Successful innovations happen at the intersection of neighboring industries

Amrita Gangotra, the lady at the helm of the IT affairs at Bharti's mobility business line-airtel-has been a success at it, be it striking the balance between work and family, or getting the right balance between the company's outsourcing vendors and the needs of the internal customers. But, there's more to her charisma than meeting the challenges thrown at her. She's the one who's gone out of her way to actively seek out challenges and take them head on. That's what, perhaps, has brought her to a position where very few women have managed to, or even aspired to, reach. She believes the CIO's task is to help deliver essential business information to employees on their devices of choice-empowering them to take important decisions, while working closely with business heads to hit annual and quarterly objectives using a clearly defined set of metrics. We caught up with Amrita for an exclusive interview. Excerpts-

What does it take to be CIO of the largest telecom company of India?

It is indeed a huge responsibility to be the CIO of an integrated telecommunications company like airtel. Traditionally, the CIO's role was limited to looking after the ERP systems, billing, CRM and so on. However, now the role has grown significantly. It has moved from the focus on cost optimization, building scale and improving customer satisfaction scores to building new revenue streams and keeping the organization abreast with new technologies.

Most of Bharti's business processes are framed on the outsource model. Does that increase/decrease your work pressure?

In the Indian market, Bharti airtel took the lead in outsourcing its IT, network and operations infrastructure to global partners with strong domain expertise, after which, many telcos followed in its footsteps. Today airtel continues to work closely with all its partners towards quality execution of plans directed to its vendors. While the outsourcing model helps us optimize efficiencies we focus a great amount of our efforts towards ensuring delivery on high service benchmarks, monitoring our partners' overall performance and adherence to business centric SLAs. This challenge is a part and parcel of managing the large scale of Bharti airtel's IT operations that exist today-which over a period of time, have successfully helped airtel focus on its core business competencies.

How do you define 'business-ICT' alignment for a communications company like Bharti?

Successful innovations happen at the intersection of neighboring industries. With the changing business model, consumer behavior is also changing. There is a huge pent-up demand for data services in India. The enabling factors such as handset prices, content and application as well as availability of airwaves to cater to this demand have created a huge opportunity for innovation in the telecom sector. Therefore, for a telecom company, convergence of IT and telecom technologies is very important. At airtel, the role of the IT chief is to provide support to various business functions, including human resource and finance. We constantly identify technologies that will help generate revenue in areas such as “m-commerce”, cloud computing services and many more. An example is airtel's launch of apps store which is going to be a huge revenue earner in the future with the advent of 3G.

Is there still a gap in the perception of 'IT as an enabler' and 'IT as a helper' of businesses?

Like any other function, IT too is going through its own evolution course. Users earlier considered IT as a function that ran basic infrastructure maintenance. IT was possibly assumed to be a bit far from doing innovations, creating something new or playing the role of business enabler. However, today IT has moved into an era of applications, systems/platforms that are not only innovative and business enabling, but also path breaking and transformational in nature.

Change in customer behavior and service consumption has been ever dynamic. With words like 'Social Computing', 'Web 2.0' imploding the digital space, the evolution of IT towards being a key enabling function had grown enormously. Today, IT is shifting from providing 'problem based' solution to a complete end-to-end 'segment based' solution like mHealth, mAd, Digital Signage/Media exchange and many more. Today, companies that are truly customer focused (like airtel), the number of core IT projects executed is 'significantly' less than the technology advice they bring into support business projects in the endeavor to improve business and customer service.

How does the management look at the CIO in their decision making processes these days and how have you so far managed to influence decisions?

The role of the CIO is moving from technical planning and implementation to strategic planning. Today, the CIO is involved in top levels of corporate planning and decision making. At airtel, the CIO works very closely with the CEO and other business leaders. Since technology plays a very critical role, the CIO gets a position on the board and plays a critical role in business decisions especially decisions that have a strong technology foundation.

What are some of the innovative IT implementations you have made, both in process as well as technology, that have had impact on the company's bottomline?

With new technologies constantly unfolding, we constantly identify and keep the organization abreast with new technologies. With the deployment of 3G, India will witness a huge data explosion. Keeping this in mind, we recently launched the mobile app store. The airtel App Central store has applications that the customers can buy or download free of cost, including tracking air ticket and rail reservations or insurance policy details. Another example is airtel Money, a recently launched e-commerce product. Airtel Money allows you to load cash into your mobile and pay for
just about anything: from a grocery store to a shopping mall or eating out with friends.

Another example is Airtel 'smart campus'. This allows the employees to take print outs, order food, etc, by simply flashing their ID cards. The ID card reader installed in front of the printing machines, cafeteria, other strategic locations, synchronizes the information with the central database. This enhances productivity, saves paper and makes the entire campus proceedings more efficient.

Ritu Singh
ritus@cybermedia.co.in