"The cloud offering is not having a solution with respect to legal point of view in India."
Ranganathan Iyer
CIO
JBM Group
Ranganathan has more than 27 Years of experience in Project Management, ERP Implementation, Business Process alignment and improvements by way of implementing technology into production, people development, Software Development, Training, with multi country deployment exposure.
Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013
The biggest challenge is to leverage technology in production process efficiency. The difficulties, if any are due to business down trend and people being more cautious in calculating ROI. These are major hindering factors.
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
Budgeting: Because of business down trend and unpredictable business requirements, traditional budgeting process has failed. The issues are on what basis one has to
budget but on how the management is allowing you to go for deviations for unpredictable business scenario.
Future Proof IT Organization: This is a biggest pain for any IT department. Industries do not know how quickly newer technologies will come and replace the old technologies. The risk governance is an issue because of new technology deployment and the IT industry is struggling to find a right IT deployment policy.
My role and responsibilities as a CIO
Over and above, businesses are looking at IT as a business enabler (present situation) as opposed to the traditional thinking of business catalyst (3 years ago).
Technology trends impacting Enterprise Business Environment
Cloud: This is one good thing which has happened. The catch is, one will go for cloud to avoid CAPEX. Cloud is good for organizations which are growing and for those that were recently founded. The cloud offering is not having a solution with respect to legal point of view in India. As per the Indian rules and regulations, one has to keep the records for 7 to 10 years for different government agencies.
Lessons learned and advice to fellow CIOs
Let me share some experiences to my fellow CIOs.
Process deployment: Be part of the business team. Try to put the business team part of the decision making process. Do not talk about IT to business users; however, use IT in the backend to provide solutions to business users.
Technology deployment: Regularly meet, and understand the different technological providers and be vocal in explaining your pain points to the providers for them to come up with a solution. Ensure one does 'Proof of Concept' wherever possible. In case POC is not possible, mutually agree with the supplier, and business users by way of communicating what is possible and what is not possible. Document assumptions as this will help you to relate the results when the technology has been deployed.
