In your view, what would be some of the key IT initiatives that you have undertaken in your illustrious career?

Way back in 2000, we undertook an IT initiative to develop a performance management system for our farm equipment division. The performance management system was built at a time when we did not have the experience or the knowledge of using analytics, the way it is used today. This performance management system was one of the key factors that helped us in winning the Deming Award for excellence in quality. IT in a way was a key catalyst in enhancing organization productivity and facilitating an environment of performance driven culture. During this period, the entire industry made a loss. We were the only company that made a profit of close to Rs 100 crore.

The second big project was Project Harmony. This project is our initiative of getting common processes across the Mahindra Group on a single IT platform. The key objective for establishing this common standard platform is to help individual group companies realize benefits in terms of reduced costs, enabled growth and exploited group synergies. These benefits are in addition to annual benefits in improved efficiency and effectiveness.

Our belief was that by creating a common shared-services platform, the Group could be in a position to exploit synergies better, improve efficiencies and effectiveness — while reducing overall costs related to areas such as procurement, HR etc. This project was unprecedented in the SAP world as most projects attempt go live of ERP for a few companies. This project not only brought together 40 plus company codes on a single ERP instance, it also involved implementation of almost 20 horizontal and industry specific SAP solutions in parallel. The creation of a single platform for common processes and master data, has laid the foundation for the rollout of shared services across the Mahindra Group.

The third area is Unified Communications, which we will focus on aggressively this year.

What are the business expectations from the CIO? What does the top management expect from you?

In my role as the Group CIO, I have been entrusted with the responsibility to devise a groupwide IT roadmap to effectively enable the quantum growth envisaged across the Group. When I was given this role by the management, I had three clear responsibilities:

Enable: Put in place the required systems and infrastructure that deliver what the business wants.

Enhance: Give the business the required performance management tools or analytics that helps the business enhance their performance to a new level.

Engender: Create or bring about new businesses that will lead to revenue generation opportunities for the group.

Let me explain this with specific examples. As a group CIO, the business expects me to use IT to take the Group forward. For example, if a Group company comes to me and says that they are expecting demand to surge from rural markets, I would start looking at providing them the infrastructure and the IT solutions that would help them take a lead in quickly tapping this market. This is where ‘IT’ can enhance the business.

The third responsibility is to create revenue opportunities for the group. For example, I was one of the key architects in making the alliance between Cisco and Mahindra happen. The first project under this initiative is intended to be the Mahindra Innovation Park, which is being built by Mahindra Life Spaces. As one can see, this will not only help Mahindra Life Spaces in using new technology to create an advantage, but will also help other group companies such as Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam to explore revenue generation opportunities. The objective is to create an ecosystem where multiple group companies can benefit.