 Suresh R Shenoy, Senior VP – IT, Wockhardt
For IT heads, people challenge extends beyond top of the list concerns like recruitment and retention, to include aspects like soft skills and providing growth opportunities.
A few years back when we were operating in silos, recruiting and retaining people was an issue because inevitably, they would seek growth and learning elsewhere. Today, with our state of the art IT systems, there are enough learning opportunities for everyone, but communication and public relation skills continue to be a vexing problem. An IT person may possess sound technical knowledge, but if he or she can’t impart that knowledge with clarity and empathy, more people issues crop up. I prefer people who are knowledgeable, understand business processes and most important, possess great communications and public relation skills.
With Wockhardt acquiring companies inside India and overseas, the people challenge has also acquired new dimensions. For example, when we push for a central database, people at other locations may feel that their importance would subside. For us the test is to convince them in a friendly way that their importance is not going to diminish. Rather, they will be freed from drudgery for more productive activities.
In the case of overseas acquisitions, IT is brought into the picture only after the acquisition is finalized. We are expected to conduct due diligence of the acquired company’s existing IT infrastructure. Of course, we also meet their IT people to understand existing processes and procedures and figure out what needs to be done to make their systems compatible with ours. Over the years, with each acquisition, we have fine tuned the fundamentals of integration and the templates are ready, so to speak. There could be one time issues like data migration, mapping business blue prints, etc. But we have all the internal expertise we need, and integration pains are few and far between.
CIO Mantra
Increasingly, IT heads are expected to understand the business dynamics of the organization - you cannot have an IT strategy without a business strategy. The IT head is expected to more business and function oriented than technical-oriented. For example, when we invested huge amounts in ERP, the question that was asked of me was Return on Investment (RoI). In such a scenario, knowledge of the business will stand the IT head in good stead. Take cycle times - manual invoicing takes place in islands and consequently, it takes several days to churn out an invoice. With an ERP system, you can churn it out online – now you can raise your invoice faster, get collection done faster, pump in funds faster and drive faster turnarounds. In the end, you get better production quality, and control over inventory and collections, which in effect becomes your RoI.
Management Tips
- Empower sub-ordinates. Trust people and make things happen. In large organizations like Wockhardt, with their huge IT organizations, shutting out people isn’t an option at all. You must give subordinates authority and responsibility too.
- Know and understand your organization’s business. For example, in a pharmaceutical company, products have short shelf life. If a product has to be consumed within 18 months of the date of manufacture, there is no point in keeping it in stock. IT has to make this information available to concerned parties. Another example could be advances for medical representatives who may be located all over the country. Since the money for the same comes out of the working capital, the best way to manage disbursal would be to create a central database.
- Create a friendly work environment. Encourage informal culture where people are free to speak. If sub-ordinates keep their problems to themselves, their efficiency would be affected and by the same token, corporate efficiency will suffer. Your sub-ordinates are your soldiers. Generals may form the strategy, do manpower planning, do cost reduction, give directions, but it is the soldiers who make things happen.
- Mandate should come from the user. IT cannot be the silver bullet, it can only provide a solution. Functional ownership matters.
-- As told to Anoop K Menon
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