Profiles: Upwardly Mobile

She's not just the IT head at Bharti mobility business, but an award

winning CIO. That's what makes Amrita Gangotra special in a space that is

primarily male dominated. A gold medallist in Operations Research from Delhi

University, Gangotra has been associated with the IT industry for over 16 years,

both at the technology as well as the enterprise end, and each stint has been a

source of great learning for her. Gangotra started her career with Allen Bradley

as a research officer for developing/automating heuristic and statistical models

on market surveys. After a very brief stint of only a couple of months, Gangotra

moved to HCL (then HCL Ltd) in 1989 to find a career in the IT industry, which

was emerging at around that time.

After just two years at HCL, Gangotra had a long stint of nine years at

Nestle where she spearheaded the implementation of a comprehensive ERP

application across business groups in India and led international projects for

the development and deployment of applications across core business processes

covering multiple countries in the world, and the company wide Y2K project.

After two years at HCL Comnet, post Nestle, Gangotra moved to Bharti in 2002.

At Bharti, she was faced with the daunting task of fixing the existing

billing system that was poorly implemented. When she stepped in, the company was

undergoing major problems with its billing system. Gangotra managed to get it up

and running within a year's time. For all the advantages of a centralized

billing system, there was a need to report inefficiencies and content

inaccuracies; and rating, roaming, and billing delays needed to be controlled.

To achieve overall operational efficiency within the billing operations, the

company undertook 'Project Laser Ops' which was an attempt to get the best

out of the centralized billing system. Gangotra was instrumental in the

reimplementation of the CRM package in all circles and its integration with the

billing system. She has also personally seen to the setting up of the

company's robust call center infrastructure. Today, the call center handles

around three to five calls per user, per month, which finally works out to be a

huge volume if one takes Bharti's entire customer base into consideration.

As Airtel expands operations, handling the scale is becoming a big challenge

for Gangotra and team. This explains why the company has chosen the outsourcing

route to manage its huge IT infrastructure. Some of the key challenges, going

forward, will be ensuring the availability of cutting-edge technology that will

enable the company introduce and deploy innovative services. Says Gangotra,

“The telecom scenario in India is highly competitive with cut-throat

competition and it is imperative for IT to ensure that the company is able to

maintain a leadership position in the market.” In fact, IT has played a key

role in the introduction of some of the innovative schemes like the “Kahin Bhi

Kabhi Bhi” service from Airtel.

“Every experience is about learning and taking every learning forward,”

says Gangotra, and that is the key to success.