Message from President, IITMAA

By Srini Nageshwar [1964-BTEE]

I have seen a question like this pop up in various IIT forums. I have tried to address our activities in the quarterly issues of Journeys. I will do so again in this issue and also distribute this via all vehicles so this gets wide distribution. This will be more detailed than usual. Much of our work has been done in the background and we have not indulged in any email traffic or fanned any flames of controversy other than the ones caused by our going about our business very quietly.

Situation of IITMAA as we were elected

The Alumni Association (in various forms) had existed from the time my batch graduated in 1964. It has now been in existence for over 44 years. Normally you would expect that a 44 year old organization would have evolved and would be very successful by now. It may have gone through a few ups and downs but it would be pretty successful and able to stand on its own two feet.

Unfortunately this was not the case. The organization had never been led by a CEO type who could provide a sound basis for growth, articulating its mission, vision, setting objectives to fulfill these and executing on them.

The upshot of this benign neglect was that it was very much a “toothless tiger”. Though it is the “official” Alumni Association and is recognized as such by the Board of Governors of the Institute, it has never been able to make its rightful contribution to the Alumni and the Institute (the two most important stakeholders).

Much like toothless tigers are assaulted in the jungle and rendered useless, other centers of activity started e.g. the OAA, the Alumni Trust fund, other websites, independent chapters etc. Alumni funds started flowing to these other organizations and the IITMAA became even more irrelevant. The only reason it has even limped along is that there is a Rs.500 contribution that is taken from every student and this gets transferred to the IITMAA. This currently is the ONLY source of funding.

It performs some services like organizing Reunions and a couple of graduation dinners and keeps itself afloat. Because it is a Society and there are legal requirements it runs things like AGMs and elections which are very sparsely attended but it is able to meet its legal obligations.

There are some very committed people who have kept the Association afloat but there is no way this activity can be scaled up and make a contribution by continuing on this path.

My experience in industry is that it takes at least 5 years to get an organization setup and performing. The IITMAAEC gets elected every two years. There is pretty high turnover of people thus allowing no continuity at all! Before this the President and the Secretary were nominated by the Institute, so we had academics trying to run this (many of them were not even Alumni!). I have nothing against academics but, in general, they are not the people you choose to appoint as CEOs. (A famous exception is Gary Loveman who came from academia to run Harrah's International and has made a brilliant success of it).

I don't even want to talk about the internecine politics here which puts even Indian politicians to shame!

So there you have it....an organization with constantly changing staff, no real sources of revenue and zigzagging along. In Silicon Valley we call this type of organization “the walking dead”.

I am sorry if I am sounding harsh and negative but it seems to me that you have to look problems in the eye to do something about them.

So what are we doing about it?

It must now be clear to everybody that this is a classic organizational turnaround situation. One has to go back to basics and rebuild and redo everything.

I expected something like this and thought that with my CEO background I could make a contribution here. This is the reason that I offered myself up for election. (By the way, I also got sucked into running a medical instrumentation start up and have more than a full time job). Being the Golden Jubilee time, I thought that this was a good time to give the Association a brand new start and a complete makeover.

The current EC inherited a pretty messy situation. On top of all this the Bye laws had been changed to add many more Vice Presidents.....many more cooks to spoil the broth!

My first objective was to do a fundamental stakeholder needs analysis. I was lucky that within a few weeks of taking over there were six reunions, so I could talk to lots of Alumni. I also talked to lots of past office bearers.

The following key insights emerged

1. The Association was financially strapped
2. The fundamental requirement of the Alumni was networking. This also happens to be the fundamental requirement of the students, who are hungering for Alumni interaction
3. Everybody was sick of multiple organizations, websites and would dearly love to have one organization, website etc.
4. Because of all this and the somewhat vitriolic email traffic, the alumni stayed away from participating.

Bottom line, everybody wanted to have ONE functioning, powerful global Alumni organization.

So, how can this be accomplished?

My experience in industry is that there really is only one way. You have to decide on a course of action, execute flawlessly and produce results. This provides credibility and everybody will start flocking towards you. Then everything goes in the right direction. You have revenues, eyeballs, attention, everything that you ever needed.

As a global entity, the Internet has to be our main tool. It is our building, our premises, much like it is for Google, Amazon and others who are Internet businesses.

Thus was born the paradigm that we needed to run IITMAA like an Internet services company.

Running the IITMAA company

A core group of people have been working on this. This includes Bob Nathan, P.S. Ramanathan, Dalton Eddy, Pramod Kunju and I.

Bob devoted his company's resources to creating our web presence based on a business strategy that we have developed. This calls for providing products and services on the web (that will generate revenue and drive traffic) and make it “sticky” such that people that come will spend a lot of time there.

