 ""Business Transformation Is A Continuous Process"")
Biztech2 discusses with Alagu Balaraman, executive vice president - IT and Corporate Development, Godfrey Phillips India, the various IT innovations taking place in his organisation.
What are the key focus areas in the overall IT investment at Godfrey Phillips? Was there any pressure while undergoing the business transformation?
We have focused our investments in moving towards a new platform for providing IT services. This involved changing the underlying infrastructure of hardware and operating systems to provide greater agility. Most of them are through consolidation and efficiency by automating the processes and going for high availability to lower the need for manning. However, more than hardware and software license, the significant fraction of money spent has been on services: both internal and external. The focus has been on changing the way we build applications and deploy them, involvement of users, trying to speed up delivery and getting better at jointly identifying requirements.
All leadership roles are about bringing about change. Dealing with change requires continuous evaluation of where we are, from where we have come and where we want to go. Business transformation, therefore, is a continuous process. All CIOs have to live and work in an environment of change. That creates pressures but nothing that stresses you out.
What are the kind of IT innovations undertaken by Godfrey Phillips?
We have implemented Oracle’s SOA suite and are in the process of implementing Fusion Middleware platform. Several business workflow applications are under development on this platform. A Business Intelligence solution has been implemented and we are currently implementing E-Business Suite for the transaction handling. We are revamping our enterprise portal. There are applications for managing aspects of new launches, market tracking, sales planning and sales analysis. On the administration front, we have been implementing ITIL processes, security policies and audits and extensively outsourcing services. On the infrastructure front, we have moved over to network storage to begin storage consolidation, server consolidation and building in high availability into all critical services.
What prompted you to deploy these applications?
The plan at Godfrey Phillips is to move all routine transaction handling from legacy applications to packaged applications. This is where the E-Business Suite comes into the picture. The objective was to improve efficiency, responsiveness and management control in routine transaction handling. Since the company is also exploring various avenues to accelerate growth, there are many new initiatives and process changes that are taking place.
Are the solutions deployed independent or in collaboration with partners?
To help with these complex, interacting projects we are working with a set of partners including TCS, Synapse and Cressanda Solutions. The internal team at Godfrey Phillips focuses on the technology selection, high-level design and project management. Everything else is outsourced.
Could you throw some light on the changing priorities of Indian CIOs?
The biggest change in the role of CIOs is the transformation from being a technical person to being a business enabler cum technical person.
We are in a rapidly growing economy and businesses are faced with more opportunities than before. CIOs are exploring ways in which technology can help make the quantum jumps that businesses are seeking today. They are creating an ecosystem that can deliver rapidly in a condition of uncertain requirements of program and project management skills, processes for technical and user teams to use to rapidly deploy applications, a network of partners to allow flexibility and scale and the processes to manage these relationships.
CIOs should develop a clear vision and articulate it in non-technical and technical terms so that people can understand the why, how and when of technology’s role in business.