Umesh Mehta, CIO – India, Jubilant Life Sciences, has built the IT infrastructure of quite a few companies from the ground up. By Mehak Chawla
Mehta’s first stable stint was with Applied Electro-Magnetics where he worked for close to five years and got his first experience in building an IT infrastructure. “I started IT from scratch there and built the data center, deployed a LAN and brought in integration,” recalled Mehta. It was here that he began to streamline IT processes, something that was to become his domain of expertise in years to come.
Mehta’s next stint was at Jay Bharat—a joint venture between Maruti and Suzuki, which he joined in 1994. Here also, he began building the IT infrastructure from the ground up. He began by setting up the standard infrastructure and then he kickstarted the move from a standard applications set up to an integrated one. It was in 1995 that Mehta joined the first wave of ERP that was just capturing the Indian market and implemented it at his organization.
The automotive CIO
Next was Case New Holland, a subsidiary of Fiat. This proved to be Mehta’s longest stint as he spent nine years in this company. It was here that he got “to work internationally and observe their IT disciplines.” As part of this job, Mehta stayed in China for two years in 2002-03. New Holland was another company where he began building an IT set-up for their new facility in Noida. “I took care of the networking, ERP and applications,” elaborated Mehta.
His biggest take away from New Holland was the opportunity to work in a multi-cultural environment. Another thing that Mehta fondly recalled from this stint was the use of mobility. “Back in 2000, we were one of the pioneers in the usage of mobility. We had access to information through SMS,” said Mehta.
After Mehta moved to Asia Motor Works (AMW) in 2008, two things were established. First was his reputation as someone who could build and develop the IT backbone for a new center or organization. Second was his reputation as an automotive CIO. Having worked with three auto-majors, Mehta felt that he “was branded as an automotive CIO.” Even though he indulged in setting up IT of another greenfield plant with AMW and also did some innovative projects, Mehta was looking forward to newer horizons.
While in AMW Mehta set up a DMS on the Cloud, which he said, was the first of its kind.
Current stint
According to Mehta, one of the primary reasons that he had for moving out of automotive industry, into life sciences, was his need for a change. “I wanted to change my industry because I was being branded as an automotive CIO,” he declared.
Now that he is well settled in his job, Mehta is learning the nuances of the industry, and finding it rather exciting. “Every industry comes with its own concepts, so one gets to learn a lot of new things,” explained Mehta.
Even though there is much to be learnt in his new job, Mehta claimed that his challenges as a CIO haven’t undergone a massive shift with the change in industry. He believed that the broad challenges of CIOs remain unchanged, no matter what industry he works in. “The biggest challenge of a CIO is balancing the scale between costs and expectations,” he said. He believed that managing expectations was something that a CIO would always have on his plate, irrespective of his organization or vertical.
Delivering solutions with lower costs and getting it right at the ‘First go’ were the other things, that Mehta opined CIOs would always have to deal with. Mehta also explained that change management would always remain a crucial part of any CIOs job role.
Tech-enthusiast
The technologies that enthuse Mehta are mobility and analytics. Though he had his stints with both earlier, he is a firm believer in their potential. As of now, he is involved with a couple of key projects. “One of them is rolling out CRM on the Cloud and we are also working on analytics with Cognos,” he detailed.
The other thing that he has up his sleeve, as the CIO of a parent company, is to constantly work to offer shared services for the group. “We run core applications and infrastructure like e-mail etc for the group companies,” elaborated Mehta. Mehta is now planning to deploy shared services for the entire group. Though not many know, his group also includes pizza delivery chain, Dominoes.
Though he is a die hard tech enthusiast, when at home, Mehta prefers to catch up with the couch potato in him and watch some television. He also endeavors to spend as much time with his kids, “Though they always complain of not getting enough of my time,” concluded Mehta with a laugh.
mehak.chawla@expressindia.com