CIO Strategy Summit, Mumbai: The CIO Executive Visions and Insights

By SiliconIndia | Thursday, January 12, 2012

The CIO Strategy Summit at Mumbai was an excellent platform for CIOs to exchange information on current topics, as well as, interact with a variety of industry vendors. After a phenomenal success of Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune editions, this time CIO's from different sectors gathered to share their views in the 'CIO Strategy Summit' conducted by SiliconIndia on 5th December 2011 at Mumbai. The event started off with a keynote session by Rahul Shandilya, CIO, Asia Motor Works on the topic, "Economy Challenges and CIO role". He said, 'CIO becoming more responsive to board room thinking and becoming catalyst / change agents. IT enablement moving towards three broad categories thinking, decision making and execution. IT needs to support all three levels differently and aptly. Technologies becoming commoditised by vendors but solution gaining differentiation.

What CEOs and the Board Expects from the CIO and IT Head

The current economic climate is calling upon all IT executives to operate with an increasingly acute and sensitive approach to all aspects of business. For executive road warriors and super-busy CEOs, it is a bit difficult to lay the foundations for the best possible relationship between them and the CIOs. To conserve a prolong relationship between CEOs and CIOs, the CIO has to fulfill certain expectations from the CEO. The CEO's and Board are thinking what business agenda IT Leaders can deliver. The panelists who focused on this topic were, Abhay Karhade, CIO, Bombay Dyeing; Rajiv Sharaf, VP-IT, Reliance Infrastructure and Suneel Aradhye, CIO, Essar Steel & Minerals Business, who said, 'It was great to be in the panel that had colleagues from diversified industries like ours. Global trends in technology and "business value of IT" have reached India in no time, in fact quite a few of us are even doing better in several areas in leveraging the latest technology and management trends in actively contributing value to respective businesses.' Kalyan Prasath, Head - IT, ICICI Prudential AMC, also shared his view on this panel and he said, 'CIO should fully understand the business and its processes which they are supporting to be effective in their role'.

Derive Technology plan to support business to improve Top line, Bottom line or improve productivity or reduce the cost of operation. Work out the value proposition which will arrive out of the investment / spend to the business Ensure IT governance. Pramod Rao, Head - Microsoft Solutions, Dimension Data and Aviraj Ajgekar, Technology Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation, bought up an interesting perspective on the topic, Building on the Cloud: Why should CIOs consider moving to the Cloud. Aviraj said, Moving to the cloud is both Business & Technical Decision.

Building your very own Cloud must be solving a Business Problem. For CIOs, moving to the cloud means an opportunity to re-architecture their some of the old critical Line of Business applications which can drastically improve the performance & save cost. For Enterprises journey to the cloud begins with building their very own Private Cloud & then moving to Public Cloud.

Microsoft offers end to end cloud solutions ranging from building their very own Private Cloud using Windows Server Hyper-V, System Center and expanding to the Public Cloud with Windows Azure, Microsoft Online Services, Office 365 & Windows Live Services. Alexander Zarovsky, Chief of International Business Development, InfoWatch, threw some light on the topic, Innovative DLP, GRC & SMM Solutions for Indian Enterprises. He said that the CIO summit was good and it was a great networking platform.

Emerging Technologies and Trends: The Game Changer

Today CIOs and IT leaders are constantly looking for technologies to cut operational costs and reduce expenses including the lowering of IT budgets. However, with a wide range of technologies emerging in the IT world, it is often difficult to make a decision on new technologies and technology trends to help organizations succeed in their business. Game Changer: In this context, which new technologies will change the game for enterprises in 2011? The answer of this question was dealt in the second panel by the panelists, Manoj Nigam, Vice President, CS-IT, Vodafone, who said, CIO role is rapidly transforming to business leaders who is much more integrated and looked up to provide the technology oriented business solutions than ever before. Especially in the era of tight budget control, drawing the careful yet long term technology strategy is key for the sustainable business edge. Other panelists were, Ashish Pachory, CIO, Tata Teleservices and Ritu Madbhavi, Sr. Vice President - IT, Draft FCB Ulka Adverting, who gave their insights on this topic.

Broad Takeaway:

The CIO Summit was a forum for senior level IT executives to engage in clear and focused dialogue with their peers and examine their management objectives in a relaxed and vibrant environment. It helped in networking and the conversations between CIOs helped them to validate CIO related issues in different manners. The best part of the summit was that it was a focused meeting for the CIOs and all of the discussions and topics were of interest and relevant. The size of the audience at the summit encouraged some excellent dialogue and networking by the speakers. This event was sponsored by Microsoft, Dimension data, Infowatch, Zoho Manage Engine and Clover Infotech.