A Congregation of IT Leaders at 'CIO Leadership Forum,' Mumbai

Mumbai: Mumbai witnessed the gathering of eminent IT leaders from reputed firms recently at the ‘CIO Leadership Forum’ on October 19 at hotel HOLIDAY INN. The Forum offered an interactive, workshop-centric experience to exchange ideas and receive actionable guidance from prominent IT executives in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses prevailing in the contemporary IT sector. It also served as a perfect gridiron to interact and to deliberate on topics ranging from disruptive technologies to controlling of budgets which formed the basis of the agenda.

This informative affair was kick started with a Keynote Session on “My Journey and Learnings as A CIO”, addressed by Jagdish Belwal, CIO, Tata Motors, which left the entire auditorium enticed with his invigorating speech.

Jagdish emphasized that ‘CIOs need to take greater ownership of the benefits realized from IT deployments. Communication and relationships with the senior executives is a key here. There is so much more value we can extract from the current IT systems provided we work on the right people and process levers along with the senior leaders in each function.’

"The business leaders who are going to benefit from the implementation, need to be put in the driver’s seat of all IT implementations for continued ownership and benefits realization. IT needs to lead the technology front while putting business managers forward to own change and benefit management,” he said.

The event then proceeded to the first panel discussion on, ‘CIO - Deliverer of Technology Resources or The Driver of Innovation and Transformation?,’ which comprised of Salil Mahajan, VP - IT, Bharti AXA Life Insurance, Vivek Joshi, Executive VP-IT, HDFC Bank, M D Agrawal, Head - IT, Bharat Petroleum Corp and Sudhansu S K, GM - IT, Meru Cab. Mohar Tiwari, CIO at Jewelex India served as the moderator for the same.
Vivek was of the opinion that the summit lifted the veil on ‘how more revenue generation is important than saving few bucks and how cost saving in some scenarios can be a misnomer.’

The successive session was by Sunil Sharma, VP Operations, Cyberoam, who delivered an enlightening speech on ‘Modern Day Internet Threats And Securing Enterprise Networks.’

The concluding discussion on the topic, ‘The State of the Indian CIOs,’ commenced soon after and it included Felix Thattil, VP - Strategy Projects & Process, DTDC Courier & Cargo, Sudhakar S Marthi, Vice President Sales & Marketing, ZOHO and Suresh A Shan, Head - BITS, MMFSL Group. It was very skillfully co-ordinated by Mayank Prakash, Global Wealth Management Tech Director, Morgan Stanley who was the respective moderator.

Overall, the CIO Leadership Forum served as the quintessential platform for the contemporary IT leaders who are responsible for the information technology and computer systems playing a pivotal role in formulating strategic IT goals for an organization.

The event was sponsored by Cyberoam, ZOHO and IESPL.