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She's not just the IT head at Bharti mobility business, but an award winning CIO. That's what makes Amrita Gangotra special in a space that is primarily male dominated. A gold medallist in Operations Research from Delhi University, Gangotra has been associated with the IT industry for over 16 years, both at the technology as well as the enterprise end, and each stint has been a source of great learning for her. Gangotra started her career with Allen Bradley as a research officer for developing/automating heuristic and statistical models on market surveys. After a very brief stint of only a couple of months, Gangotra moved to HCL (then HCL Ltd) in 1989 to find a career in the IT industry, which was emerging at around that time.

After just two years at HCL, Gangotra had a long stint of nine years at Nestle where she spearheaded the implementation of a comprehensive ERP application across business groups in India and led international projects for the development and deployment of applications across core business processes covering multiple countries in the world, and the company wide Y2K project. After two years at HCL Comnet, post Nestle, Gangotra moved to Bharti in 2002.

At Bharti, she was faced with the daunting task of fixing the existing billing system that was poorly implemented. When she stepped in, the company was undergoing major problems with its billing system. Gangotra managed to get it up and running within a year's time. For all the advantages of a centralized billing system, there was a need to report inefficiencies and content inaccuracies; and rating, roaming, and billing delays needed to be controlled. To achieve overall operational efficiency within the billing operations, the company undertook 'Project Laser Ops' which was an attempt to get the best out of the centralized billing system. Gangotra was instrumental in the reimplementation of the CRM package in all circles and its integration with the billing system. She has also personally seen to the setting up of the company's robust call center infrastructure. Today, the call center handles around three to five calls per user, per month, which finally works out to be a huge volume if one takes Bharti's entire customer base into consideration.

As Airtel expands operations, handling the scale is becoming a big challenge for Gangotra and team. This explains why the company has chosen the outsourcing route to manage its huge IT infrastructure. Some of the key challenges, going forward, will be ensuring the availability of cutting-edge technology that will enable the company introduce and deploy innovative services. Says Gangotra, “The telecom scenario in India is highly competitive with cut-throat competition and it is imperative for IT to ensure that the company is able to maintain a leadership position in the market.” In fact, IT has played a key role in the introduction of some of the innovative schemes like the “Kahin Bhi Kabhi Bhi” service from Airtel.

“Every experience is about learning and taking every learning forward,” says Gangotra, and that is the key to success.

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