CIO 3.0

Choosing a Security ConsultancyPAGE 66

TECH FOR GOVERNANCE

Tech IrritantsPAGE 55

NEXT HORIZONS

Into the HeartlandPAGE 14

A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

A 9.9 Media Publication

Volume 06 | Issue 08

December | 07 | 2010 | 50Volume 06 | Issue 08

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PART 01

CIOS HAVE BECOME SUPER-MANAGERS

OF IT AND BUSINESS FOR THE

ENTERPRISE. 25 OF THE TOP

IT LEADERS SHARE THEIR

THOUGHTS OVER TWO SPECIAL

YEAR-END ISSUES. | PAGE 28

EDITORIALRAHUL NEEL MANI | [email protected]

107 DECEMBER 2010CTO FORUMTHE CHIEF

TECHNOLOGYOFFICER FORUM

CIO 3.0You think CIOs have moved from being managers of IT to enablers of business? 25 CIOs over two special year-end issues, pen their thoughts.

EDITOR'S PICK28

Year 2010 is almost at an end. It too will have its

share if things not done, but what I'm sure will stay with us for years to come will be the effort that bore fruit during the year – the projects that gave us a real sense of accomplishment.

We at CTO Forum sought to keep you company on this jour-ney, in your quest for excellence. We made genuine efforts to help you find insights through the experience of your own peers. We brought you features, real-life case studies, interviews and

tor and (if required) criticize us. Trust me, this was no stunt. The idea wasn’t new as some dailies and business magazines have already experimented with it. For us, this wasn't about 'Jazzing up' our issues: clearly if we wanted our message to get across, it had to come from someone YOU recognised and respected, and we had to work hard before Vijay Sethi, CIO of Hero Honda finally agreed to come on board as our first Guest Editor – for the two December 2010 issues.

We began with a bang, but many unforeseen hurdles (which we are still grappling with) came between us and success. The plan (which continues in the next issue as well) was to get 25-30 CIOs to write on topics mostly outside the technology domain. Some of our contributors turned in their copies well on time, and

opinions from people in India and around the world.

When I and my team were planning the December [year end] issues of the magazine, we wanted to do something extraordinary. It should encour-age you, help you, maybe even scold you to never lose sight of the larger picture of CIOs as change makers way beyond the IT enterprise.

That's how we decided to invite a CIO, one of your respected peers, as our ‘Guest Editor’ who could guide, men-

followed Sethi's guidelines properly. Others, who weren’t comfortable writing, talked to us, reviewed our drafts and then signed off on their copies. A few didn't like the idea and courte-ously declined.

In the end, we are proud to say we were largely successful. Here’s the first of the two-part cover feature: CIO 3.0 for your perusal. I hope you’ll like the idea, and the effort that has gone into producing this. The next issue will conclude this fea-ture and will be accompanied by the results of our second annual CIO Survey. As always, I eagerly await your feedback so that this engagement becomes even more intensive and meaningful.

From One of

Your Own Closing the year with a big bang.

2 07 DECEMBER 2010CTO FORUM THE CHIEF


DECEMBER10

COVER STORY

28 | CIO 3.0You think CIOs have moved from being managers of IT to enablers of business? 25 CIOs over two special year-end issues, pen their thoughts.

COPYRIGHT, All rights reserved: Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. is prohibited. Printed and published by Kanak Ghosh for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd, C/o Kakson House, Plot Printed at Silverpoint Press Pvt. Ltd. D- 107, MIDC, TTC Industrial Area, Nerul, Navi Mumbai- 400706

COLUMNS04 | I BELIEVE: CIO: BUSINESS LEADER OR TECHNOLOGY PIONEER?Sarabjit Anand Head IT, Standard Chartered Bank on how CIOs need to speak business.

65 | HIDDEN TANGENT: CHROME LINING ON THE CLOUD Google introduces the Cr-48 Chrome Notebook.BY GEETAJ CHANNANA

FEATURES66 | TECH FOR GOVERNANCE: CHOOSING A RIGHT SECURITY CON-SULTANT Key points to remember.BY JAVVAD MALIK

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DECEMBER10 Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj SinhaPrinter & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh

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EDITORIALEditor-in-chief: Rahul Neel Mani

Executive Editor: Geetaj ChannanaResident Editor (West & South): Ashwani Mishra

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ADVISORY PANELAjay Kumar Dhir, CIO, JSL Limited

Anil Garg, CIO, DaburDavid Briskman, CIO, Ranbaxy

Mani Mulki, VP-IS, Godrej IndustriesManish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions AMEA, PepsiCo

India Foods & Beverages, PepsiCoRaghu Raman, CEO, National Intelligence Grid, Govt. of India

S R Mallela, Former CTO, AFLSantrupt Misra, Director, Aditya Birla Group

Sushil Prakash, Country Head, Emerging Technology-Business Innovation Group, Tata TeleServices

Vijay Sethi, VP-IS, Hero Honda Vishal Salvi, CSO, HDFC Bank

Deepak B Phatak, Subharao M Nilekani Chair Professor and Head, KReSIT, IIT - Bombay

Vijay Mehra, Former Global CIO, Essar Group

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55 | NEXT HORIZONS:TECH-IRRITANTS Technology for humans should be easy not annoying.BY PATTY AZZARELLO

REGULARS

01 | EDITORIAL08 | ENTERPRISE

ROUND-UP

advertisers’ index

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62 | NO HOLDS BARRED: PETER COFFEE, HEAD OF PLATFORM RESEARCH, SALESFORCE.COM on how private cloud is like a private jet.

62

A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

14 | Into the HeartlandMahindra & Mahindra Financials is taking the banking expertise of a modern India corporation to the millions who live in Bharat.

55

14



BY SARABJIT ANAND Head IT, Standard Chartered BankTHE AUTHOR, HAS close to two decades of experience in the technology, ITES/BPO

environment in a bank. I BELIEVE

CURRENTCHALLENGE

IT IS IMPERATIVE FOR IT PROFESSIONALS TO SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF BUSINESS

CIO: Business Leader or Technology Pioneer?CIOs need to speak business, while keeping a firm grip on technology.

I must say, that this transition is eas-ier said then done, but a conscious effort can really do wonders.

To speak the language of business, we need to understand the business first. As we go through this learning, we need to apply these thoughts in terms of the services and products that we deliver. This will certainly help us simplify what we want to communicate and the manner in which it needs to be said.

What does this transformation entail, then?

This transformation means creat-ing a business model that is flexible, resilient, scalable and strong enough to explore opportunities for profit-able growth. 'Strong' in this context relates to people, process and technol-ogy capabilities that form the core enablers of an organisation's move forward. Business models need to be aligned with customer needs, chang-es in the market, enhanced productiv-ity, market share and profitability.

This transformation will help us to contribute in two ways. One, we will be able to drive top-line growth through improved customer value, innovation and speed to market. Sec-ondly, improve bottom-line through operational excellence through consolidation, standardisation and automation.

IT has become a vital enabler to spearhead business growth and bring process stability. In the past decade, technology has helped the industry scale new heights. It helped organisa-tions streamline processes, improve productivity and manage risks better and simultaneously expand their geographical reach and business cov-erage at a much lower cost.

To conclude, as technology preo-fessionals, it is imperative for us to think, act and talk business. A CIO has to be more of a business leader than a technology pioneer.

IT IS A natural tendency for technology professionals to talk jargon and sound technical. IT is ingrained in their basic DNA, so they can easily understand and get excited about new technologies and concepts.

The world has changed and it is imperative for these professionals to transform into people who also fluently speak the language of business.

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LETTERS

WRITE TO US: The CTOForum values your feedback. We want to know what you think about the magazine and how

to make it a better read for you. Our endeavour continues to be work in progress and your comments will go a long way in making it the preferred publication of the CIO Community.

Send your comments, compliments, complaints or questions about the magazine to [email protected]

26 21 NOVEMBER 2010CTOFORUM THE CHIEF

TECHNOLOGYOFFICER FORUM 2721 NOVEMBER 2010

CTOFORUMTHE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY

OFFICER FORUM

T E L E COM COVE R S TORY

he Indian telecommunications industry is an excellent example of how end users usually benefit from increased competition among service providers. If anything, the intensifying competition among the mobile phone services providers in India has left the consumers happy and always wanting more. If fact, they want the world from their service providers.

The penetration of mobile connections in India has skyrocketed in the last couple of years. According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), India added more than 18 million subscribers in August alone this year, taking the total number of mobile users in the country to 670.6 million, which translates to close to 3 percent growth month on month, further consolidating India's position as the largest wireless mar-ket in the world after China.

Mobile services revenue in India will grow close to 20 percent this year to $19.8 billion, according to Gartner Inc. The Indian wire-less industry is expected to score a double-digit growth rate till the end of 2012 and the penetration of mobile connections is projected to reach 72.5 percent by 2012 and 82 percent by 2014.

Tech all the wayBut what do these figures mean for the CIOs of Bharti Airtel Ltd., Vodafone Essar Ltd., Reli-ance Communications Ltd., and other leading wireless services providers in the country. They are on their feet at all time. IT has to meet both customers' needs and expectations, be innovative, and churn out new services and products in the shortest possible time as con-ventional revenue sources slowly give way to new services and applications. Declining Aver-age Revenue per User (ARPU) is also a major concern for them.

“In such a scenario, understanding custom-er profiles and their needs is important,” says Amrita Gangotra, Director-Information Technology (India and South Asia), Bharti Airtel. “We are looking at how IT can help increase revenue as voice ARPUs decrease and we need to offer other services that will compensate them.”

For example, Airtel was able to resolve customer queries and complaints via self-service interactive voice response systems (IVRs) routed through a Customer Interac-tion Management (CIM) platform, which is linked to Airtel’s Oracle customer relation-ship management (CRM) solution. The call-er’s account information is then sent along

with the call to an agent’s desktop, where it appears in a pop-up window. The solution helped the company segment calls based on various factors such as product or service, preferred language, and the caller’s overall value (for instance, a Platinum customer) and route the call to an appropriately skilled agent. This helped increase the first-time resolution (FTR) rate substantially. With millions of customer calls, it translates into significant savings in time and money.

That these incremental innovations are happening all the time establishes only one thing: CIOs in these companies must shoulder the added responsibilities of cut-ting cost of IT services and keeping their

CASE STUDY

“WE SEE MORE CONSUMPTION OF SUCH

(APP) SERVICES IN SMALLER CITIES AS THERE IS HUNGER

FOR CONNECTIVITY AND INFORMATION. THERE IS A

PENT-UP DEMAND FOR THE MODEL.”

IT strategies in sync with business goals and all the while keeping customers happy. They all agree that innovation will play a vital role in helping their companies stand out for all the right reasons, in the eyes of the customer.

New PathsAt Vodafone Essar Ltd., India's second larg-est GSM mobile service provider, director of IT Navin Chadha saw that he could integrate the intelligence the company gleaned via its social media efforts and provided feeds

into his back-end systems. By doing this, Chadha's team aided other business func-tions as well as catered to Vodafone's cus-tomers and enhanced their experience. The effort paid off in helping Vodafone discover complaints that were going unnoticed and

DEEPER INSIGHTS

—Amrita GangotraDirector-Information Technology ( India and South Asia), Bharti Airtel

Amrita GangotraDirector-Information Technology ( India

and South Asia), Bharti Airtel

For us data analytics is a big ticket item. Unstruc-tured analysis of data is fast gaining currency as

an important way to get customer insights. This involves elements such as recorded customer calls, emails, VOCs from chat sessions and blogs. Unstructured feeds can be complex to analyse and the accuracy of their inferences can be questionable. Building a marketing strategy based on deep customer insights can give a firm a powerful competitive advantage.

While there are tools available to examine such data to extract meaningful content, deciding on the right approach and analysing the data can make a lot of differ-ence. We have a major focus in terms of how we need to segment our customers and carry out cam-paigns. This will help us to have better conversion rates and create stickiness with our customers.

With 3G on the horizon, the plan for us is to provide more services and data applications like video streaming, portal or Internet brows-ing to make it more interesting for the customers. So we have to inno-vate around how we can provide services on the data aspect which will interest the customers and cre-ate more usage around the data services.

For example, many device manu-facturers offered customers app stores deployed on mobile phones. Early this year we were the first Indian telecom operator to launch a mobile applications store (Airtel App Central). This enabled Airtel mobile customers to transform their basic phone into a Smart Phone by accessing over 1250 Apps across 25 categories for their business, games, books, social networking and other needs. Offer-ing an easy single click purchase – with no credit card required – the cost is automatically added to the customer’s mobile bill or deducted from the available talk-time.

We see more consumption of such services in smaller cities as there is hunger for connectivity and information due to limited broad-band penetration in these parts of the country. This has clearly indi-cated that there is a huge pent-up demand for the model. This will increase the data usage and the ARPUs around it.

Everything on the network side is moving towards an IP-based infra-structure and the application layer is going to play the role of a dif-ferentiator. Managing and handling the scale is going to be a challenge that has to be dealt with on a regu-lar basis.

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with the call to an agent’s desktop, where it

helped the company segment calls based on

and route the call to an appropriately skilled

millions of customer calls, it translates into

“WE SEE MORE CONSUMPTION OF SUCH

(APP) SERVICES IN SMALLER CITIES AS THERE IS HUNGER (APP) SERVICES IN SMALLER CITIES AS THERE IS HUNGER (APP) SERVICES IN SMALLER

FOR CONNECTIVITY AND INFORMATION. THERE IS A

PENT-UP DEMAND FOR THE MODEL.”

Amrita GangotraDirector-Information Technology ( India and South Asia), Bharti Airtel

strategy based on deep customer insights can give a firm a powerful competitive advantage.

While there are tools available to examine such data to extract meaningful content, deciding on the right approach and analysing the data can make a lot of differ-ence. We have a major focus in terms of how we need to segment our customers and carry out cam-paigns. This will help us to have better conversion rates and create stickiness with our customers.

With 3G on the horizon, the plan for us is to provide more services and data applications like video streaming, portal or Internet brows-ing to make it more interesting for the customers. So we have to inno-vate around how we can provide services on the data aspect which will interest the customers and cre-

networking and other needs. Offer-ing an easy single click purchase – with no credit card required – the cost is automatically added to the customer’s mobile bill or deducted

Bang on Target Bold and Virtual Boosting IT Management Lean and Virtual

VIRTUALISATION

A 9.9 Media Publication

Volume 06 | Issue 07

November | 21 | 2010 | 50Volume 06 | Issue 07LE

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CIOs of Indian telecom companies are reinventingtheir IT strategies,exploiting analytics,NUMBER PORTABILITY,

3G and SOCIAL MEDIAto attract and retaincustomers | PAGE 25

CIOs of Indian telecom companies are reinventingtheir IT strategies,exploiting analytics,

INNOVATEINNOVATEDIEINNOVATEINNOVATEDIEDIE

OR

ALPNA DOSHI Reliance Communications

NAVIN CHADHAVodafone Essar

AMRITA GANGOTRA Bharti Airtel

KEY COMPETENCIES TO MAKE THE CIO A BUSI-NESS LEADER

Communication - Most important of all is the ability to communicate both internally and externally.

Change Management - Change is 70% Sociology and 30% Techonology. Ability to integrate, drive new ideas from top to bottom requires your ability to influence and socialise with business and create a atmosphere where everybody is a winner. D.D.MISHRA, HEAD IT-OUTSOURCING VODAFONE ESSAR



BEYOND THE SUPPORT.

“One needs to move away from quantifying the return, but look at qualitative improvement of the business process execution that IT is able to bring out.”To read the full story go to:

http://www.thectoforum.com/content/business-analytics-roi

CTOF Connect Information is the lifeblood of not just corporations but organised crime terrorism, says Steve Durbin of the Information Security Forum in conversation with Rahul Neel Mani. The ISF’s released its Threat Horizon Report, and Durbin says we may have to give up some individual privacy in return for responsible governance and security.

http://www.thectoforum.com/content/less-privacy-better-security

OPINION

CHANDRASEKARAN NSPECIAL DIRECTOR - ITASHOK LEYLAND

CTOForum LinkedIn GroupJoin close to 500 CIOs on the CTO Forum LinkedIn group

for latest news and hot enterprise technology discussions.

Share your thoughts, participate in discussions and win

prizes for the most valuable contribution. You can join The

CTOForum group at:

www.linkedin.com/

groups?mostPopular=&gid=2580450

Some of the hot discussions on the group are:Does a CTO needs to be an expert on "security"?

is network and information control part of that

security matter ?

Of course, need to ensure that network communications

will support

the appropriate security protocols for the business. In

addition, administrative access to network security and

should be aware that, increasingly, these baseline capabili-

ties must be built into organization that IT connects to the

business network.

—Ashfaque Ahmad K. GM Information Technology RR Group

Are CIOs the right architects of Change Man-

agement? If yes, How?

A CIO is a bridge between IT and Business. He has to

understand what changes will bring value to the organiza-

tion and how it will impact other resources i.e process,

applications, IT and People (Organization). This is the

basic quality which has to be in a CIO.

—Sanjay DhuliaSales Manager- India at Ids Scheer

IT can be a profit centre instead of just a cost centre.



Enterprise

ROUND-UP

FEATURE INISDE

Chip Technology Lights the Path to Exascale

Computing Pg 10

Predicted growth of PC ship-ment in In-dia in 2011.

Study Finds More Takers for Risk Frameworks. DSCI-KPMG find BPO firms taking steps to free up CISOs for strategic workINDIA'S BPO firms are increasingly adopting 'Third

Party Risk Assessment Frameworks,' according to a survey by accounting firm KPMG and the Data Secu-rity Council of India, an industry body. The study, State of Data Security and Privacy in the Indian BPO Industry, conducted in a team up with Cert-In aimed to assess the current state of data security and privacy practices being adopted by the Indian BPO industry, KPMG and DSCI said in their statements earlier this month.

According to the survey, Indian organisations are taking a hard look at what they need to do to address

rising concerns over the security of their clients’ end-customer data. Further, organisations are bridging the gaps in their security skills by availing services of external consultants for the specialised security tasks, according to the statement.

