"When a customer is being acquired; conclude the transaction instantaneously and share all information with him."
Shirish Chitte
CTO
Reliance Capital
Shirish has over 14 years of extensive technology leadership & client management experience ranging across consulting, life sciences, retail, engineering, health care and financial services businesses. In his current position, his responsibilities include implementation of state-of-the-art technology to create a competitive differentiation for Reliance Capital and its businesses, besides driving increased adoption and productivity by lowering cost to serve our customers and employees.
Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations
Challenges are essentially basic; all these various technology pieces being developed on various technology platforms like social, analytics, mobility and cloud, need to be married together to deliver sustainable value to our businesses and our end consumers. This is where essentially we have been looking in terms of the challenges, that we see for next couple of years. We have the best breed kind of technologies; but somehow when we talk about the translation of these into business and customer value, that essential translation is not happening. I think this will be the key challenge; we have to look and solve a particular problem to deliver business value, where there are numerous solutions available in market.
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
Mobility is one such area where we really wanted to do something. Solutions are available; but mobile solutions across various business needs and stencils, are not integrated. Probably the service app is not well integrated with rest of the business processes. When a customer is being acquired; we need to conclude the transaction instantaneously, share all information with him- e.g. In insurance we may be able to give illustrations through the app, but probably not able to convert that transaction and getting the customer on board with us.
Technology trends impacting enterprise business environment
Cloud is one thing which is really impacting the way we are putting up infrastructure; we are actually having hybrid cloud frame work being put in place. We already have been heavily virtualized in certain businesses. We have started using certain pieces from the public cloud, for example our mailing solution is on cloud, one of our CRM solutions is on cloud and we would be creating a right mix of apps to choose between cloud and the enterprise solution. Hybrid in the sense that we have five lines of businesses having their own set of data centre infrastructure, which we will be able to consolidate in private cloud. This provides the much needed agility and variability to the IT spends.
My roles and responsibilities as a CIO
This is my first role as a CIO; and prior to this I was on the other side of the table, either as a partner or service provider. When I look at the way role is shaping up, from my perspective here, is that I am engaging more from the business side, trying to understand the business concerns. I am starting to lead business concerns into program initiatives by understanding the suitable technology use cases for it.
Lessons learned and advice for fellow CIOs
The key lesson I have learnt in the quarter of my interaction with the leadership team is what a CIO should be focusing when discussing with the CEO, is essentially about how the technology is going to be useful to the businesses. Additionally how they are going to benefit overall in driving the business strategy and driving the agenda for the businesses. Advice, so to say, it will altogether depend on the problem that each of the CIO is going through, in individual point of time. For example I have a CIO or CTO team reporting to me; which are representing the lines of businesses, for them I advise that they need to learn to talk businesses language rather than technology language.
