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An Indian CIO's fundas

With a change in the role, a CIO’s priorities have also been altered, finds Chirasrota Jena. Today a CIO is seen as a business-enabler and not just as a technology man. Here’s a peek into an Indian CIO’s priority list.

With unprecedented business growth and IT being the key driver for it, expectations from a CIO are increasing. Technology enables the ‘C’ suite to run a sound business. That said, technology investments need to be made wisely, otherwise they can adversely affect a business. The role of IT is defined in most organisations today as a business partner. There is complete awareness at the top about the potential of IT to facilitate fulfilment of business objectives. If an organisation gets results from a few IT deployments, those strengthen its positive conviction about IT. Once this happens, the sky is the limit for the growth of the IT function in that organisation. This is the most opportune time for IT to grow by aligning with the business. Most technology investments that are made by businesses today whether in storage infrastructure, enterprise applications or shop floor automation are made keeping business necessities in mind.

"We observe that large companies treat IT as a trusted strategic partner to the business rather than a support function" - Subrato Basu Vice-President, Executive Programmes, Asia-Pacific, Gartner

The role of technology is to help streamline business activity, make it more cost efficient, reduce wastage in the case of manufacturing companies and optimise resources. As a result, it is important to align IT to business as IT implementations without business imperatives attached to them are nothing but wasted efforts.

Subrato Basu, Vice-president, Executive Programmes, Asia-Pacific, Gartner informs, “We observe that large companies treat IT as a trusted strategic partner to the business rather than a support function. The general belief is that IT has the ability to integrate into every business action thereby creating a roadmap to align IT investments to business results, thus accomplishing enterprise agility.” He adds that while discussing the priorities of a CIO we have to look at three key areas namely business, technology and strategic management.

A CIO’s priorities

With growing concerns about the IT department’s role at India Inc, CIOs need to list their priorities to satisfy top management. Some CIOs decide their priorities on the basis of organisational requirements while others decide on the basis of the market realities.

Gartner Executive Programme Worldwide recently conducted a survey of over 1,400 CIOs across the globe, including Indian CIOs, on their top priorities. It found out that the management expects CIOs to run an effective and efficient technology operation. In a competitive market scenario and with growing business demands, CIOs are arranging their priorities to make their businesses stand out.

The top five business priorities as per Gartner are improving business processes, controlling costs, maintaining customer relationships, improving competitiveness and ensuring a competitive advantage. The top technology priorities are said to be business-intelligent applications, security, mobile workforce enablement, collaborative technologies and SOA.

"Managing the demands of the mobile workforce is our topmost priority" - Alagu Balaraman Senior VP, IT and Corporate Development, Godrej Industries

Alagu Balaraman, Senior VP, IT and Corporate Development, Godrej Industries says, “Managing the demands of the mobile workforce is our topmost priority. Usage of handheld devices is on the rise and IT departments have to deploy the latest applications to support the other teams. At Godrej, identifying and managing the relationship with an outsourcing partner and designing the IT set-up in a proper manner are as important as storage management.”

Business expectations from the IT department have changed dramatically and managements expect CIOs to move beyond concerns about cost, security and quality so as to help in growth of the business. Some organisations are setting their priorities in an annual plan while others do so every quarter.

Sharad Srivastav, Director, Sales, India and West Asia, Western Digital explains, “As IT budgets are often the first target of cost-cutting measures, CIOs end up working with limited resources at their disposal. Their main challenge therefore is to optimise IT budgets without compromising on quality or organisational productivity. Besides cost, the other challenges include managing data growth and maintaining various devices and their interoperability as well as ensuring the scalability of solutions.” Other priorities of Indian CIOs are regulatory compliance and reduction of TCO.

Fine-tuning processes

Although the top priorities of a CIO differ as per the needs of an organisation, most Indian CIOs agree that business process improvement tops their priority list. Information security retains its place in terms of importance at organisations such as Biocon, Hindustan Construction Company and LG Electronics. Manufacturers such as Godrej are using technology to manage growing data stores and analyse the same for their sales teams. Next comes controlling operating costs and helping the organisation maintain a healthy relationship with its customers.

Mukesh Kumar, VP, IT, Gillette informs, “My important business and technical priorities are to make a significant contribution to business growth and help my organisation achieve its objectives. To this end I would deploy solutions such as CRM and distributor automation, continuous maintenance and enhanced utilisation of mission-critical solutions like ERP and data warehousing. I would like to explore and implement new technologies and solutions for business benefits.”

