Changing role of a CIO

Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, President & CTO, Reliance Capital, shared his memories as a CIO.

Sandeep Phanasgaonkar

There was an era when it was assumed that the CIO’s role would be taken over by other functional heads, and that there would be no need of a CIO to head the IT department. All those assumptions proved to be wrong, for today the CIO plays a significant role in any organisation.

Communication, execution and being business savvy rather than being just technology savvy are the key requirements for becoming a successful CIO. It’s not just important to know technologies well...it’s also important to know your business well.

Sharing his memories as a CIO, Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, President & CTO of Reliance Capital said, “Communication is the key in today’s world, so it has to be done in the appropriate manner. You actually advise the company not just in terms of technologies that you have implemented but also in terms of what the business benefits are that you gave to the company.”

“In a similar way, you need to ensure that you communicate to your company boldly enough if the project is not doing well. It needs to be communicated early enough if the project is in danger of slipping on budgets or time or goals set up for the company,” he added.

Identification of requirements

Every organisation has certain sets of requirements and goals to achieve. Phanasgaonkar identifies two. One is the user requirement and the other is the business requirement. “When we start a project, we should document various user requirements and accordingly decide what and how our functional requirements should be in terms of reports, validation, business logic, etc.”

After identifying all requirements, companies go ahead with system requirements, user acceptance testing, and finally the project goes live. A couple of months down the line, when the CIO and project managers have a meeting with the CEO, he tells you that the system has achieved nothing in terms of time frame, customer delight or cost. So you are stumped, and you give all sorts of explanations and justifications.

In such cases, Phanasgaonkar recommends that when you start a project, you need to definitely meet the CEO’s expectations/ requirements, and these need to be converted into a set of measures.

He explained by giving the example where the CEO wants turnover time to be reduced from two hours to 45 minutes, or the cost of transaction to be reduced by 20 percent. “These are the measures you should take from the CEO because their business expectations are completely different from the average user who will give you only details like what the systems should do and what the system should look like.”

Most of the CIOs graduated from being engineers to being leaders, and are therefore always lost and occupied with their projects and in solving problems and understanding complex technologies.

In doing so, they often lose sight of what the business goals of their company are, and what the CEO expects from them.

Said Phanasgaonkar, “Every CIO needs to improve his/her strategic thinking and execution quality. Typically, in any organisation, a team of the CEO, CFO and business heads decide the business strategy. One thing I tell my team and keep reminding myself too is that everyone has a role to play in business strategies. Everyone should set his/her own goals in the company, especially in a company where technology is the key enabler of success.”

Outsourcing paradigm

Today, in every company, more and more functions are getting outsourced. The question is always what to outsource and what not to outsource. If we tend to outsource everything we will end up giving control to the vendor.

“There should always be a balancing act in terms of what to outsource and what not to outsource. Over a period of time, as the relationship between vendor and the company matures, you can decide to outsource some more IT functions to that vendor,” advised Phanasgaonkar.