IT/ITES: Worried About Data Security & Customer Mgmt

Small IT/ITES companies in India have been in the unique position of seeing rapid growth even as India's inflation grows and panic spreads across hiring circles. But all isn't rosy for the CIOs who have been unable to either sustain growth with stagnant budgets or innovate to find new solutions to problems otherwise unknown. During the course of evaluating IT projects for the PCQuest Best IT implementation awards, we observed some key trends being followed by IT/ITES companies in India, the challenges they faced and some of the solutions being deployed to counter them.

Protecting intangible assets

Recent attacks on Citibank, Apple, Sony and Nintendo have, involuntarily, cracked the whip on CXOs to track where their data flows. Companies, which deal with heavy source code related information, usually let employees access the information outside the offices through laptops and mobile phones. This information needs to be tracked, traced and monitored. The DLP solution providers are a dime-a-dozen and offer various suites to protect against voluntary or involuntary data leak. The most efficient way of keeping tap is to install a suite on the laptops that monitor emails and track the kind of keywords that are being sent in and out of the organization. DLP vendors allow CIOs and other decision makers to give special access, to those who need it, when sensitive information is being sent out within the organization.

Several companies follow a negative path by monitoring, but not blocking, Internet access. Many companies who're worried about their employe attrition rates monitor which job portals are being visited by their employees. One CIO slammed the practice and called it unethical. 'This is one huge case away from being outlawed 'legally,' explained one. This particular CIO prefers to block the portals than to play big brother. 'If they need to look outside to the market, that is their problem, not mine and they can do it at home.' The bottomline here for small IT/ITES companies is that they should monitor Internet access by their employees, but only to prevent important data from being leaked. It shouldn't be done at the cost of employee privacy.

Another data security challenge is about protecting information stored on mobile phones. There are suites, explained Dhananjay Ganjoo, Director-telecom, India and SAARC, Juniper that can be installed as a free app on a phone and then with the authorization from the licensed authority, a command can be generated through the service provider that would erase all data on the phone remotely.

Hiring the right manpower

One of the major hitches that ITES companies face is to hire the right manpower, because that's their core asset. Hence, companies end up spending significant amounts in trining new recruits. The best way to reduce these budgets is to implement IT solutions that help shortlist the right manpower from the beginning itself. Typically, companies refer to job portals and social networking sites for hiring the right manpower. While these are good solutions, they're not sufficient. Companies should look beyond those also to actually implement solutions that can differentiate good prospective employees from the bad ones. We found a good parallel solution implemented by an educational institute as an example. Called iCos, the solution was implemented by the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies. The country has been outraging on social networking websites on a particular college's cut-off percentage for admission. iCos argues that the score sheets tell nothing about the student's meritocracy. They have introduced a system that encourages a collaborative e-learning platform which helps potential employers judge engineering students based not only on the details of their projects but also the aptitude.

ERP and CRM with a twist

ERP and CRM solutions are as old as COBOL-based IT implementations. There haven't been any landmark changes to the system. Companies have been, however, trying to radically tweak and customize solutions to suit the philosophy of their organization. Hexaware, an ITES company, has tackled a very persistent and notorious problem of giving a single consolidated view of its sales function across locations and service lines. To centralize sales efforts, Hexaware implemented a global CRM. 'Our goal with customer relationship management was to create a single sales pipeline that combined sales efforts from across geographies and industry verticals. We wanted to better manage our sales activities and improve our forecasting abilities through better data.' said Saravanan Viswanathan, Head of Internal Systems at Hexaware.

The company has been raking in benefits with a ten percent efficiency increase. Hexaware credited this to the ability to 'work together more cohesively on global accounts. They now share customer and account information more easily, enabling them to deliver better service.' The new centralized sales solution also benefits corporate forecasting and planning efforts. With sales information gathered from across geographies and industry verticals, Hexaware managers can make more informed business decisions. The CRM helped better manage opportunities by intelligently using its sales resources. Hexaware, has now been able to, bring up to 50 - 60 percent improvement in responding to RFPs and RFQs. Companies have been unable to spread its wings beyond the obvious in the last year, however, there has been a willingness to change and modify but the innovation, in India, has certainly slowed down along with the economy and the reluctance to push the boundaries.

Going green is essential

The pressure to go green has been intensified and CIOs are battling the management dictate of sticking to the when-works-don't-change mantra. The usual document management systems, digitizing of several processes and virtualization have been buzz words that CIOs have been rehashing in one way or the other. Digitization had to be brought in force with growing regulation forbidding any document that could have a financial impact on the company to be kept solely in hard copies. Thus the enforcement of a huge investment into a system that would be able to not only keep it in a digitized version but also to sync together the documents that were scattered across the network. Systems, like those installed by Infosys, implemented an OCR to convert hard-copies to searchable file formats along with metadata capture through OCRing capabilities. The entire project not only found a way of reducing paper clutter, saving valuable office space, it also added to the green IT efforts that are constantly needed to keep a tight budget. 'Usually the IT department doesn't bother itself with electricity bills, and several times, parcels it off to the admin department as their headache, the electricity bills 'some of them'are the responsibility of the CIO,' said one IT head. One of the most common ways of cutting electric cost has been virtualization. It has cut out several overheads but also eases diagnosis when bugs crop up on the network. Several SMBs have now turned to it not just to utilise a new technology but also to take a step forward into utilizing resources'system as well as monetary.