Winning Projects of Best IT Implementations Awards 2011

Most of the winning IT projects this time didn't use any extraordinary technology, as one would expect. They used regular technology to achieve distinct, measurable benefits. Only the overall best IT project, GoJiyo by Godrej Industries was considered by the jury to be really innovative, using technology very differently. The project used social media in a very different way to establish a connect with the Indian youth. While most companies today are still fumbling with how to use social networking effectively, this project goes all out and creates a virtual 3D site, where users can register and interact in their own avatars. It's being used successfully to create a brand recall among the Indian youth. In fact, it has been more successful than some of the best 3D virtual sites out there, like Second Life.

The Awards Funnel

The Best IT Implementation Awards are declared through a four phase process. In the first phase, the nominations are opened up to everyone with a broad shortlisting criteria. Nominations are filed online via a simple form that asks for broad project details. Presented here is the number of projects that reached each phase of the process.

290 IT projects received in phase I: In the first phase of the awards process, we send a public invitation, asking everyone to nominate as many IT projects as they'd like, which according to them are different, and deserve recognition. We received 290 nominations, the highest so far in eight years of the award's existence. These were taken through a preliminary audit, and all redundant entries were removed.

272 reached phase II: Here, we first eliminated all projects that were still in beta stage. For this, we analyzed the start and end date of each project. All those projects that were due for completion later on this year or in the coming years, were immediately removed from the list. We also found many projects whose completion date was shown as first half of 2011. As this is too short a period for any project to start delivering any benefits, we wrote back to the heads of these projects to re-verify whether the date was indeed correct. In some cases, we found that the project heads had accidentally put 2011 instead of 2010 as the completion year. Such projects were considered. We also removed all projects that had been deployed for other countries. Plus, we also removed all projects that were not really implementations, but software projects or products under development. The remaining projects were considered, and their project heads were requested to submit a detailed audit form. While we ask for a lot of details in this form, there's one very clear request we make to all project heads -to provide as many quantifiable benefits about their projects as possible. That's because at the end of the day, the common benefits of any IT project are pretty well known -increase in productivity, automation, increase in revenue, reduced turn-around time, cost savings, and so on. But the true success of any project can only be measured if the project head can quantify these benefits, instead of putting down generic statements like these. A lot of projects dropped out at this stage, either because the project heads didn't want to share so many details about their projects, or they were not available.

130 IT projects entered phase III: The number of detailed audit forms we received. All these projects entered phase III, and their names were published on the Best IT Implementation Awards microsite. Plus, all the valid nominations were published in our June issue, thus forming the most comprehensive directory of IT projects in the country. In the third phase, the PCQuest team tried to contact all project heads whose audit forms had been received. This was either done via a face to face interview or over the phone. Here again, many projects dropped out because the project heads were not available for a meeting.

24 projects reached the Jury in phase IV: Once all the audits were done, the PCQuest team sat together to go through all the audited projects and rated them. The rating parameters constituted of business impact, social impact, ingenuity, technical complexity, and automation. Each parameter was rated on a scale of 1 to 5. We segregated the e-Gov projects as well as those by emerging enterprises (companies with less than 500 Cr turnover or less than 500 employees). While rating all projects, we specifically looked for quantifiable measures. We found many where the project heads had not been able to provide any concrete benefits. Even then, if we found a project to have merit, we contacted the respective heads, and asked them to furnish as much quantifiable information as possible. Based on the ratings, we identified 24 projects to be presented to the panel of jury members.

11 projects declared as winners: Here's the breakup of our jury's selection-3 projects in the Emerging Enterprise category, 2 in e-Gov, and 6 in the regular category, out of which there's only one overall best IT project. These projects, along with details of our jury members have been presented in the pages to follow.