CIO brainstorming and IT Strategies explained this time in Chennai

By SiliconIndia | Wednesday, January 4, 2012

What are our CIOs busy doing? What are the challenges they face today? How do they get maximum ROI for their organization? These are the questions which brought together some great minds in the 'CIO Strategy Summit' conducted by Siliconindia on 14th July 2011, at Chennai.

After the resounding success of the Bangalore and the Mumbai editions, this time around CIOs from different organizations and sectors in Chennai gathered to attend the summit.

What CEOs and the Board Expects from the CIO and IT Head:
IT management can become saturated by supply-side thinking, what the IT industry will offer next and how best to assimilate that? 'The CEOs and the Boards no more look at IT as support system, but one that would help in establishing competitive edge in the market place. And the expectation is not 'when' would the ROI yield be but 'how' would it manifest. It is through an order of magnitude improvement in productivity & analysis in finger tips to be able to make the right business decisions' said Chandrasekaran N, CIO from Ashok Leyland who kick started the first panel discussion.

The panel also addressed issues like 'What are the boards and CEOs thinking and what business agenda must IT leaders deliver to?' The other speakers in the panel were Manavalan MK, DGM- Technology from Sankara Nethralaya, who laid stress on the IT for the Healthcare industry, Amol Vidwans, Group Head - Information Technology, MARG and the Moderator for the panel was Biji Varughese, Head IT (West & South), McDonald's India.
Business drivers, Strategy and Solution for next-generation Enterprise IT was discussed at length when Sethu Madhavan, Director Marketing & Strategy from Huawei came on stage.

Then Shoaib Ahmed, President from Tally solutions took over and spoke about 'Design - Bringing Efficacy To Enterprise Solutions' and elaborated on the predictive means of going beyond technology challenges beginning from the philosophical stages of Design, to demonstrated how technology agnosticism will Improve usability, Reduce noise, Boost collaboration and Enhance intelligence.

The Competitive CIO:
How can CIOs retain their IT role, while effectively using their skills and passion to provide value within several divisions of the company? Balakrishnan Venkataraman, Ex CIO from Polaris Software said, 'The importance is of being competitive and not just competent. CIO's today, have to drive cost benefits for business in the employment of IT - and be visibly cost effective over external sources of solutions, so that businesses see the value of the internal IT setup and the CIO.'

Further the panel set up a debate on the aspect and importance of keeping business in the driving seat, with CIO understanding and supporting the business need, and helping businesses get the project budget and a good Business ROI. While Investments are managed by IT, the Returns are for Business - so business role in ROI measurement is necessary.

Emerging Technologies and Trends: IT game changer?:
Adoption of new technologies such as cloud based services, social media and virtualization have accelerated and is accelerating changes in the role, structure and purpose of IT.
'Emerging technologies have a lot of potential to create a niche for any business in the market. However, organizations should be careful in evaluating what is right for them. What is good for a certain industry segment may not be good for another. At the same time every organization should evaluate what they want and what they could achieve in logical units of time. Emerging technologies can no doubt be very attractive and promise to solve all the woes of an organization; however its applicability to the real field has to be cautiously evaluated.' said Arvind Sivaramakrishnan, CIO, Apollo Hospitals which was appreciated with a huge round of applause. Adding to the same thought our co-panelist Harinath Chakravarthy, CIO, TVS Logistics said, 'Emerging technologies, especially the social media tools like twitter are game changers, but the effectiveness of these technologies needs to be supported by a strong business case".
Broad Takeaway:

Summing up the whole experience, Ramalingam Thyagarajan, GM - Information Technology from Madura Micro Finance said that the whole event was an eye opening experience, it became evident,
that there is no 'one fits all solution' to technology problems in the enterprise world'.

'A CIO's job is something which one has to learn the hard way as there are no quick fixes to success. The key to success of any IT project is how well the IT and the User department collaborate. Special efforts should be made to ensure this collaboration and the CEO should be aware that his sole task is to encourage and foster this collaboration between the IT and User departments.' said Prem Kamble, Management and IT Consultant (Ex- CIO - Sutherland Global Services).

The event had a great ambience, with the speakers coming from diverse background made it a good mix of thoughts from all industries. The audience discovered abundant opportunities and strategies for 2011 and a chance to meet network with some of the top CIOs at the event. This event was sponsored by Huawei, Tally Solutions, Sonata Software and Clover Infotech.