IT Strategy | 2014

Q1 Three CIO and their LinkedIn profile.

1. Varun Sood: CIO, Fortis Healthcare
Linked In Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/varun-sood/1a/221/484
On New Years Eve in December 2013, when the rest of the world was putting
on their dancing shoes, Varun Sood, CIO of Fortis Healthcare, was doing something
that you wouldnt really call a celebration. But it was nothing less than an
adventure. Sood was going to shut down the companys corporate datacenter and
migrate the companys entire IT onto a public cloud! If you thought Sood is crazy,
youre not alone. In fact, many people within his team and outside his organization
thought he had gone off his rocker. Indian CIOs were ready to experiment with
hybrid cloudspart private and part publicbut a 100 percent public cloud model
was something unheard of. According to CIO Indias Mid-Year Review 2014, only 15
percent of Indian CIOs currently use or are considering moving to public clouds. And
Sood falls in that bracket. But he was unfazed. So much so that the transition to the
public cloud happened in a year after he took over as Fortis CIO. That said, it wasnt
an easy call to make. Sood had to fight many cynics, including the one within him.
Fortis is one of the largest integrated healthcare delivery providers with a
presence in five countries. It has 65 healthcare facilities, over 10,000 beds, 240
diagnostic centers and a staff of more than 17,000 people. That aside, Fortis had to
be on the qui vive to beat competition and do well in the fiercely competitive
healthcare business. And technology had a sufficiently great role in achieving that
goal. Its eICU (electronic ICU), for instance, is a tele-medicine venture aimed at
providing expert services to critically ill patients in remote locations. Launched in
2012, a time when tele-medicine was yet to gain ground in India, the system was
first-of-its-kind in the country. Sitting at the Central Command Center of a Fortis
hospital, specialists provide advanced consultation and care to hundreds of people
who have no access to such services. Thats not it. Use of wearable devices for
neonatal monitoring is another way by which Fortis ensures high-tech patient care.
IT has to support many such critical systems at Fortis, and also be able to change
with the changing face of the healthcare industry in India. The companys corporate
datacenter, which was at a hosted location, wasnt actually a problem. And
maintaining status quo wasnt going to take too much of Soods energy. But Sood
was not someone to be content with status quo. But Soods business DNAthe 10
years he spent in various business functions, including M&A, business analysis and
integrationcraved for change. Sood and his team sat together to understand how
things can be done in a better way. Also, there came a point where he had to reinvest in the infrastructure which was nearing its end of life. Our aim was simple
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to establish a scalable and cost-effective infrastructure that meets not just the
current needs but also the future needs of Fortis. Also, we as a company, were
about to take up a whole host of new initiatives, which meant that the load on IT
would go up further. Increasing overhead was another problem we faced. We had to
be on our toes just to keep the lights on and thats not the situation I wanted my
team to be in, says Sood.
Sood saw no sense in throwing more people and money at the problem. He instead
decided to start with a clean slate. We were open to all types of options---public
cloud, private cloud, hosting or on-premise, says Sood. With news of Sood scouting
for cloud vendors, he quickly became the most popular CIO in town. He was
approached by 19 vendors in the coming days, who opened out their long list of
specs and benefits on the table. Not the one to get misled easily, Sood prepared a
list of business priorities that needed to be met. Business was agnostic to the model
of the cloud IT would use, says Sood. The business wanted performance,
availability, and security. From the IT point of view, we needed scalability, flexibility,
and lower TCO and the public cloud met all these requirements, he says.
But one question lingered on: Who in their right minds would move
completely to the public cloud? This was the same question that was bothering
Soods team members. Tech professionals typically have a hardware-centric
mindset. They dont understand why you are telling them to stop worrying about
things like adding more servers or more memory. People are used to seeing
servers and having the latest and greatest tech and the best specs. It was this belief
that needed to change, he says. Sood badly wanted the teams support as they
were the ones who were eventually going to execute the project. He worked with
them closely and kept them motivated. Once he won that support, Soods
confidence doubled. Along with the hardware infrastructure, Sood and team moved
the bulk of the core applications to the cloud. Fortunately, for Sood, most of the
applications used by the company were already built for a virtual environment. That
made the migration easier. But it certainly was not trouble-free. The support from
OEMs and ISVs was a challenge. But the results were worth all the trouble, says
Sood. But ask him about how happy the end users are, Sood quickly turns into a
philosopher. User expectation is a moving target. Their benchmarks keep moving
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up, he says. Today, users dont have to worry about the size of attachments while
sending an e-mail or the delay in opening an app during busy hours. But nobody
notices when you turn on the switch and the room is lit up. But people do get
disappointed when it does not happen, he says. But for the IT team, the move to
the public cloud was worth all the debate and effort. Sood says his team does not
really spend much time on mundane tasks like capacity planning and infrastructure
monitoring anymore. They are able to focus on factors that drive business and
growth. The time spent on keeping the lights on reduced drastically. The economic
benefits of the public cloud were significant. With the savings achieved, IT could
take up other new projects that were crying for attention--without increasing
budget. Sood is able to allocate significant portion of his IT budget to newer and
innovative projects now. A team that once looked at the public cloud with disbelief
now is fully is confident in the fact that there was no other way to do it.

