Of Gmail and Gs of I
The Google growth and success story has been the subject of many books. But to me as an ordinary Indian, the very fundamental lessons that we can learn from Google story are Simplicity and Understanding.
Long back when Gmail came, it set the email stage on fire because of it's refreshingly simple interface, good performance and storage space which users really loved. Not that there were no gaps or problems - but Google has been able to understand and fix them and on top of it offer more features - like the growing storage space, chat within gmail etc.,. So, once you logged on to Gmail, Google has done something or the other to sort of keep you in Gmail. The recent priority inbox is another refreshing innovation aimed at making our life better in this age of email overload.
Two things stand out from Google's story. One, Google's applications are almost always simple and down to earth - no complicated clutter. This simplicity and the stellar user experience it provides hooks people on to it. Two, Google's ability to understand what it's so many million users want and innovate accordingly and innovate fast. This understanding-leading-to-innovation is key to its continuing popularity.
These are two things that the Goverments of India (I've abbreviated it as Gs of I :)) have to learn and learn fast. The governmental machinery today is like a 100 year old tyre which has been patched countless number of times. Not only that it is out of touch with today's needs, the governmental processes are extremely cluttered that it encourages corruption to speed up and cut through the process.
The archaic processes and the rusted government machinery are partly to blame for the CWG mess and many problems confronting India today. This is apart from selfishness, incompetence and corruption of the politicians and bureaucrats. What is urgently needed is to make the administrative processes of our governments simple and lean. Information Technology alone can't achieve that, we need to change the processes to be simple and lean along with computerization. Computerizing a complex and stupid process and legislating so many more laws will not make stuff easy.
Second, there is no proper feedback mechanism from people to the government. This is needed for the government to understand and change the governmental processes as necessary with the changing times. Rather than leaving it with the politicians, there should be an independent quasi-judicial body that will look at changes to processes and laws based on a feedback mechanism from people which is open. This body could have direct power to change processes in certain areas based on people's feedback and for other areas, it could recommend to the Government of India to be implemented after due consideration.
This is just an idea, but the bottom line is we need simple, lean governmental processes and a mechanism to ensure they stay that way and improve further based people's feedback. Unless this is done, even fifty years from now, we'll only be discussing scams after scams and problems after problems. Any mainstream party that talks in this direction is worth voting for. What do you think?
Long back when Gmail came, it set the email stage on fire because of it's refreshingly simple interface, good performance and storage space which users really loved. Not that there were no gaps or problems - but Google has been able to understand and fix them and on top of it offer more features - like the growing storage space, chat within gmail etc.,. So, once you logged on to Gmail, Google has done something or the other to sort of keep you in Gmail. The recent priority inbox is another refreshing innovation aimed at making our life better in this age of email overload.
Two things stand out from Google's story. One, Google's applications are almost always simple and down to earth - no complicated clutter. This simplicity and the stellar user experience it provides hooks people on to it. Two, Google's ability to understand what it's so many million users want and innovate accordingly and innovate fast. This understanding-leading-to-innovation is key to its continuing popularity.
These are two things that the Goverments of India (I've abbreviated it as Gs of I :)) have to learn and learn fast. The governmental machinery today is like a 100 year old tyre which has been patched countless number of times. Not only that it is out of touch with today's needs, the governmental processes are extremely cluttered that it encourages corruption to speed up and cut through the process.
The archaic processes and the rusted government machinery are partly to blame for the CWG mess and many problems confronting India today. This is apart from selfishness, incompetence and corruption of the politicians and bureaucrats. What is urgently needed is to make the administrative processes of our governments simple and lean. Information Technology alone can't achieve that, we need to change the processes to be simple and lean along with computerization. Computerizing a complex and stupid process and legislating so many more laws will not make stuff easy.
Second, there is no proper feedback mechanism from people to the government. This is needed for the government to understand and change the governmental processes as necessary with the changing times. Rather than leaving it with the politicians, there should be an independent quasi-judicial body that will look at changes to processes and laws based on a feedback mechanism from people which is open. This body could have direct power to change processes in certain areas based on people's feedback and for other areas, it could recommend to the Government of India to be implemented after due consideration.
This is just an idea, but the bottom line is we need simple, lean governmental processes and a mechanism to ensure they stay that way and improve further based people's feedback. Unless this is done, even fifty years from now, we'll only be discussing scams after scams and problems after problems. Any mainstream party that talks in this direction is worth voting for. What do you think?
Well. The driving force behind Google and Government is just to make money. Google is highly efficient to attract more users and get more money ultimately. Government of India is highly inefficient so that when you grease the system the processes can be fast and efficient. All your suggestions hold valid if we assume that we are going to get a corrupt free regime. Corruption in turn is because we have more demand than supply in everything. More demand is because we have more population. So the bottom line is if we kill half of our unproductive population, there is a possibility of achieving what you have mentioned there :).
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