IT Implementation Trends 2011

The IT implementation scenario in India continues to be dominated by four industry verticals as always --banking and financial services, manufacturing, IT/ITeS, and Govt. Of these, the banking and financial services sector continues to dominate all other sectors, with the maximum number of IT project deployments. The manufacturing segment follows close on the heels of the BFS segment, nominating nearly the same number of IT projects. The Indian Govt and IT/ITeS sectors follow manufacturing. Presented here is a closer look at what sort of technologies did these sectors embrace last year.

Banking and Financial Services -Strengthening Internal Systems

This time, we received IT project nominations from 20 different banking and financial services institutes, and between them, they shared nearly a fifth of all projects received. The banking and financial services sector therefore continues to set an example for others on how to transform your business with IT.

As far as the deployments go, the top technologies being deployed by this sector continue to be solutions for automating business processes, followed by BI and CRM. But the real interesting thing that emerges here is that banks have already deployed so much technology that now they are deploying more tech just to manage the existing one better. So they're busy deploying technologies to monitor their existing applications performance, enhancing existing systems, automating more processes, etc.

Two, the apex bodies of the banking and financial services industry -RBI, SEBI, etc have been very aggressive in forcing this sector to adopt technology. A lot of the automation that's happening in banking and financial services sector is a result of that, so as to improve efficiency, bring more transparency into the system and reduce risks.

Three, inter bank competition is becoming more fierce by the day. As a result, banks have to revisit their internal processes to reduce inefficiencies and find ways to improve customer service. They're even monitoring the time taken by their employees to perform certain tasks and deploying technologies to speed up the process. This is where solutions like CRM and BI come in handy.

Manufacturing-Focus on Higher Employee

Productivity

The second highest number of projects were deployed by the manufacturing sector, and in fact, this sector is very close on the heels of the banking and financial services sector. Last year, it had the fourth highest number of deployments, but this year, it seems that the sector has really woken up to the need for deploying IT.

A few years ago, we found ERP as the dominant solution being deployed by most manufacturing companies who nominated their IT projects. This picture changed last year, and we saw many other technologies also being deployed by this segment. This year, the same trend continues. While ERP is still the highest type of deployment, it's not the dominant one.

Other types of deployments include surveillance systems, dealer management systems, and even business intelligence systems. All of these are being deployed with a view to improving employee productivity, whether it's to integrate data from machinery on the shop floor to a decision support system, or to simply automate attendance recording, or to simply keep an eye on the labor spread across the shop floor. With growing competition, manufacturing companies require more technologies than simply ERP to stay ahead.

Govt-Process Automation Continues

The number of IT project nominations by the Govt continues to remain at the third spot as last year. A few years ago, different state Govts as well as the central Govt were busy setting up comprehensive information systems and computerizing their departments to bring more transparency into their systems. They then moved beyond that and started automating various processes to speed up their functioning. That phase still continues with a lot of projects aimed at automating various processes in the Govt. Moreover, as an extension of process automation, ERP deployments have started picking up in the Govt.

IT/ITES-Security and Customer

Service Take Center Stage

The IT/ITeS segment, which had the second highest number of projects last year, has slipped to the fourth position this time. When you have to deal with an international clientèle, who're paranoid about sharing their data with you after having seen so many scams in India, you need to put in measures to convince them otherwise.

That's what the IT/ITES segment seems to have been focusing on in the past year. For them, their most important asset is the IPR to their software, or their client's data. They need to implement sufficient data loss prevention mechanisms to ensure that this IPR remains protected. That's why the highest deployment in this segment this time was for data loss prevention solutions. The other thing that becomes important for IT/ITES companies is to keep their global customers satisfied amidst fierce competition. For this, a proper CRM deployment is a must, which commands equal precedence to the security solutions in this segment.

Healthy Participation from Sunrise Sectors

The sunrise sectors, viz. healthcare & pharma, education, and insurance continue to surge ahead with much higher IT deployments as compared to last year. This time, we found the pharma and healthcare sector busy deploying ERP systems, BI solutions, and implementing solutions for automating their business processes. The education institutes, as expected, continue to deploy e-learning solutions.

The insurance sector in India has been going really strong in strengthening their online portals. Every year, we hear some new milestone achieved by this sector in the online space. This time, a key trend we noticed was toward building 'do-it-yourself' kinds of portals, so that customers don't have to rely on an insurance expert to guide them about the best policies. They can instead, do everything themselves online. Likewise, insurance companies are building portals for all the key stake holders in their company.

Moving ahead, we're likely to see a lot more action in these three industries.