Building the intelligent enterprise

There’s more to the intelligent enterprise than just rolling out the latest ERP or CRM package. CIOs have found diverse methods of getting the most for their moolah, says Prashant L Rao

IT is an integral part of doing business in today’s world and nobody knows that better than the folks who are in the trenches fighting on the front lines—the CIOs who map an organisation’s IT destiny. A CIO’s work is never done; picking the best fit among diverse solutions available in the market is just the beginning of a long road that ends, hopefully, with the Holy Grail of RoI (return on investment). There are many ways in which a CIO can take an organisation’s IT set-up from the merely functional to the highly effective, and the winners of the ‘Seagate Intelligent Enterprise Awards’ at the recently held Technology Senate in Kochi—organised by Express Computer and Network Magazine—are masters of the fine art of mining gold from IT dross. Here we attempt to distil some of their wisdom for the benefit of IT heads everywhere.

Picking the right software for the job is just the first step. Next comes finding ways and means of squeezing the last drop of utility from the said package without paying through your nose for additional

licenses and what have you. Take the case of Bharat Petroleum (BPCL), where the IS team was faced with the problem of delivering the wealth of information locked in the Laboratory Information System. The obvious and expensive route was to purchase additional licenses of the software—BPCL had already forked out a hefty Rs 3 crore for eight user licenses. What the IS team at BPCL did instead was to build a system from scratch that pulls out data from the Laboratory Information System and presents it in a Web browser. The lesson here is that there’s more than one way to get at the data that is the lifeblood of your enterprise. A little custom programming may be all that you need to unlock the hidden potential in your information systems. M D Agrawal, the chief manager for the IS Refinery System at BPCL puts it succinctly when he says, “IT problems can’t be perceived in isolation.”

Thinking outside the box

Sometimes it is necessary to think outside the box. If ITC had stuck to traditional methods, it would never have been able to harness the economic power of thousands of villages. There just weren’t any off-the-shelf products for the job. It took an innovative kiosk model backed up by a VSAT network to bring its e-choupal network to 15,000 villages across five Indian states. In the process, ITC built multi-lingual portals for a variety of crops starting with soya. The portals provide information about weather conditions, scientific farming practices and market prices. Going a step forward, the e-choupal facilitates supply of farm inputs and purchase of produce. Thinking outside the box can lead to unconventional tactics. For instance, while ITC has worked hard to create interfaces in Hindi and provided software for typing Hindi characters using a English keyboard, in the end it is ‘hinglish’ (Hindi typed with English characters) that’s become the preferred lingua franca for e-mail and other electronic communication over the e-choupal network. Users find it awkward to painstakingly use several keystrokes to render one letter in Hindi.

Taking the second step

While most manufacturing companies are implementing some form of supply chain management and garnering the benefits of the same, Dabur took SCM to the next level. Other FMCG companies had stopped at the primary level of distribution. Dabur went ahead and integrated the secondary chain of its top 500 stockists into its extended supply chain. This gives the company better control over the pipeline and it is able to offer access to critical information through mobile phones using SMS as a medium. Integrating the first level helped, but there was still the chance of the first level of carry and forward agents getting stuffed with excess stock to meet sales deadlines. With up-to-date sales information coming from secondary stockists, this kind of juggling is no longer possible. “The real RoI here is reducing pipeline inventory,” says Gopal Shukla, Dabur’s chief information officer.

Forming pressure groups

One of the bigger problems on a CIO’s horizon is the ever-rising cost of software licenses. This is particularly true of those software categories where competing products are few or non-existent and IT heads have no alternative to the monopoly vendor. In this scenario, CIOs are fighting back by forming associations to bring down software licensing costs. Once software vendors realise that CIOs are acting as a group, they become more amenable to give them a better deal.

Going beyond the IT component

Sometimes, the CIO has to look beyond just the IT component and usher in parallel business changes that go hand in hand with IT deployment. This flies in the face of aligning IT with business by doing quite the opposite but it works. Syndicate Bank rolled out a series of business measures that helped it get the most out of its investment in a core banking system. It did this by branding all branches using the core banking system to use the same colour scheme (counter colours, etc.) and layout, offering customers a physical single-window option by letting them approach officers seated at any desk and introducing uniforms for its staff. At the same time the bank began to capture more information about its customers to enable cross-selling.

