Reimagining IT for Indian MSMEs

In India Knowillence worked with companies in manufacturing sectors over the last 7 years. We worked primarily with Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises grouped together as MSME. The challenge in these companies in setting up an in-house IT team is really hiring talented developers. The MSME companies cannot afford to have a middle management layer for IT business function until they have a clear roadmap of projects that span few years. The other challenge is that these companies cannot afford to hire a specialist to build various layers of the application and various systems. We see this trend in companies whose revenue is less than 100 crore rupees. Only when they reach 100 crore rupees they make IT a business function and a strategic department.

The MSME companies cannot afford to have a middle management layer for IT business function until they have a clear roadmap of projects that span few years.

Before we recommend the client to evaluate tech stack we provide them a vision for the IT applications. We recommend that the in-house applications should increase collaboration across the business functions in the company. Everyone from security at the gate to the chairman should have features to do their work or provide inputs about the work they performed in the application. 

The vision we share with our clients is that the applications should be mobile first because providing laptops or computers may be expensive to some roles in the organization. Some roles are always on the go and laptop hinders their productivity hence they should be able to do their work in the mobile phone. The next point we convey to the client is that the application should be multi-lingual and support voice interactions seamlessly. Typing is a productivity killer and users should not stop doing their work to enter the inputs in the application. The application should seamlessly weave into the workflow of the user. In a country like India where multiple languages are prevalent in every city multilingual feature is a must. In my state Tamil Nadu while the official language is Tamil but we do have considerable workforce from Hindi speaking states working here. The next point we convey to the client is that the applications should support computer vision. Most of the information that has to be entered into the system are already available in printed format or digital document. The application should be able to take the scanned copy of the image and extract the information and fill it in the fields and the user will review them, correct and confirm them. Computer vision saves lot of time by preventing manual entry. The last point we convey to the companies is that they should integrate Artificial Intelligence in the application which can do many tasks at the human cognition level and can keep track of the big picture and the processes.