Best IT Implementations of the Year 2010: 200 Tech Success Stories

Anil Chopra, Adeesh Sharma, Amrita Premrajan, Madhur Chawla, Govind Shukla, Mastufa Ahmad,
Rahul Sah, Sandeep Koul, and Shikhar Mohan Gupta

We entered the seventh year of the
Best IT Implementation awards
with a bit of skepticism, thinking
that we may not get a lot of project
nominations the way we usually do because
of the slowdown last year. However, we were
pleasantly surprised to receive over 200 IT projects nominations, from 150 unique
companies. We understand that enterprise
IT projects typically have long
implementation cycles taking years to
complete, but there were also many projects
that were initiated and even completed last
year. In fact, in our past discussions with
many IT decision makers, it emerged that the
slowdown was like a blessing in disguise,
because they were able to negotiate much
better rates with their vendors. So slowdown or no slowdown, the mantra
always remains that IT is
critical for business growth. So
here we are with the the first
volume of the Best IT
Implementation Awards-a
comprehensive compilation of
all the IT project nominations
we received this time.

About the nominations
Besides the first surprise of
receiving 200 IT project nominations, we got
many other surprises as well after going
through the results. The highest number of
projects were from the banking and financial
services sector, even higher than last year! So
while banks around the world were affected
by the economic downturn, Indian banks
and financial services companies continued
on a strong growth path. 25% of the total
projects received were from this segment.
The manufacturing sector, which was at the
top last year, slid down to the fourth spot this
year, which is not so pleasant. The other
pleasant surprise was to see the IT/ITeS sector back in action, with the second
highest number of projects. The top four
spenders of course, remain the same as
previous years-banking and financial
services, IT/ITes, manufacturing, and govt.
We have seen other sectors pick up and loose
steam, but these four sectors have always
remained steady. Overall, there were 21
different types of industries contributing 40
different types of projects in the
nominations. These included projects from
many of the hot buzzwords we keep hearing
these days-unified communication, cloud
computing, SaaS, virtualization and
consolidation, Business Intelligence, etc. You
can see the graph for the complete break-up.

Our Process
Our process for Best IT remains the same as
always. There are four phases-public
nominations, detailed audit forms, face to
face interactions, and declaration of winners
by the jury. In phase I, we ask everyone in
the IT and user industry to tell us about IT
projects that they feel deserve recognition.
These projects should bring benefits to the
Indian audience, while the deployment could
be anywhere. We then do a preliminary audit
to remove entries that don't fit
our selection criteria for the
awards. These include projects
that are still in pilot stage,
offshore projects that don't
bring any benefits to Indian
audience, and entries that are
of products and not IT
projects. After doing this and
pruning the projects for
duplicate and incomplete
entries, we move the rest to
phase II, wherein the heads of those projects are requested to fill up a detailed audit form. Many projects
get dropped out at this stage, because their
IT heads don't fill up the detailed audit
form, either because they're too busy or
don't get permission from their corp com to
share details with the media. We do
however give the project heads an option
to tell us which parts of the audit form
document are sensitive and should not be
published. So out of over 200 IT project
nominations, around 120 submitted
detailed audit forms.

IT Projects Directory Structure
Presented in this volume of the Best IT
Implementation awards are all the
nominations that we received, irrespective
of whether they qualify our criteria or not.
We first have IT projects for which we
received the detailed audit forms. These
are broken up by types of IT projects (see
box for the categories). After that, we've
carried a table containing a brief
summary of all the projects that came in
through our public nomination process.
While this issue goes to print, the PCQuest
team will be busy with the third and fourth
phases of the Best IT Implementation
awards process. These involve face to face
interviews with most of the project heads
who submitted the detailed audit forms.
After that, the projects would be presented
to a panel of jury members, who'll decide
the winners. These will be declared in the
next (July) issue.