Eveready Industries India Ltd. (EIIL), (NSE: EVEREADY) is India's largest selling brand of dry cell batteries and flashlights. Founded in 1905, the company has a Market cap of Rs.207 Crores.

 

In the current era of consumerization of IT, the new technology trends are "The Nexus of Forces", as defined by Gartner. All sectors are influenced with the development of technology such as Social, Mobile, Big data and Cloud. The sectors which are greatly impacted are BFSI & Telecom, as they are using these tools extensively. Even the in-house IT team of enterprises will have to work around these aspects to deliver IT-as-a-service to businesses. The early adoption of these technologies will benefit in cutting down CAPEX expenditure and increasing enterprise agility. 

 

Enterprises face few obstructions while adopting these technologies, as no vendor provides a platform agnostic service which is portable. The scenario makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services. Secondly, the vendor has to find out ways to protect the existing license costs while migrating to the solutions, which should be inclusive. Thirdly, integration becomes a major issue with existing systems and it costs heavily to enterprises, as a result they end up paying a lot of money to the system integrators. Vendors should address this with self-service options.

 

Employees Need to be Constantly Trained

When IT is seen as a competitive differentiator for the business, the expectations zoom up. As business users feel that IT should be able to accomplish required goals with the press of a button, the reality collides with expectations. Human intervention is required at some stage of the journey. The business should be able to analyze and interpret data in a correct manner. The user needs to be able to perform the transactions flawlessly. To tackle these issues, training schedules and workshops have to be conducted and a competitive culture has to be created within the organization.

 

It is not every year that there are handful of IT projects to work on, with 90 percent of the time is spent on just routine maintenance. So, to keep the team inspired and engaged, the people need to be trained on new technologies, so that the teams are updated and well-equipped in using new technologies. Employees have to be deployed for 3-6 months to different departments on a rotational basis to have hands-on working experience of all departments. Finally, employees have to be encouraged to visit customers and vendors, so as to find problems that can be solved using IT.

 

Deciphering CAPEX Budget Issues

The majority of concerns revolve around keeping track of CAPEX budget issues and to select the best solution from a plethora of offerings available. The team needs to be motivated with the recognition and rewards for their productive efforts. CAPEX budget issue can be addressed by moving into the OPEX model, at least the non-critical applications into the Cloud, and also opting for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). These services are a proven model for running applications, without the hassle of maintaining the hardware and software, and the constant requirement for upgradation. Hence, these services are proving to be simple, scalable and reliable. With vast resource availability, choosing the best among them becomes more critical. So, this issue is addressed by doing extensive research, by talking to peers, and looking up to knowledge bases of professional research organizations to filter out the best solution among them.

 

A Sporty Environment is Ideal for Innovation

Idea emerges spontaneously when the environment is quite sporty and away from the monotonous and rigid office atmosphere. An organization blog is one such platform which serves well for creative minds. The ideas related to products, services, markets and business opportunities can be posted in the blog. Later, these are reviewed annually and the best idea is chosen. The employee who suggested the idea will be featured in the in-house magazine Hexagon.

 

To ensure that the organization keeps abreast of the latest technologies, evaluating latest technologies for business requirement plays a crucial role. To implement all of them is not possible; however, the team needs to be fully equipped to handle the technologies if the need arises.