Insight of My Company and its IT Strategies
The company started around 23 years back in the year 1990 . Since then it has grown from the scratch and today it is one of the leading courier and logistics industry. This is the only company in express distribution which works with franchise model (channel partners model). This is the first company to introduce channel partner model in the express distribution and the others followed us. In the last 10 years the company has been growing rapidly has grown very much. As of now we have 6000 franchise and 400+ branches across the country & we are planning for 10000 franchise across the country by 2015. In the last 5 years there has been consistent growth for the company.
As a business enabler IT has played a crucial & important role in company’s growth. The most important part of our business is smooth information flow which has to travel before the physical parcel travels during pick up to delivery. In order to support this requirement, its required a mammoth IT infrastructure . DTDC started its journey with manual process & soon realized the requirement of it in order to scale the business. DTDC started using IT way back in 1994 & by 2000 DTDC developed a complete express distribution application. The year 2004 was a historic year for DTDC from IT perspective as this year DTDC prepared its structured IT strategy. Entire IT infrastructure has been consolidated & centralized during this year as apart of the strategy.
Views on new technologies
We are the early adopters of cloud. We adopted the cloud technology long way back in the year 2006. We use some third party applications through public cloud. Private cloud is there for some time & I do not think we need to discuss anything on this rather we are talking about public cloud. Public cloud computing is maturing very fast & expected to be a full prove service soon. I think company is not yet ready to adopt cloud of 100% of its requirement again cloud is also not ready to address business fully.
Keeping up with Technology
I keep myself updated with latest technologies via seminars, magazines and the peer colleagues like CIOs, CTOs, etc. from various organizations.
Team Size
In the centralized location we have a core team of 25 members. We have 150 support team member in the field across globe who is managing 7000 franchise and 400+ branches.
Biggest Pain Point
Our biggest pain point is connectivity. Since, we also exist in deep rural areas where the data & voice connectivity is always a challenge.
Technology Addresses pain points. Agree?
I do not think that any technology can help in improving the connectivity without the focus of the service provider or till he time the area is commercially attractive to the service provider. I am hoping on 4G launch country wide to get some relief on data connectivity.
Slowdown Impact on IT Innovation
Definitely, IT innovation did become more critical during the slowdown. The global slowdown has also affected the business climate within India and the growth rate of the Information Technology (IT) and Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) sector is also experiencing the tremors of the global recession.
Challenges Faced
External & internal threat is always there and I think no technology can secure the information completely without proper system, process, governance with quality & security compliance/standard.
Adoption of Cloud Policy
(1) The private cloud – It is much controlled & better secured compare to public cloud.
(2) The public cloud – It is based on the vendor type and vendors adhere to various compliance & standard. Putting right kind of governance and ownership contract. The contract management is very vital in public cloud policy. We put our entire focus on data security and data ownership under contract management part.
Cloud as a Tool
I do not think public cloud is playing any important role in securing the data and in future also. It depends on vendor to vendor what security policies they have and how they adhere to certain standards.
Expenses on IT Systems
We spend 2% on our annual IT budget. We focus on using IT as a tool to serve the purpose of our organization.
IT Budget Upgrading Plan
Its most unlikely till any big shift in strategy.
IT Leader – Manager First or Technologist First
An IT leader should be a Manager first. As, a Manager is the person responsible for planning and directing the work of a group of individuals, monitoring their work, and taking corrective action when necessary.
Latest Technology
I am looking forward to the technologies like Storage virtualization and 4G. It would surely help us to boost our business and also to connect to the people dwelling in rural areas.
Relationship between CIO and CEO
CIO should be a decision enabler to the CEO.
CIO’s duty is to feed all relevant business & statistical information to the CEO.
Advice/Suggestion
We have learned enough technology which brought us to this level. Now, we should become a businessman.
