IT through the sands of time

IT through the sands of time

Three decades, is definitely a long time. An era of change, actually when it comes to IT's evolution in Indian businesses. From the changing face of internal IT department, or the degree of outsourcing to how various verticals like retail or FMCG embraced IT, here's all the track-check with a man who has seen it all in his 29 years of experience as an IT professional of which 21 years have been spent wearing a CIO's hat. Upal Chakroborty, CIO at DLF Ltd,has dived deep across multi-location and multi product environments and is packed with a versatile vector experience. Here's his take on how IT has undergone and brought change in the last many years.

Pratima Harigunani

Monday, January 04, 2010

You have steered IT in many sectors, having worked as CIO of companies in the FMCG sector like Reckitt Benckiser and Pepsico, Consumer Durables like Sony, BPO like Convergys and now Realty like DLF, along with other roles in areas like Hospitality (Hotels and Travel), FMCG (Cigarettes and Food), Paper Manufacture and Printing, Retail and Commodity Trading. Are there any key vertical-specific differences when it comes to applying IT?

Every sector evolves and adopts as per its unique needs. In BPO, infrastructure side gets more prominence and network uptime is crucial to business. In Retail, CRM specially makes a lot of difference. In Real Estate, areas like collection from so many customers, or land bank monitoring issue, GIS enablement, project management etc are very relevant to IT.

In Reckitt Benckiser, it was under you that the IT strategy was defined for the first time. That must have been challenging?

Yes. Initiating something brings a lot of challenges. Resistance to computerization was obviously a big issue that time. In 1988 computers themselves were at primitive stage. I was involved in setting up systems and processes right from scratch. When I left them, they had graduated to a set of reengineered processes enabled through ERP, CRM and Business Intelligence system and with various factories and selling units connected through state-of-the-art networks.

You have also worked with consultants and IT service providers in diverse areas like implementation of ERP, outsourcing of IT, formulating IT strategies etc. How much has their role changed over the years?

Vendors have definitely improved, particularly big names like IBM etc. There is definitely much better stuff on SLAs, value addition, proactivity etc.

How much change has the internal IT department gone through in India?

Today, we are only hiring people, here for example, who are focused on business. The technical part can be outsourced, but we need people who understand technology from a business dimension. We don’t need hard-core techies for that in the team. It’s about setting up right SLAs, or issue escalation, or business angles. That’s the current trend I guess.

What would be the highlights of the last ten to 15 years?

IT earlier, was only supposed to automate certain things. Then there came the era of IT enablement, where IT could bring in possibilities in unthought-of areas. Example- ERP implementation. The focus was still on information. But now IT is an integral part. The process itself is getting re-engineered. New processes coming to fore. IT is already bringing in changes to business growth or cost reduction.

Your take on IT outsourcing’s scope?

We have already done some at DLF. As I look at it, it’s good for areas where we have no competence to run, support or manage any IT areas. For instance, a complex one like Data Centre management. Now with IBM, even if we don’t talk about cost analysis, there is definite peace of mind.

What next can we expect at DLF Group?

GIS, workflow IT enablement etc are areas already done. In Real Estate, what can really make a difference is CRM, which is an area still to be improved here. We are also looking keenly at BPM wherever processes are archaic, at good document management which becomes more crucial due to compliance. Cloud computing won’t be on our board till 2010.

©CIOL Bureau