IT managers talk about IT for corporate masses

Neeraj Sharma, director, applications development & support (IT), COLT

In any organization, 90% of the applications are used by non-IT users.
With the growing content explosion, IT managers are constantly under pressure to
run mission critical applications that cannot afford to suffer downtime.

Traditionally, an IT manager was someone who would test the performance of
various information networks With soaring changes in the business needs, the
role of evaluation, identification and implementation of newer technologies to
enhance the long term operational and strategic goals of the company falls
within the domain of responsibilities of an IT manager. The challenge lies in
the adoption of new technologies and making it user friendly for the non-IT
users. We have moved our performance appraisal from an Oracle based platform to
a HR solution since users were not comfortable with the old platform, says
Neeraj Sharma, IT director, COLT.

In COLT, we have special IT forums conducting training and application
orientation sessions for non-IT users. We have a separate department that caters
to the training needs of the employees through the help of our learning
management system (LMS). LMS helps us to generate CBT training modules, adds
Sharma.

Atreyee Datta

atreyeed@cybermedia.co.in

Raghubir Singh, assistant general manager, IT, Usha International

80% of Usha Internationals workforce is involved in marketing and
sales. Distance often acts as a communication barrier, preventing timely
dissipation of information among the salesforce spread out in the field. And
most of this mobile workforce had little IT knowledge. The IT department still
managed to find a solution to close this communication gap of fifteen days into
a matter of one hour. We have created a workflow system through which the
entire process will get automated, says Raghubir Singh, assistant general
manager, IT, Usha International.

A web form has been made available online, wherein users only need to fill in
the basic information even a non-tech savvy person can do it which then gets fed
into the ERP system. The IT department has also brought about mobile salesforce
automation to enable the sales staff to connect remotely with customers and the
organization. The salesforce has been provided with BlackBerry devices to
conduct sales via mobile phones. Since email is the most commonly used
communications channel; hence, as a security measure the company has deployed
the security applications in a redundant mode.

Atreyee Datta

atreyeed@cybermedia.co.in

Mohammed Ali Khan, systems administrator, (IT), Fusion India Project
Management

Even as the use of technological tools grows manifold in a competitive
environment, some departments including HR and accounting remain averse to
adapting new IT tools since most users have a non-IT background. Training the
non-technical users has always been a big challenge for an IT manager.

And more so when it is a non-IT organization. Says Mohammed Ali Khan, systems
administrator, IT at Bengaluru based Fusion India Project Management, One of
the major challenges as an IT manager is to get the user acceptance to newer
technologies. While IT managers seek to implement new IT tools, users too need
to adapt to the changing environment.

The non-IT users are also averse to shifting from a legacy system to modern
applications. Most users feel that there are a lot of network issues when it
comes to having hands-on experience on new IT tools and this is where users
continuously seek help from IT managers on a day-to-day basis. Says Khan, We
train our users once in every fifteen days. Sometimes users even find it
difficult to export files and consult the IT manager. Technical issues can creep
in anytime; however, users should be able to fix problems in some cases.
Rigorous training of non-IT users has helped Fusion to be profitable and be an
example for other non-IT organizations.

PC Suraj

surajp@cybermedia.co.in