Success Stories

The Jury

PCQ Bureau

01 Jul 2010 05:24 IST

New Update

What's new in this project?

Is what the jury asks and looks for in all the projects that are presented
to them by the PCQuest team. This is bound to happen when you have an
experienced jury who's been through the thick and thin of IT and seen so many IT
deployments in their careers. The jury meet is therefore the last and most
important step in the Best IT Implementation Awards process. This is where the
final winners are decided. This time, 24 projects made it to the jury (out of
the 200 valid nominations received). Last year, we had spun off Green IT as a
separate award category. This time, we've done a similar exercise for the e-Gov
projects. This category was created based on a recommendation made by our last
year's jury.

The Process

This time, we received around 230 IT projects during our public nominations
phase. The PCQuest team did a preliminary check and removed all entries that
didn't fit our standard criteria (read it at http://ld2.in/8e), as well as all
redundant or invalid entries. The project heads of the remaining 200 projects
were then contacted and asked to fill up a detailed audit form. 116 of them
were received, and were moved to the next stage, while the remaining were
eliminated from the awards process. The PCQuest team then spent time auditing
these IT projects, studying them in more detail, interacting with their project
heads to get their doubts clarified, and visiting the deployment locations
wherever feasible. Many projects dropped out at this stage as well either
because the project heads were not available, or the implementation was
incomplete. After completing the audits, the team sat together and did a
post-mortem of each IT project. Each project is then discussed at length for
it's impact (business or social), ingenuity or newness, technical complexity,
scale, etc by the PCQuest team. Several late nights and weekends later, the team
arrived at the final list of audited projects to be presented to the jury.

Karan B Singh VP/Head IT/CIO, BSES

Karan has handled different IT portfolios across several industries
including utility/power, engineering/EPC, manufacturing, IT organizations,
and automobiles. An IT strategist, Singh has handled several large IT
projects in IT infrastructure planning and management in both integrated and
distributed environments. In his 27 years career, Singh has worked for
several organizations including American, British, Japanese and German MNCs.
Karan is a gold medalist BE from Pantnagar University and MS from North
America.

Sandeep Aurora Director, Sales and Marketing Group
— South Asia, Intel

Sandeep is in charge of managing the sales and marketing efforts for
Intel in North India, East India and Bangladesh. As the director sales and
marketing, Sandeep is also responsible for leading efforts to move India
toward faster IT adoption. Prior to this, Sandeep was managing the channel
business for Intel South Asia. He has worked in a variety of roles in the
sales and marketing group within South Asia and Asia Pacific prior to this.
Sandeep has a Bachelor's degree in Science from Delhi University and a
Master's degree in Management from IMT.

Rajni Hasija Group General Manager (IT Services),
IRCTC

An M. Phil from Delhi University, Rajni has over 22 years of experience
in handling various commercial and operating posts of Indian Railways. She
has been with IRCTC for three years as Group General Manager. She is the
project incharge for sales of tickets for the upcoming Commonwealth Games
2010, and has contributed extensively for the Indian railways ticketing
siteirctc.co.in. She is also a part of the global inquiry services team of
IRCTC, more commonly known as the "139 Rail Sampark Service". She was behind
the roll out of computerization of claims on Indian Railways as well as the
development and maintenance of IRCTC's tourism portal,
www.railtourismindia.com

When the PCQuest team presents the shortlisted projects to the jury, one
person from the team is identified as the 'advocate' for each project. This is
the person who's interacted with the project head, gone through its details, and
understood everything about it. Members of the jury ask the PCQuest team further
questions on each project. This information is provided from the audit report
that the project implementers have filled up or from in-depth discussions that
the advocate has had with the implementers. Finally, after all the projects have
been presented, the jury decides the winning projects. Here, the PCQuest team
does not participate in the jury's deliberations.

Shyam Malhotra, Executive Director and Editor
in Chief, CyberMedia (Jury Chairman)

Shyam has been associated with CyberMedia since 1985 in varied capacities
and has over 28 years of experience in the IT industry. He is a graduate in
Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi and has a PGDIM from IIM Kolkata. An
engineer and business administrator by training, Shyam began his career in
marketing, working for Siemens, Tata Exports and Eicher Goodearth. Shyam was
chairman of the jury this time.

Prasanto K Roy, President (ICT Publishing),
CyberMedia

Prasanto has been with Cyber Media for 18 years in various capacities.
He's launched many new activities and projects for the group, including
Computers@Home magazine, DQWeeks, and the DQ Channels. Prasanto is one of
the finest technology writers who is equally at ease with technology and
business.

The PCQuest jury for the Best IT Implementation Awards comprises of eminent
personalities from the IT industry. This time, there five members in our jury
panel, with representation from the IT industry, user industry, media, and
government. We take special care to ensure that those who have their projects in
the running are not on the jury. And with nearly 200 projects in the running,
that can become a difficult task. The IT industry itself had many projects in
the running. So, we were indeed extremely lucky to get a very experienced jury
to judge the projects this year. We also clearly state to the jury that in case
there's a conflict of interest, wherein any of the jury members has been
involved in any of the projects in any way, then that jury member must withdraw
from the discussion for that project.

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