We are investing in an R&D team to provide ongoing development and support and to coordinate any outsourcing of tasks that we will engage in. This team will consist of three people (who will be located in the IITMAA office), two will be programmers and one will be a content engineer.

The Beta version of the website is up at iitmaa.org. We now want to get everybody registered. We want to provide everybody who registers, an iitmaa.org mail ID which can stay with them for ever. We will also offer this to the students as soon as they join. Hopefully this will enable all the IIT Alumni generated email traffic through the website. We can continue to enhance this feature over time and add more technology to it. This should start to provide some “stickiness”. We are also “exploring” the possibility of moving the yahoo groups activity to our site. Between email and the yahoo groups equivalent, there will be two good reasons to spend time on the site.

We need to “find” all our Alumni. P.S. Ramanathan (along with Pramod Kunju) has taken on the task of revitalizing all the Chapters. We are catalyzing a few big chapters first – Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, D.C. to name a few (Yes, IITMAA and IITMAANA have been working together on this!). We have provided a place for chapter presence on the main iitmaa.org website which will take on more and more of the characteristics of a portal. We would request the chapters (and work with them) to use this as their main web presence, thus meeting the requirement of the Alumni that there be one place that everybody goes to and finds out things. Chapter members can then register once on the website and access everything. We currently have over 11000 names in the Alumni Directory and over time we need to authenticate and expand this number so the directory gets fully populated. We expect the 81 batch to support this effort financially, since they have earmarked funds to populate the database.

Similarly, there is a coalescence of people around the hostels. We have a presence for all the hostels on our site. There are hostel secretaries who are working with us to develop the hostel presence. We can come at students and Alumni from this angle also.

Revenue generation

There are many opportunities that we have identified

1. Placement – This is an excellent service to be provided. There are people who are looking for both freshers and experienced people. We are currently finishing up the job portal on the iitmaa.org site. We will charge people for advertising jobs on our site and also get companies who interview at IITM to advertise their companies on the site. IITM alumni are prized hires and we can give these companies, access to our Alumni. Obviously the value of this, increases the more coverage we have of the Alumni I.e. the more alumni register. Pramod Kunju has developed an initial rate card, that we have started using.
2. Product sales – IITM logoed items have never been really designed and marketed well. As most of us know, the college bookstore on any US campus sells tons of logoed items and this is a pretty good revenue generator for them. We are working with the IIT School of management studies to assign a final year MBA project to a group of students every year to run this as a separate company. They will form a management team (CEO, product development, marketing, procurement, finance) to run this activity. This will give them a real life opportunity to run a business while they are graduating. Each class can do this and they can be measured on the increases in revenues and profits they generate during the year that they are responsible. We have talked to Prof. Ganesh and they are most definitely excited. I will mentor the initial group to get this activity going and hopefully our other successful IITM entrepreneurs can pitch in every year. This will also result in an IITMAA marketing and distribution channel that can be used to allow student entrepreneurs eventually to market their products over the internet. IITMAA will then act as a distributor.
3. Accepting payment – We need to be able to accept credit card payments on the website from anywhere in the world. We currently have two credit card arrangements – IITMAA has an arrangement with Citibank in India, which is an India only credit card and IITMAANA has an arrangement in the US. We need to streamline these. We get a small percentage of all the charges incurred on the card. If IITM alumni use these cards for a majority of their purchases, IITM Alumni Associations benefit. In addition to that we are working on getting government approvals to accept foreign currency payments. This will allow us to accept such payments to sell product as well as to accept donations from all over the world.
4. An Alumni Club – This has been a suggestion that has been discussed for a long time. The 80 batch (with Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthy) have come up with a great idea. IIT has all the necessary facilities (swimming pool, fitness center, sports arenas etc.). The one missing element was alcohol, since IIT is an alcohol free campus. As it happens the new Research Park is outside the campus but close to it. Prof. Ramamurthy has arranged for alumni to have access to the restaurant in this Park where alcohol can be served. This means that we now have ALL the elements of a club. There is still one small nuisance. Each of these activities requires individual registration, sign up, payment etc. The service we will offer from our site is that of an aggregator. This is a concept well known in parts procurement. For example, there are aggregators in Singapore who will take your Bill of Materials, procure all the parts and ship a complete kit to your manufacturing facility so you have no delays in production and you yourself don't have to expedite individual parts. They charge a fee for this service. This means that alumni can join the Alumni Club on the iitmaa.org website and the IITMAA office will be the aggregator and provide you the club membership and you can use all the facilities. The 80 batch has come forward to fund this effort.
5. Travel logistics – Prof. Ramamoorthy has arranged for 5 rooms at the Taramani Guest house to be permanently blocked for Alumni. They will be given up a week before they are due to be occupied, if no one has booked a stay. We want to add the booking of transportation with a local cab service so that you can plan a trip to Chennai and have boarding, lodging and transportation taken care of. We could eventually add a “meet & greet” service at Chennai especially for people coming in from outside India.
6. Alumni Yellow pages – There will be a facility for Alumni to advertise their own companies and services in the yellow pages for the benefit of other Alumni. This will be a free service.
7. Other services – I am sure that over time there will tons of other services that will come up. The web presence should catalyze many more of this. This must be a living web presence with continuous expansion.

