Sunday, November 20, 2005
High-return Computing
Based on seven years of work looking at low-cost computing for the developing economies as an academic, and four years of market experience in this area as the CEO of PicoPeta Simputers, I can say with considerable authority that
Low-cost computing is a red herring.
Let me use a concrete experience to illustrate.
Harvest data collection by the village accountants is the end task. We put together a complete solution and deployed it in 2003. The following are the components of the solution:
For ALL of the above the government of Karnataka parted with US$75,000, inclusive of everything.
Certainly very very low cost computing.
No other system integrator can offer such a solution at such low costs. So why has this project not been scaled up to cover the entire state of Karnataka (9000 village accountants)? The answer is simple: the total cost will no longer be low.
To reduce the cost of the scaled up solution, the easiest target to beat on is the hardware vendor. Witness the irrational focus on "sub-10,000 PC." The second in line are small application developers who will be asked to develop applications and provide support/upgrade/bugfix on a perpetual basis for peanuts. (Large software platform vendors like Microsoft and Oracle will get payments for their 'core software platform' much more readily). Still the cost will be about 15 crores, just for deploying the harvest data collection application across the state. Not a small amount to justify, given that there are farmers committing suicide unable to pay paltry loans of a few thousands. May be it is worth saving a hundred lives than to provide this solution.
That is why low-cost computing is a red herring.
The right question to ask is what are the returns on my investment in computing? I propose the se of the phrase "high-return computing". It allows for extensions like very high-return computing, super high-return computing and mega high-return computing and so on.
High-return computing changes the focus to the output benefits of computing, rather than the input costs. In the above scenario, the right questions to ask are the following:
Sadly, neither government, private industry, non-government or academia is exploring these aspects of computing. Each constituency is repeating their mantras and each is pulling in their own direction, all with good intent but with no overall progress.
We are all like blind men mightily pulling the ICT elephant to its destination of benefiting society. We not only don't know what it is that we are pulling, but each is pulling in its own favorite direction.
From now on I am going to work on high-return computing.
Low-cost computing is a red herring.
Let me use a concrete experience to illustrate.
Harvest data collection by the village accountants is the end task. We put together a complete solution and deployed it in 2003. The following are the components of the solution:
- Hand-held devices (Simputers) with the end users (Village Accountants)
- Client application on the Simputer (Kannada data collection with smartcard access control for security)
- Application on Taluk Windows PCs for data upload and download (integration of the data with back-end Microsoft platform database)
- Training of over 600 Village accountants to date
- Hardware Field support over an extended geography comprising of several districts of Karnataka
- Software upgrades, bug fixing and improvements over the past three years.
For ALL of the above the government of Karnataka parted with US$75,000, inclusive of everything.
Certainly very very low cost computing.
No other system integrator can offer such a solution at such low costs. So why has this project not been scaled up to cover the entire state of Karnataka (9000 village accountants)? The answer is simple: the total cost will no longer be low.
To reduce the cost of the scaled up solution, the easiest target to beat on is the hardware vendor. Witness the irrational focus on "sub-10,000 PC." The second in line are small application developers who will be asked to develop applications and provide support/upgrade/bugfix on a perpetual basis for peanuts. (Large software platform vendors like Microsoft and Oracle will get payments for their 'core software platform' much more readily). Still the cost will be about 15 crores, just for deploying the harvest data collection application across the state. Not a small amount to justify, given that there are farmers committing suicide unable to pay paltry loans of a few thousands. May be it is worth saving a hundred lives than to provide this solution.
That is why low-cost computing is a red herring.
The right question to ask is what are the returns on my investment in computing? I propose the se of the phrase "high-return computing". It allows for extensions like very high-return computing, super high-return computing and mega high-return computing and so on.
High-return computing changes the focus to the output benefits of computing, rather than the input costs. In the above scenario, the right questions to ask are the following:
- What are parameters that we expect to improve dramatically? Is it the productivity of VAs? Is it the expedient access to data? Can we measure the economic benefits of such expedient access?
- Given the infrastructure of handhelds, connectivity, back-end, a trained end-user group (the village accountants in this case), what kind of services can be provided to the village communities?
- Are we improving the reach of current services or are we introducing new services
hitherto impossible without such technology? - What are the economic spin offs on the beneficiary population because of such services?
- Can we put a dollar figure on all such expected benefits.
- Can we then look at the input cost with reference to expected output benefits?
Can we then decide if the returns are worthwhile for the investment? - Can we monitor the actual benefits as opposed to the conceived/propounded benefits, both qualitatively and quantitatively?
what are the expected benefits of
introduction of technology with Village accountants?
Sadly, neither government, private industry, non-government or academia is exploring these aspects of computing. Each constituency is repeating their mantras and each is pulling in their own direction, all with good intent but with no overall progress.
We are all like blind men mightily pulling the ICT elephant to its destination of benefiting society. We not only don't know what it is that we are pulling, but each is pulling in its own favorite direction.
From now on I am going to work on high-return computing.