“It is encouraging to see that security leaders are getting increasingly involved in strategic business decision making, thereby reflecting the recognition of security as a business enabler,” said Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, DSCI. “A significant number of the surveyed organisations have reported presence of a dedicated privacy function.”

25%DATA BRIEFING

SOURCE: GARTNER

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German prosecutors are accusing two local hackers of breaking into the computers of over 50 pop stars, including Lady Gaga, Kelly Clarkson, Justin Timberlake and Ke$ha. The two hackers infected the machines with malware in order to steal files that had credit cards details, private pictures, emails and unreleased songs.

QUICK BYTE ON GLOBAL WEB SECURITY

India Public Cloud Sales to Grow 40 Percent. Adoption to touch 7 percent of enterprises by 2012.THE INDIAN 'Public Cloud Computing' market was estimated to be $66.7 million in 2009 and projected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40% over the next five years to 2014, according to market research firm IDC’s October report, India Cloud Computing Market: Current State and Future Roadmap.

“In recent quarters, in the backdrop of the global economic slowdown, the phe-nomenon of Cloud Computing has gained wide interest amongst business lead-ers and CIOs,” said Kamal Vohra, Lead Analyst, Software and Services Research, IDC India, in a statement earlier this month. “The most attractive feature of this new technology deployment is the prospect of converting large, upfront capital investments in IT infrastructure into smaller, manageable 'pay-per-use' annuity payments. This feature has sparked a high degree of interest and debate amongst technology vendors, users and channel partners alike," Vohra said.

According to Indranil Dutta, Lead Analyst, User Research, IDC India, “As the market matures and more industry vertical specific and business function specific applications become available, we expect more and more Indian enterprises to see the benefit of adopting cloud computing solutions.”

During an Internet chat with Spanish daily El Pais, Julian Assange, Founder of whistle-blowing website, Wikileaks asked Obama to resign if he had asked offi-cials to spy on UN leaders.

—Julian Assange,

Founder, Wikileaks

“Obama must answer what he knew about this illegal order and when. If he refuses to answer or there is evi-dence he approved of these actions, he must resign.”

THEY SAID IT

JULIAN ASSANGE

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—Julian Assange,

Founder, Wikileaks

resign.”

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Chip Technology Lights the Path to Exascale Computing. IBM Silicon Nanophotonics uses optical signals to connect chips together faster

IBM scientists have unveiled a new chip technology that integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon, enabling computer chips to communicate using pulses of light (instead of electrical signals), resulting in smaller, faster and more power-efficient chips than is possible with conventional technologies. The new technology, called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics, is the result of a decade of

development at IBM's global Research labo-ratories, IBM said in a statement. The pat-ented technology will change and improve the way computer chips communicate – by integrating optical devices and functions directly onto a silicon chip, enabling over 10X improvement in integration density than is feasible with current manufacturing techniques, according to the statement.

IBM anticipates this work by its scientists

Worldwide connected e-reader sales to end users are forecast to total 6.6 mil-lion units in 2010, up 79.8 per cent from 2009 sales of 3.6 million units and surpass 11 million units in 2011, accord-ing to Gartner.

Yurii Vlasov, William Green and Solomon Assefa will dramatically increase the speed and performance between chips, and fur-ther the company's ambitious Exascale com-puting program, which is aimed at develop-ing a supercomputer that can perform one million trillion calculations, or an Exaflop, in a single second. An Exascale supercom-puter will be approximately one thousand times faster than the fastest machine today.

“The development of the Silicon Nano-photonics technology brings the vision of on-chip optical interconnections much clos-er to reality,” said T.C. Chen, vice president, Science and Technology, IBM Research, in the statement. “With optical communica-tions embedded into the processor chips, the prospect of building power-efficient computer systems with performance at the Exaflop level is one step closer to reality.” In addition to combining electrical and optical devices on a single chip, the new IBM tech-nology can be produced on the front-end of a standard CMOS manufacturing line and requires no new or special tooling.

With this approach, silicon transis-tors can share the same silicon layer with silicon nanophotonics devices. To make this approach possible, IBM research-ers have developed a suite of integrated ultra-compact active and passive silicon nanophotonics devices that are all scaled down to the diffraction limit – the smallest size that dielectric optics can afford. “Our CMOS Integrated Nanophotonics break-through promises unprecedented increases in silicon chip function and performance via ubiquitous low-power optical commu-nications between racks, modules, chips or even within a single chip itself,” said Vlasov, Manager of the Silicon Nanophotonics Department at IBM Research. “The next step in this advancement is establishing 'manufacturability' of this process in a com-mercial foundry using IBM deeply scaled CMOS processes.”

The development of CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics is the culmination of a series of related advancements by IBM Research that resulted in the development of deeply scaled front-end integrated Nano-photonics components for optical commu-nications, IBM says.

GLOBAL TRACKERE-reader Sales

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India PC Shipments To Grow 25%. New device launches, robust delivery by vendors fuel growth.

MS LYNC

Microsoft has released its

unified communications tool,

Microsoft Lync, a single plat-

form that integrates instant

messaging, presence, audio,

video and web conferencing,

and voice, according to a com-

pany statement last month.

“Lync delivers on our vision to

unify all of the modes of modern

business communication, giv-

ing people a more collaborative,

‘in person,’ experience with fea-

tures like HD video, conference

recording, and social features

like status updates and activity

feeds,” said Sanjay Manchanda,

Director – Microsoft Business

Division, Microsoft India, in the

statement.

Microsoft Lync Top Features

include High Definition video

including Audio/Video fed-

eration with Windows Live and

Kinect and integration with

SharePoint, Exchange and Office

Microsoft Lync Online will be

available as part of Office 365,

with voice capabilities available

in 2011. Lync Online will include

instant messaging, presence,

audio and video conferencing,

and PC-to-PC voice calls.

Microsoft Lync is the new fami-

ly brand for the products formerly

known as Microsoft Communica-

tions Server, Microsoft Commu-

nications Online and Microsoft

Communicator, and now also

includes Microsoft Lync Web

App, and Microsoft Lync Online.

INDIA PC shipments will total 13.2

million units in 2011, a 24.7% increase

from 2010, according to the latest fore-

cast by Gartner.

PC demand is growing beyond

India’s largest cities. Vendors are see-

ing an increasing demand from small-

er cities in India where PC penetration

has grown considerably. Rising income

SIEMENS Enterprise Communications has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire FastViewer GmbH & Co KG, extend-ing its OpenScape Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) portfolio to include multi-media conferencing and collaboration solutions. Based in Neumarkt, Germany, FastViewer is a

New UC Portfolio Gets Boost. Acqui-sition adds innovative web conferencing and collaboration to Open-Scape portfolio

FACT TICKER

and declining PC prices are significant-

ly contributing to this growth. Gartner

estimates that roughly 35 percent of

PC vendor revenue today comes from

Tier III and IV cities. This will grow to

50 percent by the end of 2013.

“There is an increased aspiration to

own a PC in India. The younger gen-

eration is contributing to the large scale

adoption of PCs in India in a significant

way,” said Vishal Tripathi, Principal

Research Analyst at Gartner. “Besides

reading and surfing the Internet, the

usage of PCs for watching movies, lis-

tening to music, and gaming are play-

ing a pivotal role in driving demand.”

By the fourth quarter of 2011 mobile

PCs will outgrow desk-based PCs in

India, though the total number of

desk-based shipments will be higher

than mobile PC. In 2011, the desk-

based PC market will grow 5 percent

totaling 7.2 million units year-on-year,

and mobile PC shipments will grow 61

percent with 5.9 million units.

premier provider of software-based collaboration tools, delivering innovative, enterprise-grade col-laboration in an extremely affordable and simple to use package. FastViewer currently has channels in 12 countries and serves more than 4,000 customers.“Enterprises increasingly view web, video and mobile collaboration as critical com-ponents of their communications infrastructure for the cost savings and employee productiv-ity improvements they provide,” said Chris Hummel, chief marketing officer of Siemens Enterprise Communications. “We have selected FastViewer to be part of our portfolio due to its highly efficient and simple to use application for enterprises that are looking for an affordable, flexible enterprise-grade solution. This acquisi-tion further demonstrates our commitment to our open architecture UCC solution that is unparalleled in terms of functionality, reliability and end-to-end security.” Siemens Enterprise Communications will offer the FastViewer solution under the name OpenScape Web Collaboration, as part of the newly updated OpenScape UC Suite 2011 edi-tion. The OpenScape UC Suite includes a set of collaboration, mobility, video and other tools to securely and reliably deliver improved productivity and significant cost savings to enterprises.“FastViewer’s collaboration solution fits nicely with the Siemens Enterprise Com-munications OpenScape portfolio. The combina-tion of the two portfolios will deliver the most advanced communication and collaboration solu-tion available to date based on an open platform which provides maximum flexibility and ease of use,” said Steven Fursch, CEO of FastViewer.

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shipments will total 13.2

million units in 2011, a 24.7% increase

from 2010, according to the latest fore

ly contributing to this growth. Gartner

estimates that roughly 35 percent of

than mobile PC. In 2011, the desk-

based PC market will grow 5 percent

totaling 7.2 million units year-on-year,

PC vendor revenue today comes from



A Q U E S T I O N O F AN SWE RS R A M E S H I YE R

Mahindra & Mahindra Financials is taking the banking expertise of a modern Indian corporation to the millions who live in Bharat, says Ramesh Iyer, Managing Director of the biggest non-banking finance company in rural India. Mahindra will soon start an asset management company focused on the rural market, Iyer tells Ashwani Mishra in an interview.

As the MD of the company, what are your expectations

from IT?Technology has a critical role to play in providing our customers the best services in a user-friendly manner. IT, essential to timely delivery of services, also plays an important role in managing the quality of business, and profitability. Managing credits, reliability, asset liability and risk are

some of the aspects of profitability. At the same time pooling data from the thousand of branches, and ensuring that this data is consolidated and can be used for the purpose of analysis, interpretation and taking informed decisions is what I expect from IT.

IT must design systems that provide operational flexibility. Only then can innovative ideas translate quickly to changes in products and

services for customers. I have always viewed technology as

an enabler. It facilitates rapid growth while enhancing the service experi-ence to our customers. I expect IT to deliver on all the project initiatives that help meet this objective in a timely and cost-effective manner.

On Governance and Transparency: A robust IT infrastructure is also vital to good governance and transpar-

RAMESH IYER | MAHINDRA & MAHINDRA FINANCIALS

Into theHeartland

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IT the enabler: IT must design systems that provide

operational flexibility.



A Q U E S T I O N O F AN SWE RS R A M E S H I YE R

ency. One of the tasks IT has is to help a company configure the sys-tems that will enable better gover-nance. With such systems in place, the scope of manual interventions is reduced and so are the problems associated with them.

Internally, we look at IT to ensure better practices, faster dissemina-tion of information, and better management of our finances. This also supplements the efforts of others within the organisation and helps them realise that there exists an environment of good governance supported by quick and accurate information flow.

You've increased local hiring in rural areas – a sign that

business there is ramping up per-haps? How's this panning out?We have always focused on inclu-sive growth, in terms of business and employment opportunities in all the markets where we oper-ate. Customers in the low-income groups have proved to be a catalyst to step up rural growth. Hiring local candidates has also helped us gain the trust of customers and business associates.

The company currently drives more than 80 percent of volumes from rural markets and we have tapped around 2,00,000 villages through 500 branches.

With rural market growing at 30 to 35 percent and with liquid-ity in the hands of the farmers, we decided that the rural focus had to be stepped up to expand business volumes. The growth in the rural markets has also helped the com-pany bring in more people into the credit system.

What are the IT solutions that you are currently offer-

ing the workforce in these rural areas? The company has offered 5,000 hand-held devices that are con-nected by GPRS to a central server that offers information to handle

Yes, we have applied for a license for setting up an asset management company, and expect an in-principle approval by the end of this financial year. We have one million customers and we are adding 25,000-30,000 cus-tomers each month. We don’t want to miss the opportunity to take financial products to this market.

In terms of IT, our branches are geared up with the latest technology systems and some of them already function as a standard bank branch office.

customer queries for our collection executives.

This also enables better internal checks and controls. Our monthly receivables are around 500 crore rupees, of which more than 80 per-cent is in cash. Around 91 percent of the total 500 branches are online.

Besides collecting cash, we also provide services to customers in terms of providing statement of accounts, calculating internal rate of return (IRR) through mobile branches. We are designing products according to the needs of the con-sumer, keeping in mind that there would be huge volumes involved.

You have already applied for a banking license. What

changes can we expect in terms of your business strategy and how will IT support them?

Governance

A robust IT

infrastructure

is vital to good

governance and

transparency.

Empowering

We look at IT to

ensure better

practices, faster

dissemination

of information,

and better

management of

our finances.

Profitability

IT plays an

important role

in managing

the quality of

business, and

profitability.

THINGS I BELIEVE IN

“IT facilitates rapid growth while enhancing the service experience to our customers.”



BEST OF

BREED

According to analyst firm Gartner, data governance is the way to mitigate edis-covery problems. In fact, they predict that companies without data gover-nance strategy and technology in place

will spend one third more on ediscovery than their peers (Cooperation is Key for Managing Ediscovery,

Improving Data GovernanceDiscussing a New Framework for Defensible Disposal. BY LORRIE LUELLIG DEIDRE PAKNAD

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No one group can make the determination of what information to keep or when to dispose.

AUTHOR SAYS

March 2010). Gartner rightly identifies data volume and IT environmental complexity as the two sources of high cost and high risk in discovery.

In some companies, data growth started to spike at the same point that legal hold obligations and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were revised because “save everything” was the risk mitigation

MORE SPEND-ING ON EDIS-COVERY BY COMPANIES WITHOUT DATA GOV-ERNANCE STRATEGIES

33%DATA BRIEFING



B E S T O F BR E E D DATA G OVE RN A N CE

plan. During the last five years there has been a 50% year over year growth of data volume. IDC now predicts an even greater acceleration of this growth, forecasting an increase in data volume by a factor of 44 in the next ten years.

Historically, IDC consistently understates its growth projections. This far outpaces revenue growth so the tension between the “keep everything” risk mitigation plan and the company’s financial condition is rapidly mounting. New strategies and tactics to drive better data governance at more reason-able cost to the company are required.

Cooperation, collaboration and convergenceData governance requires cooperation, col-laboration and convergence of processes between legal, RIM (records and informa-tion management), IT and business groups. Collectively, these stakeholders can and must determine what legal duties apply to information, what value the information has and then manage accordingly. As individual or isolated functions, no one group can make the determination of what informa-tion to keep or when to dispose.

A recent survey conducted by EDRM and CGOC revealed, however, that while there is complete agreement between legal, RIM and IT that defensible disposal is the benefit of good data governance practice, there are many organisational and operational barri-ers today:

100% of survey respondents agreed that defensible disposal was the purpose of data governance practice.

Most of IT and half of RIM respondents said their current responsibility model for data governance didn’t work.

80% of respondents had little or very weak linkage between legal obligations for infor-mation and records management and data management.

Only 13% had a systematic process for linking holds to sources of data and records.

80% had retention schedules that applied to electronic information, but only 38% said IT followed these schedules.

The single biggest pain point cited by legal, RIM and IT was lack of transparency and collaboration across stakeholders

What these results so clearly demon-strate is that companies are struggling

to link legal obligations for information that arise in litigation and regulation and the business value of information to their actual information and data management practices. They lack structural connections of holds and retention schedules to data and they lack collaborative and transparent processes between the stakeholder organi-sations. This is a predictable result to "keep everything", which results in massive and often mindless build up of more informa-tion without the corresponding reduction in risk initially sought.

IMRM – A catalyst for transparency and a responsibility model - The information man-agement and reference model IMRM will be as important as EDRM as a catalyst for process improvement.

In many ways, it is more ambitious and constructive because it goes beyond the legal function to the enterprise. Unlike tra-ditional information lifecycle and case life-cycle models (including EDRM), IMRM illu-minates the multiple stakeholders in data governance, their responsibilities and inter-dependencies, and the critical importance of linking legal duties and business value to information sources to enable defensible disposal. More than 90% of survey respon-dents felt IMRM could help them organise cross-functional efforts and serve as a man-agement catalyst -- its primary purpose.

The “first generation” model is a responsi-bility model that helps to identify the stake-holders, define their respective “stake” in information and highlights the intersection and dependence across these stakeholders. IMRM can provide a framework for cross functional and executive dialogue and can serve as a catalyst for defining a unified gov-ernance approach to information that links value and duty to information assets.

Elements of IMRM - As you will see in the diagram above, the information basics are distilled out and at the center of the model (with the notable inclusion of “dispose” as the end state of information). Note the

IT outpaces Revenue Growth

Revenue Growth outpaces ITChange in Revenue

25%

25%-25%

-25%

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in IT

Sp

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Employees overlooked or their depature missed

IT moves or retires data on hold improperly

Company data volume increases

Collected data volume increases

Tribal knowledge used to determine scope of legal holds

Employee turnover very high 1000s of servers and 1000s of IT staff

Spreadsheet tracking of custodian lists

Phone and email notes

"Keep everything" approach instituted to avoid recurrance Late awareness requires unfortunate disclosures

Outside counsel invoved in SSS recovery effort

Discovery costs increase with volume

Data managment costs increase with volume

Process did not improve

Risk did not decrease



B E S T O F BR E E D DATA G OVE RN A N CEB E S T O F BR E E D DATA G OVE RN A N CE

“information gates” in the middle, where information accumulates.

The business segment has an interest in information proportional to its value or the degree to which it helps drive the profit or purpose of the enterprise itself. Once that value expires, they quickly lose interest in managing it, cleaning it up, or paying for it to be stored. One of the things that the IMRM does is distinguish value from regu-latory obligation or IT efficiency. The dia-gram defines the business group’s responsi-bility to define and declare the specific value of information; all data doesn’t have value and the value of data isn’t constant.

Legal and RIM on the left side are char-tered typically to manage risk for the com-pany. The diagram underscores that it is legal's responsibility to define what to put on hold and what and when to collect data for discovery. Likewise, it is RIM’s respon-sibility to ensure that regulatory obligations for information are met including what to retain and archive for how long.

Together they both play an enormous role in how information is maintained by IT and when companies can dispose of it. As with the business segment, it calls on legal and RIM to be specific about the duties for information -- what they are and when those duties end.

