Insight of my company and its IT strategies
Bajaj Electricals Ltd is the company in the business of Lighting, Consumer durables and TLT towers/telecom towers infra projects and lighting projects. We have rolled out Oracle set of applications Oracle EBS ERP, Siebel CRM, Oracle SCM, Oracle BI applications. Our IT strategy is normally aligned to the business strategy and we dont implement technology if it is justified with business requirements. As our business lines are varied there are different requirements with respect to CRM and SCM and hence we had done evaluation and selected all these products from oracle.
Views on new technologies
Cloud as well as virtualization is the promising technologies and we have already adopted them in Server and Storage virtualization. Desktop virtualization project is going on currently with private cloud infrastructure.
Keeping up with Technology
Attending Seminars, reading magazines, Interactions with vendors and Internet based information are the means to understand the new technology options, their usefulness, benefits and adoption methods.
Team Size: 25
Biggest pain point?
Documentation, Change management while maintaining the lights on is the biggest pain. Expectations from the users are demanding and hence agility is one biggest pain.
Technology Addresses pain points. Agree?
No some of these are the process related pains and requires internal improvements. But agility related pain points can be addressed due to cloud based infra provisioning.
Slowdown Impact on IT Innovation
Yes in my opinion during the slowdown, businesses try to find out every opportunity to reduce costs and hence IT can certainly help business to be more productive and reduce cost to counter slowdown to some extent.
Challenges Faced
Security related challenges are many. Building secure IT infrastructure is very easy, but creating Security related awareness and culture across organization is the most difficult part.
Adoption of Cloud Policy
As Cloud based applications are just being implemented, we have not yet documented but for all other IT policies we do have definite policy document. For Cloud based adoption, currently policy is getting evolved.
Cloud as a Tool
Security is still a big concern and hence so far we have started journey with Private cloud.
IT Leader – Manager First or Technologist First
I feel to understand the technology; it is always beneficial to come from technology background. But as you become senior in the ladder you have to become good manager, good leader.
ROI on the Technology
Generally we try to take out ROI for every technology investments by attempting quantification of the projected benefits and compare the TCO investment required for adoption.
Latest Technology
Cloud based desktop virtualization and Mobile enablement is the two technologies we are looking forward to implement.
Relationship between CIO and CEO
It is definitely mutual relationship and it compliments and get merged with common business objectives. CIO needs to align the IT strategies towards business objectives and hence CIO has to understand the technology based solutions and keep acting as advisor to the CEO to present the benefits so that business are agile, productive and also cost beneficial.
Advice/Suggestions
Business comes first hence every technology initiative has to deliver business objectives.
