"Challenges faced by telcos are like a dual-edged sword" - Alpana Doshi, CIO, Reliance Communications

Alpana Doshi, chief information officer at RCom, has broken the corporate shackles, and riding on the wave of women power is certainly calling the shots. Earlier with Verizon and Deloitte Consultancy, Doshi joined the Reliance ADA Group and initiated new IT plans and many customer-facing initiatives. By joining India's third largest telecom operator, Doshi's focus and key challenge has been to transform IT from a support function to a business enabler at Rcom. Doshi shares the challenges and opportunities ahead with VOICE&DATA. Excerpts-

- Alpana Doshi,
CIO, Reliance Communications

What are the Top 5 ICT challenges faced by pan-India operators in telecom? And the key trends?

Challenges faced by today's telecom operators are like a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, all time low revenues are forcing operators to reduce operational costs, and on the other, competition from 'Over-the-Top' players are setting new paradigms in customer service expectation. Thus we are walking a tightrope of improving customer service levels while reducing cost, which puts innovation at the top of our agenda. Under these circumstances, the top 5 ICT challenges in my opinion are: Cost reduction by leveraging technology, enhancing ability to innovate, improvement in customer service, leveraging technology to improve process quality and efficiency, and capacity management and capex reduction.

RCom's revenue has been flat and even its profitability has gone down in the third quarter. What are the areas where you are planning to cut down cost by deploying ICT solutions?

Our focus is to leverage ICT to make business leaner, more agile, and service oriented to reduce cost of rolling out new services and service models. The primary areas of cost reduction using ICT are: MIS and Business Intelligence (BI), sales and distribution, product life cycle management, and day-to-day business operations.

With your joining, you initiated a new IT plan for RCom. How much have you achieved so far in that plan?

While cost reduction is so much part of our lexicon, my focus and key challenge has been to transform IT from a support function to business enabler. While resenting cost levels and introduction of new technology were easier goals, the major challenge was transformation of IT as a function within the organization. This task requires a major cultural shift not only within IT, but in all other stakeholders starting from business and corporate office to other support functions like procurement, finance, etc.

Today, I can proudly say that we have met all cost targets, which is seen as a major contributor in corporate-level decision-making. Today IT holds a permanent seat in all corporate-level boards and forums. Business today actively looks at IT for new innovation and revenue streams, especially after 3G IT has been the key in innovating several solutions providing new revenue streams to business.

What's your roadmap for business analytics deployment and how are you utilizing it for RCom?

RCom is discovering innovative uses of BI, driven by the need to extract more intelligence out of their business data-to drive more competitive offerings and to improve profit margins through newer revenue streams. The focus of BI will be more from historical analysis to predictive modeling, where strategy decisions can be better informed by hard data (data in the form of facts, graphs, and numbers).

With a growing subscriber base and big data boom how is the company geared to deploy big data for increasing quality of services, network efficiency, and capacity enhancement?

Since RCom has been growing consistently, hence the data management practices are in place, benchmarked against the international standards. We are constantly adding new customers every minute and look forward to grow faster than ever. At the same time, we offer VAS and 3G.

Our data is growing enormously due to subscriber growth and consumption of our services. We are applying innovative methods, system and process changes to analyze, manage, and make the best use of the resulting data.

RCom uses a data management system, which monitors the data growth, as desired. The data is segregated into 3 categories: Customer-centric, business data, and legal data.

We have configured our data storage system based upon the above 3 criteria. Thanks to our storage classification and requirements we are able to make the ends meet. We use tiered storage, which is a combination of fiber channels, SAS, and SATA of varied speed for different disk capacities. We also account the storage fabric management cache and front-end adopters dedicated to different kind of databases.

Due to sheer size of our databases, RCom has been actively involved in big data solutions. We have adopted Greenplum (EMC) to store CDRS and unstructured data and perform analytics on it. We continue to test and evaluate other products like Vertica, IBRIX, Hadoop, etc. We have implemented storage virtualization. We have also implemented unified storage (SAN, NAS) in a
single box.

You have been stressing a lot on customer-facing initiatives of RCom. Please throw some light on the key initiatives taken by RCom in this regard.

Yes, at RCom we have applied few customer-facing initiatives which include encouraging customers, which has the option of direct feedback, and a provision of whistle blow to surface the pain areas. Secondly, centralization of issue tracking has been enabled. Also, we believe in Enhance System Capabilities to handle bulk updates and take care of the SLA improvement.

What is the investment planned for ICT in FY12 and the forecast for FY13? Which are the areas where you are planning to invest in ICT?

Gone are the days when IT budget used to be allocated product- and technology-wise. As I spoke earlier, my IT is aligned with business to an extent where even our IT budgets are broken up on business focus areas rather than technologies or products. The key areas of our ICT investment are : Revenue based new development, attracting and retaining new customers, reducing enterprise cost, and improving operational efficiencies.

In FY13, RCom is planning to deploy LBS. How are you planning to utilize this service for your own benefit?

Using LBS is part of our long-term strategy. Network information and customer information are 2 key assets of any telecom operator. With bandwidth becoming a commodity, we are looking at new revenue opportunities at the service layer. Revenues are fast shifting towards network edge (from transport to services). Thus we are putting more focus on the services layer, and IT innovation is the key enabler for the same. LBS is one of the areas of IT innovation which will help us introduce a new plethora of services for our customers.