IT stores and secures information under their management. Of course, their focus is efficiency and they’re typically under huge pressure to increase efficiency and lower cost. One of the most valuable aspects of the diagram is that it highlights that, without collaboration and unified governance, IT

LEGALRisk

RIMRisk

ITEfficiency

BusinessProfit

VALUE

DUTY ASSET

Hold,Discover

Store secure

Dispose

Create Use

RETAINArchive

POLICY AND EXECUTION

doesn’t know and can’t speak to what infor-mation has value or what duties apply to specific information. Typical legal hold and retention practices don’t connect to IT data management practices.

For companies with hundreds or thou-

sands of legal matters, hundreds of codes on their retention schedule and which operate in multiple countries that have thousands of file shares, SharePoint sites, ECM and business applications, this is an impossible situation for IT. There are more than a bil-lion choices for what information in which systems is of value or subject to a legal duty. IMRM can help companies recognise that for IT to manage data efficiently, it is essen-tial to link specific duties and business value to the information assets.

The inner ring of the diagram calls for that structural linkage of duty and value to information assets. This requires policies that can be articulated in departmental pro-cedure and are executable by IT in practice; and specific rather than generic communi-cation of legal holds and retention require-ments that enables enterprise execution and disposal.

The outer rings of the diagram call for unified governance, which implies:

UNIFIED GOVERNANCE

There are more than a billion choic-es for what information in which systems is of value or subject to a legal duty. IMRM can help compa-nies recognise that for IT to man-age data efficiently, it is essential to link specific duties and business value to the information assets.

B E S T O F BR E E D DATA G OVE RN A N CE

1.Transparent cross-func-tional processes for legal holds, discovery, record retention, information value assessments, and information and data man-agement.

2.The end of a silo approach to legal holds and record reten-tion practices -- these are enter-prise rather than departmental processes.

3.Unified vocabulary across stakeholders which recognises and reconciles their different interests in information

These enable stakeholders to understand true costs and to make better decisions, which reduce total cost through more pre-cise determination of what to preserve and collect; optimal approaches for streamlin-ing and even consolidating data manage-

ment; and assessing true cost of information and discovery by business unit to enable practice improvements and behavior change.

The IMRM can help start the conversation in your company and the associated information governance process matu-rity model can help companies assess where they are today and set the course for improvement. The process maturity model

offers a plan of action tied directly to process risk and cost, so stakeholders understand the implications of current practice and the benefits of change.

— Lorrie Luellig is of counsel to, and a founding

member of, the Ryley Carlock & Applewhite

Document Control Group. Lorrie has extensive

13%HAD A SYSTEMATIC

PROCESS FOR

LINKING HOLDS TO

SOURCES OF DATA

AND RECORDS.

experience counseling clients about retention

policies and procedures for both litigation related

matters and overall company operations.

Deidre Paknad is CEO of PSS Systems, an IBM

company, and is widely credited with having

launched the first commercial applications for

legal holds, collections and retention manage-

ment in 2004. She founded the CGOC in 2004,

a professional community on retention and

preservation that IDC labeled a "think tank". She

has been a member of several Sedona working

groups since 2005 and leads EDRM IMRM

sub-group 6. Deidre has been inducted into the

Smithsonian Institution for technology innovation

twice.

To see more articles on this or any topic affect-

ing IT today, please visit www.cioupdate.com, a

premier destination site for CIOs, CTOs, and IT

executives from around the world.

advts.indd 56 12/22/2009 3:02:47 PM



MENTOR’S VIEWVIJAY SETHI | VICE PRESIDENT IS & CIO, HERO HONDA MOTORS [email protected]

DOSSIER

COMPANY:Hero Honda Motors Ltd.

ESTABLISHED:1984

IS A joint venture of:Hero Group, India and Honda Motor Company, Japan

PRODUCTS: Two-wheelers

NETWORK:4500 customer touch points across India



CTO FORUM

V IJAY S E T H I M E N TOR ’ S V I E W

A Tough Choice Thinking of technology and maintaining it in the backroom marked the old era. Thinking about business strategy, value, EBITDA and shareholder value is the new normal for a CIO.

Two questions that almost always come up in any CIO discussion:

a) What next for the CIO – is it “Career Is Over?” and b) Can CIOs make it to the Board?

To my mind – these questions are linked and the answer to both of them lies in a simple choice – a choice that each CIO makes for himself or herself. The choice is about whether the CIO considers himself or her-self a Technologist who ensures IT works at all times (be it serv-ers, storage, LAN, WAN, inter-net, e-mail or applications), or a Business Leader who has a good understanding of technology and one who has to work with other business leaders in the organization on how IT can be used to help business achieve its objectives.

That choice will determine if it is really “Career Is Over” or “Career Is (now full of) Oppor-tunities” – including being on the board or being a CEO.

If one is asked to make a choice – obviously everyone would like to go for the second option but it is easier said than

done. Why I say that is because all of us know this option for ages but how many CIOs actu-ally have made it to the board, how many are actually business leaders in their own right, how many of them have actually become CEOs – it is not that the number is zero, but it is not a very significant number either.

So, why is it that while we know the option that is good for us we still don't take it. I think an important reason for that is that we feel secure in the ‘comfort zone’ of technology – most of us feel comfortable when we talk about servers or networks, about RAM and hard disks or when we are among IT people, but we get tongue-tied or feel out of place when we are in business meetings, when the discussions relate to areas such as business strategy, busi-ness benefits, ROI, EBIDTA, shareholder value, and market conditions. I think a justifica-tion that we give thereof is that as IT people – our grooming has been more ‘inward’ looking while most ‘business manag-ers’ would be ‘outward looking.’

There are many other reasons or justifications... but it is not that no one has made it – there are many examples today. For them, I am reminded of a poem by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken – “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both... I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the differ-ence.” It's the same for CIOs, the ones who have taken the path less travelled have made the difference.

I believe that each one of us can make this difference, and for that a CIO needs a number of other Cs as well, the most prominent in my view being Conviction, Commitment, Communication, Competence, Confidence, Creativity and Courage. Many of us have all these, I think only that extra bit is required.

Talking about Cs, let me also talk about another C – CTO Forum. Rahul approached me sometime back with this ‘inno-vative idea’ – of having a Guest Editor and asked me if I would like to take it up. There were

two important reasons for why I agreed:

a.It would give me some insight into an area (publica-tions) which till now had been a black box for me

b.It would motivate me to read all the articles contributed – as most of the times one reads a few articles, glances through a few and skips many. Here as Guest Editor – I read each arti-cle with fascination (and con-centration) and must confess I got some great insights.

Thank you each of the con-tributors and thank you Rahul for this opportunity and the CTOF team for all the support and back-end work. I can now tell you all that being an edi-tor is not an easy job, and we always thought it was not easy being a CIO.

I look forward to your response to this and also the next issue of the magazine.

Best Wishes—Vijay Sethi

Vice President IS and CIO, Hero Honda Motors Limited.P

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COVE R S TO RY

First of the two part CIO 3.0 cover feature includes 12 CIOs from various verticals and different parts of the world talking about their experiences on elevating the role of CIOs in the organisation. We hope they would show you the mirror and act as a crystal ball into the future at the same time.

I N S I D E30 | Keep it Simple32 | Stop Being an Order Taker34 | Value Opportunity and Speed36 | Split in the Middle38 | The CIO as Earth Champion40 | When Projects Fail42 | CIO as Nation Builder44 | Partners in Business46 | Chief Business Enablers48 | Melt Resistance, Use ICE50 | Least Preferred Enabler52 | When IT Meets BusinessIL

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2 009 and a good part of 2010 was a year of great revela-tion. For the first time in my career I realised that IT plays a significant role beyond just

productivity or tooling, a goal entrusted to us to help the company stay competitive in the market.

The adage so true for IT professionals – to seek opportunities, cost cuts and speed – turns out to be truer now than before. I would also add another principle, which is simplicity, to complicate the 3 point agenda even further: It does not need a lot of skill-ing/ re-skilling yourself to be able to match up to these expectations of the business in trying times.

What are the traits that a CIO has to deal with agility, frugality and opportunity:

I work for a telecom service provider so my examples will pertain to the telecom service industry in general, but can be used elsewhere as well.

COST All IT managers have these three skills. Remember the day when your management or boss never expected a certain percent-age cut in costs from you? At least I can’t remember that day, maybe one day we will only be expected to spend, so I see nothing difficult in doing this. But what is challeng-ing then to attain this objective?

A normal process of cost cutting, which is budget versus actual status, and driving

your teams to get good negotiations is not the only route to reach this goal. It is under-stood and expected of you to do it. Business expects you to deliver cost cuts through a systematic process of reviewing all your deliverables, costs of the delivery and if that is actually core to running your IT function. There are times you will be surprised that it will throw up compelling cases to cut costs further. So this is actually a drill down into how you run a function and see if you can further scavenge left-overs that are unim-portant but eat into your resources.

In my current company I realised that the PC to man ratio was at 1.22 which means every man has 0.22 machines more than he should get. If you multiply the number of heads with this ratio you will find that the costs hidden in this are as follows:1. Cost of hardware (leasing cost of outright purchase cost)2. Depreciation for outright purchase cost3. Cost of asset reconciliation or physical verification3. Cost of service4. LAN ports

5. If used at users’ homes it also means cost of connectivity to your office systems and therefore service desk calls being generated6. Printing costs for these additional machines7. Monitors, spares, licenses

If you put all of these together you will realise that for 25% additional machines you are actually spending 25% costs over and above what you should pay for servicing users. Of course, all users are VIPs and need these machines, but if you ask them for justi-fication and find ways to meet their require-ments you will see most of them returning the assets. We have found a way of doing this effectively. We have transferred all the assets to the employee’s name and he remains liable till the day he resigns. This makes him actually think about the implications of owning more compute assets – fear of loss is too large for him to overlook. Compounded by the fact that the unit heads or cost centre heads get reports on how much more they spend for these 'extras.' This is just a small example, you may find more such examples, which you may have overlooked.

In order to deliver the most on the three fronts a CIO is always familiar with – cost cuts, speed and opportunities – keep it simple. BY TAMAL CHAKRAVORTY



OPPORTUNITY A while back one of my bosses used to say “Stay foolish, Stay nervous.” Great maxim. Keeps you nimble footed looking for oppor-tunities to cash in on. Opportunities are not in the realm of business development alone but also in back end functions like ours. Look for opportunities to team up with your peers in the business.

We spotted an opportunity to help the company’s sustainability agenda. We pushed a telepresence and videoconferencing agenda. You will be surprised with the off-take of telepresence. Our top management have used it well, and overall we have saved around Rs. 2.6 million in one month along with the environmental benefits that come along with it. We have also taken the oppor-tunity to work with our services sales team to build a model for a pre-sales bid from an IT stack point of view. This model works well and we are able to capture project manage-ment details for all the managed services or outsourcing bids. Outsourcing is a good way of freeing yourself up to spend more time in the business to look for these opportunities.

SPEED Absolutely pertinent in today’s world. Speed is all about decision making, quicker turn-around time and be able to deliver applica-tions or infrastructure or maybe a new ser-vice at breakneck speed. That’s only possible if you have expert bodies within your func-tion to take charge and accomplish. Speed comes from simplicity. If the architecture is simple to create and use then new services can easily be bundled on top of it. There-fore, skilling on architecture designing and ability to understand is important for a CIO.

An example of speed is our in-sourcing of various contracts from our service operators.

We have modularised work space design, far end design and basic support services. It is like a quick call-off when we are given information on a new deal that our com-pany may have signed up. The whole setup process is only about 1 month, barring a few cases where PC/laptops may get delivered late. We have our Citrix farms and applica-tions ready to in-take more numbers at the click of a button.

-tunities to cash in on. Opportunities are not in the realm of business development alone

Look for opportunities to team up with your

company’s sustainability agenda. We pushed

IT stack point of view. This model works well

outsourcing bids. Outsourcing is a good way of freeing yourself up to spend more time in

“Stay foolish, Stay nervous.”Great maxim. Keeps you nimble footed looking for opportunities to cash in on. —Tamal ChakravortyCIO, Ericsson India

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From MIS/ERP/Data Centre head to vital contributor to the business,

how has CIO's role evolved?From someone who ensured that systems and applications were up and running – an order taker for what business colleagues wanted – to a frontline technology expert who can talk the language of business, the CIO has come a long way in the 25 years since the role first emerged. This also means the CIO, instead of looking at what has already happened, is increasingly focus-ing on what is likely to happen, the MIS is making way for business intelligence.

The role of the CIO had evolved from operations manager to internal consultant. The order taker on what business required from systems and applications has evolved into a 'chief innovation officer' – an enter-prise leader who knows how to leverage information technology to drive top-line rev-enue and create sustainable business value. The new business-savvy CIO has become a full c-suite partner, helps create and drive business strategy, leads innovation and knows how to acquire, develop and retain high-performance teams who are globally de- centralised and virtually connected on-demand. There has never been a more excit-ing time or a better opportunity to be a CIO.

CEOs want the CIOs to look out-side the company walls to find new

business opportunities. Is this demand justified?

Most CEOs recognise that modern inno-vation is not about delivering better widgets but rather about evolving global business models – being more competitive by focus-ing their time, attention and energies upon sourcing customers, staff, and supply chain resources where ever in the world makes economic and good business sense. A major trend in today's enterprises into this 'new normal' involves leveraging collaborative partnerships with third parties (as opposed to outsourcing) which allow the enterprise to focus upon those core competencies that differentiate it in their chosen market and create a "value web" of external partners who can deliver, where appropriate, quality non-differentiated (commodity) services and related resources at a significantly reduced cost and time frame without impacting externally facing customer relationships.

CEOs are keenly aware that CIOs are uniquely qualified to drive these business models and supporting business process innovations and lead business change because CIOs are often the only functional executives who have an end-to-end view of the complete business processes that they support. CIOs also bring a highly disciplined framework and the necessary experience with managing complex re-engi-neering projects to support these changes to the fundamental operation of the business. Based upon the research that we have per-formed at the Center for CIO Leadership, acquiring and building the skills required to develop effective relationships with external parties (including customers) is an area where many CIOs report meaningful oppor-tunities and challenges. That said, business-savvy CIOs are more and more becoming drivers of this new form of business innova-tion leaders of business change.

What did you do to be seen as a serious contributor to business

growth and corporate strategy?I believe that the inflection point for me

CEOs are keenly aware that CIOs are uniquely qualified to drive these business models and supporting business process innovations and lead business change because CIOs are often the only functional executives who have an end-to-end view of the complete business processes that they support. CIOs also bring a highly disciplined framework and the necessary experience with managing complex re-engineering projects to support these changes to the fundamental operation of the business. Based upon the research that we have performed at the Center for CIO Leadership, acquiring and building the skills required to develop effective relationships with external parties (including customers) is an area where many CIOs report meaningful opportunities and challenges. That said, business-savvy CIOs are more and more becoming drivers of this new form of business innovation leaders of business change.

growth and corporate strategy?I believe that the inflection point for me

“The inflection point for me in my own career came when I learnt how to speak the language of my business partners.”—Harvey KoeppelExecutive Director, Center for CIO Leadership

COVE R S TORY I N T E RV I E W



in my own career came when I learned how to speak the language of my business partners. For example, I learned how to talk to the marketing and sales teams about new customer acquisition, cross-sell and up-sell, and needs-based sales approaches to relationship management. The conversa-tion was no longer about customer MIS reports or selecting the best CRM system. I learned how to talk to the CFO about our balance sheet, cash flow and earnings. The conversation was no longer only about streamlining the financial management system so that we could close in 5 business days instead of 3 weeks after month-end. I learned how to talk to our CEO about what business initiatives would positively impact the stock price, how to create sustainable shareholder value and how to ensure the safety and soundness of our operating envi-ronment, partner with our regulators and

impact the broader base of stakeholders (customers, staff, shareholders, citizenry, business partners), which would be con-sidered 'strategic.' This definition would be closely associated with the notion that CIOs need to think like CEOs, CFOs and other c-suite partners since they are the executive management team who, by definition, must have an enterprise-wide view on most every-thing that they do. Another perspective of how CIOs can be considered strategic would be differentiating between those activi-ties or initiatives that are in support of the enterprise's vision or mission, i.e. longer-term goals and objectives or 'roadmap,' as opposed to those programs or projects which are short-term tactical activities gen-erally associated with keeping the lights on and running an efficient shop.

This distinction is often characterised by explicit budget allocation to new develop-ment or significant enhancement efforts (discretionary spending) versus allocations required to support the maintenance of the business-as-usual (non-discretionary spend-ing) activities, for example, bug-fixes, minor enhancements, regulatory or compliance-driven enhancements, operational or data centre consolidations and so on. Another way to characterise the difference would be a skills-based view, where strategic CIOs are

CIOs need to stop talking jargon to their business colleagues, says Harvey Koeppel, Executive Director, Center for CIO Leadership. Have conversations around the business benefits behind that jargon and you will immediately get active support

right up to the CEO. BY RAHUL NEEL MANI

still reduce our technology and operations budget year over year.

I knew that I had become a serious con-tributor to the business when I was invited to actively participate in the formulation of our business strategy because my c-suite peers acknowledged and respected my con-tributions, not just because I had a "C" in my title.

What does it mean for a CIO to be strategic? Does he need to think like

a CEO or a CFO or what?Here are some of the more popular uses of the term. Some would say that dealing with the day-to-day running of the IT and operations functions would be 'tactical' as compared with the CIO's involvement in enterprise-level initiatives that materially

Stopbeing anorder taker



COVE R S TORY O P I N I O N

proficient and innovating and exploiting IT to support new business models, enter new markets, radically streamline processes, etc., while tactical CIOs are much more profi-cient at ensuring that the day-to-day opera-tions are run smoothly and cost-effectively.

Research done by the Center in collabora-tion with IBM suggests that business-savvy CIOs need to be both strategic and tactical depending on the needs of the enterprise as driven by their mission, goals and objec-tives, industry outlook, competitive position, economic conditions. There are clearly times when CIOs must step into leader-ship roles to move their enterprise forward and there are other times when CIOs must focus on ensuring the safety and soundness of their IT and operations to provide a solid foundation for future business growth.

