On 5th December 2025, during a felicitation ceremony organized by the Philanthropic Technical Association, Saradindu Paul, former Sr. Vice President & Group CIO at Electrosteel, reflected on an illustrious career spanning more than 26 years in technology leadership. From steering Electrosteel through its most ambitious SAP implementation during the construction of a 2.80 MTPA integrated steel plant at Bokaro to championing analytics, cloud adoption, and cybersecurity awareness, Saradindu’s journey is a testament to resilience, foresight, and transformative vision. In this exclusive conversation, he shares defining moments, leadership principles, and lessons that shaped his remarkable tenure—and offers advice for the next generation of technology leaders.
Looking back at your career, what has been the most defining moment in your journey as a CIO?
The Day Electrosteel went live with SAP for their 2.80 mtpa integrated steel plant project at Bokaro. The SAP took off when steel plant was at its construction stage from ground zero. There was no well defined process, no stable business team and process owners. Inadequate infrastructure. Navigating project under such uncertainty was a huge challenge.
What were the biggest digital transformation milestones you achieved at Electrosteel Castings / Apeejay Group?
Introduced analytics dash board in multiple functions in order to develop Smart and propmt decision making system basis the matured SAP OLTP database in place. Environment responded to it quickly and leveraged to the fullest extent.
“Change is the only constant. Respect legacy, embrace modernization, and empower people—because technology succeeds only when minds are liberated to explore and innovate.” — Saradindu Paul
Over the years, how did you balance modernization with legacy systems that were critical to business continuity?
Change is the only constant in business. In the world of man machine and money that venture is a Glory where orchestration of these three is adequately done. Unless people appreciate change no modernization can be successfull. Therefore paying full respect to legacy move to embrace modernization for successful shaping of vision set.
Cybersecurity has become a boardroom priority. How did your approach to cyber resilience evolve during your tenure?
Till yesterday cybersecurity used to be just another line item of routine IT delivery list. But today it’s big ticket priority for Enterprises. Awareness is the key piece of today’s cybersecurity practice. Enterprise must develop consistent awareness program cut across the organisation irrespective of levels and designation. Secondly IT must develop in-house competence on cybersecurity so that a tight handshaking with partners are built to ensure effective and timely protection is rendered to organisation in the ever evolving threat landscape. No whimsical stepping in the most sensitive space is appreciated.
What leadership principles guided you when building and mentoring high-performance IT teams?
Allow complete freedom to tech minds. Liberate them in exploring the evolving technology. Never do policing. In the in-house IT service environment make people feel that are equally important and enablers to business as the revenue connected functions are. For any task IT team should be responsible to deliver but not be accountable for the outcome. Outcome is set by business and not by IT.
What was the toughest crisis or technology disruption you navigated, and what did it teach you?
There are multiple. One or two are shared. During Covid when world was entering into distrustful living under the threat of Covid giant. We can’t meet people, we can’t hug people, we can attend machines in manufacturing, we can’t speak to people face to face. Yet we have to run the show and do business so that revenue stream is not choked. Huge challenge. But we could sail through with virtual meeting. We started looking for new digital platforms. Spotted few solutions like WebEx, MS Team, Zoom , Google meet etc. We entered into neo normal world with new collaboration tool.
How did you ensure IT remained aligned with business goals in a rapidly changing market environment?
Being constantly vigilant we keep the pace with market dynamics and embraced couple of IT solutions around the ERP system. These solutions are tuned to recent business practices and much ahead of functionalities delivered by native ERP system. They are focused to HRMS, PMS, Time management, Visitor management, Recruitment, Safety Heath and environmental, Production planning, CRM, Vendor portal, Quality management for in and outbound materials, document management system, drawing management etc. Such solutions are open to customisation and easy to integrate with OLTP system sitting at the centre.
What technologies or innovations made the greatest impact during your tenure—and which ones disappointed?
Continuous and consistent improvement of connectivity has made tremendous impact in accelerating business performance. It has created a desirable inroads for cloud adoption shifting from CapEx to Opex model. In house IT team is liberated from age old botheration of maintaining 99% infra uptime.
As you step away from the CIO chair, what advice would you give to your successor and to young aspiring technology leaders?
Being tuned to business explore IT and do not be complacent. Keep churning and keep the team charged all through.
If you could rewind your career, is there anything you would do differently in terms of decisions, risks, or learning?
- “Decision to make decision should be done first approach ” should be given up. Be bold and make informed decision involving all who are finally impacted so that you have their buy in all through
- No risk – No rewards. However, every risk should be critically analysed and then taken.
- No end to learning