"The irony is, CIO’s have to face the music from business and management side"

Vishad Rahangdale
CIO
Electrotherm

Vishad has 20 Years of experience in various industries in India and abroad namely steel,  capital goods, renewable energy, transmission line tower, automobile, media, textile, engineering and construction industries. A hardcore technocrat with a business outlook, he specializes in devising business-IT alignment strategy, IT governance, enterprise applications implementation and enterprise infrastructure.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations

Business landscape has become complex because customer’s behavior pattern has changed. Customer expects simplicity while transacting with business. To make it simple, internal business value chain have become complex. Businesses have to be more agile and flexible. IT plays a balancing act between customer experience and internal value chain. Today’s challenge is seamless alignment of technology with business objectives which is exclusive to the business. To list few priority areas which businesses are looking at are synthesis of transactional data that is generated in large size and provide meaningful analytics, second priority area is delivery model of IT services. Of course, cloud based solution are available but solution providers will have to aggressively invest on building trust of the businesses who still believe in brick and mortar model.

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

Technology alignment is and will be always a work in progress. Business do change very rapidly so as IT. Pain points are generally not due to framework if it is appropriately created, but arises due to change in demands and flexibility expected out of the framework. If architecture is sustainable then business semantics can be accommodated easily and that makes the job simpler. However, there would be rigid spots in the framework which are mostly reason for pain points. Second aspect is the new generation IT savvy population and managing their expectation. Third is the IT budgets and spending. The irony is, CIO’s have to face the music from business and management side.

Technology trends impacting enterprise business environment

Cloud computing, mobile computing and new generation analytics is what will have a major impact on business environment. But again it all depends on how businesses take shape in future course. What I have observed is business strategies have become more of tactical rather than remaining strategic moves. The challenge is to address strategic as well as tactical moves of the business.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

Off late, we are hearing many definitions of CIO and various debates at various forums about the roles of CIO’s. The trend is inclined towards decentralization of IT to business function level. Eventually, every business may have the IT budget to manage the IT challenges and requirement. It won’t be exaggeration to state that the role of CIOs in business organizations will become redundant. Having said this, the role of CIO is evolving in the manufacturing sector. When I joined this organization, IT was another support function. But it is evolved to the extent that IT has  become part of strategy formulation and its execution. CIOs will need to think innovatively and deliberate upon how IT can drive revenues and contribute to the growth story of the business.

Lessons learned and advice for fellow CIOs

I have gone through the same process as my peers. Until few years ago, the role remained the same except for the change in the designation. One thing I would categorically mention here, is to try to align IT with the DNA of the business rather than harping on end user satisfaction. Although end user satisfaction is important, however; treat is as a transaction.