In the Drivers Seat

Bagdadi believes in situational leadership and allows his team
members to solve their problems themselves. "Team conflicts primarily
happen due to lack of roadmap or clarity of goal, inter group conflicts, and
focus on one-upmanship. And if one shows enough trust and delegates well,
majority of team problems get resolved. Being a flat organization, where command
and follow does not work, we try to provide opportunities to express and
deliver to our team members without walking on each others toes," he
says. One of his key tasks includes selecting and building the next in line team
thereby ensuring a consistent dialog and ability to coach subordinates.

The Beginning

A true-blue Mumbaikar, Bagdadi was born and brought up in Mumbai, where he
completed his schooling at Elphinstone Technical High School and intermediate
from St Xaviers College. Armed with a mechanical engineering degree from VJTI,
Bagdadi joined New Standard Engineering as a shop floor engineer. "Even
though I was a mechanical engineer I was inclined toward IT. Many doubted my
choice, since this was at a time when computers werent a rage," he says.
In 1979, he finally got an opportunity as a trainee computer programmer in
Godrej & Boyce where he rose in the ranksfrom being a team leader to the
functional programming head.

While completion of his diploma in systems management, Bagdadi
bagged a scholarship from Japan for a six-month software engineering course.
Tokyo was the place where Bagdadi got his first taste of studying abroad and
"learnt a lot at NEC". Back from Tokyo, Bagdadi joined Godrejs
management services group with the idea of providing a consultative function to
various departments on how to use technology.

After working for eleven years at Godrej, Bagdadi moved on to
join a Godrej JV with GE known as Godrej-GE Appliances where he worked as a CIO
for nine years. After his long innings with Godrej, Bagdadi changed a few jobs
and joined CFC Countrywide in 2004 where he was the second employee.

Projects Implemented

Engaged in providing offshore processing and IT services to its parent
company, Countrywide Financial Corporation (CFCI) is a provider of diversified
mortgage financial services in selected markets. Since going live in May 2004,
the company has made three sites operational across two cities, providing more
than 1,400 BPO seats, 1,200 ITS seats, and approximately 100 KPO seats. The IT
infrastructure architecture uses state-of-the-art hardware configurations with
fail-proof capabilities. The IT infrastructure is chosen from approved standards
providing vitalization, cross platform integration, complete application
manageability through single source, and management and controllership through
best in class tools. This has provided the organization with flexibility,
interoperability, ability to implement vitalization, and identity management
fulfilling the primary objective of the organization.

Having 24X7 operations across all facilities, high availability
and uptime are the critical components. The company has two facilities each in
Mumbai and Hyderabad, and each of these are connected to the parent companys
facility in the US. The India-based WAN network is a DS3 (45 Mbps) mesh network
with all sites interconnected. In the case of one link failing, the path can be
ensured through manual routing to reach and connect all sites. Similarly, in
case any of the connecting ATM links (DS3) fail on the international site,
parallel links take the complete load and continue services until the affected
links come back in operations.

"Each time a failure would lead us to change routes
manually and apply them to operate network in an optimal way. The affected
segment would be unavailable for 40-60 minutes, thus we were working with a
network in 98-99% uptime but could not better the same," Bagdadi says.
Recently, the company implemented dynamic routing (OSPF protocol) between India
WAN areas and international WAN links. Dynamic routing resolves the availability
and uptime problem by constructing routing tables automatically, based on
information carried by routing protocols, and allowing the network to act nearly
autonomously in avoiding network failures and blockages. This has enabled an
automated fail-over for traffic between India and US or among the India WAN
sites. "Now we are able to pursue and achieve uptime and availability in
the range of 99.9% and above," he adds.

Balance in Life

With career completely overshadowing most of our personal space, Bagdadi too
had to face the dilemma of choosing his work over family. But, as is said, behind
every successful man there is a woman; he too was fortunate to have Fehmida
as his life partner who completely understood the demands of building a budding
career. A homemaker in the real sense, Fehmida has been Bagdadis sounding
board for all his ideas for the past 27 years of marriage. "Marriage is a
two-way street where empathy is a vital element to make it successful."

Being always short on time means that the couple does not talk
shop, and travels for spending quality time together. Bonding with his two sonsDanish
studying computer engineering and Kashif, studying in class VIItops Bagdadis
priority list. "Both being in the growing stage, it is important for me to
spend quality time with them." Bagdadis spare time also sees him in a
new role, as a visiting faculty to colleges where he mentors students on their
future.

Stuti Das

stutid@cybermedia.co.in