“We Want to Work with Government on Telecom Implementation Standards’’

Keeping in mind a need to educate and train the professionals in the IT and communications space,  the Building Industry Consulting Service International or BICSI is looking forward to working closely with the government in terms of establishing telecom implementation standards in India, Ketan C Kothari, Chairperson, BICSI, India District talks about the organisations current focus and its plans for India.

What are some of the primary focus areas for BICSI?

Our primary goal is to be the pre-eminent global resource for developing standards, providing credentials, accreditation, and knowledge transfer for the ICT community. BICSI will provide resources to strengthen industry knowledge, attain professional credentials and develop and build local ITS industry.

Why was this body created what was the primary reason behind the BICSI?

This body was formed as Building Industry Consulting Services International in 1977 as a non-profit organization to promote standards and practices for Information Transport System. Since than BICSI has grown to address complete ICT industry.

How many members does this group has today? and what are your plans to increase on this number?

It has more than 23,000 ICT professionals worldwide and around 125 in India. The plan is to grow this community to 500 members by 2016.

What are some of the big issues that you as a body going to take up?

We would like to work with government to form Telecom implementation standards for building industry be it residential building or commercial building. The biggest challenge today is though Telecom is treated as 4^th utility, there are no defined guidelines for implementing this unlike Power, Water and Gas. There are licensed technicians required for all other utilities but same is not the case for Telecom.

What are some of the big challenges that you see in front of the telecom space today? how can these challenges be overcome?

We believe that the biggest challenge for the telecom space, and I speak from Physical connectivity perspective is that this is completely vendor & contractor driven and not standards driven. This is resulting in all the chaos that you see when the cables are being laid on road, public places or buildings.

Please share some of the future activities of the body for the year 2014?

We have plans to conduct trainings and technical conferences in major metro cities so as to educate people about the upcoming standards, best practices and implementation methodologies. We aim to bring some discipline, in the way physical connectivity is implemented for any kind of ICT requirement.