PCQuest Best IT Implementation Awards 2007

Increasingly, more organizations are realizing the power of IT, and are using it in

innovative ways. It’s no wonder then, that this time we received more than 250

projects for evaluation. These came from 22 different types of industries, ranging from

the usual mega-IT spenders like Govt, BFSI, manufacturing, petroleum, and IT/ITES to niche

ones like poultry, travel and tourism, real estate, construction, power and utility. With

so many projects, there was likely to be a lot of variety. We were able to identify 23

different types of projects, ranging from the usual IT infrastructure and ERP deployments

to projects like controlling appliances over the Internet, e-learning, mobility, security,

etc. Now that’s quite a mouthful, and it’s taken us many months of efforts to go

through all of them.

The Best IT Implementation awards are now four years old, and every year, the number of

nominations we get has been increasing by leaps and bounds. The process for the selecting

winners awards remains the same. We open up public nominations sometime in Feb-March

inviting everyone to nominate IT projects. This time, we sent out e-mail invites to more

than 2 Lakh people. There’s a defined qualification criteria for nominating a

project. For one, it should have become operational by the last financial year. Second,

the project’s benefits should be available to Indian audience, though the physical

infrastructure could be located anywhere in the world. Third, projects that were still in

a pilot stage were not considered for the awards.

This time, we received more than 290 public nominations. We did one round of scrutiny

and validation to eliminate invalid and duplicate entries. This brought down the total

entries to 250. This entire list of 250 projects was then shared with the jury members.

They were requested to go through the same and provide us with their suggestions. They

were also requested to suggest the addition of any projects that we may have not received.

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The project heads for all the 250 nominations were sent a detailed audit form to fill

up and send back to us. This is a questionnaire that collects detailed information on

background, concept, business case, people involved, project architecture, technologies

involved, consultants, timelines, financials, etc. Some of the information we collect in

this is marked as confidential and is not disclosed. We received back about 96 of these

audit forms. Here, entries that came in within the specified deadlines were considered

first, and for those that came late, we tried our best to incorporate them. Some of the

late entries were dropped at this stage. PCQuest then appointed an internal champion for

each of the projects. It was then the champion’s responsibility to understand the

project and present its case to the jury. For this, each project champion tried contacting

the heads of all projects assigned to understand the projects better and get details. The

champions spent a considerable amount of time travelling all over the country, meeting as

many project heads as possible and seeing the implementations in action. Again, some

projects were dropped because their documentation was incomplete and their project heads

were not reachable for comments. Some other projects were dropped due to confidentiality

issues. For the remaining, once the meetings and telecons were over, the team did another

round of scrutiny and validations to remove any further invalid entries. We found that

some projects were still in their pilot stage and could not be considered for awards. Some

dropped out due to confidentiality issues.

Once all the meetings and interactions were over, the PCQuest team sat together and

shortlisted the remaining projects to present to the jury. This year, 21 projects were

presented to the jury. The jury then decided the final winners. The jury has

representation from past year’s winners, IT users, and the IT industry. It’s

also free to recommend any additional awards.

The pages that follow cover all valid nominations we received. We start off with the

winners, followed by all the projects for which we’d received the filled up

questionnaire. We also interacted with some of the IT industry’s most respected CEOs,

COOs, and CIOs. They take us through the state of IT implementations in India, how

they’re moving their organizations forward using IT, and message to others on the

same.

We’d like to congratulate everyone for all the efforts they’re putting into

deploying IT projects, and we hope you enjoy reading this story as much as we enjoyed

creating it.

Adeesh Sharma, Anil Chopra, Anindya Roy, Manu Priyam, Rinku Tyagi, Sanjay

Majumder, Saurangshu Kanunjna and Swapnil Arora