A CIO's thought leadership on busi-ness technology will only work if

the business colleagues are receptive to those ideas. How do they work together?The best way for CIOs to ensure that busi-ness leaders are open to their ideas on how technology can best support their business is to ensure that ideas are geared towards enabling tangible and measurable business benefit and that their ideas are communi-cated in business terms that their c-suite and other business partners can under-stand. For example, if a CIO attempts to talk to a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) about a new approach to data extract, transforma-tion and load (ETL) or the latest technolo-gies to enable better data warehouses using a service oriented architecture (SOA) the conversation will likely be a very short one with less than satisfying results for both par-ties. If, however, the CIO can explain how their idea for a new business initiative can reduce the cost of acquiring new customers from $1,200 to $500, can increase existing customer retention from 70 percent to 85 percent, can increase the average number of products per customer from 1.5 to 2.5, and that all of those benefits taken collectively can result in an increase in annual revenue by 13 percent while increasing annual earn-ings by 15 percent, the CMO be interested and engaged, and the CEO, CFO and the rest of the c-suite will be very interested in how to fund the effort.

The power of ICT can be huge, with a little counter-intuitive application, says Painter, Strategic ICT Advisor. Many CIOs have done 'more with less for more' once they understood the opportunistic value of a problem and acted with speed.

T he burst of the US housing bubble in 2007 triggered an era of tur-bulent economic times. In the period between 2008 and 2009, summary measurements of economic activity reported concurrent declines in consumption, investment, spending and international trade. This contraction

reflected in underlying drivers such as employment levels, corporate investment decisions and government policies.

What to do next?Governments responded with expansionary monetary and fiscal policies. Smart companies used the slowdown to take a fresh look at opportunity and to re-pur-pose business models. Today, the global economy is showing signs of resilience against a backdrop of optimism.

True value is realised at the intersection of many disciplines. Internet-based information and communication technologies (ICT) have thrived in these tur-bulent times. Cloud computing, social networking and Web 2.0 companies have



“Trust, speed and cost are interrelated. Low trust decreases speed and increases cost.”—John Anthony Painter Strategic ICT Advisor

emerged as major players. Businesses use ICT to enhance affordable

and sustainable innovation. Apple gained nearly 150% in market capitalisation in 2009-2010. At the start of this new decade, eight of the fifty largest firms measured by market capitalisation are technology firms: Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Cisco, Ora-cle, HP and Intel.

Governments use ICT for more effec-tive governance. The early development of a secure and reliable Internet banking system in Estonia offered a springboard to launch other online public services such as e-voting. Estonia now serves as a model for public sector ICT effectiveness.

Individuals use ICT to construct more cohesive societies. This bonding agent has morphed into an array of business-related opportunities tied to social networking. Nature abhors a vacuum. Today, for-profit organisations have an opportunity to col-laborate with citizen-sector organisations (CSOs) by forming never-before-seen hybrid

value chains (HVCs) to solve large-scale problems neither group has been able to solve on its own.

CSO partnerships are creating jobs three times as fast as traditional sector counterparts.

The Nordic region serves as the best example of how governments, businesses and individuals are collaborating together and using the interlocking potency of ICT to drive unparalleled results. The United Nations recently named Norway as number one on the Human Development Index (HDI) as the country with the best quality of life.

In fact, the World Economic Forum reports that the five nation-states who make up the Nordic region achieved top 10 Net-worked Readiness Index (NRI) rankings in 2009-2010. Indeed, there is clearly a correla-tion between countries who invest a level of GDP for ICT and its impact on the overall quality of life for all citizens.

ValueOpportunitySpeed&




More With Less For MoreOpportunity is often found in odd places. Executives instinctively play it safe during difficult times. While this tendency prevails, history is busy teaching a different lesson. Necessity is often referred to as the mother of invention. Consider that eighteen of the thirty firms listed on the Dow Jones Industrial Index were founded during economic downturns.

Best practices within the CIO com-munity can often trace its origins else-where. Bhaskar Chakravorti of the Har-vard Business School signals a call to action to round-up “unusual suspects.” His insight brought to light the vision of investment banker Iqbal Quadir.

Quadir reached his venture to bring universal phone service to his native Bangladesh. It’s significant that Ban-gladesh is one of the worlds most resource-and infrastructure-poor coun-tries. 80% of its population is dispersed across 86,000 villages.

Counter-intuitive thinking breeds success. A strange alliance was fash-ioned between Norwegian GSM leader Telenor, Grameen Bank and Bangla-desh Railway. The result of Quadir’s idea is Grameenphone. In 1993, there was only one phone per 500 Bangladeshis. Today, one in three has mobile access. And Gra-meenphone continues to show signs of growth with a 14% revenue increase this year. Bangladesh is currently ranked 118th out of 133 countries on the Networked Readiness Index– up 12 places from last year.

Quadir’s determination bears out a valuable lesson for CIOs. Being the first to know about a problem is less important then being the first to understand its true nature and oppor-tunistic properties. Consumers in the United States and Europe are asking for inexpensive products and services. Billions of first-time consumers in China and India will join the middle class in the next decade and can only afford the cheap-est offerings.

Gandhian innovation calls for learn-ing to do more with less for more

people. Bharti Airtel best illustrates this way of thinking with a ground-breaking business model that offers affordable and sustainable services to a more inclusive customer base.

Bharti charges 1 cent per minute of talk time – compared with 2 cents in China and 8 cents in the U.S. The cor-relation of respective cost ratios to 2009 GDP in China (+9.1%), India (+7.4%), and the U.S. (-2.6%) concludes a salient outcome. In his new book “The Speed of Trust,” Stephen Covey identifies trust as the one thing that changes everything. “Business leaders around the world have made it increasingly evident that speed to market is now the ultimate competitive weapon.”

In short, trust, speed and cost are interrelated. Low trust decreases speed and increases cost. Friction slows down the decision making process and results in a higher cost “tax.” On the other hand, high trust increases speed, lowers cost and results in a dividend. “Trust (and therefore speed) is the new currency of the global economy.”

“Gold standard” CIO credibility is earned and a premium should be placed on character, integrity and positive intent. Behaviour takes into account what we do and how we do it. There is a reciprocal nature to trust. When we give it, we receive it. When we receive it, we return it. In doing so, a cycle of uplift and speed is accomplished. Trust should be considered in context. Francis Bidault and Alessio Castello of the MIT Sloan Management Review score a different perspective on “Why Too Much Trust Is Death to Innovation.”

—John Anthony Painter is a Strategic ICT

Advisor at JohnAnthonyPainter.com. John is

a senior IT executive with 15 years of experi-

ence driving results in global strategic IT

development. [email protected]

Would you say the CIO's role is more operational or strategic?

It depends on the state that the organisation is in. When the organisation is in growth mode, the role of the CIO is to ensure that the business growth is supplemented by faster roll-outs in the right places in the organisation. At this time the CIO’s role is operational. When the organisation is changing, especially during times of eco-nomic crises like in the last couple of years,

“If the CIO goes to the board and does not know the business part, he will cut a very sorry figure.”—Anjan BoseCIO, Haldia Petrochemicals Ltd



I N T E RV I E W COVE R S TORY

Splitin

the MiddleA smart CIO knows when to stay out of tactical initiatives within the company, let his team get on with it, and focus on the big picture, says Bose. He equips himself to always see IT as a component of business and never business as means to deploy IT. BY GEETAJ CHANNANA

it is important that the CIO takes a strategic role. The C in the designation implies that s/he sits in the management committee or the board of operating directors. While there is an element of operations and a day to day role that is given to the operations employees, most of the CXOs meet for stra-tegic reasons.

Can CIOs make a tangible differ-ence in growing business, how?

There are organisations such as banks, insurance companies, telecommunica-tions providers or retail businesses where after finance or business per se it is IT that decides if the business can grow or not. We come from the manufacturing side which is

essentially B-to-B. In this scenario it is more about building relationships.

We have a highly capital intensive plant with a few customers. The same is true for our vendors. Further, in our business, the relationship between the vendor and customer is very blurred. We do not know who is the customer or the vendor, there are frequent role reversals. They supply us some products and they buy other products from us. The chemical industry is always in a group. It is a group that shares common molecules. In that environment the technol-ogy piece is of extreme importance because of the robustness of information needed; to ensure the level of transparency in what is being shared and if there are changes they

are informed in advance of the changes. At any point of time, because our fixed

costs are high, we always balance what grade to produce at what point of time. If the residency of the molecule in our plant is high, it means that it is taking longer to pro-duce, which implies that it is taking more asset time and is thus more expensive to produce. Business decisions are taken based upon this fact.

If I have committed a product that takes longer time to produce in the plant and I am not getting enough revenue from the market, I have to tell the customer. Either he can pay more for the product or we give him a choice to move away from our product. We develop that market for him.

We must optimise the product mix on the fly and that is where the value of IT comes in. This is because we cannot control the prices as they are governed by indexes.

Please cite examples where you have been able to achieve this?

I will give you a crude-based example that will help understand what we do. We




produce LPG, the cooking gas you normally use. Look at the complexity, we get LPG after we crack Naphtha. We can do three things with it – we can either sell it in the market, we can crack it further to create ethylene or propylene; or we can burn it in our power plant. This runs into crores per hour. For instance, currently, in real time we are not cracking any LPG. We are feeding 244 tonnes of naphtha per hour, and we are produc-ing LPG at 24 tonnes per hour. We are selling it in the market because the price of LPG is high in Europe because of freezing winters in the region. The market price of LPG there has doubled.

This is where IT is beneficial in deciding and anticipating the market conditions before we produce. For instance, if the global market is on the way up, we do not crack LPG or burn it in our furnaces. In our case the use of IT is more internal than external.

Should CIOs be on the man-agement committee – what

should they do to get there?It is very difficult for a CIO to be in this position unless the company believes that IT is of strategic rel-evance. He can push himself to the board but nobody will listen to him, and it is hard to find anyone that does not think like this.

The issue is that if the CIO goes to the board and does not know the business part, he will cut a very sorry figure. There are all kinds of CIOs, and my thinking is that a majority do not look at business as a business but they look at it as an opportunity to deploy IT. This is not going to work. This also makes it difficult for the next CIO to get on the board too.

Finally, it is extremely important for the CIO to speak the language of the business that everybody understands. He negates his importance himself if he is not understood by the busi-ness.

The cio asEarth ChampionIt doesn't take highfalutin ideas to make a positive difference to the only planet we have, said Alpna J. Doshi, CIO of R Com. Even a well-implemented ERP has an impact.Excerpts by Harichandan Arakali.

W hen it comes to saving the planet, action lags ambi-tion, and the way to bridge the gap is to start with what we can easily influ-

ence, says Alpna J. Doshi, CIO of Reliance Communications. "The most important aspect is that from a sustainability perspec-tive, in fact it is primarily IT that can actu-ally introduce this idea of the social environ-ment." Doshi tends to relate both business and society as a merger, "a good marriage between the two." This means that overall, "we must do things in IT which are affect-ing not only the business growth and overall business sustainability, but also as a result of all those efforts, generating some social and environmental dividend."

For instance, even an implementation of

SAP ERP system, if one has done a good job of it, the immediate output in terms of dashboards, reports and so on can be "so streamlined and targeted that a lot of paper use can be avoided."

If there is an office printer, and "this is something that we are implementing across our company," one can aim at very limited paper usage, she said. In a 'hi-tech' world, the need for looking at paper documents should be completely eliminated. "I'm sure that will take some time, but we are certain-ly on the reduction run right now."

Sustainability is certainly a must in large corporations and without it, things can go into such a tailspin that the effect on the environment can be disastrous. "While we get carried away by the so called IT initia-tives, I've really made it clear that these ini-



O PI N I O N COVE R S TORY

tiatives will be informed and driven by the need for the proper balance with respect to our place on the only planet we have."

If one doesn't institute a strong gover-nance mechanism here, with a clear target, enabling the proper and effective use of all technology, reducing carbon footprint will be impossible.

Measurement is the toughest part. Find-ing ways to quantify accurately what impact a particular effort has had takes time, how-ever, consider this simple example:

With printer and copier papers, "we track the usage and look for reduction on a month-on-month basis." They do this by figuring out what it is that people are print-ing, connecting the output with the number of copies – see if they really needed to print a certain document. Barring exceptional

cases where it's unavoidable, "we try and discourage printing." Even activities such as demo-presentations today can all be done electronically, Doshi said.

Here's another very simple idea: If a customer wants a re-print of bills, "we are trying to target particular sections of cus-tomers who we know are the most likely to use the Internet and computers a lot." "We are encouraging them to look online on our web site where we have already provided them all the information that they need."

Having spent the last two decades in the U.S., Alpna has seen "a dramatic reduction in the use of paper in that part of the world." A simple benchmarking with western world with our scene here, can also help, she said. What all of this means of course is a lot of hard work to persist and get people to change their habits to more environment-friendly ones.

nance mechanism here, with a clear target,

ing ways to quantify accurately what impact

-ing, connecting the output with the number of copies – see if they really needed to print

“If one doesn't institute a strong governance mechanism, reducing the carbon footprint will be impossible”—Alpna J. DoshiCIO of Reliance Communications Ltd



S hould the CIO own the respon-sibility of an IT project failure? There is no straight answer to the question. Very few CIOs will accept any kind of defeat

upfront. But theoretically, a true CIO or business leader is the one who accepts the ownership of the IT organisation and the projects deployed and run by it. At that stage it doesn’t matter whether the project was initiated by IT or the business.

Under all circumstances, the CIO is the one who owns the responsibility of every IT project. A lot depends on a CIO’s ability, experience and wisdom, how s/he identifies the glitches in the early stages of the project to prevent catastrophes.

In practice, the ownership of an IT project can vary from being totally in the hands of the CIO to one where the CIO organisation is merely doing the bidding of the business enterprise. In the first case, clearly, the buck stops with the CIO, in the second, perhaps one can see a failure as a joint one at best.

An IT project can fail due to different reasons, including poor need-identification and mismatch between stakeholders' expec-tations and the action taken on the project. Issues such as scope definition, cost esti-mates and ROI calculations – each one of these too has a role to play in either derail-ment or failure of a project.

I would say that the cost, stakeholder expectation mapping and the risk assess-

ment of any IT project fall directly in the CIO’s domain and in case of a project fail-ure the CIO has to bear the brunt. But in the second scenario where CIO is just an enabler, s/he can’t be held responsible for any sort of failure clearly because he is just one link. It may be a classified as a joint fail-ure of CIO and the business.

To save the projects from meeting an ill fate, it is very essential for a CIO to assess the risks associated with that project. S/he has to ensure a thorough and continu-ous communication within and outside the team so that the issues can be identified in the early stages of a project. But even after all of this, if the project fails, it is good to accept the failure rather than keep the stake-holders in the dark. We all learn from fail-ures. This is how we evolve and improve.

Collective ResponsibilityNot doing this presents various stakehold-

ers with the undesirable opportunity to play the blame game. A CIO, however people-friendly s/he is, needs to set some rules of the game. Every role, responsibility and function has to be defined and explained to its bearer. Before even taking the first step, it is essential to have everyone commit to the success and/or failure of the project. You may have seen how the critical space missions work. Everyone knows what role they have to play. But if the project meets a disaster, there is no one person singled out in the team. It is considered as a collec-tive failure and that’s the best way to accept defeat and rebuild the whole thing to make it successful.

Similarly, in IT, it is imperative for the CIO to lead from the front and keep the team informed about the scope and imple-mentation road map. In my personal experi-ence, the majority of these issues crop up because of the sense of insecurity. Everyone

The best of intentions can go awry says Daya Prakash, Head – IT, LG. When they do, ensure that everyone started with a sense of collective responsibility, learn your lessons and move on. BY DAYA PRAKASH

whenprojectsfail




is scared that if anything goes wrong, they will be blamed. That thought needs to go. Going back my example of space missions, everybody knows about his/her role. S/he performs that role and similarly others also do their job. In those cases, not only the project failures are minimised but also there’s always a sense of collective respon-sibility. An organisational matrix plays a big role in this.

Don't Look for LosersNo CIO starts a project to have it fail. In almost all instances, when an ambitious project starts, it is assumed that it will be successful. When a project fails, even those who played their part very diligently become part of an unsuccessful project team. Do we really call them losers? The answer is no. A project may have failed but to put the onus on one person or to single out one member of the team will be a little immature. Yes, I agree that the team members may need counseling or guidance or may be hand-

holding too and that’s where a CIO needs to be playing the role adequately but certainly not single out anyone to put the entire blame of the failure.

Even with external partners, the intent is not to highlight that mistake and reprimand someone even if he is an external partner. I will reiterate my point that a CIO should work more on identifying the risk early on so that every possible casualty is avoided. The risk should be mitigated to the extent that even if something happens, it doesn’t bring the project to a standstill. Yes, you do tell your partners about things which could have been better. Even the partner needs to be forthcoming in accepting the mistake and move ahead with a positive attitude.

If you have convinced the team on a proj-ect and that team is committed to taking on the job, you have won half the battle. This very team will ensure that it keeps failure out of the radar screen. It all depends on how much a CIO involves himself with the team to keep the morale high. A lot depends on those kind of soft skills of a CIO.

who played their part very diligently become

“Cost, stakeholder expectation mapping and risk assessment fall directly in the CIO’s domain.”—Daya PrakashHead-IT, LG Electronics



CIOasNation Builder

The CIO plays an important role in building an organisation. The same effort can be applied to build the nation, writes Arun Gupta, Group CTO, Shoppers’ Stop

A CIO’s role as a change agent has been talked about quite often but only as a change agent for the organisation. Why can’t we as CIOs be change

agents for the nation and be a part of nation building initiatives?

To start with, just look at the various CSR activities that every organisation engages in. Just like the corporate initiatives that may be driven by the CEO but executed by the CIOs, even the CSR activities could be driv-en by the CEOs but executed by the CIOs in terms of enabling the activity with the use of technology.

CIOs can also go into some educational institutes and teach for the benefit of the industry.

