In IT by design

During his career of two decades, Rajat Sharma, President - IT and Global CIO at Atul, has taken up each job as a new challenge and continues to do so. By Nivedan Prakash

Rajat Sharma

In a way, it seems that Atul’s President - IT and Global CIO, Rajat Sharma’s entry into the field of IT was foreordained. His father was the head of IT at Bharat Heavy Electricals in his time. That’s where Rajat got the aspiration as well as the inspiration to get into the same field.

In his career spanning 21 years, Sharma has successfully aligned IT with business at various organizations, turned around the IT organization, managed teams with a focus on outcomes, undertaken business process improvement and boosted organizational efficiency.

Possessing rich domain and functional expertise in the assessment, conceptualization, analysis, development and real-time implementation of ERP and commercial automation systems in chemicals, cement, publishing, and sugar industry verticals, Sharma is a hard core IT professional.

“My career has been fulfilling in terms of professional satisfaction, knowledge enhancement and learning. Being a part of the core management team on account of the IT portfolio, I got exposed to the organization’s core management quadrant at a pretty early stage of my career,” added Sharma.

Journey in IT

Starting his career in 1988 as a programmer at Jagran Prakashan, Rajat Sharma worked on UNIFY RDBMS on the UNIX platform and COBOL and dBASE III on MS-DOS. He also participated in the development of systems handling payroll, accounting, advertisement scheduling and billing, financial accounting, newsprint management and store accounting.

In 1992, he joined Bajaj Hindusthan as a senior programmer. He worked at the second level of the hierarchy under the system analyst along with a team of four members and initiated the organization’s IT infrastructure. Here he played a key role in analyzing, designing and developing the systems for raw material procurement, payroll accounting, laboratory analysis management and material management using the UNIFY RDBMS on UNIX running on the HCL Magnum Super Mini System.

Sharma went back to Jagran Prakashan in 1994 and joined the company as an Assistant Manager of Systems. He headed the Systems department, wherein he laid down and formulated the system design specifications for the system handling advertisement workflow, newsprint procurement management, financial control, material management, personnel operations, and newspaper circulation logistics.

“We were one of the first customers to migrate onto the Oracle 7 database upon its launch in India with Oracle Forms 4.0 at the front-end,” said Sharma.

After Jagran, he again joined Bajaj Hindusthan as a Deputy General Manager of IT in 1995. There, he headed the IT department and led the IT team involved in software development and operation controls. He designed and implemented a model system for Sugar Cane Procurement and Payment to farmers, which was recognized by the Ministry of Sugar Cane, Government of Uttar Pradesh.

Then, in 2002, Sharma rejoined Jagran Prakashan as the CTO, where he headed the IT and software development operations at the corporate office for envisioning and fulfilling the IT requirements of the Dainik Jagran newspaper. He also deployed India’s first Devnagari script based Editorial Workflow Management System. He led the team that developed and deployed a Devnagari font named ‘Jagran’ that was designed in-house and the Dainik Jagran newspaper is published using that font.

Sharma then went on to join Shree Cement as a Senior General Manager of IT. He was responsible for the Oracle Apps e-Business Suite 11i implementation for end-to-end enterprise business automation. He also implemented freight reverse auction solution integration with a RFID based vehicle tracking system.

His role at Atul

Since November 2009, Sharma has been holding the leadership role for envisioning the ICT alignment for business needs of Atul Ltd. and implementing the same with optimal efforts culminating in business efficiencies with a mix of new technology execution and upgrades.

He is responsible for ICT, information security, IT strategy, Oracle Applications e-Business Suite R12 implementation and maintenance, IT risk management, governance and compliance for Atul and its group companies globally.

Sharma asserted, “I took over the portfolio with Oracle R12 e-Business Suite in a state of instability and am working on the resurrection of the same. The IT enterprise is under the process of migration from undocumented system operations to a structured process governed organization. Significant tangible results have been obtained for the financial closure and deployment of structured IT systems in a short span of three months.”

“Meanwhile, the SaaS model of operations is a business trend that we are assessing for deployment. The migration to mobile handset based services is going to be the largest shift in IT deliverables and this would transform the paradigm of IT operations in the thought processes of CIOs. We are in the process of deploying handheld-based information updates and workflows,” said Sharma.

Outlook for the current year

Sharma felt that 2010 was going to be positive for the industry, workforce and for his company, as this year would mark a new phase in the way that people and enterprises would address the market through a leaner outlook and approach to processes and costs.

Sharma pointed out, “The foremost task in my enterprise would be to resurrect the Oracle R12 e-Business Suite ERP platform and simultaneously add new IT enabled initiatives like handheld integration, publishing of vendor and customer portals and plant maintenance automation, to name a few.”

“Going forward, my priority at Atul is to enable the current ERP system to be at the helm of the enterprise as the key decision enabler. The IT vision at Atul is to provide a robust, seamless, 24x7 platform for addressing the dynamic business needs of the enterprise with optimal efficiency,” concluded Sharma.

In his message to the aspiring leaders of the industry, Sharma said that IT was about processes and process synergy. He quoted Lloyd Dobens, ‘It is not a question of how well each process works; the question is how well they work together.’

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com