Rajiv Sharaf, Vice President, IT, Reliance Infrastructure

Known for his entrepreneurial acumen, sense of customer taste, and the ability to leverage technical skills for business, Rajiv Sharaf keeps his mantra quite simple and befitting, "IT must go to business instead of business coming to IT".

With more than 23 years of experience in the fields of telecom, broadcast, and IT infrastructure, Sharaf was recently elevated as CIO of Reliance Infrastructure, which requires him to oversee the IT function for the energy distribution, generation, transmission businesses, and the metro, roads, and cement businesses.

In his stint at RInfra, Sharaf also leads the company's business initiative to participate as an 'IT consultant' and 'IT implementation agency' under RAPDRP program of MoP. Starting his career in 1988 as a scientist in the Space Application Center at Ahmedabad, Sharaf worked closely with many other organizations namely, with Gujarat Communication Electronics (GCEL), DoT, Indian Railways, Doordarshan, BSES, and Mumbai Discom and added many feathers to his hat with best performance in terms of revenue, profitability, and customer satisfaction. Excerpts

What kind of ICT challenges are being faced by Reliance Infrastructure?

In an organization like RInfra where IT performs a dual role of a support function as well as a business enabler, the challenges are immense. We have a plethora of businesses under Reliance Infrastructure hence rising costs coupled with a demanding customer make it even more complex to handle these challenges. Apart from this, a major challenge we face is to serve a diverse spread of both our internal (employees) and external (consumers) along with ensuring a reduction in cost.

Reliance Infrastructure focuses on infrastructure, energy, and EPC. What are the new technologies that you are evaluating in FY13 in these sectors?

In the coming year, our focus will be on implementing an 'Enterprise Portfolio Management' solution for forecasting electricity consumption, exploring opportunities in cloud computing, Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI), and data leak prevention.

Reliance Infrastructure's topline and bottomline has been flat for the last 2 years. Which are the areas where you plan to cut down cost by deploying ICT solutions?

Reliance Infrastructure has deployed and used various IT applications extensively. Currently, we are in the process of standardizing various processes across all verticals so as to improve efficiency and ramp up productivity. We are also evaluating various integrated automation solutions so as to enhance performance of operations. Moreover we are looking at ICT solutions to reduce travel costs associated with managing training needs across diverse business locations.

How are you using technology for your roads business?

We have a robust IT roadmap for roads business which is aligned with various initiatives by NHAI and MOUD. Our toll management systems will be getting integrated with Common Mobility Card (CMC) which is being introduced by MOUD. We are in the process of implementing various customer centric initiatives so as to enhance customer experience and lower total cost of ownership to the organization. We have already implemented ERMS - a unique system to manage toll road business at an enterprise level.

RInfra implemented India's first GIS based Outage Management System (OMS) in Mumbai. How does this work?

In a bid to reduce inconvenience caused to the consumers by the impact of planned and unplanned outages and incidents, RInfra implemented India's first GIS based Outage Management System (OMS) in Mumbai.

In power distribution, fault identification plays a key role in the faster resolution of complaint. Today, it solely depends on experience and intelligence of the field personnel who attends the complaints. Previously, RInfra used the Complaint Management System (CMS) to keep track of the status of complaints and the data is fed by the personnel at complaint handling stations. The newly implemented OMS by RInfra will integrate existing complaint handling system with SCADA, GIS, and SAP, and identify probable faulty sections prior to the site visit by field personnel.

RInfra implemented many IT based consumer centric services. Brief us about the same.

One such service is the Energy Manager. It is an online tool for calculating energy savings through energy efficient appliance adoption. Other initiatives include a mobile based website, pull SMS services for duplicate bill/ECS service/bill not received/contact update/forms, multi-stage grievance escalation matrix, payment overdue reminder, VDS balance alerts, etc.

All these consumer friendly initiatives not only simplify CRM processes but also bring customers closer to the company and build brand reputation.

Which technological improvements are you planning to deploy to offer better services to end consumers?

In line with the initiatives described above, efforts are on to develop a wallet payment system, payments via a mobile application, online VDS payments, establishing a transaction database for payments, a chat desk for customer support, and a relay known outage information system wherein customers belonging to known outage areas are identified on calling the call center based on their locations and account number and are informed over the IVR about tentative restoration time of the outage or interruption.

What is the roadmap for business analytics deployment in the power distribution sector and how do you plan to leverage it for other divisions?

For our power distribution business, the integrated IT roadmap and system maturity achieved over a period of time have laid the foundation for analytics. We are using this platform for analyzing consumer behavior in electricity usage, patterns of various fault and breakdowns, and network augmentation. Based on this, a concept of equipment monitoring system (EMS) was conceived. This system has helped us to not only reduce faults but also do predictive analysis on the basis of historical data gathered through the system.