At Honda Siel Cars India, IT plays a major role when it comes to disposal of e-waste. Various products such as pen drives, printer cartridges, hard discs and motherboards have hazardous chemicals and its proper storage, usage and disposal techniques are well defined by the company. The awareness about e-waste management is growing, and the number of companies joining the bandwagon is on the rise. 

Volvo Eicher Commercial Vehicles (VECV) is a story of growth. This growth wouldn't have been there without IT. It is a story of lot of automation to enable faster turnaround of products and to enhance manufacturing productivity and capacity. The entire chain from the market down to the product development stage is streamlined through IT systems.  

While creativity exists in individuals in every organization, it is important leverage and create value out of it. In Vodafone, we created a platform and a process for submitting ideas and attached the workflow. The response was enormous. We had 26 creative ideas in the first hour of its launch. It has come a long way since. Today, the potential of the ideas in the pipeline is worth more than Rs. 100 million.  

This is a story about how we saved close to Rs. 1 Crore in three years - a lot of money that business can use at other places. Sometime ago, a cluttered, messy room with over 40 servers was how the the data center at K Raheja Corp looked. But thanks to infrastructure upgradation with consolidation and virtualization, we could now utilize some obvious benefits like load balancing, centralized backup, high availability, scalability, besides huge cost savings. 

After listening to the plight of a CIO friend within his organization, I feel the whole discussion about CIO becoming a 'visionary', 'businessman', 'boardroom member' is meaningless. While many CIOs may be talking of innovations in open but in reality not many get to practice it. Ideally, a CIO should have the right to challenge old ways of doing things but often this is found to be opposite.  

Max New York Life Insurance operates in a sector that lays special importance to data privacy, backup, and recovery. The regulation demands that companies keep the data safe for seven years even after the policy has matured. Therefore, while creating a data backup and recovery plan, we first identified the challenges and accordingly looked for solutions.  

Good morning. I am back with your DC Weekend Digest. Today's digest consists of a variety of interesting readings that I went through during the last one week. Ranging from why CEOs should invest more in CIOs than just CFOs to what Cisco is doing to change the market dynamics to how CIOs can look at creating a BYOD Workplace, there's lot to read.  

With the use of proper IT systems, the company has saved both cost and inventory. It has resulted into inventory reduction worth Rs 10-12 Crore. The good thing about IT is that it brings in a lot of transparency on data. Smarter supply chain has also translated into happier employees and lower attrition.  

The e-Waste (Management and Handling) Rule of 2011 will come into effect on May 1, 2012. It mandates government departments and producers of electrical and electronic equipment to take responsibility for the collection of e-waste produced while manufacturing or after the use of the products, thus, putting the onus on the producers to manage e-waste. 

Thanks to an integrated solution, all customer conversations and grievances that are voiced online and on the social media are now being addressed by Vodafone in a process driven approach. We have ensured that we go where the customer is. It has also helped us enhance customer satisfaction, and build deeper understanding of customer needs to serve them better.