"Our investments in IT have not been sufficient. We have, so far, been developing small systems in bits and pieces for features like directory enquiry, billing and accounting and fault repair. However, we have not gone in for an integrated system. All these activities, which are going on in bits and pieces have to be integrated into one large system," said MTNL chairman and managing director S Rajagopalan.

It is understood that IT investments will take a major share of the Rs 1,976 crore that MTNL plans to invest till 2000, which the company calls as its Y2K programme.

MTNL is currently in the process of finalising its plans forimplementing datawarehousing solutions in Delhi and Mumbai, which would later be connected with each other and other IT systems.

Data Warehousing solution essentially processes the operational data of a company and allows the users to analyse the data that can be used by the company to plan its future strategies. According to MTNL, by implementing such a solution, it can find out trends among its customers and package its offerings to them accordingly.

"We have huge volumes of data which are all very important to our business. If we implement such a solution, we will be able to efficiently utilise them for our business purposes," said Rajagopalan.

According to the company, by streamlining its IT investments and integrating its different systems, it would not only benefit the company but also its customers. According to Rajagopalan, while the company will gain by way of better utilisation of its resources, the customers will benefit by getting better quality of service.