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.