Author: PTI
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: August 24, 2008
Political parties may appear to be a long
way off from corporate excellence.
But BJP's attempt to marry the two seems to
have paid off as its IT wing has won the CIO 100 enterprise excellence award
for this year.
"Practical innovation has always been
the priority area of the party.
This award vindicates BJP's policy of keeping
pace with technology for the benefit of party workers and also for the greater
interest of the society we serve," party spokesperson Rajiv Pratap Rudy
said.
The Information Technology cell of the party
has been selected as one among the top 100 organisations in the country by
the international CIO (Chief Information Officer) magazine, the world's leading
journal of IT decision makers, for its "ultimate mark of enterprise excellence."
The other organisations in the country to
share the honour with BJP are Mahindra and Mahindra, HCL, L&T, KPMG, Cognizant
and Wipro.
"BJP as an organisation was always ahead
of its competitors in the use of IT. In 1996, it became the first political
party in India to have its own website. The party's automation journey has
now been institutionalised by party leadership," party's IT cell chief
Pradyut Bora said.
The party offices today are connected with
the Unified Communication System(UC). The system allows a sender to send a
piece of communication in the desired format (email, fax, SMS, voice) and
the same choice rests with the receiver too, he added.
"CIO is a magazine present in around
25 countries of the world and the award is 20 year old in the US. It recognises
IT initiatives, which promises a deep impact in the working of the organisation.
This time the focus was on the Boldness. The jury recognised BJP's boldness
in IT innovation as one of the best in the country," CIO Editor-In-Chief,
Vijay Ramachandran told PTI.
BJP offices across the nation have been put
into the Wide Area Network(WAN) system and it enables it to make hundreds
of automated calls, send thousands of faxes, post lakhs of emails and transmit
millions of SMSes each hour, Bora said.
The party's IT cell is also coming up with
a ten digit party membership ID number that would also double up as member's
Unified Communication(UC) number.
Bora, an IIM graduate, is also engaged in
associating young technocrats and innovators with political work and believes
that sound information system could prove a boon to any organisation if employed
in the right perspective, he said.
The award would be conferred on the BJP and
will be received by Bora at a function to be held in Jaipur in the first week
of September.
