IBM experts lend a helping hand to city institutes
Indian Express: When the Yashwantrao Chavan Academy for Development Administration (YASHADA) that runs courses for elected representatives and government officers decided to venture into distance learning, they were looking for IT expertise that would recommend a strategy for distance learning considering the infrastructure crunch in rural India. They found this expertise in IBM employees Erin Williams from USA and Ashley Jenkins from Australia.
The duo visited YASHDA for four weeks, worked with the concerned officers and developed a basic architectural design for a web–based distance learning method-at no cost.
While YASHDA got their work done in four weeks, Erin and Ashley are contented after volunteering for the IBM Corporate Services Corps (CSC) programme.
The two are among the nine employees of IBM who came to Pune to work on socio-economic development projects. “As part of CSC, IBM places its top performing employees with the company’s partner NGOs and not-for-profit government organisations for four weeks. The volunteers work on an IT-based project that would help the organisations,” said Ramesh Narasimhan, director, IBM India/South Asia.
This year, IBM tied up with Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Teach For India, Chaitanya, Software Institute for Rural Development (SIRD) and YASHADA, Narasimhan said.
The CSC programme began in 2008 in Ahmedabad and Mumbai and this is the first time it has been launched in Pune along with Hyderabad and Bangalore.
“IBM follows a rigorous selection process for employees who wish to volunteer for the CSC. We received 15,000 application within IBM this year out of which 1000 were selected,” Narasimhan said.
The selected volunteers are taken off from their regular job responsibilities and are briefed about the projects available across various partner NGOs and not-for-profit government organisations.
Among the team of nine, Allison Baller from USA and Stefan Duhovnicu from Romania developed a strategy and related action plan to assist Teach For India in expanding to all major Indian cities and nearby rural areas, while Cornelia Gobani, also from Romania, came up with a marketing strategy to help Chaitanya, one of the pioneers of the self-help group movement in Maharashtra to improve its visibility beyond the Indian development sector.
Serge Richards from France and Susanne Doettling from Germany developed a solution that will help FTII with scheduling of academic resources, managing track assets and inventory in the sound department and eventually to be replicated across all departments, while Michael Lun from Canada and Junichiroh Inaba (SIRD) from Japan helped with the design and architecture development of SIRD’s rural banking software and related bank management information system capabilities.
The team will return to their respective IBM offices on Friday. The team had started working on their respective projects three months before coming to Pune. The validation and finalisation of the project was done here, Erin said.
“While we realised that we have helped the partner organisations, we understood the problems faced by small organisations in India and the kind of technology needed to solve them. Moreover, we are confident that we can now work in diverse cultures,” Michael said.
The CSC programme runs in 19 developing countries like Ghana, Philippines, Romania, Tanzania, Vietnam and Turkey.
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