Theekshana

Theekshana was established in December 2006 as a not- for- profit Company which was incorporated by an Association that was made up by staff of University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC). This company came into existence as part of the vision of the founder Director of UCSC the late Prof. V.K Samaranayake who envisioned that the natural next step in the evolution of the consulting, commercializing of R&D work of the UCSC should be to form a not-for-profit company in line with international best practice at universities around the world. Theekshana was formed in order to full fill the following objectives and reasons: The World Bank and some other international and local agencies were not willing to offer ICT based projects directly to state organizations due to their policies. Under the e-Sri Lanka programme managed by the ICT Agency around 2005, the UCSC was invited to submit their proposals for national development projects but the UCSC was unable to bid for these projects due to the nature of the establishment. Hence, a proxy agency to bid for those projects, a company (which we named Theekshana) was established for this purpose in 2006. The main intention was to harness the ICT expertise built up within the UCSC over the years for executing the projects of national importance. UCSC as well as its predecessor, the Institute of Computer Technology (ICT), University of Colombo, has been undertaking software development projects through its Computer Service Centre (CSC) of state sector organizations and other parties in order to contribute to national development since 1990. However, large scale software development projects involve a significant risk factor and the UCSC was not established to manage such liability due to risks in software development projects. Therefore, it was a necessity to have an entity to protect the UCSC by managing the liability in case of a failure of a software project.