While the number of educational insti-tutes in the country is in itself not sufficient, the students coming out of these institutes are often not equipped with the right skills to be absorbed in the industry. The problem lies with the curriculum. It is important to tackle the problem at source instead of hav-ing students to do extra courses post their graduation in order to be employable. We can influence the curriculum in the schools and higher education institutes in a way that the change in education patterns are aligned to the industry needs.

Take for example an IT organisation. What are the things they’ll look for in a candidate in order to hire him? It’ll be mathematical skills, logical skills and they would need some specific technology skills

which they would typically provide once the candidate joins them. Instead, what some these companies can do is to tie up with some of the institutes and offer the techni-cal training as a part of the final semester so that the students are absorbed as soon as they graduate. This isn’t new and corpora-tions are going into the institutes to sign up agreements to hire students if they modify their courses to suit the needs of the organi-sations. With such tie-ups the employees that come on board are productive much quicker than those who come from tradi-tional courses.

I have been involved in influencing the curriculum in some of the institutes like SP Jain, where I have been a part of the academic council. Lately, I’ve been involved




with the Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan. I am try-ing to create some of these things that the industry needs and helps not just the indus-try but also the students as the institute gives them the industry experience of what is relevant in the current market context.

Federal CIOThe Indian government has been investing heavily in e-governance initiatives. We as citizens rarely get to see the benefits of this initiative. There are multiple ways in which we as CIOs can contribute. Look at the way the US has seen huge benefits in terms of col-laborated efforts across different states, across different government organisations after the appointment of a Federal CIO — Vivek Kundra. The simple thing he did was to cut down parallel projects. There were several projects running across the country trying to

do achieve the same thing. This is typically what we as CIOs do in our organisations to improve productivity and reduce cost.

Even in our country we have exactly the same issues. Every state and government body works as an autonomous body and there is no central control. Ideally a CIO within the government and today NIC is playing that role to an extent. Why aren’t they cross leveraging across states, across functions. Why does every state or city have to create a different technology for land registration, why can’t we have a national grid running that uniform technology, which could be a great direction towards the government cloud. Success in such initia-tives impacts everyone in the country as the government expenses are brought down drastically and these funds could now be used in other development activities such as education an food security.

The role of CIO associations could be big in building the nation by providing the right skills to implement large scale IT projects for the government. But the challenge is whether the government would listen and would want to involve us in the process, considering we are not a part of the govern-ment. Your starting point could be, if there is a meeting of those similar functions happen-ing anywhere in the country, that is where we can go and start asking those questions. The overall process in which the government works, doesn’t lend itself to outside help. The government has taken some people from the private sector to drive these initiatives but they had to move out of their corporate roles.

The government needs to open up to the opportunity from the CIO community and leverage the vast talent that already exists.

CIOs keep talking about good governance and good IT practices but now they need to start raising the bar to say why we are not taking such initiatives for the rest of the country. That is another way of creating awareness about good governance. Main-stream press should be shown the impact good governance can have on the country so that there can be some awareness in the country as to how we can improve the over-all governance of the country using the best practices from the industries.

These are just some small steps that can create a huge difference to our nation.

industry needs and helps not just the indus-

gives them the industry experience of what

the US has seen huge benefits in terms of col-laborated efforts across different states, across

projects running across the country trying to

“Government needs to open up to the CIO community and leverage the vast talent that already exists.”—Arun GuptaGroup CTO, Shoppers’ Stop




CIOs need to position themselves as 'Change and Innovation Officers,' says Vodafone Essar's Navin Chadha. This will help them fight undesirable perceptions within the business about IT and give them the leverage to become significant partners in business, he says.

Partners in

Business

T he role of the CIO has trans-formed from technology stew-ard to business value creator in last decade and much of this goes to recession where the

spending capability of CIOs came under scrutiny from various stakeholders.

CIOs can no longer spend in the same manner on technology as they used to do a decade ago unless they deliver substan-tial business value. This created a unique opportunity for CIOs to look at the business needs and align technology with them. It also created a need for CIOs who under-stand business and technology, and link the two. This alignment brought CIOs the opportunity to become partner in business.

As technology changes, CIOs need a vision on how such changes can create value for business. In my view CIOs are uniquely positioned to understand the technology vision and business vision and marry them. This helps in converting the traditional view

of an IT organisation from support function to enabler or partner in business.

Delivering business value is often not easy and CIOs need unique competencies to do that. They have to manage and lead change which is often more sociology and less tech-nology. In order to do this, CIOs have to be smart and maintain a close personal touch with business and influence them with their thoughts and vision.

For CIOs to become value creators, Busi-ness will also have to treat the CIO with equal respect. This can happen when CIO has managed to position his or her role in the organisation. Visibility is another aspect where CIOs can create maximum impact for the business and this can come by com-municating internally and externally.

Communication is one of the strongest requirements for CIOs and it also creates value for the role as Information needs to be communicated. As the state of the CIO is changing, we see larger representation of

CIOs from industry across various forums, technology events and panel discussions. Meeting business and communicating suc-cess through newsletters brings CIOs much closer to business and changes perceptions.

We have to fight the real enemy respon-sible for the lack of partnership from business, which is not often the attitude of business but perception of business. As the role of the CIO moves to the next level of maturity, they will have to deliver value and impact the top line and bottom line of the business. By creating such impacts CIOs do find their place in boardroom and become business leaders. This transformation from cost centre to value creator is not easy.

For this the CIOs must have the knowl-edge of the domain of the business, take active interest in day to day affairs, partici-pate in business and strategy meetings and understand the organisation's direction and goals and align IT strategy to business strategy. By managing the IT portfolio in




line with business goals, CIOs can create distinctive values and by measuring those values and ROI, CIOs can demonstrate abil-ity of the IT organisation as a value creator and bring the paradigm shift to the tradition view of the cost centre.

The next important aspect is strategy and architecture to handle business growth. Today organisations are growing at a rapid pace and technology should not only enable growth but CIOs should also bring the knowledge and 'know how' by which they can fuel growth. Just meeting the expecta-tions is reactive and as a business leader, one should be ahead of time and expecta-tion to create differentiators. This is the reason IT strategy and architecture is one very important aspect for CIO’s success and should remain in direct control of the CIO.

Today’s business is very dynamic and a rapidly changing world also creates tremen-dous demand to secure the environment and support the dynamism. This cannot happen without the robust security and compliance in place. There is an increased dependence on CIOs to do so and meet the compliance and security requirements through effective governance of IT organi-sation, vendor management, risk manage-

ment and technology implementation. This is something new but plays a significant role in protecting the business interests.

Growth is important but managing the growth is also equally important and experi-ence tells that management of growth is

more challenging then management of downturn.

Above all these, one of the expectations that usually business does not have from the CIO is to fuel innovation or bring in a culture of innovation, though innovation is extremely necessary for the organisation to succeed when business is under pressure of declining margins, falling revenue and so on. Though it is matter of debate, I believe a crisis is also a breeding ground for innova-tion. CIOs have a very important role to play in innovation by creating either the platform for innovation or managing cultural change around it or helping business with innova-tive thoughts and ideas which can dramati-cally change the outcome of the business.

In my view CIOs should also call them-selves 'Change and Innovation Officers' (CIO) by leading the change and innovation in the organisation. This will help the CIOs to position themselves uniquely within the organisation and will pave the way to the

boardroom.CIOs cannot do it all alone and they

will need to be supported by competent resourced around them. The CIOs must possess leadership skills to lead people to generate future CIOs and mentor them to lead. Success is not in isolation and when excellence breeds excellence, leadership thrives. We see more smarter and aspiring people especially in growth market and retaining them requires lot of leadership skills. Retention of key staff is important and CIOs should take leadership seriously and mentor teams under them as I agree that people leave and join their managers.

To sum it all, I believe that we have a lot of opportunities for CIOs and I view the threat of constraints of budget as an opportunity to align with business. The myth that CIOs cannot move up to the boardroom no longer exists and we see more cross pollination of CIOs and Business leaders and some CIOs moving up the value chain to become CEOs. Leadership, skills and passion can always help the CIOs achieve what they want and change the state of the CIOs.

In my view CIO is an important role and equally important is the careful selection of the CIO. The organisation structure should also support the role as not positioning the CIO at a significant level on the hierarchy is a recipe for disaster.

-

and bring the paradigm shift to the tradition

pace and technology should not only enable

very important aspect for CIO’s success and

-

“The real enemy responsible is not often the attitude of business but perception of business.”—Navin ChadhaIT Director, Vodafone Essar Limited



T he CIO's role as it evolved over a period of time first stared with the guy who was basically the chief infrastructure officer. Then it moved into the systems

area where the CIO (Chief Information Offi-cer) would provide the systems to ensure that the company was running well.

Over a period of time, the role has moved to become that of a chief integrating offi-cer. This means that the systems provided the integration of business. As technology emerges, there is a crying need for someone to articulate how businesses can gainfully use these technologies to improve/enable businesses, which then means that it is also a role of the chief innovation officer trying to tie technology to business.

"Should a CIO be a technologist or a busi-ness guy? This is becoming a moot point," Badiga said. "Unless you understand the business, how will you take all your technol-ogy suggestions and figure out which is best for your business?"

As business technology infrastructure

becomes increasingly commoditised and provided on tap, the CIO will evolve into one who can evaluate technologies for their value in enabling business. In the process, the CIO will himself become a Chief Busi-ness Enabler, Badiga said.

"In our own case, in what we call Wipro on Wipro, as technologies emerge we have to say whether this will work or not – for instance cloud computing." So Badiga's team created proof-of-concept projects to show how this might work well. "This was post virtualisation and all that. Then we said, it works well and why don't we create a mechanism to provision for all our develop-ment projects."

Using discrete components for equipment and software used to take up to six weeks, every time a new project requirement came up. Now using the cloud environment, "we are provisioning it in between 35 minutes to 6 hours." Earlier, with each requirement, "you had to go and buy separately with all the attendant issues of reuse, control an so on." With the integrated cloud, it was about

“Do we need technology innovation as part of the manager, the answer is yes. Does he need to be a good technologist, yes again.”—Laxman BadigaCIO of Wipro Ltd



As technology infrastructure becomes increasingly commoditised and provided on tap, the CIO will evolve into one who can evaluate technologies for their value in enabling business, Laxman Badiga, CIO of Wipro Ltd., said. In the process, the CIO will himself become a Chief Business Enabler, Badiga said, in an interview with Harichandan Arakali.

keeping track, ensuring licensing – "even the vendors were evolving."

"To gain six weeks, we improved the provisioning cycle. From there to move to self-provisioning, you give more control to the user," Badiga said. The CIO is now an infrastructure provider after innovating on the provisioning cycle and creating a mechanism to be able to do that in the first place, he said. "So now with a day's notice, we have the environment to do this."

Consider a different example – physical security: "Can we provide it as a practice, as a service," Badiga wanted to know. With no single vendor, they had to figure out how to bring in all the various requirements

The key is that apart from the technology involved, one needs to know how the busi-ness works – "so there is no one answer." What is happening, however, is that the role of the CIO is evolving into one that encom-passes the ability to talk technology from the point of view of how it will boost business. Eventually, infrastructure will get commodi-tised and the CIO will increasingly become Chief Business Enabler.

of access control to buildings, fire safety, attendance of personnel, alarms, employee safety, anything else one can think of and integrate them into one centrally controlled service – "again using technology."

"So, do we need technology innovation as part of the manager, the answer is yes. Does he need to be a good technologist, again the answer is yes." He or his team should be able to say "this is what the business needs and this is how we can be enable it with this technology."

Next, new ways of delivery of services is another area of interest for the modern CIO. This involves timely transfer of informa-tion to the right person in the organisation.




Get people to believe they have a stake in the change that is coming, equip them to handle the change and hand-hold for as long is necessary, says Satish Pendse, CIO, HCC. That, and acceptance that change management too is integral to a CIO organisation's success, will get you there, he says.

W hen it comes to the suc-cess of any project, three things form the key — people, process and tech-nology. Technology would

be the easiest to handle considering technol-ogies are more mature today and you have a good number of skill sets in India. Manag-ing and changing the processes is slightly trickier as you need people to do that, and it is the people part that is the toughest as a project can only be successful if people start using it. If you can manage people well through change management, then you’ve achieved your goal.

The best way to deal with change manage-ment is by using what I call ICE technology. ICE stands for involvement, communica-tion and education. If you’re involving peo-ple in the process of change that you want to bring in, if you involve them in the process right from the conceptualisation, then more the involvement, more the ownership, more the participation and thus fewer the chances of project failure.

Involvement: Involvement can happen in various ways. Take for example an ERP proj-ect implementation. Suppose you involve people in selecting the ERP packages, you need to involve them in deciding why you

need an ERP an organisation. And if they think you don’t need an ERP, then let them speak up and let there be a debate on that. Then involve people in project implementa-tion. Implementation teams should ideally be chosen from the team which would subsequently get benefited from that imple-mentation. The basic point is to involve peo-ple in the changes that you want to achieve.

Communication: Most problems in the world happen due to the lack of communi-cation. If you’re working on an IT initiative and if you communicate what the initiative is, what it’s going to do, what it would do to each individual, what it means to the organi-


Resistance,

use icemelt



sation, then the possibility of resistance from the sudden change is reduced signifi-cantly. If you say upfront that these would be the problems but these are the solutions and this is the reason why we’re doing it, the more you communicate to people about the initiative, the better it is.

Moreover, communication is a two way process. You can’t just tell people about the project but also need to listen. You listen to people’s problems, their doubts, their suspi-cions, and then address each of the issues. If you make that kind of communication, the intent behind the change is well com-municated, you let a good amount of debate to take place and once there is good amount of agreement about the intent of the change, about the difficulties of the change, about the difficulties that people would have to face and what the solutions are for it

— all these things if well communicated throughout the change process, create less uncertainty in the minds of people when the change actually happens because before the change actually takes place, you’ve already equipped people to handle it.

There are various ways to communicate to the employees — through in-house jour-nals, projects teams can conduct debates at various places, you can do an e-mail campaign, ask people to send their doubts through e-mail. Depending on the type of organisation and the organisation culture, any of the means can be adopted. The important point is to make regular commu-nication about the change until the change actually takes place.

Education: The third important thing is to educate. You need to educate people about the change. For example While deploying a new technology, you require people to use sophisticated systems which they are not used to. So you need to educate and train them about it. If people are unable to use the technology or if they are finding it too complex, then immediately people develop negativity about it. If you train them adequately, then the change becomes much smoother. Education needs to be done at various levels of the organisation in various ways. At senior levels, you may not have to train people hands on but you still need to educate them about the concepts, about the benefits etc. At operational level you’ll need to tell people more about the tools and tech-niques. What’s important is that you edu-cate people about the initiative much before it is launched and you need to continue educating and training them even after the initiative is launched so that the change gets ingrained into the system. A kid who’s learning how to walk doesn’t start walking on day one. You don’t just teach him how to walk one day and expect him to walk per-fectly. You’ll teach him until he’s confident of walking.

These are the three basic principals to smoothen change. Moreover, you always need to under promise and over deliver. Let people be ready for eventualities and work in such a way that eventualities don’t happen.

Whenever we deploy an organisation-wide change through IT, we do face this kind of challenge. When we deployed ERP for the first time, five years back, we did face these


of agreement about the intent of the change,

“The best way to deal with change management is by using ICE — involvement, communication and education.”—Satish PendseCIO, HCC




challenges and we were prepared for it with the principals mentioned. One learning from the deployment, however, was that the time that we envisioned for people to start using ERP was much longer than we anticipated. Time to use the new system may be shortened but time to actually start getting business benefits from the deployment can take much longer and so we need to con-stantly train and educate people till the time they start getting business benefits out of the deployment.

In a scenario where you feel that the change management issue is so big that you’ll have to rollback the project, you should instead look at an elongated change management initiative. Since you didn’t do that proactively, now you’ll have to do it reactively. The reac-tive change management would take at least 1.5 times to twice the time com-pared to what it’d take with the proac-tive approach because by this time the negativity has already been set into the organisation and you have to undo it.

Middle Down ApproachThere are some organisations where the top down approach works well. However, it is the middle layer that is the strongest in most organisations. While the top layer comprises people like the CEO and Directors, the middle layer comprises department heads and regional heads. This is the layer that runs an organisation on a day-to-day basis. Therefore it is important to con-nect to the middle layer for change management and it is better to drive the bottom through the middle layer. Middle is strong in terms of opera-tional decisions. The top is required to give the strategic support, middle is required to drive it operationally.

Middle layer is also the toughest layer to manage in terms of change manage-ment. Top works at a strategic level and looks at the business advantage and thus is sold to very easily. The bottom layer typically is driven by the bosses. If the bosses decide to adopt the change, then they are also willing to accept it. However, it is the middle layer that really decides to accept or reject the

change in their minds. It is also a very intelligent layer, which operationally and practically runs the organisation. If the middle layer is managed well, it is the best way to manage change.

Even our organisation is one where the middle management is very strong. Project managers manage typically a 300-400 crore rupee business and in effect they are the MDs of a 300-400 crore rupee company. So if they decide not to deploy a project, it won’t happen. So, when we implemented organisation wide ERP, we focused on the project managers as supporters of our initiative. So, we tried to show the project managers the benefits for them to adopt ERP. Yet, convincing them wasn’t very easy as they would chal-lenge whatever you would say. So we had to arrange one day workshops for them every three months where differ-ent functions of ERP were discussed and after 4-5 such workshops then we realised the usage is really happening. We used to listen to them on a one-on-one basis and talk, even talk to them casually to get their honest concerns and feedbacks and then we tried to address these. The whole exercise took us more than a year.

Change to Drive ChangeI would say that in order to drive the change, we as IT people first need to change ourselves. I’ve found various times that IT people feel their job is just to deploy technology, offer training and support and that change manage-ment isn’t really their job because from their point of view it is a very boring job. They feel change management is not technology and is just a soft-skills job. Even in my team I’ve people who want to go on and implement other technologies even before the business users are ready to accept the previous one.

So, first, all IT people need to under-stand that change management is real-ly their job because unless the business user accepts the change, it is the IT people’s job to drive change manage-ment. That change first needs to hap-pen in the minds of the IT people.

