Sell continuity. Not downtime.

MUMBAI, INDIAl: J.Ramesh, GM- Corporate IT, Crompton Greaves Limited tells us a smart formula of consuming, selling and leveraging IT with value as his own strategy spells out.

How is this year taking your broad-range plans on IT forward?

We are doing a lot of things. All acquisitions for last five years had been inside discrete systems so getting information into a single point with information availability agility will happen with a broad SAP rollout initiative. We have refreshed SAP servers, updated database and created architecture in such a way that scalability of blades and servers is achieved as desired.

Where does virtualization fit and accelerate this piece?

We have a lot of non-SAP servers and applications so we bought virtualization to save space. The goals are already through as we have seen a gain of about 20 to 25 lakhs in power savings and 18 lakhs in server maintenance.

Anything else to achieve information agility?

Yes. We are working towards near RDR. Far RDR for limited number of users was ok but billing etc necessitated a new platform. So we assembled everything and created a near RDR system. The point is that 45 per cent of system overload comes from information overloading so heavy transactions unnecessarily delay availability of systems. No data base response time has reduced drastically to about 900 milliseconds against a benchmark of 1200 milliseconds. Besides it has improved work life balance as employee’s time is not unduly wasted on unnecessary activities.

How do you distill your lessons from all your broad and deep experiences?

I have learnt that IT has to be the interpreting function and not just a sale one. Whenever one needs to get approval for heavy-expenditure laden hardware investments etc, it is natural to be in a challenging spot on convincing management. It is not going to work if you sell them IT specifications. If it does it will consume a lot of time and procrastination. Instead one can tell the business side that such and such investment is reasonable so that business does not stop due to technical delays. If business continuity is highlighted instead of other areas or productivity, it yields faster results. IT has to translate business goals and not vice versa.