‘The catch is in determining where to cut the IT budget without sacrificing effectiveness’

Southern Petrochemical Industries Corporation, or SPIC, is an Indian company that makes petrochemicals. Its core competency is its fertilizer portfolio with additional interests in the areas of power, oil and natural gas, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology applications in agriculture. No doubt, a business group of this scale having varied interests has to use ICT extensively to get the desired result. And that is what Shiva Shankar has been doing for the company as its group CIO. VOICE&DATA spoke to him to know more about the ICT related issues and challenges his company face, and how hemitigates the challenges with the help of ICT. Excerpts-

What are the technological challenges before the oil and gas sector?

Constant cost reduction, better RoI for the investments being made, higher availability, predictable system performances, business intelligence/data warehousing are some of the challenges in this industry which are not very different from the other sectors.

What is your IT security and cloud computing strategy?

Security has been a key factor when it comes to a new solution design or protecting existing landscape. The perimeter security is fortified and governed by strict norms. All the devices and policies are reviewed and governed by corporate policies. There are well defined process in place for identity and access management. In addition, we are already adapting cloud solution for our messagingrequirements.

Down the line we are also exploring the possibilities of using the IaaS for some of our lesser critical systems. For our core business apps & ERP we are planning to have a private cloud/shared infrastructure to support all group companies.

What are the pain points with respect to integration of technology?

Companies invest huge costs in system integration and maintenance for business applications and services. The most common pain points are:Business Relevance: The application and infrastructure technology that is applicable to one group company may not be suitable for other. Integrating different application (legacy and new) technologies to deliver business service is a phenomenal task and needs close scrutiny.Integration Cost: In today's time when the intention of most of initiative is to optimize cost, but often huge integra-tion cost cause the initiative to overshoot budget and at times fail.

Effort for Integration: The lead time required to understand system and plan the integration results in extended project timeline causing delay t business. This may lead to considerable opportunity loss to business.Availability of Right Solution: Often unavailability of right solution/services lead to business process. Leaders see a significant increase in the number of errors/issues caused by integration services as these pain points cause a delay/roadblock to application transformation initiatives.

How do you plan to leverage your ICT expertise gained over the years?

In today's highly competitive environment, companies and organizations are hard pressed to keep and maintain costeffective ICT solutions. Over a period of time I have gained experience to bridge this gap in the operations by optimizing very distinct services. I am planning to

apply these areas amongst others:

IT and businesses work hand in gloveStandardizing and consolidating the infrastructure

Consolidating the vendors to have better control and cost

Convert capital into operating expenses by introducing cloud, rental or lease management of ICT equipment

Optimize process, introducing service management thereby improve efficiency

Role based resource allocation and asset management services

License consolidation and adaptation of open source

Procurement services utilizing central IT rather through respective group companies

Introduce ICT audit services

There is lot of pressure on CIOs to reduce operational manpower cost. Keeping this in view, what are the strategies you have planned for your company?

IT plays a key role in most functions within an organization and is clearly a contributor to cost. Consequently, IT costs are coming under increasing scrutiny. The complexity is in determining where to cut the IT budget without sacrificing effectiveness and efficiency. We depend heavily on our ICT landscape and application-ERP systems-and want to ensure that the expertise understands its context and importance. Hence we are working on unifying support to our ICT landscape across group through tier-1 and -2 partners.

Besides, we are working on the following initiatives to optimize IT cost:

Share licenses, services, and human resources among different LOB

Centralized IT procurement decisions and negotiations

Kindle innovation-encourage employees to share their innovation ideas

Instead of PC desktop refresh introducing thin client model

Vendor consolidation and renegotiate maintenance contracts for all group

Use more open source products

Cost of skilled resource is also an important contributor and we are working on optimizing on those fronts too.

Increase automation

Rework the FTE ratio from vendor to support IT landscape

Keep departments up to 15% under-staffed

Introduce self service and training to end users to enable self sustenance

Recruit graduate trainees to create bench resources.