TECHNOLOGY

 

TECHNOLOGY

 

ONLINE IMPACT: STUDENTS LOSE WRITING SKILL,COMMIT ERRORS

 

RELIANCE JIO

 

TOI REMAINS INDIA'S MOST TRUSTED NEWS

 

TECHNOLOGY

 

APPLE FEST

 

CRIME

 

5 G PRICES ROOL-OUT LIKELY IN AUGUST-SEPTEMBER

 

GOOGLE NEWS

 

CHENNAI NEWS

 

ALL IN ONE SUPER APP

 

TECHNOLOGY

TECHNOLOGY

WOMEN BETTER BORROWERS

TECHNOLOGY

BEWARE OF MOBILE LOANAPP THAT STEALS USERS PHONE DATA

 

With digital files and signatures, NDMC cuts down on use of paper

 With digital files and signatures, NDMC cuts down on use of paper

---

Vibha.Sharma@timesgroup.com
04.02.2022

New Delhi: Over a year after launching an initiative to digitise all its files, records and even regular correspondences, New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) claimed to have been successful in reducing use of paper by up to 90%.

“The initiative is a part of the eoffice concept. Around 1,500 officials/staff are being provided digital signatures. More staff members will be given the facility as per requirement,” said an NDMC official.

The e-office concept has been adopted as per the Centre’s direction to curb use of paper and promote electronic communication.

“So far, 42,500 new electronic files have been opened in the e-office, in which a total of about 8. 9lakh new digital green sheets were created. Apart from this, over 2 lakh new correspondence sheets with other departments/offices have been opened in the e-office for the convenience of staff/officials. By doing this, 27 lakh correspondence pages have been saved so far,” said the official.

The council claimed to have prooffices for the implementation of the green concept. “The number of other electronic equipment has also been increased to reduce the use of paper. Almost all departments now have facilities for100% e-files,” stated NDMC.

Till now, more than 12,000 personal files have been scanned. “Apart from personal and new files, we are digitising old data and files too. We have so far scanned 52,000 files that had 1. 5 crore pages and the process is still on,” said the official.

In phase-2, service books of all 10,000 regular employees of NDMC will be digitised.

Why programme managers are so valuable in today’s digital era

Why programme managers are so valuable in today’s digital era

Diverse sets of people need to be brought together. That requires orchestrators

Sujit John & Shilpa Phadnis | TNN

22.12.2021

As we move towards autonomous driving, almost everything about a car is changing. RK Shenoy, senior VP of mobility solutions at automotive tech company Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions, says the company is having to combine electronics, including high compute platforms, with algorithms to identify objects, with software to autonomously run the vehicle, and with the mechanical aspects of the car.

To run such a programme, he says, they need people who are tech savvy, and also have large teams that are working on multiple functional areas – mechanical engineering, hardware, software, AI, cloud, connectivity. This is where programme managers are becoming vital.

“Programme managers need to manage functional areas that are different. They need to handle teams that are distributed across the world, because in no location are we able to have all the competencies required. We may have mechanical engineering and video analytics in Germany, while India does many of the sensors, and the systems to test, and then we do field trials in China, North America,” he says.

Autonomous cars are no exception. As digitisation seeps into every aspect of a business, it’s opening up a host of new opportunities for companies. While the first steps may involve digitising certain functions, the real value comes from combining many of these small projects to deliver an altogether new business offering to customers. Like the way Swiggy and Zomato, for instance, combined our smartphones with restaurant digitisation, and delivery network digitisation to offer us a delightful new food experience.

Srini Srinivasan, regional MD for South Asia at PMI, one of the world’s leading project management institutes, says the digital transformation journey of an enterprise consists of a lot of smaller projects that provide specific chunks of outcomes, which then roll into an overall umbrella that provides a much larger business outcome. “There are a few common threads to most of these programmes. Number one is the amount of complexity. It’s enormous. There is also the need for speed, agility, innovation,” he says.

So, he says, while programme management is about technology, it’s also about people, change management, cultural change, and about cross-functionality – “because everything that happens in a programme cuts across horizontally.” Kirti Seth, CEO of the IT-ITES sector skills council of Nasscom, and the head of Nasscom’s FutureSkills Prime programme, describes a programme manager as a “conductor of conductors.” Each project team, she says, is like a mini orchestra, and the programme manager has to conduct a bunch of these bands to play in harmony.

The programme manager, she says, must be first a business owner, because you need to understand the value you are driving. The tools and techniques must follow. And that needs to include digital fluency. “The programme manager does not necessarily know how to write an AI programme or a machine learning algorithm, but should definitely know what they can do,” she says.

Since the role requires dealing with a variety of people, the ability to collaborate and communicate are also vital. Seth says programme managers should be able to speak the language of their stakeholders, and not get lost in jargon.

SKILLING TO MANAGE

PMI has been working with organisations like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, and Nasa, to understand the future of programme management. Srinivasan says what they are learning is, historically, companies have chosen their most senior project managers to manage programmes. But those project managers grew up in a particular domain. But the breadth and scope of a programme is more than one domain.

So, today, at the centre of PMI’s skilling platform is a course called Programme Management Professional (PgMP), a global certification that is transferable across industries. It takes care of understanding the technical programme management requirements, and is augmented with other skills around collaboration, design thinking, critical thinking, and business agility. PMI has also created courses for junior and midlevel employees who would be involved in transformation projects. “We are looking at a completely new audience, which we call changemakers,” Srinivasan says.

Shenoy says the number of programme managers in Bosch is rising. About 10% of his 20,000 engineers in India are project and programme managers. Bosch has a tieup with PMI, and Shenoy says certification courses help a great deal. “We also have a reverse mentorship initiative for Bosch leadership and programme managers, where graduates who have recently come into the company become mentors to give us inputs on new technologies. At my age I cannot become an AI expert, but it was important for me to know what its capabilities are,” he says.

Challenge on Instagram leads to murder

Challenge on Instagram leads to murder

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Coimbatore: 22.12.2021

A 22-year-old gangster, who dared his rivals via a post on Instagram to bump him off when he visits Anjugam Nagam near Chinnavedampatti in the city, was murdered by a four-member gang in full public view at the same spot around 8.30pm on Monday.

V Sriram, of Sampath Street, posted a video on his Instagram page a few days ago challenging the rival gang members from Kannappa Nagar to try to finish him off when he visits Anjugam Nagar on Monday night. Sriram is a member of Rathinapuri gang.