadhyay.
The single window application itself came into operation in
August 2006. It’s too early to draw conclusions of its efficacy
from an ROI perspective. But Project Falcon has already
received a national e-governance award for ‘Exemplary
usage of ICT by PSUs’ in February this year. And going by
other indicators, it appears to be a technology solution that
“The systems
were working
as silos in their
respective area.
This forced
customers to deal
with separate
departments.”
— Rajkumar Upadhyay
Deputy GM-IT,Bangalore Telecom District
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has combined financial innovation with the intent of being
user-friendly to CSC officials and the public. The trick lay
in planning — and marrying an efficient front-end with a
robust backend mechanism.
Technology Begins at Home
In several respects, the management of BSNL had taken the
technology plunge much before its counterparts in other
sectors of the economy. In the 1980s, for example, it had
computerized several aspects of its operations pertaining
to a range of services like billing. The question at the turn
of the century, for Bangalore Telecom District, was whether
its great strength was turning into a greater weakness. For,
technology expansion was happening in phases through
a process of adding systems without a central network to
house their multiple systems.
Further, though a customer could avail of technology
benefits during registration of services, the time and effort
it called for was still immense. “The New Lines (NL) server
was catering to Bangalore City as a whole, and the customer
from any part of Bangalore had to come to the centralized NL
counter working from a specific location,” says
Upadhyay. “The systems were working as silos
in their respective area,” he adds.
By 2006, BSNL was rendering a range of
services beyond just new lines: broadband,
mobile telephony and its peripheral services,
apart from billing and complaint redressal
functions. Such a market required an integrated,
multi-faceted and faster system to cater to these
services — a WAN, to begin with.
“Without a wide area network, it was difficult
to consolidate all the servers, leading to lack of an
integrated database for a single front-end,” says
Upadhyay. “This forced the customer to deal with
separate departments. The lack of an integrated
database also delayed information from getting
to management, thereby causing reduced control
on efficiency of customer services,” he explains.
Significantly, Upadhyay felt the best step
forward was to develop the application in-house
for two reasons: no one could understand the
needs and limitations of the front-end better
than its own IT team. Secondly, it was best
placed to tap the benefits of BSNL’s large existing
infrastructure and resources.
“Our entire IT cell is not more 20-30 people,”
says Upadhyay. “We appointed a networking
team for the WAN work who would deal with
the switches, fiber connections, etcetera. This
had one sub-divisional engineer and one junior
telecom officer, apart from the maintenance guys.
From the software side, we had four to five people.
Our software employs ASP and JSP, primarily
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because we had in-house expertise in those two
platforms,” he adds.
To begin with, the Bangalore Telecom IT
team connected all its area servers in January
last year, using optic fiber onto one network, SNAPSHOT
yet allowing them to function independently. Bangalore
This would form the core architecture. Then, Telecom
they brought the commercial office, call center District
operations, network management system Revenue
and central directory enquiry onto the same (Karnataka
platform to enable an integrated view from a Circle)
Rs 3,100 crore
single location. And all dumb terminals working
in the system were replaced by PCs. “Except for I.T. Budget
< Rs 4 crore
the WAN infrastructure, we haven’t spent on (Bangalore)
anything else,” says Upadhyay. “Building the
Customer Service
WAN network cost about Rs 1 crore. Otherwise, Centers
we have used existing resources like optic fiber, 44
and freeware like Apache Tomcat for the Web IT team
Server,” he adds. The WAN can be used for > 30
other applications and is scaleable, he says. Services
Typically, for projects like this, a large portion New land lines &
related services
of the expenditure is spent on consultancy. Mobile telephony
By developing and maintaining it in-house, Broadband
Bangalore Telecom bypassed that spend. Bill payment
Complaint
redressal
Lining Up Solutions
The Karnataka circle has an IT budget allotment
of nearly Rs 15 crore per annum, a third of
which is utilized by Bangalore Telecom. However, if you can
demonstrate benefits, budget is not an issue in government,
Upadhyay asserts. Unsurprisingly, the success of the single
window application is expected to pave way for a model
that will be developed and managed by a vendor. This will
consolidate the 12 servers in Bangalore. “We will begin that
shortly, and are inviting tenders from April,” he says.
Another component of the project that is on the anvil is
disaster recovery. “We are doing a DR server. That is one thing
we need to build in.” says Upadhyay who is also Bangalore
Telecom District’s deputy general manager for infrastructure
planning & business development. The current lack of DR is
among the project’s few weakness.
And as far as ROI is concerned, apart from the visible
benefits at the front end, Bangalore Telecom has begun to
generate a higher quantum of revenue through its services.
“In terms of money, because of reduced timelines, we record
additional rental and revenue because we can provide a
service to customers earlier than before. With that calculation,
we can document how we have already recovered costs. There
are process efficiencies,” Upadhyay points out.
The biggest benefit though is intangible: back-end
capability. With online management reports on the
performance of critical parameters, which impact delivery of
services to the customers, the application has created greater
transparency in the system.
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Project Management
The result is that Bangalore Telecom is now able
to report, classify and compare performances
of area managers. It has given management
a handle to hold division heads accountable
about areas to focus on, to laud efficiency
— and point to pending jobs. The back-end
infrastructure has effectively overcome the
practice of depending on divisional heads and
their subordinates for status reports on works
and projects.
In addition to the CSCs, the IT organization
also devised two routes for customers to access
service and information: an SMS server and the
Bangalore Telecom website. Customers can get
information and avail services, like complaint
booking, complaint status, bill enquiry,
outstanding bills and changed number enquiry,
by sending a message to the SMS server. The
information is also available on the website,
apart from a function to pay bills online. For
online payments, the amount passed on by
BSNL to the gateway is Rs. 3 per transaction in
case of transaction through bank or 1 percent
subject to maximum of Rs 1,000 if a payment
is made via credit card.
While alternative routes are gaining
currency in Bangalore, the onus is still largely
on the customer service centers. These continue
to be the face of BSNL’s quality of service, and training
personnel at the CSCs was a challenge. “They were reluctant
to use computers at the start, fearing that one wrong press of
a key and they might lose data — or, worse, the system might
get damaged,” smiles Upadhyay.
The solution was to keep it simple. “At every level, when
we discussed a new technology, I told the persons concerned
what part of it would be relevant to our target. If I shared the
whole project, they might have found it mind-boggling. But
telling each one of them their parts helped me keep it simple
and generate the desired result,” he explains.
This approach proved especially useful in the development
stage, says Upadhyay, because an IT head in government
takes upon himself the task of integrating versatile, albeit
limited, technology skill-sets. “A person might be in IT today.
Tomorrow, he might be elsewhere…When we completed work
on the single window product, the IT personnel themselves
were surprised with the results,” he says.
Upadhyay believes Project Falcon is capable of being
implemented across Karnataka and in other geographies too.
He only hopes amassing the signatures then doesn’t turn out
to be as much of a challenge as it was in Bangalore. CIO
Chief copy editor Kunal N. Talgeri can be reached at kunal_t@cio.in
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