Imran VelzuriChief Information Officer · Essays & perspective
Customer information systems5 min read
Keep the digital room faithful to the real decision
Broken characters exposed a gap between technical checks and a useful customer quote. Repairing that gap required language review as well as software work.
The name looked right in the application. It did not look right in the customer's quote. Some characters had disappeared and others were broken. The colleague who entered the name had done the expected check, and the document-generation team could show that a file had been produced. We had evidence for two successful activities and an unsuccessful customer result. As CIO, I had to examine the way we had defined completion rather than ask which team could be assigned the failure.
I ask what the screen is entitled to tell the person looking at it. A legible name, a current room plan and a plausible colour image are different kinds of evidence, and the system should not quietly make them interchangeable.
A timestamp can order files without resolving the decisions inside them. Competing room revisions needed an explicit professional review before either became an installation instruction.
Our visualiser remained useful for layout, but viewers read it as exact shade evidence. Narrowing the service required acknowledging the limits of an investment I had supported.
Floor-covering retail estate
32 showrooms
Fictional Nerqali Floor Stores, headquartered in Guwahati
Internal technology remit
48 employees
Twelve contractor positions are additional; five reporting leaders
FY2026–27 delegated authority
₹14.8 crore
₹11.6 crore operating expense plus ₹3.2 crore approved change spending
Keep the digital room faithful to the real decision
I am Imran Velzuri, CIO of the fictional Nerqali Floor Stores in Guwahati. Our thirty-two showrooms help customers choose carpets and floor coverings for rooms that are already part of their lives. I began in survey-data work after studying mathematics in Aligarh. The first systems I encountered taught me that a tidy representation could hide an unresolved measurement. Retail added another dimension: people may read a convincing digital image as a promise about the material that will arrive at their home.
Nerqali employs 720 people and recorded ₹284 crore revenue with ₹18.9 crore operating profit for the year ending March 2026. Thirty-eight installer enterprises collectively hold 76%, with management owning 24%; I have no personal holding. I lead forty-eight employees and twelve separate contractor positions through five leaders. My delegated FY2026–27 remit is ₹11.6 crore operating expense plus ₹3.2 crore approved change spending. CEO Nusrat Delvani takes enterprise recommendations to directors. Commercial head Sanjay Qervathi owns the customer proposition; I am responsible for the systems supporting it.
My recent work has concerned the meaning carried by those systems. We rebuilt quote production so Assamese and Bengali text could survive the journey into a customer's document. We made competing room-plan revisions visible instead of allowing the latest upload to erase an earlier agreement. We examined recordings from remote consultations and removed material that no longer had an approved purpose. A room visualiser then forced a harder choice: a powerful demonstration was encouraging customers to assume a level of colour fidelity the service could not establish. We narrowed what the software was allowed to claim.
Readable text required a whole-document review
A 240-document sample found seventy-eight with missing or broken characters. After a ₹42 lakh project, fourteen of 260 reviewed documents still needed meaning or wording corrections.
Two room plans could both look current
Twenty-two of 119 sampled projects contained competing plans treated as approved. Explicit revision reconciliation was funded rather than an automatic last-upload rule.
A colour impression was being read as a promise
Forty-three of 176 pilot viewers treated the room visualiser as an exact shade preview. We retained layout exploration while withdrawing that unsupported interpretation.
Current focus
Ensuring customer documents and room representations remain useful without conveying more certainty than the evidence supports.
Conversations I welcome
A first outside non-executive discussion after preparation, employer consent and review of the proposed company's needs.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
Formation
Bachelor of Science in MathematicsTorvali Science College · 1995
Postgraduate Diploma in Computing, part-timeBrezani Systems Institute · 1998
Imran brought the visualiser's remaining misunderstanding to the investment review even though he had supported the pilot. We could judge the narrower service with its costs and limits visible.
Nusrat DelvaniCEO, Nerqali Floor Stores; fictional colleagueThe full record ↗
Contact
A first outside non-executive discussion after preparation, employer consent and review of the proposed company's needs.