ICFRE Drafts a Digital Roadmap
By Sonal Desai
Mumbai, Jul 17, 2008

The Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) is getting into an e-parivartan' mood. The initiative is a part of the council's roadmap to adopt e-governance across the organization.

The council is developing a comprehensive Indian Forestry Research Information System (IFRIS) to stress need for change management and research information management system.

M/s Wipro Ltd, (Gurgaon) is project consultant, and M/s Sobha Renaissance Information Technology Limited, (Bangalore) has designed, developed, and will implement the IFRIS software.

IFRIS will translate the present working manual systems into automated systems, enhance responsiveness through workflow automation and knowledge management, increase access, efficiency, transparency and accountability of services, provide real-time information management of research projects, monitor ICFRE engagements with external stakeholders, convenience of users, and stakeholders in accessing information and services, and generate MIS reports.

The software will be deployed on a pilot basis in September-October 2008. It will be rolled out and user acceptance tests will be conducted from December 2008 to March 2009, according to Harish Kumar, scientist and project manager (e-governance) for ICFRE.

As per the roadmap, a copy of which is available with CXOtoday, the council connected all its offices over Virtual Private Network (VPN) in 2007. It will deploy video conferencing and an ICFRE Intranet portal in 2008. In 2009, the council will set up a data center in Dehradun, and a disaster recovery center in Bangalore. It will also digitize internal services and set up infrastructure for digital signatures. ICFRE will go completely paperless and will be able to enable online government-to-government transactions in 2010. It will provide online services to 50 % of its stake holders in 2012 and will cover the entire gamut of services through the Internet and Intranet in 2015.

The council is meanwhile is studying the technical and financial bids from Symantec partners for a tender it invited for a 1,000 user licenses for Symantec Endpoint 11.0, last month.

The ICFRE wants 550 licenses for its headquarter at Dehradun, 106 for the Tropical Forest Research Institute in Jabalpur, 110 for the Arid Forest Research Institute at Jodhpur, 130 for the Institute of Wood Science & Technology in Bangalore, 130 for the Institute of Forest Genetics and Tree Breeding in Coimbatore, 150 for the Rain Forest Research Institute at Jorhat, 70 at the Institute of Forest Productivity in Ranchi, 50 for the Himalayan Forest Research Institute in Shimla, and some more for the Forest Research Centre in Hyderabad, Centre for Forestry Research and Human Resource Development in Chhindwara (MP) and the Centre for Social Forestry & Ecorehabilitation in Allahabad.

Kumar said that the council used e-trust earlier. "But that was giving us a lot of problems. The licenses for e-trust are due to expire July 23, and our consultant and project team advised us to opt for Symantec Endpoint. We were also considering Norton, but it utilizes a lot of hardware resources, and our PCs cannot take on that burden. In fact, we have tried Symantec on some of our new PCs and they are working well."


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