'It was painful to embrace new IT solutions'

BANGALORE, INDIA: Companies have now started putting behind the traditional IT solutions to embrace newer technologies in order to improve their business. They are now realizing that they cannot lag behind other companies in adopting the best technologies to be competitive in the market.

For Electrotherm (India) Limited, too, a change was inevitable. It was, in fact, a painful experience for them from coming out of the traditional IT solutions.

In an interview with CIOL, on the sidelines of the C-Change programme, Electrotherm's chief information officer, Vishad Rahangdale, talks on how painful it was for him to scrap the old IT solutions for the newer ones and take people on board in crucial IT decision making.

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

Rahangdale: For us, 2011 was the year of IT implementations and deployments. We implemented various SAP solutions across all the business verticals in our firm. We also consolidated data centre services for the entire group and collaborated using Sharepoint.

We also went live with McAfee DLP for Security Policy enforcement.

CIOL: Could you explain some of the overhauls of significant scale or value at your company last year?

Rahangdale: It a 180 degree IT transformation from traditional IT during last year, as far as Electrotherm is concerned. It has helped us improve our productivity and scale the business. IT was more aligned to the business.

CIOL: What are your future plans?

Rahangdale: In the first half of this year, we are expecting business consolidation due to the market scenario. Aligning IT accordingly would be our priority during this period. In the second half, we are anticipating IT investments in the areas such as BI (Business Intelligence), and CRM (Customer Relationship Management), preferably in private/public cloud solutions.

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

Rahangdale: We think that the emergence of cloud solutions is a major breakthrough of the year gone by. We are planning to make the most of it in the coming years

CIOL: What is your advice to peers in terms of lessons, mistakes or challenges you experienced last year?

Rahangdale: While aligning IT with your business, major challenges lie in how you deal with a plethora of expectations. Setting your expectations right is of paramount importance. The key is to make them party to the IT roadmap.

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

Rahangdale: Migrating from traditional IT to the most structured IT set-up is a major breakthrough at our company. We feel that this has changed the rules of the game. The business has become more responsive and accountable.

IT has enabled businesses in reducing redundancies and trivialities at micro and macro levels. Accuracy of information flow and transparency were a few other dimensions which made the businesses more competitive.