Indian CIOs better than their global peers in innovation

By SiliconIndia | Thursday, January 5, 2012

India's top enterprises, set to spend over $10 billion on technology services this year, are better than their global peers when it comes to using technology to drive innovation and launch disruptive business models.

According to an IBM study of over 2,500 companies across the globe, the Chief Information Officers (CIOs) at companies such as Maruti Suzuki, Shoppers' Stop, Reliance Life Insurance, Asian Paints and many others plan to use technology solutions for lowering their operational costs, and also explore newer ways of doing business. "Indian CIOs appear to be more visionary when compared with their global counterparts, according to our study," said Shanker Annaswamy, Managing Director of IBM India.

One of the significant findings of 'IBM's Global CIO Study' is the evolution of Indian IT leaders when it comes to their involvement in business. Almost 40 percent of the Indian CIOs report directly to their CEOs, while around 31 percent of their global peers report directly to their CEOs. This reflects their involvement with the businesses, something every technology leader aspires to achieve.

Moreover, 80 percent of the 100 top Indian CIOs surveyed said that they plan to use data analytics and business intelligence (BI) tools to help their businesses become better. Analyzing customer and sales data will help these companies track their customers better and sell relevant products and services.

Top banks such as HDFC and SBI are using BI software for tracking customer behavior, their spending and investment priorities and then sell relevant solutions, instead of wasting precious time and money on mass-marketing campaigns. "Even as we negotiated hard with vendors for doing more with less, our agenda for using more BI and data analytics remained unchanged," said the CIO of one of the top Indian banks, requesting for anonymity.

Retailers such as Shoppers' Stop are already seeing benefits of software investments in tracking data. "We have a technology that focuses on stock replenishment, therefore, stocks are auto-replenished, making things faster, quicker and better as it was manually done earlier," said Arun Gupta, CIO of Shopper' Stop.

Gupta, who recently bought new software for connecting all the stores and vendors, is seeing better efficiencies. "Merchandisers are now able to see what their inventory status is across all the Shoppers' Stop stores. This helps in understanding which stocks is moving faster, and also which locations are selling what," he said.

In a year when businesses had to cope with lower demand for products and services, Indian CIOs managed to stay on track with long term technology investments without shelving crucial projects. "We had budgeted 10 percent less for IT spend this year compared to last, but we will be spending 15 percent lesser and this is not cause we have deferred IT spends, but because of cost savings due to price renegotiations," said Gupta of Shoppers' Stop.

Many Indian telecom companies are also seeking to invest more in environment friendly technologies, and are buying new solutions for lowering power consumption. "There is a real business need for chasing the Green agenda when it comes to telecom firms-especially because even 20 percent reduction in $5-6000 they spent every month on towers will be huge," said Nipun Mehrotra, Vice President and General Manager, IBM Global technology services.

Meanwhile, private sector companies are not the only ones ahead of the technology curve. Public sector companies such as Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) so gearing up with new technology investments to help their business serve better .

"Last year our budget was around 20 crore, this year it is more than 30 crore. We are spending a lot on business intelligence, HR pay roll solutions and SAP," said S Soni, Executive Director of IOC.