Convincing top management

Unless the CEO/CFO combine are convinced about the merits of an IT implementation, chances are it won’t get the funds and attention it needs to succeed. So what’s a CIO to do? They’ve adopted varying methods to get their point across. One CIO found that the only way to get a sanction of Rs 60 lakh for a DR site to be put in place even before business operations commenced was to put it to the board with a CIO paper on the consequences in case of a disaster. That worthy succeeded in his aim and the board cleared the proposal. There are less drastic methods. A popular one is to do a pilot project that shows the IT department’s ability to solve business problems. Another is to maintain an open door policy so that business heads feel comfortable about bringing their problems to the IT department knowing that their problems will be treated by IS as its own.

There’s more to an intelligent enterprise than buying ‘best of breed’ products and hoping for IT nirvana. To be one, a company’s IS department has to find ways and means of extending the benefits of IT to everyone in the organisation without having to splurge on additional software licenses and the like. Sharing best practices with peers and forming lobbies helps. In the end, the intelligent enterprise is the one that does more with less.

Seagate Intelligent Enterprise Awards 2003

The Seagate Intelligent Enterprise Awards 2003 were presented to four organisations that have made innovative use of information technology to further their business goals.

The overall award, The Intelligent Enterprise of the Year 2003, for the most innovative enterprise went to V V R Babu, CIO, ITC (e-Choupal Project).

There were three runner-up awards: For primary distribution integration with secondary distribution: Gopal Shukla, CIO, Dabur. For Digital Nervous System: M D Agrawal, Chief Manager—IS Refineries, Bharat Petroleum. For Employee Sales Portal: Sanjay Govil, CIO, Eicher Motors.

ITC’s electronic choupal

ITC initiated its e-choupal project to streamline its dealings with Indian farmers in 2000. This is a project on a massive scale that ultimately aims to cover every sixth Indian village. Each choupal covers around eight villages and 15,000 villages have been covered to date in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. The initiative This Web-based initiative of ITC offers farmers of soya, wheat, coffee, and shrimps with all the information, products and services they need to enhance farm productivity, improve farm-gate price realisation, and cut transaction costs. The project was built using .NET. The e-choupal portals are based on Indian languages like Hindi, Kannada, and Telegu. The problems Power cuts in rural areas can run for eight to ten hours. ITC even provided gensets at a few locations. It didn’t work out and in 2001 ITC shifted its focus to using Ku Band VSATs. The power problem was solved by using solar panels. The benefits Enhanced relationship with farming community across 15,000 villages so far. Reduced transaction cost for its agri-commodity purchases. Information on inventory retained by the farmers, which can improve the quality of trading decisions. Provided means to expand reach to rural markets through cross-selling of the company’s products and services. The project has become a hot topic with academics. Harvard Business School did a case study on it and 90 students came for three days to study e-choupal. Future roadmap The e-Choupal project has seen the implementation of around 2,500 information kiosks and ITC has made plans to increase the kiosks to around 10,000 in order to serve farmers in 100,000 villages by 2007. However, it hopes to accelerate the pace of the project and complete it in another two to three years.

Technology Senate 2003

Asia witnessed the largest IT event of the year that involved CTOs, this November at Kochi. Express Computer, Network Magazine and the Business Publications Division of the Indian Express Group hosted Technology Senate 2003 (TS 2003), an exclusive event for enterprise technology decision-makers and leaders. TS 2003 was attended by around 200 CTOs, CIOs and IT heads from Indian enterprises across the country. And it featured conferences, round table discussions, analyst meets, awards presentation ceremonies, theme pavilions, and a live demonstration of a futuristic network. The event was very successful in meeting its objective, which was to create a platform for enterprise IT heads to share and gather knowledge from peers, analysts, real life case studies, and technology leaders Hosted on November 26 and 27, TS 2003 was unique in a number of ways. It was a purely editorial team-driven initiative, which meant that the conference content largely consisted of technology presentations, analyst opinions, and discussions among the IT heads on predetermined topics of relevance to the community. Never before has an event for enterprise IT heads been held on such a grand scale in India. The delegates from different parts of the nation were flown to Kochi the evening before the opening day. Most of them derived tremendous value from their participation, and have expressed eager interest in being part of Technology Senate 2004, to be held next year.