“I think that many top managers still do not see IT innovation as being important to grow their business.”—SS MathurCentre for Railway Information Systems

Innovation drives wealth: this has been an undeniable fact throughout human history, and most business innova-tion is dependent on technology. Businesses depend on innovation for

long-term growth, so it is surprising to find that many businesses do not see technology as the obvious solution for managing and accelerating growth.

This is evident from the fact that the first reaction of most businesses during a down-




leastpreferredenabler!Often, businesses and governments are blind to the obvious when it comes to enabling growth and service, says SS Mathur, CRIS. Organisations that persisted with technology investments, come out winners even during tough economic conditions. BY S S MATHUR

turn is to cut technology spending. In the case of IT, this has happened twice during the current decade: once during the dotcom bust of 2000-2001, and again during the downturn of 2008-2009. Spending on tech-nology and IT saw a precipitous fall in the countries most affected by the downturn.

Businesses that persisted with technology innovation during the downturns emerged the strongest after the bad times were over. Where Amazon.com, Google, and eBay kept the thrust on technology innovation to ride out the tough times, others such as Com-merce One faltered by not doing so.

In India, we have seen Moser Baer embracing technology and thriving through its use. Without resting on its laurels, Moser Baer has reacted to changes in its business environment by giving itself a new technol-ogy direction each time, from the manu-

facture of floppy disks, to CDs, DVDs, and now solar panels. Such organisations have shown that, in the long term, continuing the investment in technology is the lowest risk approach to business.

On the other hand, some of the largest organisations have fallen by the wayside because of under-investment in technology.

Why, then, are so many businesses reluc-tant to invest in technology, especially IT? I think that many top managers still do not see IT innovations as being important to grow their business. For example, organised retail has been facing growth challenges in recent years. Footfalls remain stagnant, and location costs are difficult to cover. But how many technology solutions have we seen for this problem? IT, in particular, can offer a number of innovative solutions, from better warehousing, to logistics for home delivery,

to tie-ups with local retailers. It just has to be recognised as a strategic driver of growth.

Similar is the situation with governments. When budgets are tight, and they are nearly always tight, technology, especially IT, is the first to be affected, even though IT can substantially reduce the cost of serving the citizens, be it by better targeting of welfare schemes, or by reducing the cost of revenue collection by leveraging the Internet. Imag-ine the impact of technology in the logistics sector, if simple things like entry tax and octroi collection could be facilitated through electronic payments. The savings for the economy would be enormous! Fortunately, the Government of India has realised this in recent years.

Clearly, technology must be the first rath-er than the last preference for business and government!



From a CIO to a business manager and a part of a larger corporate sup-

port you have seen it all. How did you handle the changes in responsibilities? How did you manage the transition? The most important thing in a board situ-ation is that you are not managing, it's an oversight position. Your job is to protect the shareholders, to help and assist the management. Many directors confuse that with their old job where they were very good managers.

The transition can be really difficult because all of your training, all of your experience is hands on, to solve problems, to work with colleagues who are trying to

solve problems mutually. So one thing is telling yourself that it is not your job to do that. Once you do that, you look to apply the skills and knowledge that you have, to the job of a director. Once you do that, it's quite fun actually. You get to see the company from the highest level. You get to support the CEO.

CEOs have tough jobs and its quite a lone-ly job. You really are the top of the organisa-tion and there is no colleague inside the company for you, you're the top person, so the board can serve as a tremendous sup-port system for the CEO, if there is a good relationship between the CEO and the total board and the directors as individuals. I

always looked to try and make that connec-tion with the CEOs, so that they would trust me and open up to me and I could help more. It's a difficult balance, so there is a little bit of tension in there.

How should one handle these situa-tions of tension?

I think you have to be prepared for it. I can say that I was prepared for it. There were times where I brought up positions as a director, which were positions of commit-ment. And there were certain requirements for me stay on-board and participate. They had to be ethical, open and transparent with the directors and we had to agree on objec-

As his responsibilities changed, from long-time CIO at HP to Royal Dutch Shell’s first CIO-from-outside to an EVP with Juniper, Mike Rose found the best way to get the job done is not to preach technology or business. He saw his role as helping people find that meeting ground, Rose told Rahul Neel Mani in an interview.

WHEN IT Meets Business



I N T E RV I E W COVE R S TORY

tives for the company and live by them. I wouldn't tolerate any deviation.

When you were the CIO both at Shell and HP. What was the true percep-

tion of a CIO and the IT organisation that you were leading of these companies ? At HP, I became CIO in 1997. One of the things when you're a CIO at a technology company is that everyone is a CIO, everyone has a lot of knowledge and they all have opinions. So one of the challenges is work-ing with very smart tech savvy colleagues and getting them to appreciate the opera-tional nuances and requirements of run-ning a large IT company.

At Shell I had a very different experience. They were, for the first time, going outside to find a CIO. It was the first enterprise CIO that had a lot people reporting directly to him. In the past they had small coordinated teams. They decided that they wanted to have a more modern approach with the

intention that I could come in and learn about the business and teach them about IT, so that they could handle it once I left. My successor there was Alan Matula, a very good CIO. He was with me 4.5 years and he took over once I left.

In these 2 organisations did you do anything in particular to change the

perception within the stakeholders of the company? Yes, very much so. I worked very hard at having that business level discussion. Back 15 years ago there was the discussion about the business savvy tech people and tech savvy business people. And then we asked ourselves in CIO positions, what are we? The answer is we have to be both. The goal actually is to help everyone meet in the middle. So if your strength is busi-ness, teach them how to infuse technology and help catch up with competitors and likewise if you are a technology person, you don't lead with technology, you lead with business. So we had conversations at my

When you were the CIO both at Shell “Most important thing in a board situation is that you are not managing. Many directors confuse that with their old job of managers.”—Mike Rose, EVP Service, Support & Operations at Juniper Networks




level and we encouraged them at different levels. Since these organisations were very large, all you could do is lead and teach by demonstration.

Were you assertive also at times? Very much so. If you are in a CIO

position, then you're waiting to be asked and many times you may not be asked. If you are simply serving and giving people what they ask for, it might not be what they need, so it's always good to create some healthy tension.

The fascinating thing is that the stakehold-ers are all different people with different views of IT. Very few came from IT. Many of them didn't understand why it was all so complicated, they tried to simplify it. So you really did have to lean into them. You were serving them, you're supporting and enabling the business. But you needed to be assertive else they would trivialise the job and your contribution and ultimately not listen.

Did you ever hate being a CIO? I never hated being CIO, but there

were times when I had self doubt. I thought was I sharp enough to work with my col-leagues because I worked in very capable environments with people technically and intellectually strong. I just sometimes challenge myself to do the job well because you lead a lot of people and if you did not do a good job, the company would not be successful because if you are weak, then the company can overpower you, the stake holders can overpower you. That doesn't mean they want anything that wasn't good for the company. Strength respects strength and there were days when I felt that I was not being strong and articulate enough to convince my colleagues to do something dif-ferent, maybe even when they were asking me to do it.

What were the things you did to be strong from within?

When I started in HP in the 1970's, I asked myself if I had the ability to move up. Frankly the decision I made was that I probably didn't, so I probably would work there for 5 years. I learnt whatever I could, asked as many questions as I could. And I followed the advice of Dave Packard, one of the found-ers, which is - make a contribution. The prof-

its will follow. That's a great way to approach any job at any level. Just make a contribution, don't try and win an argument and don't try being in the spotlight, and I ended up spend-ing 23 years there instead of 5.

How did you deal with vendors -- as just suppliers or partners?

I was really clear with suppliers. I wanted them to make a profit on my account because if they didn't then I would I have a lousy team supporting me. They would be complaining all the time. But I didn't want to be the most profit making account, I wanted to pay in the top quartile for price performance. I wanted to be among the very best in the world in terms of efficiency and proficiency. That means you have to narrow that down to number of intimate suppli-ers and keep that healthy tension there. So when somebody says that you're getting a great deal, I do not take that at face value. I say prove it to me, with me, show me what companies can do when they're working with a vendor because you can't do it alone, you have to do it with collaboration, not through negotiation and you need transpar-ency and work very hard to get the right eco-system in the company.

How do you balance your role with outsourcing?

Trust and transparency is important. That said, you have to build a sufficient intel-lectual base in the company, so that you can guide things architecturally and you can prove to yourself with your supplier that you're doing things the right way.

The last thing is you have to be very cau-tious of people claiming to be your strategic partners. In an industry that has consoli-

dated such as IT outsourcing, the game is really getting economies of scale by doing things in a very effective way, the same way for lots of customers. It's hard to see how you're a strategic player if you're doing this for my competitor and everybody else in the industry the same way for economies of scale. If you want break away and be dif-ferent from the pack, you better have the intellectual horsepower in the organisa-tion because that is not how the industry is going to support, they are going to try and help as many people as possible to get economies of scale.

You've said CIOs are actually bolted to infrastructure and have failed to

focus on business models, how does that happen? When you think about such a CIO, it hap-pens in a couple of ways. One is the structure of an enterprise: CIO is often really a proxy for centralised infrastructure and not for business IT. I always said to the CEO, if you see me as central IT, as Infrastructure, don't use the term CIO, hire an infrastructure manager, you don't need me. But if you see me as business IT for the enterprise, that's what is important to get unbolted. There are many times business leaders want to bolt you and sometimes CIO's bolt themselves to the infrastructure because it's the one place in IT where you get very quantifiable data, you go out and deal with vendors, do comparisons, you get into the business process arena, you get into working very intimately with go-to-market and business models, that is where the outside world actually competes, that's the most difficult part. That's where you go from being a tech person to being a business savvy tech person.

The Story Continues...Look out for the second part of this series in the December 21 issue of CTO FORUM.

NEXTHORIZONS



NEXTHORIZONS

I was traveling recently, and was greeted with a card to programme a wake-up call (figure on adjoining page) in my hotel room. I was stag-gered. I removed the actual hotel

name, but this was real. Is it just me, or are these 19 steps to program a wake-up call a bit much?

I built a successful career in technology by following one guiding principle: Make tech-nology less painful for humans to use.

To wit: You need to focus as much (if not more) energy on the human interface as on the technology itself. Don’t ever show of the richness of your technology in the user interface. Focus completely on the user’s task. Understand how people are thinking about the task they need to do, and help them do it the way they are inclined to do it.

The point is never to show that your tech-nology is smart and powerful, it’s to make your customer feel smart and powerful.

Patty’s 3 Laws of Technology(Break them at your own business peril.) Technology should not rob people of their

humanity. If you present technology instead of a

human interface it HAS TO WORK. Technology should never make people feel

stupid.

Tech-IrritantsTechnology for humans should be easy not annoying. BY PATTY AZZARELLO

PH

OT

O:

PH

OT

OS

.CO

M

Get Everyone on the Same Page. Pg 57

The CIO Redefined. Data-room-tinkerer to master-thinker. Pg 60

FEATURES INSIDE



N E X T H OR I ZO N S S I M PL I C I T Y

new -- especially if there is to be no human back up when things go wrong ... which they will. Set your standard to, “It has to work.” Not, “It has to be leading edge.”

Don’t lose customers. If you replace humans with technology, if it doesn’t work you will lose customers because you have given them no possible alternative but to go away. There is a corollary to this law which is, “Don’t make people work hard to give you their money."

3. Technology should never make people feel stupid. - This issue is starting to go away as technology is actually working better and young people are immune to thinking that it is their fault if it doesn’t work.

Complexity is the enemy. But when tech-nology is unnecessarily complicated and hard to use, it makes (us old) people feel inadequate because we can’t accomplish the task at hand. I don’t think I have ever got through a self-checkout lane without requiring assistance from a clerk and feel-ing a bit stupid.

Here's what I mean: If you buy wine or beer, for example,

someone still needs to check your ID. Result: You Fail.

If you by an item that is too large to put in the bag, the system will freeze because it can’t sense that you put it in the bag after you scan it. Result: You fail.

If you buy organic produce, it doesn’t have a option for organic. Result: You Fail.

At this point you are given the choice either to wait for help (you feel stupid) or to steal money from the store because you can’t find a way to pay the organic up-charge (robbed of your humanity, and being made to work too hard to give them your money).

The good, at least mitigating, news is that most self-checkouts follow rule No. 2. It HAS to work so they put human backup close by.

Here's a question to ask yourself: Does your help desk have a human back up for when all else fails?

Good for businessI can tell you that in every business where I had responsibility to bring technology products to market, focusing on the human interface was good for business.

1.Technology should not rob people or their humanity. - Probably the best example of this are those voice automated systems that make you talk to a computer on the other end of the phone. I don’t know about you, but I hate this. I would feel much less robbed of my humanity if I was greeted with a computer voice that said,

"I know I’m not a person like you are, and that you’d rather talk to a person, but we think we can help you faster if you are willing to give this a try. We won’t make you talk to a computer and pretend it’s a person, and feel like an idiot shouting answers and phrases repeatedly because we can’t actually understand them … Please help us route your call by keying in your account number and answering ONE question -- then you’ll be connected to a real person." Any time your user interface makes a per-son translate something they are thinking or feeling into a narrow input that your technology will accept, you have robbed them of some humanity.

Check you help desk interface. Are you engaging people like humans, “Get help with order entry” or are you asking them to submit “trouble tickets” on “dba admin support?"

2. If you present technology instead of a human interface it HAS TO WORK!If you want me to sign up for your service on your website, don’t require a special new version of a flash plug in for me to do it. Don’t invite me to leave you feedback, only to have a link that doesn’t go anywhere. Don’t optimise your interface so much for one platform or environment that it doesn’t work right in others.

When something goes wrong a human can recover and use creativity and judgment (and opposable thumbs) if the transac-tion does not work. Technology just sits there not working, and the user goes away annoyed and irritated having failed to com-plete the task.

I was duped recently at the airport when I accepted a boarding pass sent to my mobile phone and got to an airport that didn’t have the ability to read it.

Another time, I was promised I could pick up a prescription after hours, from an automated pharmacy dispenser, and they had misspelled my name when they input the prescription so there was no way I could

pick it up and no way for the machine to recover. There was a phone support number on the machine connecting me to a line which was un-manned after hours.

Make it fool proof. One of the best soft-ware tests I ever saw was a CEO who sat on the keyboard. The system broke. Test your technology in ways users are not supposed to use it, because they will always do things they are not supposed to do.

Use Standard (boring) components. Go out of your way to use technology compo-nents that are as standard and as hard to break as possible. Don’t try to make your screens extra-pretty, or use bleeding edge widgets and gadgets in your user interface because they amuse you or you are trying to be impressive, or you want to try something

PROGRAMMING A WAKE-UP CALL

To Schedule a Self Programmed Wake-up Call

1 Pick up receiver2 Press the “Messages” button3 Press “U” to change user options4 Press “C” to change call options5 Press “A” to schedule automatic wake-up

6 Press “C” to change your wake-up call

schedule

7 Press “A” to add a new wake-up call

8 Press 3 or 4 digits to select wake-up time9 Press “A” for AM or “P” for PM

10 Choose one of the following options:

a.Press “M” for Monday thur Friday

b.Press “S” for Saturday and Sunday

c.Press “E” for Everyday

d.Press “X” for one time only (any day)

11 Press “K” to keep the wake-up call

12 Press “X” to exit the automatic wake-up

main menu

13 Press “X” to exit the call schedule call

schedule options

14 Press “X” to exit to the main menu

15 Press “X” to exit the system

To remove all scheduled self-programmed

wake-up calls:

Proceed with above steps 1-4.5 Press “R” to remove all wake-up calls

6 Press “X” to exit the call schedule options

7 Press “X” to exit to the main menu

8 Press “X” to exit the system



S T R AT E GY N E X T H OR I ZO N S

Having a strategic plan is a vital aspect of any successful organisa-tion. While many CIOs believe they only have moderate influence on the company’s strategic plan, in reality

the CIO and the IT department are the powerhouse behind it. So, even though the CEO leads the strate-gic plan, the CIO is both a strategy creator as well as the plan’s enabler.

In today’s transformational times, technology is driving business process transformation in ways it never has in the past -- in ways that are faster and more dynamic than anything we’ve witnessed previ-ously. Technology can provide options and capabili-ties that most executives may never have considered simply because they don’t know what’s possible. This is why active input from the CIO is increas-ingly more important; the CIO knows what’s pos-sible technologically. Technology is a key enabler of strategy. Typically, once executives know what their top five strategic imperatives are, they then look at what technologies will enable those imperatives in the most cost effective, efficient, and game-changing way possible.

If you simply ask people what they want and then you give it to them, you’ll undershoot because people will under-ask. They don’t know what’s possible. In that same way, the strategic planning com-mittee will undershoot identifying strategic imperatives because they don’t know what is technologically possible. And today, there

Using technology as the key enabler of strategy in an organisation. BY DANIEL BURRUS

Get Everyone On The Same Page

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We put extra effort on the user’s thinking process, the user interface, the install, the demo, the “start here” experience, the docu-mentation, the customer support help desk, and the sales and contracting documents and processes.

By doing this, my businesses were able to steal share from competitors who were overly focused on the features of their tech-nology alone and tortured their customers and partners because of it.

Taking this approach is also critical for

your help desk, because 90% of the cred-ibility of IT is based on your users’ experi-ence with your help desk. They don’t see or understand the huge mountain of business critical technology that you build and sup-port to keep the world turning nor do they care. They just see the screen that says, “raise a ticket” ... whatever that means.

—Patty Azzarello is an experienced executive,

author, speaker and CEO/business advisor and

founder of the Azzarello Group. Patty has 25 years

of experience in enterprise technology. She has

held leadership roles in General Management,

Marketing, Software Product Development and

Sales, including roles as vice president and general

manager of HP OpenView, chief marketing officer

for Siebel Systems, and president and CEO of

Euclid Software.







N E X T H OR I ZO N S S T R AT E GY

are new things that are technologically pos-sible every day.

Beyond the numbers Most organisations have strategic plans that are really financial plans in disguise. And the larger the organisation, the more true this statement is. In other words, the goals of the strategic plan are monetary goals. Having goals related to profits is fine, but that’s only one element of a strategic plan. You also need a plan for what you’re doing to de-commoditise your commodities -- those prod-ucts and services with increas-ingly thinner margins and greater competition. You need a plan that outlines what you’re going to do to differentiate yourself from your competitors. You need a plan that details your innovation strategies for creat-ing new products and services that drive new markets. Those key elements are often missing in a financially focused strategic plan.

