Views on new technologies I feel that these technologies will help enable various organizations leverage IT in a more flexible, seamless, with faster implementation and cost-effective manner to be more aligned with business and help he business to enhance the value to the end-customer. These will provide reduction of up-front costs, lowering the overall TCO and de-risking services provided from localized & owned facilities and data center.
Resources to Keep Updated with Latest Technologies Well its reading, interacting with colleagues, partners and participating in various discussion forums, though I feel thats never enough & too much to be completely abreast with this ever evolving field.
Biggest Pain Point I always believe the biggest challenge that any technology evangelist and a CIO faces is to ensure that we can help business derive benefits as per the strategic objectives of the organization. If we are able to achieve just this then it will not just benefit all technologist but will ensure that technology plays a leading role in creating innovations for the business.
Technology to Address Pain Points Technology can play a leading role in creating innovative solutions for the business and the end-customers by enhancing customer satisfaction, operating efficiency and responsiveness. When IT plays a critical and innovative role, it will obviously mitigate the business problems and become a vital cog for the organizational strategy.
Slowdown Impact on IT Innovation IT innovations are not just critical during slowdown but have become integral part of creating business value. Any organization that needs to grow in todays economy leverages IT heavily in building new & innovative business models. For e.g. in the ITES space business platforms and processes as a service as a business model is only possible due to innovations led by IT. Adoption of Cloud Policy The cloud is maturing into a compelling imperative for IT as a service for business consumption in our organization. The adoption of our cloud policy involves an integrated framework that will influence the design of future application development and enablement to induce high level of decoupling and componentization of application nodules, breaking them down to services that imitate the basic requirements of business that can be consumed/reused by different enterprise/business applications in a uniform way.
Role of Cloud To ensure information security on cloud some of the simple steps that an organization can adhere are as follows:
1. Encryption of data at rest and in transit becomes extremely important because of the lack of visibility into network traffic and your cloud provider‟s admin access logs.
2. Deploy every security tool you deploy on your physical servers in the cloud as well because all the cloud providers will give you is a naked OS without adequate security.
3. Ensure to get all the security policies and procedures around access controls and network traffic from the clouds service provider. Clouds service providers customers need to know who did what and when, and they need to be allowed to see the logs.
IT Leader Manager First or Technologist First An IT leader is in a leadership position and hence needs to evolve being a leader from being just a technologist . He needs to ensure that he demonstrates true leadership & managerial traits as ultimately he is part of the ecosystem that is much beyond technology.
Latest Technology Some of the new technologies that will shape 2012 and beyond is the unification of cloud computing, social media and social networking, mobility and information management which are all evolving at a rapid pace. Business unit stakeholders often recognize the value of new technology before IT departments can harness it. In addition, emerging markets are growing rapidly in terms of technology expenditures and influence. Growing technology use and energy consumption around the globe have led to an increased emphasis on green technologies and power conservation within IT industries.
Relationship Between CIOs and CEOs In todays environment I believe that all the CEOs understand the importance of IT with respect to integrating it with the strategic blueprint of the organization, which makes it imperative for the CEOs to leverage ITs strength to build competitive differentiation for the business.Though there may be instances where CIOs dont directly report to the CEOs, yet in todays world you can figure out how strategic the CIOs function is by the amount of time spent in IT discussions in the corporate boardrooms
