The branding of the Indian IT industry’s image as a superpower in the software services game has been largely associated with Nasscom, which has worked tirelessly for pushing the India Software Inc. brand. But there is one more organisation that deserves some credit for positioning India as a global player—the Computer Society of India (CSI). Established way back in 1965, CSI has been immensely successful and has grown from just 50 members to 18,000 members today.

Despite this, the knowledge-base of the association has not been well known and not many people know about the advantages of joining such an organisation. This is mainly because unlike Nasscom, which is primarily in the limelight due to its efforts to promote India’s prowess in the software services space—CSI’s efforts have been more towards fostering and encouraging interaction and sharing knowledge among its various members.

Also, while software companies have a trade organisation in the form of Nasscom to take care of their problems—the same is not the case with software professionals, who don’t have a representative body to advise them on issues related to careers or even new emerging technologies or segments. This is where an organisation like CSI can be of tremendous help to an individual.

Keeping these issues in mind, CSI has renewed its focus this year to enable the community to grow further. The first step towards this goal has been the creation of the full time post of executive director. Previously, executive committees, which were responsible for the decisions of CSI, used to change every year and hence the decision-making process lacked continuity. But now, with the appointment of Deepak Shikarpur as executive director of CSI, things should change for the better. In order to encourage more members to join CSI, the outfit is also introducing new awards like the ‘Young IT professional award’ to encourage youngsters.

Also noteworthy are the association’s efforts to encourage e-governance—it recently announced the results of the e-governance awards to applaud the efforts of various organisations in the field of e-governance.

But the one area that CSI has decided to focus on extensively this year could have a profound impact on the entire Indian IT industry. Shikarpur explained, “During our interactions with various industry leaders we have found out that many projects of Indian IT companies are lost due to the non-availability of specific skill sets. For example, even though India has more than a million IT professionals today, not more than 10 percent of them are certified IT professionals. Hence, if India has to sustain its competitive advantage over other countries, then we have to create quality manpower. To address this issue, we are in the process of tying up with IEEE. We will be offering IEEE’s CSDP (Certified Software Development Professional) certification programme to our members.” The benefits of such a certification are immense to software professionals as the IEEE is considered to be a leading authority in technical areas ranging from computer engineering to telecommunications to consumer electronics. While previously CSI members used to join by word of mouth or by referrals, the new era promises to be one of action where CSI will try to focus more on value creation rather than being just a representative figure.