The Chief Who Perished

This

is not fiction. A very senior MIS chief of a large Mumbai-based company was asked to put in his papers because

he was not aware of the latest in communications. He had

made the company spend lakhs of rupees in getting an ERP

installed a year back. Today, his bosses have come to know

of Application Service Provider (ASP) that will deliver and

manage applications to enterprises from data centres across

a WAN. According to experts, about 80 percent of corporate

users will soon shift to the use-and-pay model to keep

control over costs and technological obsolescence.

This is the power of

the Internet and convergence. And a major driver behind this

is the growing power of communications.

Going back to our MIS

chief, we ought to know what his fault was. While he

believes that the management was too harsh as communications

was not his forte, the top brass feels that everything

revolves around communications in this competitive world.

The company deals in manufacture and distribution of white

goods and for them things like channel management, stocks

and inventory management, competition analysis, customer

feedback and complaint handling is of prime importance. It

wants to link up with partners all over the country via a

Web-based intranet that brings down stocking and delivery

time by 75 percent. It wanted a reliable and scalable

communications backbone for the organization which would

ensure that the management, the partners including suppliers

and channel, and the consumer could get across to each other

irrespective of the means of communications each was using.

The company wants to

cut down costs and be more efficient and effective. But most

importantly, it wants to feel the pulse of its consumers,

and attract them with a VFM proposition that includes

personalized service, flexibility and options, better costs,

faster delivery, and state-of-the-art anytime support. And

what is making all this possible? Communications of course!

LAN and WAN are merging; technologies

for voice and data communications are converging. And the

MIS head has no option but to become the communications head

as well. The top management wants a person who will not only

build their communications infrastructure, but also tells

them of ways and means to exploit it. This particular MIS

chief got the boot because he was too hooked up with

internal systems and nice MIS reports which had been centre

stage in the old world where quality communications was

neither available nor needed. But today, communications is

not only available, but is guiding the future of corporate

houses and their MIS chiefs.