Subbarao Hegde

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"Lead with Speed & Innovate at Internet Speed."

Subbarao Hegde

CTO & VP - Business Integration & Automation

GMR Infrastructure

With over 28 years of experience in heading the Information Technology functions, Subbarao has transformed the organization into an IT savvy "Knowledge Enabled Digitized Enterprise", which includes IT strategy aligned with business, digital transformation and created an e- enabled Business eco system.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations

Economic pressures have been felt across business as of now. Most organizations have postponed their IT investments on new hardware and software. Keep the lights “ON” in IT budget is extensively used, just to run and maintain what one has already got, leaving little for new initiatives in an 80/ 20 budget ratio. The main challenge is to come out from this 80/ 20 trap and rationalize the capital intensive investment and focus on cost management techniques, resource optimization through best practices to address the growth and to increase productivity. Prevailing market dynamics including social and environmental related factors, affects business modernization strategy. The technology providers have to offer modern alternatives that are cheaper, faster, and smarter.

My wish list for 2013:

• Future- proof cloud based IT architecture provisioning to facilitate business transformation, agility, mobility, business oriented digitalization and business analytics
• Enhance enterprise businesses engagement through collaborative platforms, to merge the back office processes and the front office systems with the customer store so that today’s socially powered customer can interact and engage beyond traditionally touched front office team.
• To work upon efficient ways to collect, process and analyze massive real time data
• Focus on consumerization of IT, simplify IT and measure the IT usage pattern

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

• Foolproof 100%- enterprise data security.
• Ensure 100% error free video conference between sites all the times.
• Allow BYOD for enterprise application access.

Technology trends impacting enterprise business environment

Social media/ business, mobility, big data analytics, clouds and smart assets will have significant impact on the enterprise business environment.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

The prevailing market trends like cloud, digitization, social, mobile, sourcing, consumerization etc. are reshaping the role of the CTO/ CIO in an organization. It is true here as well. The challenges and opportunities for businesses in this digital economy are enormous; one has to keep pace with changing technology and consumer behavior. Accordingly the CTO is becoming a Chief Digital Officer (CDO).

Lessons learned and advice for fellow CIOs

Business expects the enterprise agility “Lead with Speed” and innovate at “Internet Speed”. For which, CIO leadership has to play a role as Chief Accelerating Officer (CAO) to avoid business impacts due to any delay in IT alignments. Hence CIO role is directly impacting businesses.

CIO has to lead and play multiple change management roles like “Chief Infrastructure Officer”, “Chief Integration Officer”, “Chief Intelligence Officer” and “Chief Innovation Officer”, which all leads to the role of “Chief Impact Officer”, justifying the expectation that his role impacts the businesses. He has to clearly demonstrate value-for-money in the management of core IT servicesproviding the right services at the right price and the right level of quality. He has to be a value driver like the Chief Improvement Officer- to understand the business and needs of the CEO, CFO, Lineof- Business heads in order to maximize the benefits from IT automation in businesses. The current socially enabled technology trend is forcing us to change our workstyle and will leverage IT by applying it to businesses in different ways (as a business value creator/ differentiator). Early adopters of this trend are better- off.