Corporate leaders deliberate on harnessing IT for business

CIT-2004, a conference-cum-exposition on communication and information technology, concluded in Ahmedabad on Sunday.

A live video conferencing session with Srindhi Varadhrajan, director, Terascale Computing Facility, Virginia Tech, USA, was the highlight of the event.

The event, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in association with the government of Gujarat and Gujarat Informatics Ltd at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, saw a host of speakers talking on a variety of topics relating to IT, business and education.

Several participants at the conference interacted with Srindhi Varadhrajan.

Varadhrajan gave a presentation on the efforts that went into building the third fastest computer.

The supercomputer was built at the cost of $5.2 million and is more economical than the world's two other fastest computers.

There was a session on exploring IT for distant education, in which D Pathak of IIT, Mumbai, explained how IIT Mumbai has successfully established remote centres located at engineering colleges across the country.

In the session on 'Harnessing IT for business benefits', Varun Jha, CIO, Tisco, said, "There may not be a direct return of investment from information technology and so conventional approaches of measuring business values do not work so far as IT is concerned. Benefits from IT are intangible and cannot be measured strictly in accounting terms. Generic IT can give customers value, but it alone cannot give a competitive advantage."

C N Ram, head, IT, HDFC Bank, in his presentation gave the example of leveraging IT in financial services.

Kaushal Mehta, CEO, Motif Inc, said, "The single biggest challenge to the BPO industry today is neither investment nor infrastructure and not even geography. It is the people management."

He dwelled on the challenges that lie in creating people-oriented business and creating the right kind of environment for nurturing human resources in the ITES and BPO industry.

Vishnu Varshney, CEO, Gujarat Venture Finance Ltd, in his speech on 'Incubation and entrepreneurship' cited the complacent mindset of the entrepreneurs, lack of social infrastructure and cosmopolitan environment as some of the reasons why Gujarat does not have a world-class IT company.

Ravi Cahuhan, in a session on 'Convergence - emerging trends in communications technology', explained that convergence is not a singular event. It operates on multiple simultaneous planes, each with its own drivers, impact risks and rewards.

In his presentation, he showed how will the future enterprises look, complete with internet, multimedia applications, storage, networking and security mechanism.