CIOIN

Dinesh Kumar, Executive Director

NTPC

The system has ensured that hierarchy and geographical distance don't come in the way of capturing ideas and figuring out ways to harness them

Executive summary

CIO 100 Winner: Last year, Dinesh Kumar rolled out a large scale SAP implementation across NTPC and change management initiatives. At the same time, Kumar decided to introduce a collaborative framework across the enterprise. Part of the collaborative framework was audio and video conferencing that would enable the company to reach out to all its employees.

Rolling out an ERP throughout an organization is one of the largest and toughest exercises before an IT team. And, usually, all of an organization's resources get so absorbed in ensuring its successful deployment that other IT initiatives are sidelined.

Dinesh Kumar, executive director at NTPC, India's largest power company, decided he wasn't going to be a statistic. Last year, as his team was neck deep in rolling out a SAP implementation across NTPC and change management initiatives were in full swing, Kumar decided to introduce a collaborative framework across the enterprise. This would not only help with change management, he reasoned, but also take the organization beyond the ERP deployment, enable increased productivity and reduce costs.

Part of the collaborative framework was audio and video conferencing that would enable the company to reach out to all its employees. Change management for the ERP required a lot of interaction with all users and the audio/video conferencing facility would come handy.

"A major challenge was getting people to adapt to the technology. To ensure we had really effective conferencing, do's and dont's were circulated among all project heads and repeated at the start of such meetings," says Kumar.

Post the rollout, the new system is being leveraged to conduct crucial activities such as management committee meetings, project monitoring, and reviews of upcoming thermal or hydro power generating projects. Management committee meetings take place regularly across all of the organization's 40 locations with over 150 participants taking part simultaneously.

"The conferencing initiative not only helps us save costs and time but also helps us in coming together to find speedy solutions to critical issues that need to be tackled immediately during various stages of upcoming projects. It has also ensured that hierarchy and geographical distance do not come in the way of capturing ideas and figuring out ways to harness them," says Kumar.

"That should go a long way in reducing the lead time in meeting the XI Plan target of achieving 50,000 MW by the end of 2012," he adds.