Ravish Jhala
Systems Manager
Tridenthotels
Insight of My Company and its IT Strategies
EIH Limited, under the aegis of The Oberoi Group, operates hotels and
cruisers in five countries under the luxury ‘Oberoi’ and five-star
‘Trident’ brands. The Group is also engaged in flight catering, airport
restaurants, travel and tour services, car rentals, project management
and corporate air charters.
Oberoi Hotels & Resorts is
synonymous the world over with providing the right blend of service,
luxury and quiet efficiency. Internationally acclaimed for all-round
excellence and unparalleled levels of service, Oberoi hotels and resorts
have received innumerable awards and accolades. The last decade has
witnessed the debut of new luxury Oberoi leisure hotels in India and
abroad.
Trident hotels are five-star hotels that have established
a reputation for excellence and are acknowledged for offering quality
and value. These hotels combine state of the art facilities with
dependable service in a caring environment, presenting the ideal choice
for business and leisure travellers.
In our company, IT is
evolving and I must comment that the IT initiatives in our Company are
well supported by top management and driven within the company. We have
Corporate IT team located in Delhi and each business unit’s setup with
the IT staff to manage business unit operations.
Views on new technologies
Keeping up to date is like thinking without ink. If you don’t have ink
you can’t write same way in IT if you are not keep yourself on learning
curve on daily basis you may be outdates as on a minutes ago. To keep
myself in line with what I don’t know, I do following:
1. Research
2. Reading books and only selected magazines
3. Google is best friends
4. Registered my name to receive daily news letters from different sources
5. Write articles in media
6. Write blogs
Team Size
My belief for team is depends of your dream / vision. If you have big
dream, you need best team. Luck on my side, I have best team in place
starting from Senior Management to the people whom I worked with. We are
total 11 people managing the business operations 24 x 7.
Biggest Pain Point
I would not like to answer this questions keep in mind the PAIN POINT
but we as team work on single goal – To hell with circumstances, let
create opportunities. Our opportunities areas are:
1. Keeping our self in line with business
2. Saving time, cost, improve efficiency of business
3. Build eye for competition and trends.
Technology Heals Pain Points
Technology will help to reach and understand the pain point and if
implemented and managed correctly, it will surely address the
opportunities areas too.
Slowdown Impact on IT Innovation
More than IT innovation it is important to learn and train myself and
team and prepare them for the good time to come ahead. Keeping our guest
both internal and external connected to business which will bring
loyalty to business in long run. Innovation has to be implemented;
Implementation is easy but difficult to manage. My focus in this
difficult time is to innovate in what we already implemented and manage
is well to churn 100% result out of IT.
IT Budget Upgrading Plan
Our plan to decrease or keep it on same level as last year. This does
not mean that our company is not focusing in fact we are working on many
new projects this year and our focus toward consolidate, automate and
enhance the usage of IT within company.
IT Leader – Manager First or Technologist First
I believe that person first start from basic and learn how the
technology works and how best use of the technology will help to enhance
the operations. You have to techno-business manager to ask WHY I should
use the technology? What it will benefit? And finally understand HOW it
will be used?
ROI on the Technology
My ROI works with simple calculation. Save one rupee for company or earn
one rupee for company. We have our own tracking matrix on different
parameters to understand where we stand and how much impact IT creating
on business.
Latest Technology
Business Intelligence, Mobility, IT Governance and Compliance, Cloud, Green technologies, Business automation.
Relationship Between CIOs and CEOs
There is only one difference of I and E letters and if I take this
letter out from this title there is no difference. In fact these are
just title and in our IT team we each one is CEO of our section and CIO
of our sections.
Advice/ Suggestion
Come together, build future and support upcoming CIOs. Give chance to
prove and mentor your down line. Create a platform for knowledge sharing
and not competing with each others. Let’s have one vision, one team and
one dream!
