Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan will solicit funding for the 'digital museum' app, Itihaasa, unveiled in April this year.
The app is managed by the not-for-profit firm, Itihaasa Research and Digital, dedicated to doing research on the evolution of Indian IT industry across six categories - time, people, organisation, IT policy, technical terms and place. The free app, which is available on iOS as well as Android phones, already has 600 videos of IT veterans sharing insights on the various phases of the IT industry.
Kris Gopalakrishnan explains the importance of tracking the growth of the Indian IT industry in context. The Infosys co-founder noted that the research attempts to answer questions such as —when programming was first taught in India, what developments in IT programming and education led to the growth of IT entrepreneurship and what policies shaped the industry since its inception.
He also highlighted that the development of IT industry was impacted by political policies which posed difficulty to importing computers into the country, a point earlier highlighted by his colleague Narayana Murthy.
"So far I have been funding it. It is been an investment of about Rs 1.5 crore. But we will begin talking to other people to fund this through grants. The idea is to continue to build on this platform, because I do not see this work as ending," Kris Gopalakrishnan told the Economic Times. The research company has formed an advisory board which has Mastek founder Ashank Desai, former Tata Consultancy Services CFO S. Mahalingam, Professor S. Sadagopan and IT veteran Saurabh Srivastava.
Krishnan Narayanan, one of the research management heads of Itihaasa, shared his thoughts on the digital phenomenon and his framework for evaluating a digital enterprise. He cites business model, customers or data centricity and digital infrastructure as the benchmarks to evaluate a digital enterprise.
Itihaasa attempts to capture the trajectory of the IT and IT-enabled services, which contributes 9.5 percent of India's GDP, according to Kris Gopalakrishnan.
