Raghu Kumar Paruchuri

CIO City >> CIO Yearbook 2013 >> Insights Profile >>

"Elevate IT to the role of game changer for an organization’s growth rather than being just a cost center."

Head - IT & Business Applications

Tata Power (Strategic Engineering

Division)

Raghu has close to 15 Years of experience in the areas of ERP consulting & IT. Prior to joining Tata Power SED, Raghu has been with organizations like PwC, Oracle & Capgemini, where he has worked on large scale ERP implementation & support assignments cutting across geographies such as India, Asia- Pacific and Europe. He is an MBA & CFA (ICFAI). He is also a certified CISO (C|CISO) He has been recipient of Top 100 CISO awards 2011 & has been a finalist at Top 100 CIO awards 2012 & top 100 CISO awards 2013.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations

The big challenge in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 will be to elevate IT to the role of game changer for an organization’s growth rather being just as cost center. I would look forward to solutions in the following areas:
a) Mobility
b) Desktop virtualization

The expectations from the technology providers would be as follows:

a) Demonstrate tangible business benefits of the technology
b) Simplify technology adoption

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

It is true that with the advances in technology, “keeping the lights on” is no longer one of the KPIs for the IT teams within enterprises. Having said that, the ever changing economic landscape and newer business realities are throwing up new challenges. The following are couple of things which keeps me awake at night:

a) Ensuring information security in the BYOD era wherein the increasing numbers of gen Y workforce are keen to bring their own devices.
b) Coming out with innovative technical solutions with agility to enable business to come up with go-to-market solutions faster than their competitors.

Technology trends impacting enterprise business environment

We are in the defence space. For us, the following trends will have significant impact:

a) Desktop virtualization
b) Unified threat management
c) BYOD

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

In my case, the role has changed from ensuring that the IT systems are always up and running (keeping the “lights on”) to one where I am concentrating on executing projects which aim at enhancing the employees productivity, improving the information security landscape, consolidation of infrastructure and green IT.

Lessons learned and advice for fellow CIOs

The advice would be to be aware of business realities of the industry that your enterprise is in, work towards continual improvement in business- IT alignment and be proactive in adoption of new technologies in an innovative manner in order to provide competitive advantage to business.