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.