The Satyam fiasco

In 1995, when I started writing my very first IT opinion column for a leading IT fortnightly, I asked my editor for advice because I was then just 22 years old.

The Satyam fiasco

Shielded no longer: The blatant half-truths in Satyam's balance sheet leading to the Rs7,800 crore scam, makes it a front-runner for the Vapourware awards file pic

When details of the sordid Satyam saga broke, I thought about what this editor had told me and felt that it is a pity that the IT industry has never followed his sage advice.

If you think about it, when news of how Satyam fudged its figures hit the stands, everybody who was anybody in the IT industry started acting like teenage kids caught in a rave party. And newspapers started blaming Satyam, the IT industry, the auditors, and the bankers for all this.

In a way, this is something that could have happened in any industry, but the IT industry being the IT industry, well, there was a lot more hype. One veteran of the IT industry told me a long time ago that the IT industry is just like the movie industry minus the guns and the sex scandals, and he was so right.

The problem with Satyam is not with the blatant half-truths in its balance sheet, it is with the IT industry itself, an industry that takes pride in its miasmatic vapourware. In fact, the problem of vapourware which involves promising and then never delivering is so prevalent in the IT industry that one publication actually gives out something called the vapourware awards every year.

At one level, this industry has always lived on hype in one form or the other. The tragedy is that the hype is so overwhelming that even something grand ultimately looks like a let-down. A classic case is the dotcom boom that happened close to a decade ago. The Web was a revolution, but the dotcom boom promised so much and delivered so little that people began to wonder what the Web was truly capable of. It was only after the hype subsided that the Web grew at a saner pace.

While we need to look at ways of making auditing more robust, this will only be at the watchdog level.

Fundamentally, we need to look at ways in which we can make the IT industry itself behave in a more realistic manner.

One way that the industry can learn is by cutting down on its unrealistic projections. True, this is a highly innovative industry, but this doesn't mean that you have to bring forth a pseudo-innovation every day, right?

u00a0Surprisingly, one industry that the IT industry can learn from is the pharmaceuticals industry. While companies may want to announce a new drug every day, this can only happen after entities like the FDA clear the medicine.

We don't need something that stringent, but something that will make the IT industry more grounded in realism rather than hype is welcome.

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