"Copy the best. It’s not always a good strategy to be an innovator"

Prashant Veer Singh
CIO and CISO
Bharti Infratel

Prashant, a senior IT professional having more than two decades of experience across Telecom, Infrastructure, BPO, Services and Government sectors in leading successful transformation projects by leveraging technology and the business acumen by effectively partnering with stakeholders to build viable technology platforms that facilitate business growth, performance, and profitability.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations

Simplicity cannot be over- emphasized in the current context, wherein product life cycle and business turn- around have increasingly shortened. Enterprises often have complex and contrasting business needs and users have less time to learn and adopt the IT applications.

In this era, wherein all of us have so much automation but less time, ubiquity of all applications available across all platforms without losing the session context will be the true differentiator
and real WOW.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier

The ability of accurate/ on time billing and accounting of transactions is the key deliverable of any IT setup. With continuously evolving business cycles and product mix, we always find the speed and simplicity of change eluding. More so with the unique nature of our business, customization of COTS, complex integrations, and highly controlled change management environment becomes the basic ingredient of IT solution delivery.

All this to support the business from >35000 sites, the ability to continuously collect, store and analyze the data, to give accurate and in-time inputs to the business, for them to take timely actions, is the key.

Technology trends impacting enterprise business environment

Mobility and business analytics.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

It has graduated from IT Head to strategic business thinker, and instead of supporting the business, create business and revenue differentiators.

Lessons learned and advice for fellow CIOs

• Stability in IT environment is very critical and achieved with huge amount of investment of planning, time and resources. Don’t upgrade the HW/ SW, just because new version is available, see the tangibles to the enterprise and if required, you may decide to skip the upgrade cycle altogether
• Copy the best, and it’s not always a good strategy to be an innovator
• Invest 5-10% on innovations/ new ideas
• Agility in IT is always expected, no one will tell you this