Tata Steel, Fortis turn ‘Champions’

MUMBAI: The first ever CIOL Enterprise Connect Awards, 2004 names Varun Jha of Tata Steel as the ‘Champion CIO’ in the above Rs 1000 crore revenue category. Sunil Kapoor, CIO of the New Delhi based Fortis Healthcare has been identified as the ‘Champion CIO’ in the below Rs 1000 crore category.

The Enterprise Connect Awards is instituted by India’s leading IT portal CIOL, in association with Dataquest magazine to recognize and reward cases of exemplary work carried out by the Indian CIOs.

The Enterprise Connect Awards is instituted by India’s leading IT portal CIOL, in association with Dataquest magazine to recognize and reward cases of exemplary work carried out by the Indian CIOs. In a pioneering attempt by CIOL, the awards aim to understand the extent of reach and spread of IT and its prevalence of usage among the Indian enterprises. The underlining focus of the award is meant to recognize the efforts of CIOs in enabling IT.

The awarding process, which began in May this year, received nearly 149 nominations from across various industry segments. For the first time ever, CIOs were presented with a detailed questionnaire that sought answers on the alignment of IT & business and projects of excellence undertaken by the companies in recent years.

The winners of the awards were those companies who best demonstrated leadership qualities, business-technology understanding, people orientation and performance through pioneering and innovating efforts.

The Enterprise Connect Awards 2004 was judged by a team of esteemed jury members chaired by Ashok Soota, Chairman & CEO of MindTree Consulting and comprised of Shyam Malhotra, Editor-in-Chief, CyberMedia Publications, D Ashok, Independent Consultant, IIM-B, Prof.Bhatnagar, IIM-A and Ibrahim Ahmad, Editor, Voice&Data. The jury members, after a rigid iteration process, selected twelve winners.

Varun Jha of Tata Steel was followed by Amrita Gangotra, CIO of Bharti Televentures and Venkat Iyer, CIO of TVS Motors Company who won the Gold and Silver Awards respectively in the above Rs 1000 crore category.

In the below Rs 1000 crore category, Sunil Kapoor of Fortis Healthcare was followed by Shobana Ravi, CIO of TAFE and NC Raghuram, CIO of Orchid Pharma who won the Gold and Silver CIO Awards.

Among the individual awardees, Hindalco’s CIO Sanjeev Goel has won the ‘Pioneer’ Award for having adopted cutting edge/ emerging technologies, ahead of time. The company has deployed asynchronous mode communication over satellite channel for the first time in India to connect all of its business units, zonal offices and godowns at a cost of 30 percent of the bandwidth tariffs applicable to other technologies. The company has saved nearly Rs 39.48 lakh per annum through this initiative.

CIO of Punjab National Bank (PNB), KS Bajwa has won the ‘Innovator’ Award for innovating on an existing technology/application for use originally not intended. With the introduction of multilingual software, the bank enabled transactions to be carried out in languages other than English. The product, developed entirely in-house, has led other banks to view multilingual application with interest.

The ‘Advocate’ Award went to ITC Limited CIO, VVR Babu for his contribution towards acceptance of IT within the organization including both the top management and end users. Under his stewardship, the company decided to provide handhelds with WiFi connectivity to the field staff in order to meet the business need of capturing procurement transactions of leaf tobacco across 70 rural locations. With data being captured at source, it resulted in recording zero errors and instant reconciliation of stocks.

The ‘Extended Manager’ Award has been won jointly by Tata Teleservices and SRL Ranbaxy for having created value for the business by connecting strategic external stakeholders. The jury panel decided to declare both the companies as joint winners as each of them demonstrated strong capabilities in all the qualities (in terms of strategic deployment of IT, business benefits, understanding the business needs of both the internal and external customers and people), required for this award.

In the case of SRL Ranbaxy, with their forward and backward integration with Lab Management System (LMS), the company was able to connect its franchise, sales team and customers. The implementation was successful despite the people manning the collection centers being computer illiterate and the sales team’s initial skepticism. By setting up wireless WAN, Tata Teleservices was able to extend the sales point right up to the doorstep of the consumer, which helped it to increase sales by 300 percent in 3 months.

CIO of Mahindra & Mahindra, Aravind Tawde has been selected for the ‘Process’ category award by positively impacting business processes through successful use of IT. The jury reasoned out that the development and launch of the company’s hit utility vehicle ‘Scorpio’, is a direct result of streamlining product development processes.

The Enterprise Connect Awards 2004 ceremony, was held at The Leela in Mumbai on the 27^th of August, 2004.The jury headed by Ashok Suta, Founder and Chairman, Mindtree Consulting went through rigrous process of selecting and ranking the companies based on certain parameters.

Speaking on the occasion, Ashok Soota, who was also the chief guest, said that CIOs must deliver more business value through IT, “ Make technology more user friendly and simplify at the front end. Processes needs a push approach towards IT investments today,” he added.

Shyam Malhotra, Executive Director, Cyber Media and member of jury said that CIOs needs to add value to the businesses and there ROI should not be calculated on IT impelmentations in organisations. IT should be the part of organisations andf act as enabler and facilitator fopr the enterprises.