Hari Shankar Prasad Singh, executive director, has been the chief information officer (CIO) of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) since December 1, 2020. He leads the information technology, operation technology, data centre, telecom and enterprise resource planning (ERP) groups. In addition, he is driving the company’s digital transformation agenda and steering the upgrade journey to SAP S4 HANA.
Singh has around 35 years of experience. He led a very competent ERP team for a successful migration to the SAP-S/4 HANA digital platform on December 11, 2022, ensuring improved performance, accelerated digitalisation, reduced transaction processing and development of better insights from improved analytics. With this transition, ONGC now ranks amongst the first few organisations in the country to run on the latest SAP software S/4 HANA version 2021. Recently, Singh was conferred with the IDC Industry Innovation award, the IDG CIO 100 award and the Governance Now Digital Transformation Leader award.
The management style of Singh is guided by collaboration and communication. His participative management style drives collaboration among members of diverse teams. He works tirelessly to maintain a direct communication link among team members to remove any communication gap that tends to creep in across hierarchies in a large organisation.
Singh firmly believes that data is the new oil and has been instrumental in enhancing the data connectivity network in ONGC by enhancing and augmenting the leased line network and introducing new technologies to provide robust connectivity to the remotest locations. He actively steered the implementation of a common data platform for analytics. The platform connects to all the major data sources in the company.
He has held many key positions at ONGC and contributed significantly in many areas. He was the head of coordination at the corporate headquarters and played a crucial role in enabling the continuity of oil and gas operations at remote installations. In addition, he has experience in various technology domains in oil and gas process plants and offshore installations.
Singh is an electronics and communication engineer. He also holds an MBA in operations management. He has completed the Advanced Management Programme from MDI, Gurgaon, the Leadership Development Programme from the IIM, Kolkata, and a certificate course in petroleum management from the University of Alberta, Canada.