Test before you leap

INDIA:

What are the new areas of your future IT plans?

There are multiple ones. We are working on applications to integrate all our stockists with a good distribution integration. There are lot of applications in progress for core system integration, BI, supplier portals, Ariba and vulnerability assessment.

How do you ensure alignment with business?

We have an annual exercise called AOP or Annual Operations Planning where business heads present their planned initiatives and changes for the coming year. Out of that we draw the IT plans accordingly and choose solutions as per business needs.

Is it easy to select the right solutions specially when there is so much hype that vendors create often?

There is a marked difference between the way things work in India and elsewhere.  Once you open a requirement so many vendors would come with their options and everyone will claim of a great solution or a good lineage in terms of customers. In actually their experience or touchpoint is very small. I always talk to my CIO friends or ask for references. It is a good idea to give them a task or assess through one-on-one interactions and test their deliverables rather than depending on paper claims. In one instance, when we were looking for training requirements for SAP, one service provider claimed a lot on paper but failed miserably on the first topic we gave them.