I wish to support humanity with successful IT deployment

In today's fast changing global marketplace, hotels are striving to articulate, adopt, and deliver the best to their customers. To know more about the challenges a CIO faces in the hospitality industry, Dataquest spoke to Ashish Khanna, AVP, Corporate IT, The Oberoi Group. Excerpts

The key intent of IT is to mesh it with organization's goals and strategy-but it's easier said than done-if you reflect on this, how big a challenge this is as well an opportunity for the CIOs and can you cite your own experience on this?

I think the goal for all the departments in the organization is to mesh with organizations' goals and strategy. However, the IT department is very uniquely positioned within the enterprise as it cuts across all functions. The role of a CIO is to constantly collaborate with key stakeholders to understand the changing business requirements and align IT deliveries accordingly. It should also align itself with the business to understand the changing business scenarios and market needs and provide innovative solutions to automate processes and provide better go-to-market for business.

RoI is the new management mantra. Given this, can you talk about how you achieved more bang for every penny spent on IT? Can you suggest some best practices that makes for achieving greater RoI and lesser TCO?

RoI and TCO are very important as it provides a measurable KPI for investment made by business on IT. The CIO's must prepare their own industry specific RoI/TCO matrices rather than depending on generic matrices provided by vendors to explain the investment to the business and derive value out of it.

Per se if you look at services industry like hospitality-customer is the king and its extremely competitive. So how are you leveraging IT for your competitive advantage and can you talk about the kind of tech backbone you have in place and how it has impacted the operations?
We have a very strong tech backbone to connect all hotels with centralized systems to support central reservations.

What is that one thing that you would like to change (tech wise) and what are some of the key tech milestones you have set for yourself?

One thing which needs a serious change is the licensing policies of various OEM's which currently rules the enterprise IT to support the consumerization of IT. My personal tech milestone is to spearhead an IT deployment which should support the entire humanity in making their day-to-day life better.

Please share your major events of past and current role that shaped your career to what you are today.

I started my career with Mahindra and Mahindra and the role was to integrate all dealership networks with the SAP system of Mahindra. This was a very different experience for me as I didn't have any previous experience with the automobile industry and the challenges associated with it. Hence I spent a lot of time over the counter of delearships interacting with end customers and understanding the business and customer perspective first. This has helped a lot and I had successfully rolled out the system in my region and later headed the project for pan India deployment.

From here, I joined Taj group of hotels and managed the IT department of their property in Lucknow. This was a major shift in the customer handling and servicing. This industry helped me understand the concept of customer as god infact here customer is never called as customer but guest. I learnt the basics of hospitality here and managed few successful implementations here like VoIP, central reservation systems and latest property management system.

From here I moved to The Oberoi Group at Corporate IT to manage their IT strategy and to manage the IT Infrastructure domain. The major turning point here was the global centralization of active directory and emailing system which was conceptualized and spearheaded by me. This has helped me learn the length and breadth of the organization and help understand the primary business operations for all it's SBU's and their integration with central system.