Pratap Gharge
Executive Vice President & CIO
Bajaj Electricals
Insight of My Company and its IT Policies
Bajaj Electricals 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.
Opinion 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 people.
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 Heals Pain Points
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.