2. Prasanth Puliakottu: CIO, Sterlite (Vedanta)

Linked In Profile: http://goo.gl/zgSVkb
Sterlite Technologies ISO 9001 certification gave its customers quality
assurance, but the company needed a stamp of security. Enter ISO 27001. Sterlites
plant in Aurangabad already had an ISO 9001 certification, and that ensured its
customers high standards in production processes and high quality. But with 45
patents in its kitty and some of the largest telecom and power operators banking on
its products, Sterlite realized it had to strengthen its information security standards
as well. Since we operate in global markets and service a lot of global clients, it
was important for us to standardize and strengthen our information security
practices, says Prasanth Puliakottu, CIO, Sterlite Technologies. Puliakottu wanted to
create a comprehensive framework which included all aspects of production and
processes, including information security. That was because commitment to
information security was a prerequisite for many of Sterlites clients. Right from the
time of receiving an order till the time of delivering the final product, Sterlite
performs numerous quality checks to fulfill client requirements regarding
information security and ensure standardized procedures. The process was tedious,
time-consuming and there was always the fear of missing a step that could cost the
company a lotsometimes, to the extent of losing a client.
Puliakottu realized that an ISO 27001 certification would cement the fact that
Sterlite took information security seriously. He roped in Sunil Pawar, Sterlites CISO,
and the heads of different LOBs to create an ISO 27001 framework. Puliakottu and
his team spent around 18 months creating an information security and process
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standardization framework. This framework included even the most basic yet often
neglected pieces of data security protocols like how paper used during work hours
should never be left unattended.
Both Pawar and Puliakottu spent the first three months for the initial
preparations and creating a standard ISO 27001 framework. This included external
audits, risk assessment, profiling, and closing gaps in processes. But the time of
implementation came along with the need to make some strategic calls. With four
plant locations and offices scattered across India, Puliakottu had to figure out a way
to conduct security training and implement policies at all locations. The real
challenge was completing the entire process in as little time as possible. It took us
totally 15 months to go live at all locations. Individually, each plant would have
taken about eight months instead of 12, but the collective time frame would have
been larger as well, says Puliakottu. Another challenge was to get employees
enthused and serious about security. We realized that information security in itself
is a boring topic and people might not be enthusiastic to attend training sessions,
says Pawar. However, the duo had other plans. Puliakottu roped in the HR team and
initiated a fresh round of training in various enterprise applications for employees.
The security guidelines were plugged into these training sessions as part of the
larger scheme of things. Just the kind of sugar-coated pill the employees needed.
The impact of the newly acquired certification on Sterlites image wasnt hard
to see. Notably, the company finalized a deal with a UAE-based customer within just
a few days of acquiring the certification. Earlier, the client would come with a
checklist and conduct an audit before signing a deal with us. Now, almost 90
percent of the general questions on most checklists are automatically answered
because we adhere to ISO 27001, says Puliakottu. He expects that as a result of
this, Sterlite will be able to generate about Rs. 100 crore more than what it would
have earlier made over a stipulated period of time. Having assured quality and
security for its customers, Sterlite Technologies can now expect to connect more
countries.

3. Munender Soperna: CIO, Dr Lal PathLabs

Linked In Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/munender-soperna/11/93/2a4
Enterprises in the healthcare sector are going all out to ensure customer
satisfaction by automating certain crucial business processes. And Dr. Lal PathLabs
(LPL), is one of them. Dr Lal PathLabs is a 65-year-old healthcare company with a
rich experience in pathology testing. With over 150 Labs and over 2,000 centers
across the country, it offers the largest test menu and caters to over 12 million
customers every year. Despite its envious presence, process automation existed
only at lab locations and was captured in the ERP directly and moved to LIMS for
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analytical processing. Patient information was being captured manually at collection

centers, which form a major share of LPLs total business. Collection center
executives used to fill the Test Requisition Form (TRF) manually at their location and
send it along with the sample. This arrangement created a number of challenges
like pre-analytical errors, revenue leakage, and inefficiency, which in turn, increased
turnaround time. We are growing at a rate of 30 percent a year and our sample
load is increasing day-by-day. It becomes difficult to manage business critical
processes. Manual processes need a lot of manpower and attention in the business
value chain, says Munender Soperna, CIO, Dr. Lal PathLabs. So, in November 2013,
the company decided to invest in an e-registration module, a standalone application
hosted on the cloud. Now it hardly takes 40 seconds to register a patient and
provide him with a cash receipt. Unlike earlier, when the manually-captured TRFs
were registered in the system at lab locations, now our executives register patients
at their respective locations, and the data transfers automatically to my ERP
location. When the sample reaches our lab, we can directly send the sample to the
required department for processing. This has reduced the duplicacy of patient data
entry and turnaround time drastically. As mentioned earlier the sample does not
wait for the data entry process which sometimes could take 30 to 35 minutes. This
has increased our efficiency by 15-20 percent, says Soperna. Today, the application
has been rolled out in about 900 locations, and is leaving a lasting impression on
customers and the companys business.

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Q2 Table of content for IT strategy document?

1. Executive Summary
1.x [summary/synthesis of the strategic plan including vision, mission, goals,
drivers, key programs and initiatives etc.]
2. Current Position:
2.x [a snap shot of the current information technology environment]
3. IT Strategy
3.x [Strategic goals, objectives & planning]
4. Governance:
4.x [details the IT Governance structure and links it to the strategic plan]
5. Alignment:
5.x [details current and proposed programs and initiatives in support of the
proposed strategy]

Q3. Enterprise Architecture document

Michigans Enterprise Architecture Document

http://goo.gl/vsuRu9

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