When Alpna J. Doshi, chief information officer, Reliance Communications, sees a mountain, her instinct is to scale it, an approach that typifies her entire career?
Like so many Reliance employees, the person who inspires Alpna J. Doshi is the company?s founder and legend, Dhirubhai Ambani. From an early age, she admired his achievements and his success in becoming a pillar of India?s economic growth.
?He is really the ?man of the century? for me, a person who established an empire which changed the face of Indian industry. He used to resolve difficulties with courage and imagination. He always inspired us to ?think big, think fast, think ahead ? ideas are no one?s monopoly?, and the philosophy works,? she says.
Another person whom she greatly admires is the Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi, for her vision and moral strength in the face of adversity. Doshi says it is incredible the way Kyi has shown total determination to stand up for what she believes in, no matter how long it takes. ?She is a woman of substance and possesses a depth of personality and character that is amazing,? she says.
As chief information officer of Reliance Communications (RCOM), Doshi is driving key IT transformational initiatives to support business growth for the company.
She is well known and respected in the industry for her execution skills, turning around companies, people management skills and leadership. Her 360 degree management style stands out and, as a woman in a male-dominated industry, she long ago broke the glass ceiling to establish herself right at the top.
In her career, Doshi has led major initiatives in the telecom, media and entertainment industries. She has worked for Verizon, Systems Integrators and Suppliers (Telcordia Technology and Mahindra Satyam) and in management and strategy consulting with Deloitte and Touche.
As someone known for innovation in cracking new business models and an industry leader in business and technology transformation in large organisations, it?s hardly surprising that challenges bring out the best in her.
One of these has been to transform IT from a support function to a business enabler at RCOM. Gone are the days when the IT budget used to be allocated product-wise and technology-wise. IT at RCOM is aligned with business to an extent where even the company?s IT budgets are broken up according to business focus areas rather than technologies or products.
The key areas of RCOM?s IT investment are revenue-based new development, attracting and retaining new customers, reducing enterprise cost, as well as improving operational efficiencies.
Turning IT into a business enabler has been quite a task. ?This has been a major challenge. It required a big cultural shift not only within the IT department, but in all other stakeholder departments, starting from the business and corporate office to support functions like procurement and finance. These days, IT has a permanent seat in all the corporate-level boards and forums. Business today actively looks at IT for new innovation and revenue streams. Especially after 3G, it has been the key to providing new revenue streams to business,? she says.
Of course there are other challenges faced by India?s top telecom operators. According to Doshi, these include all-time low revenues that are forcing operators to reduce operational costs, competition from ?over-the-top? players which are setting new paradigms in customer service expectations, the need for cost reduction by leveraging technology, the need for an enhanced ability to innovate, and leveraging technology to improve process quality and efficiency, and capex reduction.
Business analytics is another area that she has been pursuing by discovering innovative uses for it, driven by the need to extract more intelligence out of the company?s business data in order to drive more competitive offerings and improve profit margins through new revenue streams.
?The focus will be on predictive modelling, where strategy decisions can be better informed by hard data ? data in the form of facts, graphs and numbers,? she says.
Due to the sheer size of its databases, RCOM has been involved in big data solutions. It has adopted Greenplum EMC to store CDRS and unstructured data and performed analytics on it. The company tests and evaluates other products such as Vertica, IBRIX and Hadoop. It has also implemented storage virtualisation and unified storage (SAN, NAS) in a single box.
Big data helps organisations in maintaining a competitive advantage by focusing on growth areas. RCOM?s data is expanding enormously due to subscriber growth and consumption of its services.
?We are applying innovative methods, system and process changes to analyse, manage and make the best use of the resulting data. We use a data management system that monitors data growth as desired. The data is segregated into customer-centric data, business data and legal data.
?We have configured our data storage system based upon these three criteria. We use tiered storage, which is a combination of fibre channels, SAS, and SATA of varied speeds for different disk capacities. We also use storage fabric management cache and front-end adopters dedicated to different kinds of databases,? she says.
Doshi is clear about the impact of big data. Technologies that have revolutionised IT to what it is today, she says, are the mainframe revolution, the PC revolution, the internet revolution, the cloud revolution and now, big data, which is the next big thing. As the shift from voice to data usage takes place, along with value-added services, 3G and 4G, the spurt in data will be immense and big data solutions will be required.
On future trends in the telecom sector, Doshi believes that, given that voice traffic has reached saturation point, data services will drive the next phase of growth. ?The constraints in wireline expansion and upgradation will focus future growth on wireless technologies, both for fixed and mobile usage. We will see multidirectional network and IT architecture focusing on linking next-generation networks, mobility, video and cloud,? she says.
Asked which of her many assignments has been the most satisfying, Doshi replies that her job with the Reliance Group has been the most memorable. And when RCOM won the Global Excellence TM Forum Award for Business Innovation (for its 3G video delivery platform) in May ? the first Indian telco to gain this distinction ? she was thrilled. (TM Forum is a global, non-profit industry association focused on enabling service provider agility and innovation.)
The award was, in a way, a recognition of the pioneering role played by RCOM, which revolutionised the industry in 2003 by bringing wireless telecommunication to the masses. More specifically, the Reliance 3G video delivery platform was the first of its kind streaming service offered by any telecom operator in India and commercialised in December 2011.
The platform offered 3G users an interactive platform to view adaptively streamed video content across a slew of devices such as PCs, smartphones, tablets, MIDs and multiple OS such as iOS, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Bada and BlackBerry OS.
?It was a great honour to win this award after competing with industry leaders worldwide. As an international award, it highlighted our ability to bring in transformation through innovation along with our operational excellence and leadership,? she says.
According to Doshi, the company has been at the forefront of technology. Moreover, she maintains, the company has always had a much wider vision that extends beyond its own targets and that is the desire to ?contribute to the growth of the country and the industry?.
?Today with CDMA, GSM, 3G, wireline, data centre, content and other advanced services like cloud under one umbrella, our technology platform spans the entire communication value chain, whose scale and technology often form the basis of case studies at various national and international platforms,? says Doshi. ?However, we are never content with our achievement. Instead, we are always looking at scope for improvement.?
Being a business unit head, her main aim is to drive the organisation towards generating more revenue and ensure a high level of customer satisfaction. In order to achieve the former, the latter needs to be taken up as an urgent priority, she says. ?In terms of management, I personally believe in the need to be hands on in the areas affecting my customers directly, whether internal or external. All other activities that are indirectly affecting or supporting the customer need to be taken up after that, for which I seek my team?s help.?
Doshi started out at the top as a student and has never looked back. She has an MS in computer science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore; she studied international business management and telecommunication studies at the George Washington University; and has a global business leadership certificate from Harvard.
Since 2002, she has been an officer and board member of the TM Forum. Doshi is also secretary and chair of the Membership and Governance Committee. Typical of a high achiever, even her leisure pursuits are challenging ? playing the piano and painting.
