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

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.

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.

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.

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.