"My top-most priority is proactively developing IT as an infrastructure to facilitate business growth over the next five years" Satish Pendse Chief Information Officer, Hindustan Construction Company

The top management has realised the potential of IT to facilitate business growth. Everybody’s clear that they can derive competitive advantage by making the appropriate use of IT. There is pressure on CIOs to respond to this opportunity.

Satish Pendse, Chief Information Officer, Hindustan Construction Company says, “My top-most priority is proactively developing IT as an infrastructure to facilitate business growth over the next five years. This involves scaling hardware and data communication networks, deploying integrated software such as ERP, data warehousing and portals. I am even thinking of using IT to facilitate improvement of efficiencies and ensure that human resources including training are ready to leverage our IT investments.”

Enterprise agility is high on the agenda for most CEOs. For the CIO, building IT agility according to an enterprise’s agenda for change and contributing to enterprise governance will be critical.

Delivering projects

Delivering projects on time is another key priority that could end up at the top in the next few years. CIOs across the country are facing pressure regarding timely project delivery.

Balaraman opines, “As CIOs have to make presentations at board meetings, top management expects them to possess high level business skills. Meeting the deadlines of various projects and analysing data to be presented either at internal meetings or external ones is a tedious job. Making the tools available to help analyse data for the sales team are also important factors that CIOs need to be concerned with.”

During the implementation of any particular solution CIOs are under pressure as the process generally takes a lot of time and money and business houses expect a lot from the IT department and from the deployment in question.

Radhakrishnan Menon, Group Head, IT, Biocon says, “I have always given priority to the implementation of projects. There are always delays in the implementation process due to which the whole IT team remains under pressure. So we have always tried to finish projects on time. As our company primarily deals with research, we always have projects on hand. The IT team has to face deadlines in order to meet the business growth as defined by the management.”

CIOs have to manage these expectations. They need to educate the organisations on the fact that investing in IT is the first step towards leveraging organisational potential.

Pendse informs, “Cultural transformation to leverage the potential of IT is a much bigger challenge and the CIO can’t be the only person handling it. It has to be a broader agenda to be tackled through greater involvement of senior and top management. It’s also a time-consuming process and will take longer than it takes to deploy IT tools. To expect this focus on cultural transformation from an organisation that is passing through a high growth phase is a challenge for CIOs.”

Security threats

Information security remains a top priority in most Indian organisations. With the advent of Internet, wireless and mobility, information security risks have increased manifold. Hence it needs to be addressed in a comprehensive manner. The IT departments of organisations involved in R&D (pharmaceutical companies and MNC R&D centres) or those safeguarding their client’s information (BPOs) have to remain alert.

Menon says, “Information security is my topmost priority. Proliferation of gizmos such as USB flash drives, smart mobile phone and notebooks has resulted in rising threat levels. To provide security to our networks and data there is a need for awareness about security mechanisms.”

As competition heats up, there is pressure on overheads. Informs Arindam Bose, Head, IT Systems, LG Electronics, “When we are rolling out any big change relating to IT, there is pressure to meet deadlines, cost, user satisfaction and also a project’s key performance indicators (in the form of tangible business advantages) that have been pre-agreed upon with the management. Presently the IT department is like oxygen for an organisation. Maintaining a well planned security system throughout the organisation is an important priority for it.”

Gartner’s message

As business expectations for CIOs and IT continue to evolve, CIOs have to demonstrate an ability to control IT costs and quality of service. With these accomplishments as the baseline, CEOs are looking at CIOs and IT for greater support for business growth and enhanced enterprise ability to compete in an increasingly crowded market. CIOs should recognise the need to change IT so as to deliver increased business expectations.

Basu informs, “CIOs should focus on attracting, developing and retaining the best and brightest employees. The only sustainable competitive advantage is people. Motivate them to stay or face loss of differentiation through attrition to a competitor. Secure a seat at your company’s executive table (if you don’t already claim one). IT must define and drive a firm’s strategy. Ensure that your CEO understands that IT is central to the company’s business strategy.”

CIOs have to invest even more time in understanding the nature of the business and customer requirements. Basu added that they should develop new technologies by using the latest tools and platforms. The CIOs have to re-engineer their resource allocation to ensure that only 30 percent of IT funds address legacy environments. They should increasingly resort to outsourcing for non-core, non-differentiating functions. If the company is low technology-intensive (as measured by IT spending divided by operational expense) they should work to make their job obsolete. Because IT is not strategic, the company should focus on vendor or partner management. If a company is technology-intensive, their role has to gravitate toward the business realm and pull business functions to IT.