Best IT Implementations of the Year 2010: 200 Tech Success Stories Slowdown or no slowdown, IT is always there to help, and

that's exactly what we saw this time. Despite the slowdown being at its peak last year, we received over 200 IT project nominations, which truly shows the important role that IT Decision Makers and their IT teams have played to help their organizations come through thick and thin. Kudos to them! We entered the seventh year of the Best IT Implementation awards with a bit of skepticism, thinking that we may not get a lot of project nominations the way we usually do because of the slowdown last year. However, we were pleasantly surprised to receive over 200 IT projects nominations, from 150 unique companies. We understand that enterprise IT projects typically have long implementation cycles taking years to complete, but there were also many projects that were initiated and even completed last year. In fact, in our past discussions with many IT decision makers, it emerged that the slowdown was like a blessing in disguise, because they were able to negotiate much better rates with their vendors. So slowdown or no slowdown, the mantra always remains that IT is critical for business growth. So here we are with the the first volume of the Best IT Implementation Awards-a comprehensive compilation of all the IT project nominations we received this time. About the nominations Besides the first surprise of receiving 200 IT project nominations, we got many other surprises as well after going through the results. The highest number of projects were from the banking and financial services sector, even higher than last year! So while banks around the world were affected by the economic downturn, Indian banks and financial services companies continued on a strong growth path. 25% of the total projects received were from this segment. The manufacturing sector, which was at the top last year, slid down to the fourth spot this year, which is not so pleasant. The other pleasant surprise was to see the IT/ITeS sector back in action, with the second highest number of projects. The top four spenders of course, remain the same as previous years-banking and financial services, IT/ITes, manufacturing, and govt. We have seen other sectors pick up and loose steam, but these four sectors have always remained steady. Overall, there were 21 different types of industries contributing 40 different types of projects in the nominations. These included projects from many of the hot buzzwords we keep hearing these days-unified communication, cloud computing, SaaS, virtualization and consolidation, Business Intelligence, etc. You can see the graph for the complete break-up.

Our Process Our process for Best IT remains the same as always. There are four phases-public nominations, detailed audit forms, face to face interactions, and declaration of winners by the jury. In phase I, we ask everyone in the IT and user industry to tell us about IT projects that they feel deserve recognition. These projects should bring benefits to the Indian audience, while the deployment could be anywhere. We then do a

preliminary audit to remove entries that don't fit our selection criteria for the awards. These include projects that are still in pilot stage, offshore projects that don't bring any benefits to Indian audience, and entries that are of products and not IT projects. After doing this and pruning the projects for duplicate and incomplete entries, we move the rest to phase II, wherein the heads of those projects are requested to fill up a detailed audit form. Many projects get dropped out at this stage, because their IT heads don't fill up the detailed audit form, either because they're too busy or don't get permission from their corp com to share details with the media. We do however give the project heads an option to tell us which parts of the audit form document are sensitive and should not be published. So out of over 200 IT project nominations, around 120 submitted detailed audit forms.

IT Projects Directory Structure Presented in this volume of the Best IT Implementation awards are all the nominations that we received, irrespective of whether they qualify our criteria or not. We first have IT projects for which we received the detailed audit forms. These are broken up by types of IT projects (see box for the categories). After that, we've carried a table containing a brief summary of all the projects that came in through our public nomination process. While this issue goes to print, the PCQuest team will be busy with the third and fourth phases of the Best IT Implementation awards process. These involve face to face interviews with most of the project heads who submitted the detailed audit forms. After that, the projects would be presented to a panel of jury members, who'll decide the winners. These will be declared in the next (July) issue.

South-East-Central Railways : SECROADS An office automation solution that takes care of workload with minimal staff. AEGON Religare Life Insurance : Human Resource Management System Key processes of HR were automated across the country to provide better turnaround time and better consistency ICICI Bank : Peoplesoft Implementation A single instance of customized Peoplesoft for 18 countries was rolled out to overcome data mismatch Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance : Kotak Rewards & Incentive System Entire process of reward program was automated to monitor and reward sales force in a transparent manner

HRDG , CSIR : Fellow Management System Web based solution implemented to reduce workload, ensure better management Punjab National Bank : CBS@RRB Core Banking Solution has offered solutions like improved customer service, housekeeping, etc. Punjab National Bank : BCP Automation Project The BCP project offers them to serve customers across branches of PNB even in the absence of connectivity Punjab National Bank : Enterprise-wise Data Warehouse Data warehouse was initiated to facilitate Decision Support System for the management along with MIS Lovely Professional University : University Management System Seamless integration of the administrative & academic procedures through UMS. IBM Daksh Business Process Services : Self Assessment for Privacy & Security SAPS, an enterprise initiative to gain visibility to the risks & provide value addition to the clients Bharti Airtel : Unified GIS A single repository of Airtel's entire network inventory on a GIS, its attributes and geographic information Hexaware Technologies : HexaPower The project envisaged cost savings through resource optimization and also increase in operating margins. Reliance Life Insurance : Paperless Office The project was initiated to automate various processes to improve process control, reduce average turnaround time. HDFC ERGO : Helios The company can access policy related information in a clear, consistent and correct form. Rajasthan Cricket Association : Online Match Ticketing To overcome hassles like authenticity black-marketing of ODI tickets, RCA completely automated ticketing process Irevna, a division of CRISIL : Dynamic Access Control Management It seeks to assign project specific access to VLAN and file sharing for end users Century Communications : LEAP 3 A film post production house adopts latest green IT technologies.