Umesh Bhapkar, Director- IT Systems for Synechron India, reveals digital transformation route
1. What’s the IT roadmap of Synechron India?
The IT roadmap at Synechron includes several digital transformation initiatives that are intended towards employee productivity enhancement, better customer and end user experience in using IT services, providing competitive edge to our business and enhancing data privacy and security at the centre of all the services. A few examples include deployment of AI and ML enabled chatbots that will provide quick responses to end user services without having to go through traditional ticketing procedures, advanced analytics using Power BI to provide business intelligence, implementation of automated payment processing using Robotic Process Automation services and deployment of Hybrid Cloud strategy to keep a balance between the on premises and cloud services. Meeting privacy and data security compliance with ISO, PCI DSS, SOC1&2 and GDPR are at the core of our strategic IT design & Operations. The IT initiatives in the roadmap are tracked as Strategic, Tactical and Operational initiatives and are constantly aligned with Synechron business objectives.
2. What are the technologies that will characterize the next phase of digital transformation at Synechron India?
Technologies such as AI/ML, Chatbots, Cloud, RPA will lead our digital transformation journey to improve asset and operations lifecycles through human insight and collaborative innovation.
Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and Extended Reality (AR/VR/MR) will continue to power our innovation centres also known as Finlabs.
Java Full stack, .Net Core, SCALA, SPARC for development and Selenium will drive our automated testing environments.
Static and dynamic code analysers from (FORTIFY, Veracode) along with Acunetics, Nessus will help secure our software development environments
AWS, Azure, GCP and Pivotal will fuel our Hybrid and multi cloud environments.
3. How is Synechron India’s cyber security strategy going forward?
Synechron’s cyber security strategy will continue to have top down approach with senior management attention and sponsorship and will be very dynamic to adapt to changing business and risk environment
The risk assessment conducted periodically to identify vulnerabilities, threats and risks will be the foundation for the controls that will be implemented.
This approach includes Defence is Depth strategy with layers of security controls including Management, Technical & administrative controls.
There will be much more focus on people aspects being the weakest link along process and technology which will be strengthened as well.
Data Privacy and Security will remain at the core of our IT and business strategy.
4. With your rich experience of steering technology, can you please share some of the unique lessons learned.
Some of the lessons learned with my experience as a CIO are:
- Constantly align IT strategy with business strategy
- Understand the business, listen to the business
- Chose the people and build a team that resonate with your vision
- Measure the business outcomes, not the tech delivery
- Measure, measure and measure (everything can be measured even user experience)