So, yes, financial planning is a vital com-ponent of strategic planning; it helps your company reach your financial goals. But true and thorough strategic planning also looks at how you gain new competitive advantages and other broader concepts that can accelerate growth beyond the target numbers of a financially focused plan. Dynamic strategic planning needs to be a mix of financial planning (strategies to reach financial goals), strategy focused plan-ning (strategies to create sustainable com-petitive advantage), long-range planning (using research to determine future posi-tions), and tactical planning (to determine your execution strategies).

An old saying tells us, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” That saying has never been truer for companies than today, which is why having a strategic plan is so essential. But just having an annual strategic plan-ning process that creates a fixed, static plan is no longer enough. Today, it’s important to build change into the plan and have the ability to adapt it in real-time because the world and markets are changing so quickly. In other words, it’s time for companies to do some dynamic planning.

Dynamic vs. static planning These days, a traditional static plan is becom-ing less desirable and less effective, and a dynamic plan is becoming more relevant and imperative. What’s the difference? A static plan is a document that is published, shared with key employees, and then put in a filing cabinet. In contrast, a dynamic plan goes beyond one-way informing and also commu-nicates the plan in a two-way, on-going dialog

to everyone in the enterprise. A version is also shared with strategic partners. It’s a living, breathing, and evolving entity that everyone engages in and supports. Think of it like this:

A dynamic strategic plan com-municates rather than informs. It’s a two-way dialogue between the company leaders and the employees.

A dynamic strategic plan reaches beyond the company

walls and goes out to strategic partners. After all, how are your strategic partners going to help you if they don’t know what you’re trying to do?

A dynamic strategic plan evolves. It elicits dialogue and input from others. It can be continually refined and improved. This is in contrast to a static strategic plan, which is sent out to employees with the expectation that they’ll adapt to the plan rather than the

plan adapting to them and the market. Why are these three points so important?

Because with a typical static strategic plan, people may not have time to read the plan, they may not agree with the plan, and they may not take action on it. In addition, they may find major flaws in the plan but have no means to provide risk-free feedback regarding their concerns.

However, with a dynamic strategic plan, you’re communicating with people and you get feedback. You’re not telling people the plan after the fact. Rather, you’re showing them the plan and asking for their help with identifying potential challenges. The goal is to solve the problems before they occur.

Following are some additional hallmarks of a dynamic strategic plan:

Break it down. Remember that big lists rarely get done. Therefore, it’s important to highlight and break down the plan into its elemental strategic imperatives. And if you have more than five, you have too many. The magic number is three.

Why break a long plan down into basic elements? Because you want everyone in the organisation to know the basic elements. If they don’t know them, you won’t accom-plish them. If people have to look them up, they won’t. However, if it’s broken down into short elements, it’ll stay top of mind.

When it’s top of mind every day, people will know what the strategic imperatives are and will be more likely to attain them. Hav-ing the plan broken down into its basic ele-ments is like having a guide that leads your organisation to the future.

Tell stories. Bring the words of your company’s strategic plan to life by turning it into story form so that it becomes visual for people. Have the plan paint a picture in every employee’s mind’s eye so they can see what this plan will do and where the com-pany is going.

Visuals are powerful. If you’ve never seen what E=MC2 means (the visual of it) then you still don’t understand Einstein’s theory of relativity. However, those who see it in a visual story format understand it, i.e., an atom bomb going off.

For many organisations, a strategic plan can be complex and often just as hard to understand as the theory of relativity. There-fore, take the complexity in your plan and simplify it; boil it down to what it means to

5%ORGANISATIONS

WILL START USING

MICROBLOGGING

PLATFORMS BY

2012

Once executives know what their top five strategic imperatives are, they then look at what technolo-gies will enable those imperatives in the most cost effective, effi-cient, and game-changing way.




the employees and the company, and help everyone see it in their mind’s eye. Some companies have gone as far as hiring a graphic artist to paint a mural that depicts the plan. They put the mural in the lunch-room or in the entryway to the building. It becomes a visual that depicts the plan, including the outcome. Talk about getting a story ingrained in people’s minds!

Go multimedia. While your dynamic stra-tegic plan could be a document, it could also be a video that people watch; and it could be an audio they listen to; and it could be a picture they look at; ... and it could be any combination of these things.

Remember that people learn in different ways. Some people prefer to read a book, while others prefer to listen to a book in audio form. The people who prefer to read the book wonder why anyone would listen to a book. And those who prefer to listen to a book wonder why anyone would purchase a printed book.

Since we all learn in different ways, it only makes sense to put the strategic plan out in various formats. If you put the strategic plan out in one format, then you’re only engaging one learning style within an organisation that has multiple styles. In fact, in a world where multimedia is easy and the tools are relatively free, there’s no excuse for not get-ting the strategic plan in multiple formats.

Get social. Social media is an ideal way to make a strategic plan dynamic. There are internal secure versions of various social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook. Simply do a Google search to find them. The key word to remember is “social.” It’s about creating engagement and involvement. For example, as employ-ees execute the plan, you can be tweeting success stories, accom-plishments, and roadblocks -- all in an effort to gain feedback and ideas. Additionally, you can be using online collaborative tools to work with the different groups that are executing the plan so everyone can see where the other parties are in need of help. Unfortunately, most organisations still have silos and fiefdoms. A dynamic strategic plan tends to break them down and get everyone headed in the same direction.

Gain engagement How do you enact all these points? With technology. Dynamic strategic planning such as this is enabled by technology. That’s where the CIO should be helping to drive the ideas and push them in the organisation to the highest level.

The bottom line is that truly successful and innovative companies will have a stra-tegic plan that is in motion. They’ll have a dynamic document that can be added to, massaged, and refined with graphics, video, and audio, as needed. They’ll have an inter-nal, multimedia website versus a static and informing one. In short, they’ll have some-thing that’s dynamic and moving. That’s simply impossible to do without technology.

Realise that the younger generations at work will read, respond to, and engage in a dynamic plan much more so than an old-fashioned static document. This is similar to

what happened in many market-ing departments. In the past, companies would blast their commercials to the masses in a one-way, static, informing way and hope that people reacted to it. But marketing is shifting with interactive media. Today’s companies are trying harder to engage the customer and get them involved. In that same way, we need to engage our employ-

ees at all levels rather than just statically inform them. Fortunately, the tools to do so are there, and the CIO knows what they are.

But this isn’t just about the younger work-ers who have shorter attention spans and who expect a dynamic strategic plan. The Baby Boomers and older workers running the companies are drowning in information yet searching for knowledge and wisdom. Most of them don’t have time to read long and static strategic plans. They, too, need dynamic plans in order to cut through the clutter and become engaged. Because the CEO and other C-suite executives don’t know what’s possible, they’ll never ask for a dynamic strategic plan. This task rests solely on the shoulders of the CIO.

With the rapid pace of change, the tradi-tional static planning system is a dinosaur. Most people do it only because they have to. Now is the time to redefine what a strategic plan is -- for the organisation, for the employ-ees, and for the limitless opportunities such a plan affords everyone involved.

—Dan Burrus is one of the world’s leading

technology forecasters and business strate-

gists, and is the author of six books, including the

highly acclaimed Technotrends, which has been

translated into over a dozen languages. He is the

founder and CEO of Burrus Research.





Get social. Social media is an ideal way to make a strategic plan dy-namic. There are internal secure versions of vari-ous social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook.

20%OF BUSINESS USERS

WILL USE SOCIAL

MEDIA OVER

EMAIL BY 2014



N E X T H OR I ZO N S S T R AT E GY

The CIO RedefinedFrom data-room-tinkerer to master-thinker. BY PAM BAKER

The role of CIO has morphed faster than Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde -- with about the same amount of agony. Not so long ago CIOs were respected misunderstood master geeks who

were often software developers and programmers themselves. More recently, they’ve been shackled to securing and supporting a hodge-podge of bring-your-own-tech and often derided for being behind the times.

In the beginning, the CIO’s importance to busi-ness was a given (for who else knew what the heck a server was, much less how to make the thing work). Later, the CIO role became something of a mix of head hacker-smacker, cost-shrinker and Web-weaver. Now, the role has morphed once again; this time to something a little harder to label but infinitely more respectable. In essence, the CIO role has moved from data-room-tinkerer to master-thinker.

“The new marketscape is putting the ‘Informa-tion’ back in Information Technology,” explained Elizabeth Swei-gart, director of Opportune, an energy industry consulting firm. “With a services-based economy, the category of intangibles and intellectual property goes far beyond patents and trademarks; the value in these service organisations lies in the knowledge of the individuals delivering the services.”

Those CIOs that understand this paradigm shift will advance their careers at lightning speed. Those that do not are apt to lose their keys to the data room.

CIO as profit prophetCIOs are now not only fully out of the data closet but standing on the profit generation pedestal. “More enterprises are becoming information companies directly or indirectly deriving profit from the intellectual and information assets and our ability to capitalise on those assets, in real-time,” said Rob Meilen, CIO of The Sports Authority. “Our executive teams are turning to the CIO for strategies and actions that monetise the enterprise's information assets.”

In other words, CIOs are no longer expected to sit at the board-room table and suggest ways to move other C-seat dreams into real-ity, but to stand and present new revenue streams from the data the company already possesses.

“Technology is only one part of the equation. The CIO must focus

on the quality of the data captured, not only the method of capture,” said Sweigart. “Going forward, CIOs will be called on to ensure that their organisations are able to gather, store and update the knowl-edge and information held within their company by a workforce that is becoming even more transitory.”

CIOs that can truthfully boast their databases are clean, and that they found a new and meaningful way to monetise that data, are on the career fast track. “In the future, for information-based service organisations, the CIO and COO will perform the same role; there is no need to have both. Why? The revenue generating operations are information based,” said Stephen Hay, founder of the New Zealand-based boutique consulting firm, People and Process Limited.

CIO as changelingPerhaps the most interesting aspect of this recent mutation in the CIO’s role is the expansion beyond the IT space. “A CIO's role is expanding from corporate leader to change agent focused on enhancing the return on investment of information technology, expanding the business impact of IT, and acquiring and managing innovation,” said Michael Meehan, co-founder and CTO of ENX-Suite, a software and services company that helps organisations like Sears and the City of Chicago plan and execute sustainability programs.

For example, one of the new areas now falling under the CIO’s

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domain is energy. This is primarily because IT is an energy hog in need of slaughtering but it can also be because energy from the datacenter can be sold to the new smart-grids thus creating yet another new revenue stream. “Energy is one of the last unman-aged assets in the enterprise and CIOs can make huge gains if it is managed just like any other corporate asset or liability," said Meehan.

CIOs must also look to cutting energy costs, without cutting services, while inno-vating to profit from energy generation where possible. In addition, the need to protect the environment and leverage new “smart” technologies is, in effect, placing the CIO in the forefront of facility manage-ment, too. Because of this, moving facilities and energy under the scope of the CIO will become more common in the near-future.

“Changing the organisational structure such that both IT and facilities report to the CIO is a relatively simple way to align everyone in the data center around common goals, metrics and objectives,” explained Lennart Jonsson, vice president and CTO of

And, just like healthcare, CIOs must now work closely with federal regulators, hospital staffs, clinicians and other industry players, CIOs in every industry must also be able to form teams that include mem-bers outside of IT and even outside of the organisation. Soft skills are thus increasing in importance. However, in this massive expansion of responsibilities it is important not to lose sight of the continuing need to proactively manage IT.

While career advancement for CIOs is not dependent on the CIO’s ability to master all these new roles (at least not yet), those that can demonstrate such a skill set have a definite and definitive competitive edge.

— A prolific and versatile writer, Pam Baker's

published credits include numerous articles in

leading publications.





Eaton Corporation's Electrical Sector. “That, in turn, will help ensure that IT and facili-ties managers are equally motivated to lower power bills without reducing uptime.”

CIO as big picture specialistThe CIO role is also breaking into special-ties. While they must maintain their role as general IT overseer, they must also adapt more to industry specialization than they have had to do in the past.

At healthcare organisations, for exam-ple, “concepts being tested today, such as accountable care organisations and the patient-centered medical home, will rely heavily on growing IT capabilities within healthcare organisations, and CIOs will be heavily involved in that process,” explained Fred Bazzoli, senior director of Communications at CHIME – the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, an organisation comprised of 1400+ healthcare CIOs. “This goes far beyond getting software installed and making sure PCs have enough memory to operate new programs.”



N O H O LDS BARR E D PE RSO N ' S N A M E

SUPERMARKETSOF PRIVATE JETS &

Peter Coffee, Head of Platform Research, salesforce.com dis-cusses with Geetaj Channana how the private cloud is like a

private jet and the public cloud, a supermarket

You have very strong views about the private cloud. Why do you think they are a bad idea?

When someone says that they would rather have a private cloud, I believe I know what they mean but I also believe that what they prefer is in some ways unneces-sary and in other ways impossible. When someone says that they prefer a private cloud, after one or two questions, they say that they believe that the private cloud will be more secure. Then, I say let us discuss the nature of security. If you try to have security in your own operations you have – complex technology and a rapidly evolving threat environment that becomes your problem to monitor and address.



PE T E R CO F F E E E N O H O LDS BARR E D

You are in an environment where the people that you trust with the information are really your greatest source of risk.

Now if we turn the question around and ask, how is the true cloud a superior means of secur-ing your assets? There are several reasons for this. The first is that, the legacy of IT is that ownership is possession and possession is control. There is a perimeter – inside that perimeter is trust and outside that perimeter is 'not trust.' The true cloud is designed to be a highly shared system. There is no perimeter – now we must say that not where you are, but who you are decides what you can see. So instead of a boundary we have a representa-tion of the right to interact with the data. Deep down in every piece of data, it knows what its ownership is and then we can say to any customer that there are members of your per-sonnel who should be able to read certain things but not change them; others should be able to change them in a very precise way. Also, when someone uses their privilege, we can record that they have used their privilege.

Now this turns the question around, when you are in your own data centre, you rely completely on the trust that you have in your people. When you are working with our systems you can manage their privileges in a much more accurate manner, and you can have a record of what they did with their privileges. If they, either by accident or malice, misused their privileges – you know who did it and when.

The first reason, why people believe that they would rather have a private cloud, is because they think that it is more secure. I tell them that the public cloud can be more man-ageable or more secure than what they have today.

The other belief that I encounter is when people believe they will have more power to build a customized business solution if they own and

operate the resource, than they will if they are using a shared resource. For them I need to draw the picture and say that this the model that we have built, operate and maintain is in the lower level. When we improve the capacity, speed, accuracy or capability it is for everybody. In the higher layer, there are things that are specific to the clients and their work flows. There are various ways to inte-grate what you do in the cloud and other resources.

Those are two reasons that people think that they would rather have a private cloud but turn out in practice not to be correct.

Now, lets look at the other side of the coin, which is, when you say that you want to have a private cloud you mean that you want to continue investing in capital assets in infra-structure. That is what it means. You are going to buy hardware and license software, when you are doing capital expenditure it means that when you have a new business opportunity or a new initiative that you would like to undertake – the first question will not be what should we do, it will be do we have capital budget? If the answer is no, then it would be next quarter or next year, before you are able to do anything. This drastically slows the ability of the business to respond to its envi-ronment. And that is a serious cost.

Also there is a point that if you want to operate the resource your-

self, you will need many skilled staff members like database, security etc. who will not be fully occupied. Our [Sales Force. Com’s] security teams are the right size to handle 87,000 customers worth of security and they are fully engaged and they are con-tinuously monitoring the threat envi-ronment, they are continually having interviews with regulators and policy makers. The cost of this world class security team is being spread across 87,000 customers. Which means that the cost of being that safe with us much less than the cost of being this safe on your own.

This is why I believe that the pri-vate cloud is a seduction, a danger-ous label, especially, for an emerging market. Here is what it is – if I have $5 billion dollars with me to build a new global brand based in India. What will give me greater success – spending 10 percent of those assets on cloud computing resources - I write the cheque to Amazon and say that I need 1,000 virtual serv-ers for research and testing; from Salesforce.com I would need 1,000 seats of support for my customer outreach and 100 seats for my sales team. Now, this is all done and I have spent only 10 percent of my fund. 90 percent is available to do the real work. This is an appealing idea. It is one week since we had the conversa-tion about starting this company and all those services are already up and running. I am now focused on creat-ing a global brand.

What is the other way of doing things that the people who

want to sell you a private cloud like to see you do?They want you to spend not one week, but one month or a quarter purchasing hardware which is not made in India, licensing software which will be a cheque that you would be writing in USD to an American company and take up 60-70 percent of your start-up assets, send them out of the country, wait a few months, and then with the small

“When someone says that they prefer a private cloud, after one or two questions, they say that they believe that the private cloud will be more secure.”

DOSSIER

COMPANY:Salesforce.com

ESTABLISHED:

1999

FOUNDERS:

Mark Benioff,

Parker Harris, Dave

Moellenhoff, Frank

Dominguez

SERVICES:

Enterprise cloud

computing



N O H O LDS BARR E D PE T E R CO F F E E E

fraction of your remaining resources, you starting building your global brand.

That is what I see when I see somebody come to India and ask you to build a private cloud. They actually want you to pay tribute to an empire of infrastructure and slow your ability to enter a new market. Also, they reduce the amount of resources that you have available for creating differentiation and brand power. This will also hold true for an established enterprise that wants to enter a new market.

This is why I think this label is a misrep-resentation and I believe that it appeals to people’s ignorance and misunderstanding, instead of appealing to the intelligence and enterprise.

CIOs have this concern that it is easy to get into the cloud, but very

difficult to get out of it. Is it true?The good CIOs understand that when they

tion of service on a local server. The CIO needs to feel a greater sense of assurance, that this a choice that you can make – or if you desire – un-make.

