In a career span of less than two decades, Ashish Chauhan, group CIO, Reliance Industries, has done it all. Born and brought up in Ahmedabad, Chauhans parents, who are government officials, instilled values like honesty and perfectionism in him. After his intermediate from Ahmedabads reputed Gujarati medium school Diwan Ballubhai Madhyamik, he did his BTech in mechanical engineering from IIT Bombay in 1989, and followed it up with a post-graduate diploma in management from IIM Calcutta in 1991.

A Good Beginning
Chauhan began his innings with the Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI) in the project finance department, where he was responsible for financing and postfinancing follow up of power and electronic goods related projects.

Chauhan considers himself fortunate enough to have been selected with four others to be a part of the team to set up the NSE after the Harshad Mehta scam.

His first brush with technology was at the NSE, where he was involved in setting up Indias first commercial satellite telecom network and also the screen-based trading system for equity trading, clearing, risk management, listing, and writing regulations. In addition to this he was overlooking interior decoration, legal aspects, negotiations, imports of equipment, getting telecom licenses, project management, purchase and lease of premises.

Ashish Chauhan, Group CIO Reliance Industries

After the project started, Chauhan was designated as the head of business and operations for the equities market in NSE, which became the largest exchange in India within eleven months of its operations and over a period, the third largest exchange in the world by the number of trade.

And, by the end of 1995, Chauhan was given additional responsibility to set up the first exchange traded financial derivatives market. This included conceptualizing, marketing, changing legal framework, and writing regulations.

Chauhan terms his seven-year tenure at NSE as an enriching experience, where, in spite of being the youngest member in the team, he was entrusted with responsibilities which made him grow as a professional. While working at NSE, I also set up several path breaking initiatives such as the Initial Public Offering (IPO) through screen-based book building, NSEs Certification in Financial Markets (NCFM) for equities, derivatives, depository, mutual fund, real time risk management, Online real time surveillance in securities markets, and creating NSE-50 (Nifty) and several other stock indices, setting up of the index management company, trading of Nifty at Simex (Singapore Monetary Exchange), and real time risk management using parallel processing for millions of investors, he adds.

Managing a Behemoth
In his current role as the group CIO of Reliance, Chauhan has his hands full.

He is all praise for his current employer, where the work culture is entrepreneurial and result oriented, with a lot of decision making delegated to the person working in the field or on a project. And, this gives each employee a control over his environment as the decision making rests with him, unlike in other organizations. But, at the same time, the coherence and control over standards, processes, and integration is not lost. This is one of the reasons why we are able to do world scale projects in a lesser time span and at lower costs, he says.

The group has a CIO for each business who is called a business CIO and there is a team of highly skilled professionals who support these business CIOs. Currently, in a corporate role, my work profile is to facilitate each business CIO in achieving highly effective IT implementation and operations for their respective areas, he elaborates.

Most businesses today are highly automated, requiring tremendous capabilities to automate and operate these complex operations under extreme conditions.

Reliance on IT

Reliance is one of the few companies where an annual operating plan for providing an overall direction and planning the work for the year is prepared in granular details by each BIO, which is combined at the corporate level, and presented to the management for approval. During the course of the year, this plan is updated based on changing business priorities over the year and progress monitored through monthly reviews.

Half-yearly BIO meets are held to improve communication with the large IT team consisting of more than 2,000 highly qualified engineers. Periodic top management reviews provide the essential vision, direction, and guidance to the IT team. A separate corporate team (Program Management Office) works with the IT leadership to review, coordinate and guide all the running IT projects, SLAs, timely completion, rollout, and effectiveness of IT. The PMO team also helps in monitoring progress of various teams, organizing for training, skill management, planning and budgeting of IT initiatives.

Even though the IT team in Reliance is highly motivated, maintaining this motivation is an area where the management spends considerable time and efforts. Periodic skill enhancement opportunity, vertical and horizontal movement opportunities, compulsory rotation, appraisals linked to performance, leadership skills demonstrated during the period and setting up of pre-set specific goals are some of the generic steps taken by the company to ensure fairness and efficiency in the organization.

Balancing the Tightrope

Being an MD radiologist meant that my wife too had a bright future ahead of her, but she decided to go slow on her career to help me work long hours and strive to reach my own potential, he says. Also, the medical condition of their son and no other social support system in Mumbai meant that one of them had to go easy on their career.

Chauhan is all praises for her ability to manage her personal requirements as well as manage the requirements of their only child. Despite me not being there at home, even at critical moments nor being able to attend social events on most occasions, she has shouldered all responsibilities without any complaints whatsoever, he says proudly. In addition, being a medico has meant that she advises Chauhan to take care of personal health, that has been extremely important in retrospect.

In short, she has been a true support. Doing the balancing act between work and family, and at the same time, being a motivating factor in his life.

Chauhan does not believe in forecasting, and, therefore, resists from making any plans for the future. His idea of the next 10 years and beyond is to grab as many varied opportunities as life has to offer and add value to his work.

Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in

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