Wanted: Architects, not bricklayers

If today, Tata Sons? senior executives decide to build an employees? networking site across all its business operations, the CTO does not need to employ programmers with Java knowledge to build the application. The application is available on the internet. The CTO can slice and dice according to his requirement.

Or if the Indian corporate major decides to have some other application like Funwall for the networking site which ?customise tagged pics (or upload your own), skin your favourite YouTube videos, share them with your friends?all on your wall,? the unknown company Slide Inc will provide the application.

It is like going to a mall to pick and choose the best applications. And the mall is Facebook, the hot networking site, in which many large IT and entertainment global major want to have a stake. Facebook did not develop the application?it only allowed Willy and Will and Slide Inc to use the Facebook platform to showcase their products.

The networking site has its own usual disclaimer: Facebook is providing links to these applications as a courtesy, and makes no representations regarding the applications or any information related to them. Any questions regarding an application should be directed to the developer.

There are 8,589 daily active users for FlirtWall, which constitutes 5% of the total Facebook users and for Slide Inc, the number is 3,619,124 or 21% of the total. In today?s globalised world, if North America sneezes, can India avoid catching a cold?

Sitting in the study of his fifth floor flat in one of south Kolkata?s posh housing enclaves, Amitava Maulik sees something ominous happening in the IT world for the hordes of young programmers who are joining the IT profession with skyrocketing salaries. He believes that in a few years, it would be difficult for a Java or visual basic programmer with barely two years experience to command an annual income of Rs 6-6.5 lakh?as they do now?unless the programmer develops the skillset of a solution provider rather than a mere code writer.

Maulik, as the chief of a US-based software company, Connectiva Systems, which develops telecom software, is finding it hard to convince his juniors that the old way of programming is fast losing its relevance. ?Simply knowing Visual Basic or Java will not give our engineers and IT professionals any good job in future,? says Maulik.

Across the industry, programming as a standalone profession is under pressure. Ganesh Natarajan, the deputy chairman and managing director of Zensar Technologies, says that, in a typical software services company in India, 90% of the employees are programmers and the rest are system designers and architects with domain skill sets. ?This is going to change,? says Natarajan. ?We would see that, in future, less than half of the new intake would be programmers. The companies would like to recruit youngsters with skillsets that go beyond the programming mindset.?

For Natarajan, this means that an IT professional would require an understanding of at least one of the areas like product designing, architecture development and model building and skills to have domain specific knowledge for pure application development.

Vijay Talele, Kale Consultant?s head of technology, agrees with Natarajan. ?At present, we have 300 programmers with programming skills in Java, Visual Basic and Oracle. In the next few years, we will have more people with knowledge in system architecture so that techies can work in a hybrid application environment, rather than being simply programmers.?

Kale?s area of operation is solutions for the airline cargo system. The company is entering into new areas like shipping and logistics business. Talele believes that enterprises across the world are moving towards a hybrid architecture where software components will play an important role. ?A programmer has to understand the design and architecture of a business operation so that a software component can be developed and plugged in where ever there is a need for customisation,? he says.

So is programming as a career threatened? Maulik says that it would be an exaggeration to say that there is no future for very good programmers. ?We will need programmers but they would be of high class variety who will solve complex algorithms,? he says. Others will do something else like building software components that will be plugged in the enterprise software.

?To build components, one has to know how the system works. Previously, it was the duty of a few people who were in charge of the project,? says Talele.

Today, programming is evolving in a way where programmers have to take part in designing and understanding the system and program the components together for the enterprise requirement. All this is happening as the IT world is experiencing a paradigm shift led by the new internet collaborative architecture of Web 2.0 and the coming of the SOA (service-oriented architecture). ?These have created a different way how programs are created, distributed and implemented,? says Talele.

In a new environment, one of the changes would be if a programmer could develop a standalone application or a software component, say for the retail industry, add functionality to an existing application and upload it on the internet for a buyer to test and use. The buyer could be a Pantaloon or a Tesco.

Sanjay Marathe, the chief technology officer of Zensar, says that software components are required because the business processes in the vertical industries are becoming standardised. ?So one can buy components and plug-in and where ever special functionality is required. In future, either one can develop inhouse or outsource it to the software service companies who have specific domain knowledge,? he says.

The applications available in the Facebook are just the starting point for this kind of change, says Bikram Dasgupta, the chairman and chief executive officer of Kolkata-based Globsyn Group. ?Programming has become a commodity and it is not enough to know only one language, but multiple skills with a solution. There will be several options to distribute these applications and components,? he adds.

Marathe sees all these changes in the light of availability of readymade tools to code the system design. ?In software programming, in the structure of requirements, design and coding, it is the last one where automation has been most,? he says. ?A significant portion of software coding as a job has been reduced because of the availability of tools in the market. The tools in turn are being developed in Web 2.0 and SOA environment,? says Marathe.

In this change, the most crucial part for an IT company is to guide the human resource of programmers to the next level of domain knowledge of skill sets, says David H Tai, director (HR learning), IBM India/South Asia.

Tai says that for companies like IBM, it is always a challenge to create an internal learning programme that will keep the employees in tune with the latest development. ?Open source programming community and SOA are changing the way one looks at the programming world,? says Tai.