In a recent interaction with CIOTech Outlook, Santosh Rai, Chief Information Officer, Asahi India Glass shared his insights on business leadership, devising efficient strategies and various other aspects. Below are the key takeaways from the exclusive interview –

Boasting of an illustrious career spanning over 17 years, Santosh joined Asahi in 2019, prior to which he has handled key management positions across a variety of companies such as Vardhman Textiles, International Tractors, Asia Motor Works, VE Commercial Vehicles, Volkswagen and AVTEC. Some of his areas of specialization include product support, quality assurance, crisis management, joint application development, benchmarking, capacity planning, project and resource management.

What steps do you follow for effective digital transformation within your company?

There is a step based framework which many companies follow, wherein any digital transformation policy/framework that has been successful in an organization is blindly copied and implemented by other companies as well. This is a very wrong approach because having a one-size-fits-all mentality towards their digital transformation will fail to deliver the desired outcomes for the company. Secondly, we need to prepare a heatmap on the current progress of our digital transformation journey, based on which we have to list different initiatives, pair them with industry-best practices at India level and then proceed towards global standards. Based on the many analytical reports that will be generated during this process, you must carefully select your short, mid & long-term priorities.

Based on those priorities, you then have to do a thorough analysis of the benefits they bring to the business, determine the associated costs of implementation, and then convey this information to all the concerned decision makers. Once you get approval from them, you need to conduct a pilot project, analyze the market response and then start working on a full scale project. Since this is one of the most successful approaches towards digital transformation plans, I strictly adhere to this and also recommend others to do the same.

Suggest a few methodologies/frameworks business can follow for successful project management.

There are different approaches for different kinds of projects. For instance, if you want to improve your services, you need to follow ITIL framework or the ISO: 20000 framework. Similarly, in terms of ERP re-implementation, you need to follow an agile approach. Although quite a few ERP implementations are done through devops frameworks, I personally feel agile framework is a more effective one in this regard since it enables organizations to clearly showcase the outcomes to their business partners and gain their confidence. Also, it is very important for the business leaders to ensure a clear line of communication and collaboration between the IT team and various other departments to reap maximum benefits of following the agile methodology.

Explain about the importance of having an IT strategy that aligns with your overall business objectives.

Unlike old times, IT is no long longer just a support function, but an enabler. Thus, it is necessary to first understand what your primary business strategy is. For example, we have three business operations and each of them have different business & IT strategies. Since we are mainly into the B2B segment and primarily deal with OEMs, our main business strategy for our auto division focuses around retaining our market share. Since this is a tough task to accomplish, it is paramount for us to improvise on our backend processes and keep them focused on quality, delivery, traceability, innovation and other critical aspects. Having an efficient IT strategy that can properly support your business strategy is very much important in today’s context.

How can an organization ensure cybersecurity practices across all its business processes?

In most cases, businesses have a false mentality that cybersecurity or IT security is solely the responsibility of the IT teams. However, it is important to understand in digital age, that cybersecurity is one of the core aspects of every business strategy. Thus, the organization must create awareness among all its across all departments about various cybersecurity practices and give them necessary training about the actions that need to be taken when faced with any suspicious activity.

What are some of the easy, but effective ways IT business leaders can stay updated with latest industry happenings?

It is important for every business leader in the IT industry to be open to constant learning. Attending various seminars, conferences and webinars is one effective way for business leaders to not only stay updated with changing market dynamics, but also familiarize themselves with new technologies and their diverse use cases.