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PC QUEST Best IT Implementations Of the Year 2008 : Top 13 IT Implementations of India

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PCQ Bureau
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IT deployments in India continue to grow unabated, showing how serious Indian

companies, govt, and other institutes are about using IT for business or social

benefit. Out of so many implementations, there are some that are truly

different. In fact they're so different that they can be used as an example for

others to follow. The winning IT projects of the PCQuest Best IT Implementation

Awards have this winning streak in them.

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Our process for selecting the winners remains the same. We start off with a

public nomination process, wherein everyone in the IT community is invited to

nominate an IT project. The nomination criterion requires that an IT project

should be an original idea that leverages IT, or it could be an original usage

of technology. It could also be leveraging technology to bring benefits to the

user and consumer community, or it could be leveraging technology to bring

social or business benefits.

This time, we sent the invitation to more than 4 Lakh people. The entire

nomination process was done completely online. Once we received the nominations,

we did a first round of shortlisting, and removed all invalid entries. These

included redundant entries, or those that didn't fit the criteria at all, i.e.

projects whose benefits were going to foreign countries. The remaining projects

were moved to the second stage, wherein we asked for a detailed report about the

project. Here, we asked for complete project details, right from the specific

business or social benefits that they deliver to the technologies used, and even

the financials involved. Many projects dropped out at this point, and we finally

received detailed audit forms of 106 IT projects. This was higher than what we

received last year.

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Once we received the detailed audit forms, we started the second round of

scrutiny and validations. Here, the entries that came in first and within the

defined deadline were given priority. We tried our best to accommodate as many

entries as we could, but some had to be dropped at this stage. We then looked at

each project report in more detail to see if they really fit our selection

process, i.e. whether they were indeed original ideas or used technology

innovatively,or whether they brought business or social benefits. In each form,

we had specifically asked for information like the actual business benefits that

were derived, and what really set a project apart from the rest. Many forms

didn't provide this information very clearly, or didn't provide it at all. After

scrutinizing all the forms for this, we brought the list of projects down to 65.

Each of these was then assigned a project champion from PCQuest.

The project champions' job was then to understand each project in more detail

by either visiting the IT project site, or in case that was not possible, by

contacting the IT heads over the phone and email. Here again, many projects

dropped out, either due to confidentiality reasons, or the head was not

contactable.

For the remaining projects, the entire PCQuest team sat down together to do

the shortlisting. By this time, all the project champions were completely

familiar with the projects they were assigned.

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During our meeting, we rated each project on five parameters-innovation,

business impact, social impact, technical complexity, and scale of

implementation. For each parameter, we gave each project a maximum score of 5.

So the maximum total score possible for each project was 25.

Lots of heated debates, empty coke bottles and leftover pizza crusts later,

we arrived at the final scores. All projects that received a score of more than

10 reached the final jury round. We even revisited projects with a score of 10

to see if any could be considered for the final round, and a few indeed managed

to qualify there as well. Finally, we arrived at a list of 24 projects that were

to be presented to the jury, to decide the winners. Details on the jury members

and the deliberation process is presented on the next page.

So here we have it, the winners of the best IT implementation awards and the

finalists. We would like to congratulate the winners and the project heads for

putting in so much effort into deploying their IT projects.



A little bit of history
The Best IT Implementation

Awards were instituted five years ago with an objective to recognize all the

good work happening in the country on IT implementations. The number of

implementations we have to



evaluate has been growing every year. Starting from 10 valid nominations
five years ago, we now receive more than 100 detailed IT project reports to

evaluate every year. This obviously includes projects from just about every

leading company in India. So much so that we have divided the Best IT

Implementation issue into two volumes. The first volume was released in May,

which contained all the 160+ IT implementations. This volume contains the 24

finalists that were presented to the jury.
The Jury

Top 13 IT

Implementations of India

Government of Rajasthan : Online BPL Census

ITC Wills Lifestyle : RFID

HDFC Standard Life Insurance : Consultant Corner

Reliance Industries : IT Project Management System

Shri Sant Gajanan Maharaj Trust : ERP Deployment

Government of West Bengal : CoRD

Intel : World Ahead Community Implementation

Infosys Technologies : Productivity Enhancement Platform

ICICI Bank : Enterprise Server Virtualization

Apollo Tyres : Transport Mgmt System

FICCL : QMail and Exchange Co-Existence

Reliance General Insurance : Policy Kit System

DUXSoft : Project SPARX

Other

Finalists

Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services : MF ESAVE BITS

POWERGRID : Maintenance Mgmt System

Yes Bank : YCCRM

United Spirits : Project Delta

ICICI Bank : Selling Framework Compliance

Wipro Technologies : Collaboration Simplified

FICCL : Enabling LOS process

Kerala State Poultry Development Corporation : Integrated Financial

Accounting System

Directorate of Mass Education, Karnataka : Adult Literacy Using ICT

BPCL : SO2 Emission Control & Monitoring System

ICICI Bank : iMobile

CXO Speak On The relevance of IT for their business

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