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 Shirish Gariba
CIO
Elbee Express
"User is the King. Ultimately it is the user who will come back and inform whether a technology is benefiting the company or not."
Shirish Gariba is the head of technology at Elbee Express, but is involved in all business strategies, because he feels that a CIO should equally participate in business and other functional areas than just IT, to remain in pace with the competition. He talks about a few recent IT projects with Megha Banduni Rai, Sr. Correspondent, Network Computing.
What growth potential do you see in your industry? What factors are driving this growth?
Our industry (express delivery and distribution) has an excellent growth rate and would continue to do so. The area of growth are many but if I were to take express distribution and freight delivery industry, the growth is in the securitized products which include debit cards / credit cards / welcome kits- all this comes from banking and financial institutes. Similarly, we have growth coming in from insurance segment. Also, the ecommerce segment is growing fast and will continue to grow faster provided we give them payment options.
What are the top technical challenges you face? What measures do you take to meet them?
Speed, scalability and functionality are the top three technical challenges. Plan the projects which need to be delivered faster and take the business on your side and make them participative. This is how you can meet the challenge of speed. Scalability is addressed via infrastructure investments and functionality is met through business study and meeting customers.
You recently rolled out On demand CRM. What were the key reasons to choose On demand CRM?
After evaluating many CRM products, we finalized on Salesforce.com, which I think is the world class On demand CRM. There are many reasons to choose Salesforce.com versus other and the prime reasons are it is simple to use, has great speed, scalability and availability, easy customization and fast deployment.
What benefits you foresee from the CRM implementation? Did you do any customization to the application?
The project was deployed in less than 4 weeks and we have done adequate investment in training the users to make sure that they get the best out of the application. Being a SaaS product it is available for users whenever and wherever they desire with same quality and functionality.
We have done customization to the application in a very short time. For instance, now our customer service division gets to know the tracking details via web services in salesforce.com. The sales team has the visibility of daily and monthly sales with dashboards and is now permitted to enter collections in the application.
So now we get one view of all customer information right from his address, contacts, opportunities to sales, collections and resolution. This is really a wow situation for our customer service team, sales team and for the management.
What are the top IT initiatives undertaken at Elbee Express? Why you consider them the best?
CRM, Business Intelligence and Mobility are the top three IT implementations at Elbee Express so far. They are all customer facing projects that have benefited the customers largely. In BI, we have given freedom to the users from the planned report so that they can think out of box. They can drill, drag drop according to their thoughts, ideas and opportunity.
Mobility is a big project where we capture the delivery information and update it in real time to the server which publishes the information to the user. We have to do a lot of work to deliver the application. BI with all required features has led to easy user adaptability and easy use of the application.
How do you measure IT effectiveness? What does ROI mean to you?
Measuring IT effectiveness means how much business value it creates and how much of business problem(s) it has solved coupled with the acceptance or adaptation of a particular technology by the business users. All these are important to consider. Ultimately it is the user who will come back and inform whether technology is working for them.
What kind of trends do you think are emerging in the IT space?
Adoption of Mobility, Web, Virtualization (apps, server and network), Business intelligence and CRM.
What is your people management mantra at workplace?
Be involved but take it easy, work very hard but this is not the last job, never miss occasion to chill, think like an entrepreneur and last but not the least customer alignment.
Best piece of advice/tips for future CIOs?
User is the King. Align your IT to customers.
Recent book you are reading?
The Night of the Gun by David Carr, Five Love Languages- How to express Heartfelt commitment to your mate by Gary Chapman.
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