As the CIO of Reliance Communications, one of the fastest growing telecom firms in India, Dr Sumit Chowdhury’s challenges are unique. Operating in the fiercely competitive Indian telecom market, Chowdhury’s team has to ensure that the IT infrastructure is ready in terms of capability to support this fast paced growth, and flexible enough to quickly launch new products or value-added services. In short, IT is both the backbone and the accelerator.
“In most modern companies, IT is the core of the business and can have significant top and bottom line implications. A CIO, as the business head of this IT function, is very much a contributor to the cash flow and balance sheets of the company,” says Chowdhury.
Chowdhury understands the critical importance of cash flow, and is using the downturn effectively to focus on making productivity improvements, negotiating better contracts, and introducing transformation technologies. All these initiatives are aimed at cutting down major cost drivers in the business, improving utilization, and reusing existing assets.
Enhancing business value
At Reliance Communications, the IT function is driven by revenue and profit targets. This forces the function to be efficient and deliver more value to its customers. This makes it imperative for the IT function to be on the same page as the business, and to help drive the business, by using the power of IT. “The new platforms, processes, and business models introduced by the IT team are changing the way an organization interacts with the customer, and the products and services that are delivered to the end customer,” says Chowdhury.
The dynamic nature of the business which Reliance Communications is part of, makes it imperative for its CIO to have frequent interactions with business heads across the organization to understand the demands of the business. Chowdhury also interacts with the Chairman and business heads on a bi-weekly basis, to review the progress of strategic IT projects that impact the business.
Considering the pace of growth and the scale of the company’s operations, risk mitigation and detailed planning are extremely critical since improperly executed projects can even disrupt business. Chowdhury recalls one such project which involved upgrading the company’s CRM system. In a business such as telecom, where on any given day, thousands of calls are made per hour, a downtime for an upgrade would have been disastrous.
Chowdhury used his man management and project management skills to successfully pull off this ambitious project without a downtime. “Upgrading our CRM system that supported more than 70 million customers—without a downtime—was one of the most interesting projects as the alternative was to have a 72-100 hour downtime as recommended by the vendor,” recalls Chowdhury. In another important project, the IT function took initiative in creating projects and automating processes for 27 different departments. The result—the company achieved business value greater than its actual investment.
Measuring IT effectiveness
To make sure that IT meets the desired expectations, the company uses standardized metrics from leading firms. For instance, the firm has taken several metrics that Gartner uses to benchmark IT spends of telecom companies and other metrics that benchmark how IT companies run themselves. IT effectiveness is measured by the cost of IT per customer served, per employee served, per product introduced and per change implemented, says Chowdhury.
“We look at the business value of the IT initiatives and ensure that we are delivering more value than we are costing the business—in several multiples if possible,” informs Chowdhury.
Chowdhury believes that a CIO aspirant must have the ability to multi-task and display qualities such as persistence and tenacity, when presented with challenges. He must also have an architectural vision of the business, with the capability to effectively articulate a problem across the information chain.