Let''s Face IT

Indian enterprises are, without doubt, on an all time high in their growth. Just as the enterprises are scaling up their IT infrastructure to support their business growth, manage global networks, and different applications, their CIOs are realizing the magnitude of the problems in the process. The challenges and solutions were deliberated in an Infrastructure Summit organized by Dataquest across Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata. Over 200 CIOs discussed the issues threadbare with an August panel in each city in a bid to find ways and means for the challenges in the process.

Government Raises its IT Stake

IT Infrastructure Now High on the Government Agenda: Ashis Sanyal (L) prescribed the need to have an e-readiness index, while Prakash Kumar (R) suggested that IT vendors have a major role to play in collaboration with the government

While delivering the keynote address in Kolkata, Ashis Sanyal, director, DIT, recounting from his experience of over 30 years in managing IT infrastructure in the Government sectors, said, "The Government is striving to proliferate various IT applications across the country. But, because of the vast geographical spread, allocating resources like time, effort and money pose major challenges, and these have to be resolved with utmost diligence." To maintain some sort of e-readiness index is absolutely necessary for the Government under the current circumstances, felt the man responsible for all the SWANs across different States.

Former IT Secretary of Delhi Government, Kumar, in his keynote address in the Delhi Summit, elaborated on the work of the Delhi Government in establishing the IT infrastructure for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. He was particularly involved in setting up many infrastructures including broadband, website as well as their management to the tourism and travel industry. Quoting examples from the Sydney and Beijing Olympics, Kumar emphasized that a model needs to be worked out for managing such a large-scale games event.

Corporate Heads Admit Concerns

Enterprise Raised Today's Pertinent Issues: Lalit Sawhney (L) stressed on disaster management, while Jitendra Kulkarni (R) focused on how HR issues could impact an organization's IT infrastructure

For IT infrastructure management, Kulkarni expressed a different take in terms of his main concern. "Scarcity of skilled people is definitely a major issue as IT is one area where retaining good quality people is very difficult. There is a continuous churn of people, who either get trained and move out of the country or are picked up by MNCs. So, mid and low end companies are finding it very difficult to retain good technical resources," he opined. When it comes to IT infrastructure investments, it is very difficult for organizations to exactly arrive at what is the return on training and retaining efficient workers. Often it is noticed that there is no direct linkage between the bottom line impact and the stake involved. Taking this crucial HR factor into perspective, Kulkarni prescribed that IT investment could be divided into two parts. One is the defensive kind of investment, which is more internally focused, and the other is offensive, which is more strategic in nature and focuses towards the customer or the market in competition.

Kunwar provided with new definitions on IT infrastructure management. "Execution excellence is required not just to manage the hardware infrastructure, but also for various applications, and also to ensure organizations work seamlessly. The buzzwords in IT infrastructure management, therefore, have to be execution, orientation and actionable intelligence." Though IT infrastructure management is the most important factor as all business activities depend upon it, planning and carrying out projects to ensure effective management of IT are often typically undervalued to the detriment of the organizations. The management concerns also found resonance in the Kolkata panel discussion when Abhrajit De of Haldia Petrochemicals said that effective application management could often overcome some deficiencies in infrastructure.

Sawhney, a veteran with several large enterprises including Hindustan Lever and Reliance, provided a fresh perspective related to IT and disaster management. "There has to be a proper setup for disaster recovery in a documented fashion knowing that each disaster is always of a different kind. All the CIOs need to work in a direction to mitigate the risks, make sure that there are enough systems and processes to be put on ground in a manner that every time there is a maintenance upgrade and expansion, and there are no fall backs. Moreover, while reducing duplication of efforts every thing works like clockwork" He also suggested that the opportunities of lowering infrastructure costs and operation costs should be taken into account and CIOs should try to focus on them.

In the Kolkata panel discussion, Abhrajit De explained the importance of IT management software, which is becoming crucial for enterprises and service providers who want to dynamically align their businesses and IT services, achieve greater control over their IT infrastructure, and ensure an improved user or customer experience. "IT managers must have the processes and tools in place to ensure that the infrastructure keeps pace with business needs and provides guaranteed levels of service at predetermined costs," he said.

Recognizing the inevitability and the importance of outsourcing IT infrastructure management, CN Ram of HDFC Bank emphasized on the security aspect. "There is probably a lot more hype about the security issue and actual security problems. It is appreciable that ever since automation started to hit the financial industry, there has been a lot of work done on security. These range from combating internal security, which is collusion and fraud to things like maker-checker concept. Ever since Internet banking has come in vogue, security issues have gained further importance." At the end of the day, even while outsourcing, a balanced perspective is necessary, keeping in mind that the finance industry and risks go together.

Anwar Baghdadi of Countrywide Financials felt that the infrastructure should be such that they are able to take care of the ease and flexibility of people working around that infrastructure. Thus, nothing changes even if business-outsourcing activities change. All that it requires is a framework, ensuring that there is an interconnection of a virtual mechanism to the organizational structure. Albert Herbert of Wockhardt Hospitals believes that outsourcing is also strongly dependent on the technology behind it. Managing the IT infrastructure as a loosely interconnected group of components is no longer sufficient. Rather, the infrastructure must be managed from the viewpoint of the lines of business it supports. Specifically, IT managers must have the means and tools to ensure that the infrastructure keeps pace with business needs and provides guaranteed levels of service at predetermined costs.

Some other common pertinent issues emerged from the various panel discussions. These include problems like tracking, controlling and making the most cost-effective use of the ever growing and ever more complex mix of IT assets. Secondly, CIOs are facing the challenge of ensuring availability of external services and integrating them with internal service solutions. And lastly, streamlining the daily activity workflow for a more proactive work pattern and the implementation of new initiatives in a timely fashion is gradually becoming a sine qua non for these CIOs. All the IT heads also need to strive to achieve centralized management, controlling the IT environment, be it infrastructure or outsourcing infrastructure management.

Manogyata Narayan

manogyatan@cybermedia.co.inThe technology sector itself, including both the IT and BPO segments, have traditionally been one of the biggest users of IT. As they scale up their IT infrastructure, they have started encountering a myriad of challenges. These were elucidated by the three other keynote speakers: Jitendra Kulkarni, head of Redington India and India's #2 IT distributor in Chennai and Bangalore (Kulkarni has subsequently left Redington); Atul Kunwar, CEO, Transworks; and Lalit Sawhney, CEO, Creative IT, in Mumbai.Widespread scaling up of IT infrastructure has not just touched the Indian corporates, but also the Government sectors. Prakash Kumar, joint secretary, Ministry of Ocean Development, Government of India, informed, "IT deployment in the government sectors have undergone a complete paradigm shift, from simple AMCs to complete outsourcing." Initiatives taken by the Government under the NEGP have opened up opportunities for the private sector in terms of IT investments in collaboration with the Government.