Event

The CIO’s new role

The future of IT and managing this rapidly growing area of business were the topics of discussion at this year’s CIO summit organised by Gartner. By Kushal Shah

As Indian companies take on global competition, leveraging and optimising the use of their IT assets to boost productivity has become an imperative. Indian CIOs are involving themselves in the business of their companies. Gartner hosted ‘India CIO Summit 2007’, the sixth year of this event, to lend a helping hand to the Indian CIO community. This year’s event tackled various topics faced by Indian IT leaders such as how they should drive IT agendas, what should be their priorities for the current year, emerging trends in security, open source, the future of BI and the importance of innovation.

The inaugural session by Peter Sondergaard, Sr. Vice President, Gartner Research, dealt with a CEO’s concerns and the how they must drive the IT agenda. In this session he emphasised the importance of innovation going so far as to ask CIOs for the reason behind lack of innovation in most organisations. Most CIOs reason that ‘ideas are easy but execution is difficult’ and others say ‘we tried but it didn’t work’. Sondergaard said, “IT can deliver innovation which other parts of your organisation cannot.” He urged organisations to change the operating model of their business by changing mindsets in the form of culture, organisational structure, business processes and infrastructure by using technology.

Andrew Rowsell-Jones, VP Gartner Executive Programs, Asia-Pacific spoke about the priorities of Indian CIOs for 2007. Improving business processes; controlling operating costs enterprise wide; and attracting, retaining and growing customer relationships were cited as major priorities. “CIOs can create enterprise leverage through focused leadership and create results today for the future,” said Jones. According to him CIOs need to work in and on the business. The Indian IT budget grew by an average of 16.2 percent compared to the global average of 3.2 percent and still the need for revenue growth is ranked at number two in the Indian CIO’s priority list, a cause for concern. Continuing on the theme of innovation, he said, “You have to get better at innovation in this hypercompetitive year of 2007.”

Andy Kyte, Research VP and Gartner Fellow, Europe gave seven work streams for enterprise platform migration such as inventory model, governance model, finance model, (re)sourcing, project initiation and review, and validation and release management in order to reduce the agility gap. He recommends identifying and extrapolating the life cycle for next five years including the adoption of seven work streams.

“A new view on the IT budget is needed as IT costs are more visible than its value,” feels Jones as he gives the formula for yield as value created per resources applied. IT yield is the result of increase in the business value and the management of IT costs. A couple of things CIOs can do to improve the position of IT in their organisations were put forward. According to him CIOs should get the business credit for all of their IT initiatives by translating technical performance into business performance and they should even incorporate IT yield into their management and leadership practises.

Talking about the practical lessons and uses of open source in the enterprise, Brian Prentice, Research Director, Gartner-Asia Pacific said, “Open source is the fundamental way of dealing with intellectual property and it is not a product of technology.” It’s more to do with software licensing. The principle strategy behind the open source model is to enforce a structure and encourage behaviour in which no single entity has exclusive control over a piece of software. People say that biggest enemy of open source is Microsoft. Prentice argued that initiatives by Microsoft in this area known as Microsoft shared source belie this. These days a lot of software is made on top of open source code. According to a Gartner study, by 2012, 75 percent of the software products will have open source embedded in them.

Some management concerns in adopting open source are stated in the form of legal risks associated with open source licensing and integrity and interoperability with established technology. According to Prentice licensing is the biggest issue when it comes to adopting this technology. He listed a few steps that can be followed before establishing an open source policy such as clearly identifying and becoming familiar with details of each open source license considered, and measuring the maturity of the OSS project in question.

Gone are those days when e-mail, office suites and ERP systems were the killer apps. Fresh categories of software have arrived in the form of wikis, blogs, social networks and BPM. Prentice said that four technology squadrons form the killer Cs—consumerisation, community, componentisation and constraints. He said that, “More affordable, pervasive, connected, powerful technology is becoming part of the fabric of everyday life and it will become effectively visible by 2020.”

Talking about the current state of IT and its future directions, Kyte said, “In the current scenario, the issue of budget cycles builds bitter relations between business managers and CIOs. To solve this, CIOs should set aside a portion of their budget for bettering relations.” Security should still remain a high priority and it should be an integral part of IT. Kyte suggested that CIOs should manage their security proactively rather than merely reacting to threats. Earlier the scenario was such that IT was driving BI but now it’s other way round and BI is a fundamental tool for managers helping them drive IT and business making it one of the most important aspects of business. Social networking and Web based applications such as second life avatar will have an impact soon.

In all, many topics of interest to the Indian CIO were covered giving better insight into industry issues, trends and remedies for the community.