The pandemic has unleashed Indian IT’s ability to maintain business continuity and help clients de-risk their businesses during exigencies, while ensuring productivity, data security and constant customer connect, says ITC Infotech, the technology arm of retail conglomerate, ITC Ltd.
So far, the company said, it was clients’ concerns over security, productivity and related issues that restrained tech players from easily allowing work from home (WfH), but Covid-19 has broken that mindset, both at the customer and HR fronts.
Sudip Singh, CEO & MD, ITC Infotech said, “During these unprecedented times, we as an organisation continue to be driven by our true north of staying focused on our employees and clients. We did a post Covid customer study and its finding allowed us to further sharpen our response mechanism.’’
Clients are increasingly appreciative of the speed in which the tech firm enabled technology, facilitated business continuity through WfH while ensuring productivity and maintaining confidentiality and security of customer data, as per Jaismon Emmanuel, senior vice president – business excellence at ITC Infotech,
“So, moving work to home was not about just providing laptops and dongles to employees. We had to build a comprehensive security environment for each of our people at their homes on a war footing basis. It included setting up secured VPN connections for which we purchased thousands of tokens, and also installing VoIP soft phones for seamless connectivity between customers,’’ he explained.
To understand what’s on the mind of the customers, their security concerns around WfH and their priorities at these challenging times, ITC Infotech, in association with Feedback Insights, a market research firm, has conducted a study which identified data security, privacy and productivity as priorities.
Some 99% of ITC Infotech’s close to 10,000 people are currently working from home. Weekly customer meetings and reportings have now become daily and the quantum of client interactions and collaborations have risen significantly. “All these have boosted customer comfort. They also realised people are now available with support for longer windows. So, our learning has been, if key issues are taken care, a lot can be achieved from this de-risking model called WfH,’’ added Mr. Emmanuel.
To enhance employee centricity, the company has created a War Room, with cross-functional and cross-regional senior executives to action inputs flowing in from the executive management. It has also launched a crisis communication app and a ‘Fight Karo Na’ app, to provide employees a comprehensive repository of guidelines as they work remotely. To help customers, ITC Infotech has set up a `COVID-19 BCP Cockpit, that works as a dashboard providing real-time visibility into multiple operations across various metrics and markets.
