Although there is a natural tendency to put IT investments and initiatives on the back-burner during financially tough times, Satish Pendse, HCC’s CIO, explains why this is actually the right time to invest in IT.
T he world is passing through one of the most challenging times and Indian construction and real estate businesses too have been affected. The confidence has taken a beating resulting into demand drying out for real estate. (Of course, now there are some signs of revival). Money appears to have dried out. Lenders have become extremely conservative. Businesses having foreign currency investments too have been suffering due to rupee depreciation.
As a response, many organisations have scaled down their expansion plans and most of the investments are put on the back-burner. Investments in information technolgy (IT) can be termed as “discretionary”, since they are not mandatory for keeping the business running under tough times. Hence the natural tendency is to put the IT investments and IT initiatives on the back-burner.
The election outcome has definitely helped to alter the confidence positively. Although its actual impact on the business may take some more time, it’s now expected that India will resume its rapid growth path, sooner than the rest of the world. Let’s analyse the scenario from IT investments perspective.
What do IT investments deliver?
The bare minimum benefits of IT investments such as speed, connectivity, internet exposure etc. are now given and they have become part of the business. The other strategic benefits of IT investments can be summarised as follows:
Visibility: The businesses have rapidly grown in size and complexity. Without IT, it’s no longer possible to have a complete picture of a large and geographically spread business. IT tools such as SAP kind of ERP work on a single database across locations, across departments, giving us an end-to-end visibility of the business.
Control: When the organisations were small, the owners, the MDs, the top managements could exercise personal control. With the growth, it’s no-longer possible to exercise the personalised control. IT tools have provision to build controls within the application and track any deviation.
Customer acquisition and retention: Integrated software such as CRM and ERP help to track all the contacts with the customers, maintain the customer-wise records and assist in better servicing of the customer.
Real estate developers can use IT creatively to give pictorial views of the projects, its progress, etc. This can be made available at various customer touch-points including websites. Rich customer experience results into better acquisition and retention of the customers.
Reduction of costs/cycle-time and improve efficiency: This is the key benefit of IT investments. Using IT appropriately can help avoid duplication and considerably speed-up the business process and help to reduce the wastage. It takes over the routine and low value added manual tasks and performs them more efficiently.
Backbone to sustain business growth: The way infrastructure like roads, ports, airports help to sustain the growth of the country; in the same way an IT backbone helps to sustain the growth of the business. It helps to build strong, rugged and efficient business processes which are necessary to sustain the growth and make it less person dependant.
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