India 's Best IT Implementations

Ten, Sixty six and then... one hundred and thirty seven.
No, we am not talking of some arithmetic progression that you need to solve.
These are the number of projects that have been covered for the Best IT
Implementation Awards these last three years. The number of valid nominations
received each year is slightly higher than the numbers covered. And the total
number of nominations received is much higher.

Overall Best Freight Operations Information System, Indian Railways

Most Innovative Mail Attachment Stripping, ICICI Bank

Maximum Business Impact B2B Petroleum Portal, Reliance Industries

Most Challenging Implementation SBI Connect, State Bank of India

Maximum Business Impact Genius I, Shamrao Vithal Cooperative Bank

Maximum Social Impact Integrated Information System of Foodgrains Management, FCI

Most Innovative Corporate Personnel Movement,Mahindra & Mahindra

Let us explain

The Best IT Implementation Awards have an open nomination process; anyone
can nominate any project. But there are some qualification criteria for a
nomination to stand valid. Firstly, the benefits of the project should be
available in

India

. And the project or the module

being nominated should have come on-stream during the
previous year. So, a project could have taken years to implement, but if it
became fully operational during the previous year, then it is eligible to be
nominated. And frankly, we have not strictly enforced the time clause, but
projects that are significantly old do not qualify.

Since the qualifying criteria is that the benefits of the
project have to be available in

India

, projects done by

Indian software firms for entities abroad do not qualify.

These previous years, we used to use both paper and online
nomination forms. But this year, we eliminated the paper work and restricted the
nomination form to the online one only.

Once the nominations are in, there's a preliminary audit
for qualification. Every project that qualifies is sent the Awards
questionnaire. Once that is done, the PCQuest team starts the follow-up audit of
the project. This process is very elaborate and often continues till the early
hours of the day the jury meets!

During this stage, many projects drop out, due to various
reasons-most common of these are confidentiality issues, where the project
implementers are not in a position to reveal project details, or the project is
not

actually complete or is just a pilot. Some of these dropouts are really good
projects, and we have tried our best to get over the confidentiality issues.

There are some really good ones in this list, and more than
the awards themselves, there are ideas and solutions that the rest of us would
find useful in our Enterprises. While these awards are meant to identify and
encourage outstanding work in Enterprise IT implementation, their actual value
is in creating a bank of ideas for the rest of us.

Adeesh Sharma, Anil Chopra, Anindya Roy, Krishna Kumar,
Sanjay Majumder, Sujay V Sarma, Rinku Tyagi