Enterprise IT Implementation Trends

The nominations we received this year broke the chain

of trends in IT deployments we saw till last year. Quite

a few interesting projects that were different from conventional

ones were observed. Here's an overview of the implementation

trends we could analyze from all the IT projects

that we received.

BPM & A and Web Based solutions rule

Business process management and automation solutions

have enjoyed the highest adoption by Indian enterprises, according

to the IT project nominations we've been receiving

year after year. This year is a little different in that besides

BPM & A, Indian enterprises are also deploying web based

solutions in a big way. Together,

they form around 28% of the total

nominations we received this year.

The banking and financial

services and insurance companies

were the biggest adopters of BPM &

A solutions this time, and not

without good reason. Both have a

huge employee and customers

base, which needs to be managed.

Traditional, shrink-wrapped solutions

are not sufficient to cater to

all their requirements, hence a

need to go custom to automate specific processes. Reliance

Life Insurance for instance, setup a solution to automate

its new business and underwriting process. ITeS companies

are the next major group requiring BPM & A solutions.

Web based solutions don't really come as a surprise either.

In fact, it was only a matter of time before their adoption

became more widespread. Today, anything you can do

offline is also possible on the web, which is why, there's a

whole range of web based solution projects that were nominated.

These included everything from basic Internet portals

to SaaS and Cloud based apps.

ERP not just for manufacturing

Till last year, we found most of the project nominations for

ERP coming from the manufacturing sector. This year, the

trend is a little different, and there's a whole range of different

industries deploying ERP. These range from publishing

houses to poultry to airports, trading houses, and even

IT/ITeS companies. Indian Broiler group for instance has deployed

an ERP solution so that the performance of livestock

can be measured at each stage of the production process.

Even education institutes and public sector undertakings

have joined the bandwagon. The Oxford College of Engineering

for instance has deployed ERP to automate all their

processes, consolidate data for the group of institutes, and

even deploy new technologies like smart card readers and

biometrics to automate processes.

Business Intelligence

is gaining popularity

Another popular implementation

trend we noticed was for business

intelligence solutions. Clearly,

with so much of data being

churned out by so many different

apps, there's a need to consolidate

them and generate reports and observe

the key performance indicators.

Otherwise, how would a business take the right

decisions? If your competitor has launched a new campaign

in the market, how will you counter it without first understanding

your own customer base? Every day we see telecom

companies launching all sorts of schemes. If one company

launches per second billing, another counters it with half a

second billing. All this can't happen based on whims and fancies

of individuals. It requires a careful analysis of the kind

of customer base you have, what kinds of investments would

be needed to launch a counter scheme, and what would be

the returns and over what period? Business Intelligence solutions

make all this possible, and easily.

Govt. Projects continue process automation

and computerization

If we were to analyze the e-Gov projects, then a majority of

them are related to business process management and automation.

There were some however, which were completely

different, such as the complex Tsunami Early Warning System

deployed by Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services. As the name suggests, it helps detect likely tsunamis

that might hit the Indian coast well in advance, and even has

features built-in to prevent false alarms. Another interesting

project embarked upon by the govt. is Project Insight, which

is aimed at using ICT to help the differently-abled.

Been there, done that. So what's

next?

One interesting thing we observed about IT implementations

this time was a dramatic increase in the variety of IT projects

being deployed. This happened despite our having classified

and incorporated all the latest buzzwords in our project types

list, viz. Cloud computing, virtualization, SaaS, BI, unified communication,

etc. We received project nominations for all the hot

buzzwords, and around 20 more types of projects. A majority

of these different projects were from very large enterprises, and

the logic for the same is pretty straightforward. They've already

'been there, done that' as far as the usual IT implementations

go. Now, they're moving to the next level, which involves integration,

standardization, technology upgrades, etc.

For instance, what do you do if you're already running all the key business apps like ERP, CRM, SCM, etc? The next step

is to integrate and standardize them, neither of which is an

easy task. There would be business apps running from different

vendors, because they were deployed at different points of

time. Some of the apps could be on older technologies, and

would require to be upgraded before they can be integrated

with others. There would even be multiple variants of the

same business app running, because of the new company that

got acquired. So while the parent company might have been

on SAP ERP, the acquired one was on Oracle. Many large enterprises

grow by acquiring smaller companies, and it leads to

such situations. Many of the projects in the 'other' category were of this nature only, where a company already had multiple

business apps running, and was facing integration and

standardization issues.

Project SMILE and Harmony from Bajaj Electricals and

the Mahindra Group are two classical examples of this. While

in project SMILE, the company moved from legacy apps to the

latest versions of all business apps and integrated them with

a big bang approach, in the latter, Harmony intended to provide

a common platform for all the group companies of the

Mahindra group.

So these were some of the implementation trends we observed

from the IT projects we received this time. You can read

more about the projects I mentioned in this article in the rest of

the story.