Taking IT leadership to new heights

As a technology practitioner, Prasad Parab, Group CIO of Pidilite, has been successful in building a highly effective IT team and has had the hunger for continuous learning in the process. By Nivedan Prakash

Prasad Parab, Group CIO of Pidilite carries with himself approximately 20 years of experience in the IT field. With his clear vision, Parab has been able to cut across multiple departments of the company with focus on the bottom line. He has the practical understanding of where the company is going and how to map technology accordingly.

“I have few words to describe my attributes which fits me the best—imagination, leadership, vision, strategic thinking, interpersonal skills, ability to navigate in a complex organization, and balanced planning versus execution,” said Parab.

Career background

As a fresh engineering graduate from S. P. College of Engineering, Mumbai University, Parab started his career in 1986 as a maintenance engineer. He had a brief stint of two years in chemical and textile company before shifting to cable industry in design field.

After working for 13 years for cable industry with RPG cables and Cable Corporation of India and then moving to EDP in 1990, Parab was responsible for delivery of systems integration projects, covering entire project life cycle, starting with scoping, outsourcing, testing, implementation and maintenance.

In 1999, he got an offer from Ion Exchange to be part migration from a distributed system to a centralized home grown ERP. And after working for eight years in engineering and project domain as a CIO, he did get an opportunity to work for Pidilite as a CIO.

Parab pointed out, “As mentioned earlier, during my career of 23 years, I worked for three companies except the present one. Though I have started my career as maintenance engineer and after working for two years, I moved to cable design, where I shifted my career to IT and since then I am handling IT function for almost 20 years.”

“Being a maintenance and design engineer, I had got an opportunity to prove my analytical ability and be a part of the IT team. As IT was destined to be the business enabler for future industry, IT was destined to be my future career driving force,” added Parab.

In CIO’s role

As Group CIO, Parab is managing IT functions entailing IT infrastructure, project development, user interaction, database management, security and licensing, and IT recruitment, amongst other job roles.

Some of his major job responsibilities include:

• Selecting and driving implementation of applications to bridge the gap between in-house customized ERP systems.
• Customization and enhancement (add-on) support on SAP-B1 implementation for overseas subsidiaries.
• Managing all aspects of software development, implementation, maintenance, and enhancement for the entire Pidilite group.
• Management of WAN connectivity across India with migration plan to on-demand bandwidth enhancement on MPLS platform.
• Planning, budgeting, and selection of hardware, software, and office automation equipment.
• Management of SLA driven FMS contract across the country.

“Some of my major achievements include MPLS roll out at more than 80 locations, order to delivery cycle time reduction during process re-engineering, and IT infrastructure consolidation initiative for reducing server foot by 80%. I am presently implementing virtualization and MPLS VPN roll out for more than 100 locations,” said Parab.

As the IT head of the organization, Parab believes that as a business enabler and technology practitioner, one must have the following qualities to built highly effective IT organization. He/she should be a team player, be a good listener, have positive attitude, not have fear of failure, and a good understanding of business. Moreover, he/she need to have hunger for learning, should constantly keep updating himself about new technologies, business processes, etc., great thinker, high customer focus, should be able to face challenging and high pressure situations, and at the same time, keep looking for innovative ways to increase operational efficiency at organization level.

Meanwhile, Parab believes that cloud computing has been shaping up as a key trend for 2009. Today, the main benefit of cloud computing is that it enables adherents to only use what they need, which is something of prime importance. Software-as-a-Service will be the next thing which will transform the thinking of a CIO.

“Virtualization, data center consolidation and secure wireless network dramatically improves the efficiency and availability of resources and applications in an organization. Internal resources are underutilized under the old ‘one server, one application’ model and IT admin spend too much time managing servers rather than innovating. An automated datacenter, built on a VMware virtualization platform, lets you respond to market dynamics faster and more efficiently than ever before,” highlighted Parab.

Parab is also of view that cloud computing, Software-as-a-Service, virtualization and secure wireless network dramatically improves the efficiency and availability of resources and applications in an organization.

Looking ahead

According to Parab, there have been signs of economic situation improving gradually and getting competitive workforce will be a real challenge in the year 2010. Being a brand leader in the market and to maintain the same requires continuous business innovation and increase operational efficiencies using IT enablement.

“If we talk about the year 2010, I think next year most of bandwidth will be consumed on application consolidation after seeing the benefit of infrastructure consolidation. Besides, Software-as-a-Service along with cloud computing will play significant impact on corporate IT,” opined Parab.

Going forward, Parab has three important priorities:

• First and most important is getting support of the leadership. The benefits need to be communicated from top so that there is cooperation from all stakeholders.
• Secondly, there must be tangible business benefits, such as increase in productivity, time saving, increase in sales, etc.
• Lastly, the project must be completed in agreed time-frame. If it gets delayed, stakeholders lose interest and adoption becomes increasingly difficult.

Here, Parab is quick to point out that as an organization, they should look at practical, implementable, and cost-effective solutions rather than weighing futuristic solutions.

In his message to the industry, Parab says that the aspiring leaders should look beyond technology; focus on business and customers, think ahead, big, and global; be adaptive to change and ready to innovative; keep learning from your own experience and other sources; live a healthy and peaceful life. It is very important to live a balanced work-life, be clear about the end objective while doing any projects, delegate responsibilities as it helps in nurturing talent and frees up your time.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com