How do we execute all this?

The basic foundation we needed for all this was the new iitmaa.org website. The basic foundation has been laid. It has taken the best part of a year to do this. We are now feverishly adding the services on the site. We would like to have a lot done by the Pan IIT meet which is being held at IITM this time from Dec 19-21 2008.

The key resource elements are the three web employees, Bob Nathan's management and engineering resources and the core team that I referred to earlier in this article.

This whole activity is still in the embryo stage. It will probably take at least another two years until it is incubated and is capable of surviving on its own.

It is also very clear that some fundamental changes need to be made to the IITMAA organization and setup if this momentum needs to be sustained and built upon.

Changes needed

1. Eliminate all the Vice-Presidential slots that were created. This eliminates a huge amount of unnecessary administrative work at election time and simplifies the organization.
2. Have the President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer run the organization. They can involve other people as the case may be and depending upon the projects that they want to pursue.
3. The IITMAA secretariat needs to be strong and powerful. This is the implementing organization. It also serves the global alumni. Seshan Rammohan (President of IITMAANA) and I have agreed that this will also be the MAANA Secretariat. We will hire a Manager, preferably a recently retired IITM alumnus who will have the stature to interact with the Director, the Deans, alumni and so on. He/she should also have the capability to get things done in Delhi. This needs to be a full time hire.
4. Have the Manager be the permanent Secretary of the IITMAA EC.
5. Only elect the Vice-President and Treasurer every two years.
6. Let the current Vice-President automatically become the President. This will allow excellent continuity, since the person will end up serving as the Vice-President for two years and the President for two years.

A word about the geographical location of the Office bearers. The constitution does not specify that people should reside at any specific place. However, my experience in the past couple of years has been that a significant presence is required in Chennai. My situation has been a godsend. I commute between the Bay Area, Geneva, Switzerland and Chennai, India EVERY month. I have been doing this for 11 years and will have to do this for some more time. This has worked out well because I am able to interact with people in the US and in India regularly. This also provides the Chennai presence.

At least until the IITMAA is well setup and can stand on its own two feet, a significant Chennai presence is needed for the office bearers.

Next steps

The term of the current EC will be over in December 2008. We are holding an alumni meeting on the 6th September 2008 and an EGM on 4th October 2008. The Secretary will move motions proposing the above changes at the AGM.

A lot of effort is going into the alumni meeting. We are trying to put together a program that will draw about 500 attendees with the help of students and alumni. We want to make this the first activity where there is more Alumni engagement than ever before. Ajit Narayanan, a 2003 alumnus has been helping design the program. You will read more about it in the latest Journeys.

We are using the AGM as a catalyst to actually do an Alumni-Student conclave. The first Alumni- Student conclave will happen on the 6th/7th September 2008. The Institute was already thinking of starting an Alumni day. So this fits in with Institute plans nicely. Hopefully this will develop over the years as a prime Alumni-Student interaction event and will become the third key event on the campus in addition to Shaastra and Saarang.

My own situation

I feel good about having given the IITMAA a certain vision and direction and having removed a lot of the politics out of the day to day work. This has been a huge personal effort but it will literally go waste if there is no continuity.

I am open to serving as President for another 2 year term to complete a lot of the things that I have referred to in this article. At this time I should be able to hand over charge to the Vice-President and preserve excellent continuity in the program. Hopefully by then

1. Things will be running smoothly
2. Programs will be bearing fruit
3. A majority of the Alumni will be participating in IITMAA
4. IITMAA will be financially sound.

This has been a lot of hard work to get this far. My fellow EC members and the Alumni need to be thanked for the patience that they have shown (after all, because the EC was quiet, everybody thought that nothing was happening!) and the massive efforts that have gone into getting this far. The Alumni office at Chennai needs special appreciation. They have been functioning and going about their business efficiently and quietly against quite a few odds.

Finally, a call to action. Please attend the AGM and provide us your support so we can move IITMAA forward.

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