We're seeing an interesting situation with the IT implementations that are
happening in Indian enterprises this time. Till the first quarter of last year,
things were going very smoothly for everybody. The market was growing,
organizations were busy expanding, deploying new types of IT projects, etc.
Then, the brakes of economic slowdown brought everything to a grinding halt.
Strategies had to be shelved and tactical measures taken, budgets had to be cut,
and IT solutions had to be deployed that would help save costs, improve
productivity and make the organization more agile.
That's why this time, the highest number of projects we received were for
automating and managing business processes, which is one of the first things any
organization would use IT for to save costs and increase productivity. This was
followed by IT infrastructure related projects, and the third one was ERP, which
is again about workflow automation. These three comprised of more than 50% of
the total projects we received.
But the good news is that there was no slowdown in the number of deployments
last year. The same four industry segments that are always the most active were
active last year as well-Banking and Finance, IT/ITES, Govt, and manufacturing.
Nearly 60% of the projects we contributed by them. Possibly the acid test would
come next year, because the IT spends for most organizations have come down this
year. Would these four segments continue at the same pace? Or will we see new
segments emerge? It would be an interesting situation to watch.
Speaking of new segments, we received healthy participation from the
education segment this year. They formed the fifth largest chunk of IT
nominations received. Hopefully, we should see even more action from them next
year.
In the Best IT Implementation survey this time, we received 230 total
nominations for 20 different types of IT projects from 28 different types of
organizations. Moreover, these projects were received from organizations of all
sizes-small, medium, and large. The entire survey process was conducted online
this time. After receiving the nominations, we removed all projects that didn't
fit our selection criteria. We cleaned up all redundant entries, and moved the
remaining projects to stage II. This required a detailed audit form to be filled
up by various project heads. We received around 125 detailed audit forms from
this stage.
In the pages to follow, we've broken up all the projects by type. Further,
projects in each section are covered in alphabetical order by the names of the
organizations they've been deployed in. Projects for which we received the
detailed audit form have been covered in half page each, while the remaining
projects have been presented in tables at the end of each section. Since all the
projects for which we received detailed audit forms have the potential of
winning, we've given them equal coverage. Next stage is a detailed audit of
these 125 projects, which would be done by senior people from PCQuest. The
audited projects would then be presented to a panel of jury members, comprising
of eminent personalities from the IT industry, CIOs, govt, and media. This jury
would then decide the winners.
We've spent many months to create this directory of IT projects, and feel
that it would be a good reference for anybody wanting to know what kind of
projects are being deployed by different types of industries.
Apart from that, we've also analyzed the IT implementations we've received to
tell you about which industries are deploying what kinds of IT projects. Plus,
we also have a special section on IT implementation ideas for tough times, and
another section on project management advice.
We hope you enjoy going through all the projects, and find the information
useful. Enjoy, and watch out for next month, in which we'll be declaring the
winning projects.
Anil Chopra, Adeesh Sharma, Anindya Roy, Mastufa Ahmed, Swapnil Arora,
Sandeep Koul, Rahul Sah, Rakesh Sharma, & Vishnu Anand