'RoI should be realized in 6-12 months'

The biggest challenge for any CIO is getting into new initiatives and show cost justification for your decisions. Any CIO or a IT/IS manager need to primarily identify the business objective of the enterprise and their customer base and then focus on whether IT enabling helps them in increasing their revenue stream or customer base or efficient management. We need to think of its long term benefits, the cost of updations incase new version come up and various other factors of ROI. I feel the ROI should be realised within a year or 6 months depending on big budget to mid-size project.

Also, for CIOs of MNCs wanting to implement any new IT initiative, has to do so in collaboration with their parent company as otherwise interaction/interface with each other will lead to utter chaos incase both then use different platforms, applications, etc. It is important to ensure single window interface. Besides enterprises need to drive people to leverage technology and systems. Our own experience has shown that toying with new and hyped applications, hasn't helped us much when we introduced the call centre concept.

In an industry like us, where most of the people are on the field, i.e. (the sales and marketing personnel) we require solutions that empowers them to report or record their daily business and which gives them immediate feedback of the sales status. Though of course, CRM and SFA solutions have aided to a large extent, I feel it is more beneficial for the supply chain segment.

Also for a mid-size company like us with a very focussed target customers (since we specialise in Diabetes care, our focussed customers are diabetic patients and doctors specialized in treating them) and also for those who do not have manufacturing base in India, outsourcing supply chain process is a better option at least here in India.

Although online supply chain has caught up here, it is yet to make a deep inroads and entities are yet to adopt to new business models. As such, new entrants in our line and SME enterprises without a strong manufacturing base, will find the whole process long drawn to source, procure and distribute. By outsourcing our supply chain, we have reduced our over head costs and inventory levels which has helped us concentrate on our core business.

As IT managers, we need to take responsibility of data integration. Data and analytics infrastructure should be centrally managed to drive efficiency and enterprise learning. More specifically, IT team should maintain control over customer data models to enable cross-team consistency to measure our success.

Coming to the much hyped 'e-detailing' solutions for pharma companies, I'm yet to see the a great deal of it. I feel any online initiative has to be complemented with offline dealings. Pharma companies essentially have two types of customers, patients and the doctors. Even while considering patients to be e-enabled and willing for e-dealings, we cannot say anything about the doctors, specially in the Indian scenario.

The amount of time a doctor spends with the sales reps and on the net for e-details is almost the same but unlike abroad, the percentage of doctors who are online and who are interested in e-detailing is abysmally low here. So personal contacts and visits are extremely important for us.

As an IT manager, my concern is to not to jump to conclusion because somebody else out there succeeded by implementing certain solution. Our variables might be different and if need be , we can test the waters by going for simple solutions and see the benefits. We need to wait and watch in implementing any solutions, which involves huge investments till it gets stabilized and standardized.