This is important to know that we rec-ognize the concern and we are addressing the concern by offering a greater variety of options. Clearly, I believe that once you are in the cloud you will start taking advantage of cloud capabilities. You will start to use analytics, collaboration tools, and powerful work flow capability. Once you have done that and you decide that you want to run it somewhere else – well there will now be things that you will have to implement for yourself. I do not apologize for the fact that we offer great value, and wanting you to stay with us by offering things that would cost you more to do yourself. I do not regard that as lock-in, I regard that as a job that I am supposed to do.

pizza delivery, chemical sample delivery etc. About eight years ago, I did a web search

for _RM, which is ARM, BRM, CRM, etc. I found that everything except J, Y and Z had been used, and sometimes more than once, for 'Something Relationship Management.' Everybody knows that all business applica-tions manage some kind of relationship – sometimes one-to-one, sometimes one-to-many, sometimes many-to-one etc. When someone says to me that is our platform only for CRM, I say that you have a very narrow view of CRM and you do not realize how many common elements there are in busi-ness applications. You have entities that relate to each other in time or space or in some kind of cause effect manner and there is much that is common here. Is it true that our Force.com platform would not be a good choice for writing the next generation role playing game on the net – Yes. There are things that this platform is not designed to do.

But, if you think about it, if you wish to cre-ate a business around a gaming opportunity online, would it not be very attractive if all of your talent was focused entirely on the game playing engine. The thing that is your distinc-tive asset and all of the things that you wrap around it – like billing your customers for their time, providing customer support, etc. – would it not make sense for you to take care of this by just adding cosmetics to something available online. This way you can focus all the efforts at the heart of the service you are offering.

This is one of the most important things that a person needs to understand – that the public cloud is a supermarket. Walk in the grocery store and you will find isles with rice and beans, on the other hand will be a section with delicatessen that has complete, ready to eat meals. Then there are many other things in between. The cloud has become this general. We are the delicatessen department where we offer somewhat higher degree of packaging of somewhat more complicated offering. On the other hand is Amazon which offers you the rice and the beans of cloud com-puting. Clearly, I would rather go to the super-market than do what a private cloud will have be – which is to stick a shovel in the ground and begin to grow my dinner. That is what the private cloud is.

Cloud is not one thing, but many ideas – all you pay for is function. —[email protected]

“Clearly, I believe that once you are in the cloud you will start taking advantage of cloud capabilities.”

decide to build a windows application in favour of a Linux application they are trad-ing greater speed and capability of develop-ment against less freedom. It is very useful for the CIO to understand that the cloud also offers a spectrum of choices. I can write very standard open source code, that could normally run on a server or I could run with equal convenience on a virtual server on the Amazon cloud. Running it there means that I can have 100s or 1000s of servers for the day and then stop paying at the end of the day. But, if for some reason I decide that I want to run the code on a server right in front of me then its fine.

We have our own initiative, with VMWare called VMForce, that will allow this capabil-ity with Java applications. This is where you can deploy a spring Java application to the Force.com cloud or apply the same applica-

Lock-in is something that you continue to use something that does not work very well because switching away from it has become very expensive. I must tell you that for our customers, the only cause of switching away from us is needing to do for himself, what we have previously done. I do not consider that at lock-in. I do agree that it is a switching cost, not one that I feel that demands an apology.

What is the level of customization that can be done?

Enormous. There are some people who use the word platform to mean, here is our application and you can modify it, we use this word to mean that if you do not want our applications ignore them and do not pay for them. We have customers who have built applications in our platform to manage financial services, motion picture cinemas,

HIDDENTANGENTTHE AUTHOR IS Executive Editor, CTO Forum GEETAJ CHANNANA

[email protected]



Chrome Lining on the CloudGoogle introduces the Cr-48 Chrome Notebook.

There is a possibility of a dumb terminal that can be carried anywhere by the employees

BY THIS time next year you can have your own Chrome notebook to play with, but for now you may have to be content with the tens of reviews that have appeared on the Internet. As with mobile phones, Google is working hard to make a mark in a different way on the erstwhile note-book.

Google has been working fever-ishly on its Chrome-for-notebooks platform, which it announced earlier this year.

Unlike the usual operating systems that we have, the Google Chrome OS uses the cloud extensively for every-thing that you would want to do on your notebook.

It is literally a thin client on the move. So much so, that the Chrome laptop won't work at all if you are not connected to the Internet. And, your interface to the notebook is the well-known Chrome browser. Anything can be done on the notebook, as long as it is in the browser. Now, isn’t that exciting?

The Cr-48 notebook that has been given to a select few has received some very interesting reviews.

Chrome 9. Going forward you may see functionality being built right into printers to support this feature.

But the software is also not without its own problems. For instance, there have been various reports of Adobe Flash slowing down the notebook considerably. But, this is still a proto-type and can be given the benefit of doubt – I am sure these niggles will be solved in time.

Take all this in the enterprise con-text now – you can see the possibil-ity of a dumb terminal that can be carried anywhere by the employees and is dependent on your servers for doing anything. With data on the move being close to ubiquitous, most of your employees can be powered by such devices easily. Just that, Google has not announced an enterprise plan for these things yet.

For me, these are great signs of things to come that are going to change the way we implement IT in an enterprise. Be it the tablet devices, or cloud powered notebooks, be ready for your world to be rocked to the core. The cloud is getting bigger and bigger.

Reviewers like Techcrunch.com have described it as both “Shiny and Tar-nished” at the same time.

The body of the notebook is Mac-book-esque with a matte black exte-rior and island keys. Though most of the keys are well placed, one missing link is the caps-lock key, which has been omitted from the keyboard totally. Instead the notebook has a search key. Also, there are only a few extendable ports. There is only one VGA and one USB port on the note-book. It has in-built 3G and Wi-Fi hardware for connectivity.

One of the biggest reported prob-lems has been with the track pad, which has an inbuilt button. It is reportedly extremely buggy and doesn't work properly at all.

Getting on to the software, the machine boots up in close to 10 seconds and is ready to use for the first time in a few minutes. The set-up process is as easy as connecting to your Google account. Another interesting feature is the online print option for the notebook. For now, you can print on any printer that is connected to a computer with Google



T E CH F OR G OVE R NAN CE S E CU R I T Y

It is important to choose the right security consultancy in order to be really secure. BY JAVVAD MALIK

POINTS5

KNOW what you

want

IS IT a real infosec

company?

WHAT'S THE income model?

UNDERSTAND THE limits

KEEP IT simple

CONSULTANCYCHOOSING A SECURITY

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Track record not personalities Does the consultancy have a track record in delivering the type of security you’re specifi-cally after? Or is it a consultancy solely built around a personality? It’s not to discredit infosec personalities in any way, shape or form. But unless that personality will be delivering the consultancy themselves, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll receive any advice close to the level you’ll be charged for.

Follow fads Check up on their research. Is the consul-tancy chasing after virtualisation one year and smart phones the next? Are they always looking over the horizon at the next emerg-ing fancy threat, without having enough time to fix today’s bugs? Do their service offerings change depending upon that weeks press releases?

Keeping it simple Does the consultancy continually publish all these papers about how to protect you from these super-advanced techniques and exploits that very few people can actually develop, and most hackers will NEVER USE. It’s the simple stuff that works now, and will continue to work years into the future. Security need not be complicated.

Understand the limits You cannot outsource blame. You HAVE to take responsibility for your organisation's mistakes. Whether they be IT mistakes, ven-dor mistakes, even mistakes made by your most trusted employees. These are all secu-rity choices. You don’t have to be an expert in security; you just have to make informed decisions to control your organisation.

—This article was first published on www.infose-

cisland.com and is reprinted with prior permission

from them.

By and large, it is somewhat irrelevant whether you’re eating a genuine Indian meal or not. You just look for one that will fill you up and not burn your insides.

The same traits are displayed when organisations set out to hire an infosec consultancy. There are many consultancies out there. Most of them aren’t even really geared towards security which results in the your organisation's intestines exploding and an empty wallet.

So, to help you out, here are some things to consider when choosing an infosec con-sultancy:

Know what you want First off you need to decide why you actually need an infosec consultancy. Is it because the work can’t be done in-house? Or there are confidentiality issues? Or someone at the golf course just mentioned how their infosec team can sort out all of your prob-lems?

Is it a real infosec company? Many accountants, auditors, builders, pen-pushers, retired policemen, bankers, dolphin trainers, sperm donors and ben-efit fraudsters have somehow positioned themselves as infosec experts. But scratch beneath the surface a bit. Is this really a security company? Or another company trying to make some money off the security industry?

What’s their income model This is a touchy subject for many organisa-tions out there. Does the company actually have an income model based around actu-ally making your company more secure? Or do they simply want you to feel as if you’re more secure by writing huge reports designed simple to keep a regulatory body off your back?

There are hundreds if not thousands of “Indian Restaurants” dotted around London. However, we all know that most of these places are not owned or run by Indians at all. You have a large number of Bangladeshi or Pakistani’s owning and managing these establishments. But for convenience there’s an unspoken rule that the owners will advertise their food as “Indian cuisine” and customers will always refer to it as going out for an Indian.

S E CU R I T Y T E CH F OR G OVE R NAN CE

Many accountants, auditors, builders, pen-pushers, retired policemen, bankers, dolphin trainers, sperm donors and benefit fraudsters have somehow positioned themselves as infosec experts.



T E CH F OR G OVE R NAN CE S E CU R I T Y

Enterprise Security To Be Altered ForeverThe next dump from Wikileaks may have a huge impact on enterprise security. BY ANTHONY M. FREED

how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investiga-tions and reforms, I presume... For this, there's only one similar example. It's like the Enron emails..."

The Enron emails revealed a calculated culture of corporate corruption and an ethical void so vast that the disclosures spurred one of the biggest regulatory reforms in American history, yielding the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which nearly ten years later is still finding its ultimate reach.

Information security professionals, both inside and outside the corporate structure, have long been fighting an uphill battle in their efforts to bring assurance to the forefront of enterprise management activities.

The widespread dependence on infor-mation technology and the dynamic nature of the challenges inherent in the

protection of sensitive and proprietary data make security efforts difficult to justify to executives with a return-on-investment mindset that was drilled into them in business school.

Information security is seen as a cost-center proposition, where risk is most often evaluated in the absence of a breach event, leaving security professionals in the awkward position of proving a negative in order justify an increased need for resources to counter burgeon-ing threats.

This information security paradox becomes readily apparent to all involved in the aftermath of a catastrophic data security event, and WikiLeaks is pursuing just that.

The crux of the problem for enterprise security is the fact that increased regulation has not resulted in increased security, in fact the contrary may be true. Mandated audits and the threat of regula-tory sanction too often appear to be greater threats to the company

If the recent classified data disclosures by whistleblower organisa-tion WikiLeaks can be said to have officials in the US and other governments in a scramble, then it would be fair to say that the pending release of confidential records from private enterprises

should have executives and shareholders in a serious pucker.In an interview with Andy Greenberg of Forbes in early November,

fugitive activist Julian Assange revealed that his next target is the private sector, and the implications for the future of enterprise infor-mation security efforts is unprecedented.

Assange made clear his intentions to release damning documenta-tion of improprieties by at least one major US bank. Also pending release are documents from pharmaceutical companies, financial firms and energy companies.

"We have one related to a bank coming up, that's a megaleak," Assange asserts. "It will give a true and representative insight into

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bottom-line than does the risk of a data loss event.

In a recent interview, Larry Clinton, President of the Internet Security Alliance said, "in short many organisations are now devoting their cyber security resources primarily to audit compliance which does not necessarily correspond to improved security. Indeed by drawing resources away from actual security to focus on regulatory com-pliance we may well be weakening our security."

The focus on compliance also gives the executive class a false sense of security. When all of the checklist boxes are filled in, the required certifications are in place, and the audit teams have given enterprise secu-rity efforts the green light, their focus turns elsewhere.

The pending release of thou-sands of pages of confidential information by WikiLeaks will undoubtedly shock corporate management out of their state of complacency.

So what is at stake? Well, a lot.Potentially, the revelations

could shake shareholder confi-dence across multiple sectors, and we could witness a sharp decline in the stock prices of

enough companies to negatively affect any hope of an economic recovery for some time.

It could also, as Assange predicts, be the catalyst for even more regulatory reforms that, while well intentioned, will again ulti-mately do little to increase enterprise secu-rity while further raising the cost of compli-ance - a cost ultimately borne by consumers.

But on the positive side of things, it could be the impetus that the information

security sector needs to finally garner the resources required to optimise security efforts, ultimately reduce the risk of data loss events, and realise long term savings for businesses.

This utopian feat will be evident when security best practices finally become "baked-in" to the enterprise at every stage of operations, in sharp contrast to the "we built this, don't let anyone break it" mentality that is currently the status quo.

Unfortunately, but predictably, it takes an event of such catastrophic magnitude to cause a sea change on the level we will witness after WikiLeaks decides to pull the trigger on the private sector.

Get ready to see how the sausage is made.

—Anthony M. Freed is the Managing Editor of

Infosec Island. This article was first published at

www.infosecisland.com and is reprinted with prior

permission from them.

S E CU R I T Y T E CH F OR G OVE R NAN CE

INCREASED

REGULATION HAS

NOT RESULTED

IN INCREASED

SECURITY, IN FACT

THE CONTRARY

MAY BE TRUE

Dr. Pramath Raj Sinha, Managing Director, 9.9 Media kept the delegates fully engaged during his talk

Climbing the Corporate MountainCTO Forum in partnership with Juniper Networks organ-ised a two-city leadership event on the rise of the CIO.

House Full - Delegates came in large numbers to listen to the leadership talks in New Delhi

Mike Rose, Executive VP, Services, Support and Operations, Juniper Networks kept it very interactive and friendly with the participants.

Event

E VE NT R E POR T J U N I PE R N E T WO RKS



It won’t be inappropriate to quote Stephen R. Covey who said, “Man-agement is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership deter-mines whether the ladder is leaning

against the right wall.” Assuming that CIOs in India are pushing

the envelope to rise above merely playing the role of a technology leader, CTO Forum in partnership with Juniper Networks organised a two-city leadership event named “Climbing the Corporate Mountain: Journey

CIOs networking with each other before the start of the session in New Delhi

CIOs who attended the session in New Delhi paid undivided attention to the speakers while they kept ques-tions for the last

CIOs and other IT leaders in Bangalore did not shy away from ask-ing difficult questions and took notes while the speakers were presenting.

J U N I PE R N E T WO RKS E VE N T R E POR T



to the Board” during the month of Novem-ber 2010 in Bangalore and Delhi.

Breaking away from the conventional format and keeping technology aside for a moment, the sessions were purely focused on how CIOs should look at acquiring the essential skills to equip themselves for the journey to the corporate board.

While talking to the CIOs about their jour-ney from the back office to the board room, Mike Rose, Executive VP, Service, Support and Operations, Juniper Networks and for-mer CIO of Shell and HP warned about the common traps of enterprise IT that CIOs are mostly bolted to the infrastructure. “This is the primary reason that CIOs fail to focus on business models. Instead, the business model should drive the architecture,” he said.

“CIOs should partner directly with the economic buyers of technology which are far different then end users,” said Rose. Concluding his talk, Rose left the CIOs with a suggestion to be insatiably curious about their business to make an entry into the board.

While Mike still linked his talk with tech-nology framework in mind, Dr. Pramath Raj Sinha, Managing Director of 9.9 Media and Founding Dean of Indian School of Busi-ness (ISB) Hyderabad spoke about the other attributes of leadership drawn from his personal experiences. Quoting Dalia Lama in the beginning Dr. Sinha said, “It is worth remembering that the time of greatest gain in terms of wisdom and inner strength is often that of greatest difficulty.”

“What is the one most critical attribute/characteristic/feature of leadership/lead-ers,” asked Dr. Sinha to the participating CIOs. “Leadership is synonymous with breakthrough performance. While other things are important and attributes of suc-cessful leaders, what makes it most effec-tive is ‘performance’ of the leader that is aimed at positive, sustainable step change,” said Dr. Sinha. Dr. Sinha also advised the CIOs to ask and take risks. “One must be opportunistic. “Breakthrough achieve-ments are contextual to opportunities and deliberate risk-taking creates opportuni-ties,” he concluded.

A large number of CIOs who attended these sessions in Bangalore and Delhi had countless questions and points of view.

Mike Rose, Executive VP, Services, Suooprt and Operations, Juniper Networks making a point at the session

VIEWPOINT

RECENTLY I attended the Dell Ser-vices and Solutions for the Virtual Era analyst event. One couldn’t help but be impressed with the progress that Dell has made in transitioning from a PC supplier to a serious contender as an enterprise solutions company. Why do I think that? Well, for starters, only a year after buying Perot, you would never know they are two sepa-rate companies. If asked, employees will still identify themselves as Perot or Dell, but otherwise there is very little indication that integration is needed yet. In fact, there appears to be very tight alignment in messaging and go-to-market, which is very much solution focused with vertical exper-tise leading the way.

Dell’s mantra for the event was that they were open, capable and afford-able. The open part was emphasized not only through Dell messaging, but

a printer company.So while I came away extremely

optimistic for the future of Dell, they still have a lot of work ahead of them. From a brand perspective, many still consider them a PC company, but by continuing to deliver and promote their success stories, that will change. There are still gaps in Dell's portfolio, but it has been diligently acquiring companies to fill those. Heck, even HP and IBM are still acquiring to bol-ster their offerings, so expect this to continue for some time.

As virtualization continues to per-meate organisation and change the landscape of IT and data centres, look for Dell to make its presence felt as it establishes itself as an end-to-end IT solutions provider.

with products such as VIS and AIM, and through a number of custom-ers that they brought in to talk about their Dell Solutions. Such solutions included products from Dell as well as their competitors, which Dell is designing and supporting. In fact, one of the customers I spoke to (a detec-tive from Florida) paid Dell one of the highest compliments for a Technology Solution: he referred to it as a “tool,” something he used to make him way more productive at his job, not a com-plex IT solution comprising servers, storage, networking, and applications that he had to manage.

Another proof point of Dell’s com-mitment to rapidly expanding its capability to deliver enterprise solu-tions came in the form of the number of new employees that came from the enterprise groups of companies such as HP, IBM, and Cisco, not Lenovo or

Dell – The Enterprise

Solution Company Establishing end-to-end

offerings for organisations

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bob is an ESG

senior analyst

focusing on data

center infrastructure

management

and automation

software, data

center infrastructure

and technologies,

and professional

services.

BOB LALIBERTE | [email protected]



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