'We have started videoconferencing at all regional offices'

You have harnessed IT in a major way to improve efficiency
and productivity. What challenges do you see as a CIO?

ABB India is in an accelerated growth mode and one of the biggest challenges I
see is to ensure that the IT system keeps pace to support and facilitate
business growth. Systems are a key element of the company's 4-S management
philosophy (systems, speed, spirit and simplicity). Leveraging IT to ensure
scalability and gain competitive advantage is an integral part of our systems
approach. ABB is a technology and innovation driven company with knowledge and
domain expertise being a vital asset supporting our technologies. Therefore, it
becomes important to protect our Intellectual Property, so another focus area
for IT is to support data protection across the organization. There are, of
course, many challenges that come with growth and many are related to IT
systems. Besides reliability and continuity, we also focus on ensuring that our
systems are robust and scaleable.

As ABB enters the billion dollar club, what are the key areas of
focus for IT infrastructure?

Delivering functionalities on time and getting it right the first time is
extremely critical when you are serving a billion dollar operation spread across
the country. As our growth momentum accelerated, it became clear that IT needed
to proactively facilitate and support business growth. Further, as part of our
rapid growth, the workforce is also rising. Since our business is extremely
systems driven, it becomes imperative to bring our new employees to understand
our processes and systems speedily, which is another challenge for IS. For ABB,
functionality, openness, integration, portability, multi-language,
multi-currency support, scalability, technology and tools were some of the
critical factors.

How well have you integrated ABB India's offices
nationwide?

Our offices are completely networked. We introduced the backbone of MPLS for
WAN and our LAN is on a 1 GB backbone. We have also recently introduced
videoconferencing at all major manufacturing and regional offices. This brings
us the benefits of reduced travel costs and at the same time help us stay
connected.

Malovika Rao

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in