Hitting Perfect Harmony

It all started when the top management at the Mahindra Group were on the
lookout for a solution that could enable two way-interactive communication
between the senior management and the group employees, and between the employees
of diverse companies within the group. As the Mahindra group has nine industry
verticals ranging from automotive, IT, holiday resorts and financial services,
this diversity made it difficult to conceptualize a common platform that could
bring everyone together to exchange views.

This gave birth to the One Mahindra initiative that still is considered one
of the most mature Enterprise 2.0 initiative in corporate India. As a first
step, corporate IT created a portal based on web 2.0 to leverage on the
synergies and knowledge of employees across the group. "We did a small survey
and we discovered that many of the group employees have created communities on
Facebook and Orkut. So we realized that there was a latent need for people to
collaborate," says Arvind Tawde, senior VP & CIO, Mahindra Group. After
extensively researching popular social networking forums Tawdes team zeroed in
on three applications that could deliver phenomenal results. These include
MahiSpace (a personal page where employees can display their profiles and areas
of expertise), Ask Mahindra (a forum where employees can ask questions and
receive answers from colleagues across the Mahindra group) and Innovation Pad (a
platform where users can put forward innovative ideas and have the opportunity
to have them implemented). The groups goal was clearto position their Intranet
One Mahindra as a group-wide employee networking portal which could help
employees showcase their skills, expertise and domain knowledge.

Our Enterprise 2.0 initiative was based on a latent need for people to collaborate	Arvind Tawde, senior VP & CIO, Mahindra Group

Apart from One Mahindra, the Common Customer Database (CCDB) was one of the
key IT deployments where the corporate IT team pooled in all the customer data
from the companies within the group. Another major project which is currently
underway is called Project Harmony and will go live on April 1, 2010. It is a
very large project and the IT team has been working on it for the past two
years. It identifies the common processes across the group including accounts
and finance, recruitment, and HR. These have then been put on the common IT
platform which is hosted centrally on a single instance at Mahindra city. While
this is a technologically intensive project it also involves a high level of
change management. It is a major milestone because once the project, goes live,
even the smaller companies within the group will enjoy the benefits of a central
IT architecture. Forty companies will go live on the project on April 1 while
two companies that are based abroad will be roped into the project next year.
"Project Harmony has been the most challenging of all projects and is also one
project that I am passionate about," says Tawde.

Going ahead, Tawde plans on deploying a private cloud for all the common
applications across businesses. "This will prove to be a viable business
initiative as we already have over forty companies within the group who will be
the immediate customers for a private cloud," concludes Tawde.

Priya Kekre

priyak@cybermedia.co.in