'IT is like a business partner for PTI'

BANGALORE, INDIA: There is no other go. If you are eager to compete with your peers and become a dominant power among them, you have to be dynamic and cannot afford to be complacent. And you ought to improve your performance and deliver high-quality products to the customers.

Well, India's premier news agency PTI, too, had no other option, but to equip itself with state-of-the-art technologies to remain a top player in a highly-clogged 'news' market like India. The implementation of latest IT solutions are of paramount importance as long as a news provider of its stature is concerned; they cannot lag behind others in disseminating information faster and in real time. This change is so obvious, as it has deployed various IT solutions to transform its entire business to deliver a high-quality service to its customers, despite all odds.

Here, in this interview, its chief technology officer, Tridib Bordoloi, shares his experiences on how the deployment of latest technologies helped it transform its business.

CIOL: What are the major technology investments at your enterprise?

Bordoloi: In the past two years, our major focus has been on overhaul of the core IT infrastructure to enable PTI to focus on new growth imperatives. Hence, investments have gone towards servers, networking and security, so that the vast subscribers (customers) across the globe can experience a seamless and real time service delivery.

The focus also covered internal work flow applications, which enabled hundreds of employees across the country to work in a collaborative manner.

In a nutshell, the focus has been on overhauling of the entire supply chain of information collection, editing and delivery over a secured IT infrastructure.

CIOL: What are the primary overhauls of significant scale or value?

Bordoloi: In a way, the technology overhaul has been quite transformative for PTI as it has defined new and better ways of working internally and new possibilities externally. Technology bottlenecks can create artificial boundaries, hence creating a siloed culture and a ‘you versus us’ paradigm.

Removing those bottlenecks can create a ‘win-win’ paradigm and release and channelize immense amount of human energies, which can become the foundation for a transformation.

As mentioned earlier, we had an overhaul of IT at PTI and this was of both significant scale and value. Scale can be measured not only in terms of what was put into place, but also in terms of reach. It has also resulted in significant value creation, both for PTI and its customers. We provide authentic and timely news to providers across the globe, and making it real time has significant value for our customers. Creating value for them in turn creates value for us.

CIOL: What are your future plans?

Bordoloi: Our strategy for future is to leaverage the IT infrastructure, which has been put in place now. The focus now has to be on demand side of IT, that is, how internal business users use it for creating strategic advantage. With IT working smooth, innovation at the process and business level is possible.

CIOL: What are your areas of interest from the recent tech-breakthroughs?

Bordoloi: We are certainly interested in evaluating cloud model for providing IT services to internal business users. The exploration on how cloud can be helpful is going on.

CIOL: What are your advices to peers in terms of lessons, mistakes or challenges you experienced?

Bordoloi: Two important pieces of advice. One, treat IT function as a competency centre, which requires a CIO to embrace a service provider's approach. Adopt attitude and practices, which increases the alignment between IT and business, as their working hand-in-hand is of immense importance.

Two, personal risk taking is very important for letting IT drive transformation, as it creates anxiety in the system. Deep conviction, confrontation avoidance and appreciation of people and situation come quite handy to deal with the anxiety associated with any transformation. The result is worth the risk.

CIOL: How is IT a competitive differentiator/innovator/business value centre at your organization?

Bordoloi: IT has emerged and will continue to be a business partner at PTI, and together we shall create higher business value.