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Presently working as the president and head of IT Applications at Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), the largest private sector company in India, Ashish also worked as the CIO of Reliance Infocomm till 2005. He was associated with Reliance Infocomm from concept to implementation and operations

Considering the fact that Reliance has a huge business set-up, how do you align your IT with business?
To align IT with business, one needs to understand the business in detail and the IT team needs to be engaged at all levels of business.

As a service within a large organization, the IT team needs to be aware of the needs and aspirations of users at each level and each aspect of the organization. For the purpose to be effective, the IT team needs to be a part of the business team at each level. It also needs to understand the issues and priority of each group and person within the organization to ensure that the solution that are available within the organization are most optimal taking IT services from a mere provider of tools to that of 'strategic significance' endowing 'competitive advantage' to the organization on a sustained basis, for the long run.

Transparent and effective processes managing business and IT interactions go a long way in establishing the trust and working relationship which improves the credibility of IT team within the business which Reliance has inculcated in its day to day life.

How do you manage technology across all the verticals Reliance operates in?
Management of technology across a large organization that spans several verticals and large number of plants and offices across the world is a remarkable task. Strategic, tactical and operational issues compete with each other for attention of the IT manager all the time with several nuances and sector specific issues.

In a large organization the IT manager needs to define the priorities and have patience to provide tangible, effective and efficient IT framework in a rapidly evolving organization-with constant changes in technologies, platforms, methods and processes.

What best practices do you follow in the area of technology management?
Lots. One of the practices we follow is to strive to be a business centric rather than a technology centric organization. That's the reason we call ourselves a 'Technology Agnostic' IT team. At the same time, we strive to ensure that the proliferation of technologies do not overwhelm the operational team. Due to this, we need to constantly maintain a balance between the new and the old.

One of the IT process innovations we have developed is what we call RADD (Rapid Application Development Deployment), a unique framework to Reliance where in we are able to quickly develop a prototype application, integrated with the rest of the IT framework within the organization which can scale up to very high levels. This framework has given us substantial results over several projects. This method is deployed in a few projects and standard SDLC framework is deployed in most projects based on requirements. In essence, instead of being dogmatic, we have a set of best practices which we try to use based on the best fit for specific requirements.

What do you think are the most significant technology management challenges?
Technology is an ever-evolving field where the state-of-the-art becomes legacy fast. One of the biggest challenges that a technology manager faces is to maintain technology continuum in a large organization. On one hand we have rapidly evolving technical and business processes, and on the other we have the organization's ability to absorb and accept the changes at various levels. It is difficult to manage the change in an organization spread over several plants and business across all continents. The challenge for the IT manager is to modulate the organizational perception, define what is strategically important, take steps to direct the organization in a specific direction and ensure organizational acceptance at all levels.

Within the IT and telecom infrastructure, applications and security, which one do you find the most challenging to plan, purchase and deploy, and why?
All three are important. Planning, purchase and deployment of all the three have to go hand-in-hand. The challenge is in identifying the most optimal mix of the three rather than trying to solve the issues on an independent basis. For example, an application that requires continuous availability along with huge data flow across the network would require optimization at all the three ends that include network, hardware and applications.  

How do you justify the RoI for business technology initiatives?
RoI in a normal organization is typically done at the beginning of the project for justifying the investment. Post investments, very few IT groups in the world end up comparing perceived benefits at the time of decision making vis-ŕ-vis actual benefits accrued within a specific time frame and the reasons for under or over achievements. From the perspective of a large organization, there are several projects that are strategic in nature and there are many projects that affect only specific work stream or a business. In addition, there are many projects that are internal to IT department such as database tuning, application optimization which may not yield feature related results but yield results more in terms of allowing higher capacity for transactions within the same hardware and network infrastructure. In essence, RoI implementation for a large organization is an involved exercise. Each group involved in decision making and then following up with the IT team, business team, management, procurement team etc needs to be aware of the interplay of various factors to truly appreciate the effect of projects getting implemented; and whether the indicated RoI makes sense at the time of investment decision making as well as over the life of project; and subsequent operations and maintenance face.

How do you manage your relationships with vendors?
We maintain a professional relationship with all our vendors. Performance matters the most and there is no scope for the vendor to compromise on that because of regular reviews and performance evaluation.

Should a CIO remain a technology expert or should he become business savvy as well, to become part of the core strategy team?
To contribute to the business in a meaningful manner, CIOs and the IT Team have to understand the business, processes, nuances and importance of each function that it supports. Without this appreciation, IT will be like a 'body without a soul'-which will be of very little use to the organization.

With outsourcing becoming a norm among Indian enterprises, what are the key CIO concerns?
Outsourcing has been used effectively in Indian enterprises from the beginning of the IT revolution. The perspective with which the Western world has been doing outsourcing over the last decade is rather different from that of the perspective with which Indian organizations have been doing the same. CIOs are concerned on various issues including optimal fit of the outsourcing skill set, result orientation, actual results, promise versus performance, security, cost, supervising needs, transparency, user satisfaction and several other parameters-not necessarily in the same order. At a point in time, a specific parameter becomes more important to manage depending on the situation. However, all the issues need to be managed in perfect harmony to yield best results for the organization. Outsourcing as a concept has been deployed in larger organizations from the perspective of cost reduction and not from the strategic leveraging of IT.

Enterprises today are adopting a holistic approach to organizational security and take into due consideration three key factors-people, processes and technologies. How important are they for you and how do you align all the three?
It is true that for any successful security strategy implementation, a holistic approach is a must. Without all the three elements controlled and monitored, the potential to break is as high as its weakest link. IT Managers have to act as the bridge between the business users and the IT security team to ensure that proper alignment takes place on a continuous basis between all the stakeholders, processes and technologies. There are many interesting and innovative frameworks coming up to real time monitor breaches even at the application level and quantify the risk due to various potential breaches which will help concentrate on real important issues. However, it is a constantly evolving but very important field and many such experimentations would be required for any organization to achieve the best fit security framework for its own needs.

Rahul Gupta
rahulg@cybermedia.co.in