The smarter enterprise

A man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.

—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

If a man is known by the company he keeps, then what is a company known by?
Nowadays it seems to be all about the quality of people and processes that determines a company’s rise or fall. If IT has a role to play here, it is to ensure that the quality of people and processes come shining through rather than being hampered and frustrated by poorly designed and deployed information systems.

Aquiring and retaining that ‘intelligent’ edge means different things for companies in varied verticals. For a broadcaster like AIR, IT can mean the difference between iffy analogue broadcasts that turn quality programs into inaudible aural goo and crisp and clear digital broadcasts that do justice to its programming. For ICICI Lombard it meant combining the power of two disparate technologies—Geographical Information Systems and Risk Management. At SRL Ranbaxy, IT was used to tie in all the threads of its country-wide processes into a single cohesive system.

Whether it is to reduce credit card fraud at HDFC Bank or making it easier for commuters to purchase tickets on the Indian Railways—IT can be that trump card which helps an organisation go beyond the mundane to the sublime. Examples abound, be it NDPL’s Sampark CRM that has slashed the time taken to redress customer complaints to less than a third of what it took. Or KDMC’s citizen facilitation centre project that helped issue more than double the number of certificates from the previous year. Or even Wipro Technologies’ shift to Exchange 2003 and use of a SAN as part of its messaging infrastructure by which the company’s been able to consolidate 24,000 users on to a single site.

Not coincidentally, these companies are the winners of the Intelligent Enterprise Awards this year honouring the IT innovators of Indian industry and we have devoted this issue to telling you all about their achievements.

That’s not all. If you missed out Technology Senate 2005, our correspondents were there to chronicle Indian IT’s premier event and we have a session-by-session account of what happened at Technology Senate 2005 in Thailand. Some of the highlights include Gartner’s list of hot technologies and their impact on Indian IT users in the next couple of years and write-ups on everything from 64-bit computing to convergence and everything in-between. Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride down the technology boulevard but you won’t regret a minute you spend reading this issue.

Prashant L Rao
Head of Editorial Operations