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Align IT with business to achieve growth

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: What was once popular is long forgotten now! Gone are the days when the saying was What Kolkata does today, India does it tomorrow. Being still the knowledge capital of the country, Kolkata has a lot of potential as a city to emerge as an industry-friendly zone.

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As the capital of eastern India and one of the key ports in the country, the city has its own importance on the global map. Not to forget, its one of the most densely populated place in the world. Kolkata can beat any other city to become India's leading economic zone, provided it can overcome two of its most crucial predicaments conservative mindset and living, leading to a conformist political practice.

The good news is that people and their mindset are changing. And this is clearly visible through the way Kolkata's business houses are coming up to transform their processes to suit modern business environment and steer their way towards growth.

Realizing the benefits of industrial power and modern day technology, the local corporate segment has been pretty active towards adopting contemporary IT practices over the last five years.

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Said Dipankar Ghosh, GM, HR and ICT business, Biecco Lawrie, "IT is an enabler. IT is more of business intelligence than technology that contributes to improve business output through latest infrastructure being set up."

Take the case of Haldia Petrochemicals which has been using IT since the last ten years. Its key objective has been increasing business efficiency through IT. However, with growing trends in business, the requirement for IT has also been shifting. And today the situation is more complex, since IT is no more mere implementation of hardware and software, rather its involved with streamlining business process and driving towards future growth.

"The key challenge for us is how to best utilize the existing assets, and go for new technology at the same time. It is very important to establish a seamless and optimized infrastructure that would enhance business productivity," said Abhrajit De, DGM, IS, HPCL.

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For Sudarshan Sengupta, management consultant, Amiya Commerce & Construction, the biggest challenge is to identify the best solution to be implemented at phases boosting its business process.

"For us, cycle time of projects is very crucial. Therefore, IT plays a very active role to meet our goal. Also user acceptance is very important since it is they who run the show," he said.

"Our challenge is to optimize the processes and implement the latest technology aligning it with business needs. Training the users accordingly is another challenge," he explains.

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Ghosh too emphasizes on the growing complexity of aligning IT infrastructure with business process, and optimizing the former to attain better efficiency.

Like HPCL Philips Carbon Black has been using IT for a decade, and over the last five years the adoption has accelerated tremendously. For Man Mohan Goyel, head, IT, managing the legacy system while migrating to new technology is difficult.

"It is important to maintain a simple IT infrastructure whenever we are upgrading and optimizing it to get better business output," he said.

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As IT adoption has been increasing among SMEs, so have been their challenges. While designing the solution according to business process is a tough job, managing the infrastructure is even tougher.

"Today technology is changing rapidly. As a result, it becomes difficult for SMEs to identify the right solution," said Satish Choudhary, MD, Techniche.

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"To make things simpler, modality of business has to be modified in order to meet these challenges. SMEs have to be more flexible and open towards adopting new technology and aligning it with their business requirements," he suggested.

Abhrajit De of Haldia Petrochemicals advocates tightrope walking between utilizing the existing assets and adding new technology at the same time.

Arguably SMEs are one of the fastest growing sectors in the Indian economy. And IT is the tool that helps them achieve the desirable growth.

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"There is no second thought to that. However, to enable the desired growth, it is important to align IT infrastructure with business process," said Sengupta.

"And to do that seamlessly, it is important to understand the present situation, the plan for the next five years, what the current need is and how the system can be erected to support the required future growth so that scalability is possible with minimal additional cost. And to get the best result, the CIO has to come out of his traditional role of a technocrat and become a business leader. While the management also has to be more informative and open towards new technologies," he opines.

Ghosh too has a similar opinion, "A CIO has to be more involved with overall process in order to understand the business requirements and identify the appropriate IT solution." According to Goyel, a CIO needs to drive the business.

"He not only has to be updated about the latest available technologies, but also has to understand his business. Then only he can implement an effective and optimized IT solution for his organization."

While agreeing to the changing role of a CIO, Vishal Anand Gupta, deputy manager, systems, Calcutta Medical College & Research Center said "It is also important to have a representative from the management to work in congruence with the CIO to identify and buy the right business process oriented technology solution. The whole procedure will be much easier then."

As IT is gaining greater importance as a business enabler, it is also evident that the CIO today has a more important role to play. With the marriage of business and IT becoming the need these days, the role of a CIO is expanding rapidly. While the transformation has already started among the corporate, the SMEs too have to catch up with the trend.