The Deceptive E-Face

The Internet, undoubtedly, has a global leveling effect. But there are levels… and then there are levels. With India’s booming IT services sector, I decided to click on and explore the websites of two firms that specialize in developing IT products for, and providing IT services to, banks and financial institutions.

The first IT firm is a Bangalore-based giant, one of the top-five IT firms from India. The homepage opened quickly enough. It had a few graphics but most of the information was textual. On the left side was a bar indicating the various sectors that this IT firm has domain expertise in. I clicked on Financial Services, and the page for that sector came up. Like most good IT services firms, it featured client case studies. I clicked on that link. A page opened up with links to a variety of case studies: an Investment Portal for a Large Wall Street Major, Application Architecture for an Australian Insurer, Transaction Processing System for a Leading Credit Card Franchisee, and so on. Clicking on any of these links revealed simple 1-2 paragraph text accounts: the problem faced by the client, the approach taken by the Indian IT service provider, the solution developed, and the implementation stage of the solution.

The second IT firm, based in New Bombay on the outskirts of Mumbai, claimed special expertise in banking and financial services….The homepage was graphics rich, and took a while to download. With stock pictures galore floating all over the Internet, it is easy create a “Western looking” façade… the smiling blond bespectacled Western woman, multicolor technology graphics, fancy silhouette icons, lots of color…

There was, of course, the obligatory link called “casestudies”. I clicked on it, and waited… and waited… and waited. I was using a high-speed connection at one of India’s foremost educational institutions, so I cannot blame the connection for the trickling-molasses download speed. After all, with the same connection I had nearly instant access to the homepage, the sector page, and the case studies pages of the first firm.

The second firm’s main page for case studies was also relatively graphics rich compared to the first firm’s. This “casestudies” page of the second IT firm took at least five full minutes to download.

The second firm’s IT case studies dealt with a Large Bank in West Africa, a Leading Bank in Saudi Arabia, a Leading Bank in Cyprus. The Indian Major goes after the high-profile Wall Street accounts and the Indian Minor goes after the competitively easier West African and Middle East accounts: fair enough! Clicking on the Saudi Arabian link gave lots of project details, a long list of technical platforms and languages deployed, and of course the obligatory “stock graphic” of a non-descript high-tech office setting filched from the net.

From a credibility-building perspective, the Indian IT Major giving only broad-brush accounts in its case studies while the Indian IT Minor giving a richer palette of project details makes sense. As it moves up the competitive ladder, this Indian IT Minor would also begin to skip details and move to broad-brush case study descriptions.

But the treacle-slow download of the homepage and the links within that is inexcusable. It totally punctures the mythical e-face that this Indian IT Minor is trying to create with its Western-looking graphics. It screams loudly a rather unsettling message: “I have programmers with time on their hands to create graphics-rich pages but I am not willing to invest in high-speed, high-reliability web-hosting for my corporate website!”

Yes, the Internet is a great leveler… it allows the quick creation of fantastic, modern, futuristic e-faces in the form of professional-looking websites…but it unmasks deceptive e-faces just as quickly!

Nik Dholakia