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The Jury: Arriving Upon the Final Verdict!

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PCQ Bureau
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We at PCQuest were thrilled to receive about 175 projects as public nominations this year, which came in from over 30 cities and 25 different types of industries. Of these, the few projects that did not meet the basic selection criteria were knocked off from the list of nominees. Post this, we solicited detailed audit forms from the project heads of the nominated implementation. For the uninitiated, the detailed audit form captures the minutest of details about the projects, which our team uses to analyze the nomination. So, we were not surprised to receive audit forms which ran upto 20 pages in length.

The editorial team of PCQuest had their plates full for the past two months, meticulously bringing out the USP of projects and getting in touch with several point of contacts of the nominated projects for complete clarity of each and every project. The team also conducted a web based audit of many projects which were found interesting and needed an additional deep diving to gauge their impact. There were several rounds of editorial deliberation before arriving upon the list of semi-finalists which comprised of 26 projects.

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It was really difficult to arrive at this list, as almost all the projects that had made it to the previous stage were strong contenders.

At this point, we were ready for the jury discussion. Like in the past 8 years, we invited experts with unparalleled technology know-hows to form the panel: Ajay Kumar Dhir of Lanco Infratech, Manish Bahl of Forrester Research, Rajesh Munjal of Carzonrent, Vikas Arora of Microsoft, and Anil Chopra of PCQuest. All the jury members were handed the June 2012 issue of PCQuest which had featured all the projects that made it to Stage-II and Stage-III; so that the jury members were aware of all the nominees.

On June 8, 2012, we held the jury discussion at Crowne Plaza Today, Gurgaon. The session was moderated by Binesh Kutty, Senior Assistant Editor, PCQuest. Besides him, the PCQuest Editorial team took up the role of Project Champions. Each team member i.e. Abhijit Ahaskar, Adeesh Sharma, Mastufa Ahmed, Rahul Kumar, and Sandeep Kaul, were championing a set of semi-finalists. Needless to mention, they had gone through each projects nomination forms, audit forms, spoken to the project heads and end users when necessary, and conducted web based audits for projects that called for it. They made presentations for each semi-finalists citing the key reasons why the particular project should win an award.

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The jury members went beyond the presentations and asked several other important questions to clear doubts about the projects. We saw the jury members referring to the jury dockets, which had a detailed writeup for each of the project, and also cross checking facts with the detailed audit forms, which were made available to them. After each presentation, the jury members scored each project on the following parameters: Business Impact, Social Impact, Ingenuity, Complexity, Scale, and Overall Total. We should mention here that the jury members were given the power to use a wild card to bring in any project that was in Stage-III to the jury discussion. Besides this, they were also given the opportunity to change the parameters for scoring if required. The better part of the day was spent on presentations by the project champions. It was then time for the jury members to deliberate on the winners for each category. At this stage, the jurists sat together and discussed each project and the scores that they had given to it. Post these discussions, they unanimously picked winners for each category of the awards.

We at PCQuest loved each moment of this years Best IT Implementation IX Awards process. Right from the public nominations to the jury's final verdict. We would like to congratulate all the winners and runners up for making the cut. We look forward to the felicitation awards show which will be organized in the month of September. Keep reading PCQuest to see the announcement of the awards show details. That said, it's time for us to sign off this edition of the PCQuest Best IT Implementation Awards. Next year, it will be the Xth Edition of the prestigious awards; we are looking to make it even bigger and even better.



The Jury

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Ajay Kumar Dhir



Executive Director and Group CIO, Lanco Infratech

Dhir has over 30 years of distinguished experience as CIO with blue chip corporates in India and abroad. His core responsibilities, as the Group CIO at Lanco Infratech, include IT Strategy and overseeing the operations of all IT & Systems, IT Shared Services, Information Security, SAP Implementation, Business Process Re-engineering, and IT Risk Management, Governance and Compliance across all Business Units, SPVs and locations in India and abroad. Besides managing IT at the Lanco Gropu, Ajay also heads the Delhi CIO Klub. He has received several awards and recognition as a CIO, including being selected by DATAQUEST as one of the Top 50 CIOs of India.

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Manish Bahl



Director - India Research Operations, Forrester Research

Bahl serves Vendor Strategy Professionals with research on the adoption of IT systems across Asia. He focuses on the differences in vertical markets like the public sector, healthcare, energy and utilities, and financial services. He works with leading IT vendors to guide their technology direction, market positioning, and messaging based on an analysis of technology trends and an understanding of corporate IT buying patterns and requirements.



Bahl is also responsible for end to end research projects management and developing the research team in India. Before becoming a part of Forrester through its acquisition of Springboard Research, he was a senior research analyst at Evalueserve.

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Rajesh Munjal



CIO and AVP, Carzonrent

Munjal is an IT professional with over 15 years of experience with various companies, with the last one being at Kuoni Travel Group. He heads operations for Radio Taxi business at Carzonrent and is responsible for managing existing business operations in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad and ensuring implementation of operating strategy for taxi business.

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His responsibilities include fleet deployment, call center management, technology management and credit control in line with company policies and processes. Besides this, Munjal executes a strategic role coupled with relationship management, program and project management, customer service, and general management.

Vikas Arora



Group Director - Operator Channel, Microsoft India

Arora has over 20 years of experience in the IT Industry and is part of the leadership team at Microsoft's Indian subsidiary. At Microsoft India, he has the experience of managing the Enterprise Services Division (Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) and Premier Support Services (PSS)) for Microsoft India, and Cloud Services strategy.

He started out with Microsoft as a Managing Consultant in 2000 and was responsible for setting up the Microsoft Services business in the Western region (based in Mumbai). Post this, he moved to the Enterprise License Sales business (EPG) as Director — Technical Sales and later moved back to Enterprise Services.

Anil Chopra



Editor, PCQuest

Chopra has over 16 years of editorial and analysis experience in the technology space. In his stint he has had the experience in the IT publishing business, specializing in managing all channels of media publications, including print, online, and events.

He started ground up from the PCQuest Labs, where he reviewed all sorts of IT products and services. That said, he has hands-on experience of almost all enterprise level as well as consumer products and services. Besides this, he also speaks at various technology seminars, from where he gains a lot of knowledge about the industry straight from the end users.



The Final 10 winners have made it past 175+ projects that were nominated in the first stage.



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