For a fortnight every year, Sandeep Manchanda retreats to a remote nook in California where he spends time with the most important force in his world: his inner- self. Communing with himself has taught this CIO of Global Development at Marsh & McLennan Companies (NYSE: MMC, the $23.7b market cap holding company for Marsh, Mercer and Putnam Investments) a couple of good lessons: the ability to listen, and the patience to understand. “You will know what you can achieve only when you stop to listen to yourself,” observes the CIO.

At forty, Manchanda’s successes prove his observations to merit. Soon after his graduation from the IIT-Delhi, Manchanda came to intern with IBM at White Plains, NY, in the planning group—analyzing how supplies were faring, whether the business was meeting budgets, delving into the marketing databases, and building systems that gave information to the business-side. “The funny thing is, what I built at IBM in those days I still find lacking around me today,” says Manchanda. “In those days, we had this collaborative forum that would host questions and fetch answers to my queries from team members as far away as Australia. I used this forum to help me build an entire system in a language I didn’t know, for the management to review data in usable information format—something that would take a laborious three hours everyday now shrunk to instantaneous responses.” From the richly collaborative environment, Manchanda moved on to a smaller company— “a part candy and part computer shop,” he laughs. The unstructured organization demanded rolling up sleeves and wearing many hats—sales, installation, service backup, and so on.

The young Manchanda spent over a year at the start (what is now Computer Land) and then moved on to work for a research firm—a subsidary of the MMC group— National Economic Research Associates. The research firm needed Manchanda’s skill mix of SAS programming, PC environment, the business side of computing, and the newly-learnt network management skills. In 1989, Manchanda joined NERA at the White Plains office, to build up the analytical capabilities of the business. As a research firm, the projects in the enterprise included analyses of data for issues like clarity in mergers and acquisitions, monopolistic slants, price fixing and so on. “The economists would present analyses to the legal world based on the database slicing we would implement,” recalls Manchanda. The IT lead expanded his role to work with the breadth of business practices at NERA, building up a small and nimble team to work on the large databases each of these practices would acquire.

In the late Nineties, Manchanda embarked on a mission to retire the mainframe environment within NERA, promoting the faster and cheaper PC framework. “The challenge was really political,” recalls the CIO. Manchanda built a strong business case for the migration, used some judicious power management and commenced building relationships with the user communities to help them understand the scenario.
In 2000, the dot-com boom left the CIO at NERA chafing to experiment and try his luck in the startup world. The understanding president at NERA offered Manchanda a whole quarter to go out and look at other prospects, while he also broached the issue of talent retention to the CEO of the holding company, MMC. Jeff Greenberg, then the recently-appointed CEO at MMC, asked Manchanda to meet the team at the corporate office to review a fit. Manchanda then began working with the CFO, Sandra Wijnberg, in reviewing technology expenditure across the board, issues of standards, and policies, and took over as global development CIO in 2001.

As the CIO of global development, Manchanda was entrusted with establishing IT policies that ensured collaboration among MMC or its holding companies and “no mistakes.” He began with talking to the CIOs of the three companies—Marsh (the insurance and risk management company), Mercer (the consulting arm), and Putnam (the investment company), only to find that the CIOs did not know each other, nor ever talked to each other. In fact, Manchanda found that two of the companies operated their email on Lotus Notes, while one used Microsoft Exchange. “We still use a web-based directory to communicate across the MMC arms,” he rues.

The slightly taken-aback CIO set about altering the environment. Understanding that each of the three businesses had very effective CIOs who were responsible for the business-side profitability of IT, Manchanda has been careful in percolating the corporate standards and decisions down the hierarchy. “For the first time, we formed a CIO Forum, and addressed the standards issue, the network issue, the connectivity issues—a whole year passed in this. And then 9/11 occurred, which changed the world for us,” he says. The company lost 292 employees in the tragedy and an entire data center at the WTC. But clients had to be served and services restored from the Putnam data center in Boston. “We have since expanded the Putnam shared facilities, but didn’t replace the WTC data center.”

For the next nine months, an MMC corporate team led the move to establish an enterprise-wide data consolidation. The exercise paid off, as the consolidation led to significant cost savings, nimbler enterprise-wide application deliveries, and some common grounds for the three companies. The CIO recounts his company’s very careful approach to projects, especially when the time spans a couple of years and more. “For instance, we were evaluating a particular application development for a business that brings us more than fifty percent of the revenues,” he recounts. Wary of the inefficacy of the “big bang” approach—assembling all requirements, picking up a basket of shelf-ready tools and pulling together a large application, the Mercer CIO directed the team to first look at the big picture, which “was the first correct step.” The team then came up with a technology strategy plan that would deliver final solutions. Working with consultants, the team defined a roadmap for the disparate uses of the technology model, “remember, we are still talking about the technology needs and the uses we can put it to,” says Manchanda. Once the roadmap was ready, the team picked up a mid-West region’s office, and built a pilot project that went through rigorous testing in the “real life” business. Almost two years later, the CIO says, the technology model is now across the business’ offices worldwide. “In this period, a variety of factors changed, the business environments changed, but the technology model had accommodated for exactly such vagaries,” he observes.

Picking up three examples, Manchanda makes his business case for new technologies in the enterprise. “Putnam is best known for its customer service. The alliance between business needs and technology know-how has paid off well,” he recalls. The call center operations used labor arbitrage out of Vermont, where homeworkers could plug into the telephony and databank systems seamlessly, maintaining a cost-efficient service platform without missing a beat. At Mercer—the largest human resources consultancy, the compelling business advantage is global reach. “To deliver comprehensive information on our clients’ human resource needs—pensions, retirement plans, benefits and so on—in compliance with local regulations demanded different capabilities from technology,” says Manchanda. While in Marsh—the insurance intermediaries and risk management advisors—the process of moving paper from client to broker to underwriter to the reinsurance is a long and inefficient process; a familiar pain point of the industry itself. The Marsh team is deploying solutions that would enable entry of client-side information into a central databank, which would then be available to the underwriter to act on—seamlessly. “It might not be a big differentiator, but if you operate as globally as we do, the advantages are simply outstanding,” comments Manchanda.

In line with the cautious approach at MMC, the CIO has deployed the first MMC-wide client-facing application to over a thousand colleagues globally. In less than three months, and a shoe-string budget, he calls this popular application a “prototype in production.” “Usage generates requirements, not talk,” says Manchanda. As the CIO of global development, Manchanda is combining resources and technologies across the MMC arms to focus on client relationship management. “Each arm has clients who could provide potential business to the other arms, and our efforts to standardize client information systems will enable us to build revenues,” he sums up. For Sandeep Manchanda, that is a sufficiently intangible brief to chew on.

For now.