Editor’s Choice Awards

Interview: V S Parthasarathy, Group CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra

What are the three essential things you consider while rolling out so many new IT implementation projects in a year?

"Enable-Enhance-Engender" is the mantra given to the IT Team. Today's IT landscape has gone beyond enable & enhance. Every new initiative is seen from "Engender" perspective. Essentially every new initiative must cover all 3 of them. We ensure that the project is towards ‘Creating something new' for the business, the ‘Deliverables of each project' are well defined and it is ‘Adequately resourced for - both - money & skills'.

How do you identify the challenges that merit the roll out of a new IT initiative?

An initiative comes up based on "Pain or Gain" and it should be directed to ensure that business runs ‘leaner-healthier-faster-smarter'. Once the assurance of ‘leaner' IT & ‘healthier' systems is established, the ‘faster' works towards the user experience. ‘Smarter' is purely through Innovation.

Simple steps that lead to a successful project are:

1. Addressing whether ‘pain or gain', 2. Falling in the relevant quadrant, 3. Simulating challenges

How do you manage so many IT initiatives across so many companies?

There is a 3-tier hierarchy in place with strategic leaders & IT heads across the group companies:

1. Strategic Leadership Council (SLC), 2. Technology Leadership Council (TLC), 3. Cross Functional Teams (CFT) - need based

SLC & TLC jointly work to evolve a concept at strategic level. Being a federated organisation it allows many initiatives to work upon at a given point of time. The CFT then takes it forward for execution. My role as a Group CIO is purely to ‘step in when required and move out of way when not'. I call it ‘Nose in - Hands out'

Is there a common IT vision for all the group companies?

I strongly believe that without a vision, there is no path possible. One would not know where to go. So a clear & articulated vision is a must. So YES, we do have a common IT Vision which is well communicated.

Interview: SBI

Change, upgradation, continuous improvement-these are some essentials for sustainability in today's competitive environment for any organisation. Awareness of the changing technological environment is a must, and continuous upgradation in the IT environment of the organization catalyses the business aspirations. An integrated IT architecture for transaction systems and information management is already in place in State Bank of India.

Change management is performed on all applications in a controlled manner. Risks associated to the changes are always managed to an acceptable level and all critical changes are always tested in a non-production environment.

In our Bank all application groups have a Change Control Committee (CCC). The CCC identifies all changes and approves them before implementation and ensures that all changes are compliant with the statutory, legal and regulatory requirements. Any change before approval is analysed for its need, impact, priority and security implications by the CCC.

How do you identify the challenges that merit rolling out an IT initiative in your organization?

Right from the initiation phase of any project, we list out the potential challenges which we as a team will face during the project implementation. When it comes to State Bank of India, the humongous scale and diversity of operations itself pose a big challenge. The external environment, organizational barriers, what's worked well in the past are some of the important aspects we keep ourselves abreast with.

As the project work starts, we continuously review the "health" of IT projects and also identify gaps in requirements, staffing needs, end-user training plans and change management initiatives that might threaten the success of a systems implementation, software upgrade or new hardware roll-out. We also ensure that all the project documentation is complete and there is no gap between users' requirements and what IT thinks that users need.

Each IT vertical in the Bank has robust Performance Monitoring capability for monitoring, trouble shooting and resolving problems related to their area. We have regular metrics of performance monitoring which are in use for monthly and yearly performance review.

Risk assessment procedure of the Bank follows a zero-tolerance approach for the first time for new systems/applications. In this approach, all the threats and vulnerabilities a particular asset may be exposed to are identified and appropriate controls are selected to mitigate them and reduce the risk to acceptable levels. Afterwards, Risk assessment procedure follows an ongoing approach for existing systems/applications. This approach takes into account all existing controls and their effectiveness in terms of residual risks and assessment for new vulnerabilities and controls required.