CIO strategies and challenges for today's enterprises: An insight

By SiliconIndia | Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Post recession, there have been paradigm shifts within the IT community; the role of a CIO has changed from being an information officer to being an innovative officer. The strategies too, have changed for a CIO but what has not changed is their continuous hunger for technology adaptation and adoption.

SiliconIndia conducted a dynamic conference for CIOs - 'The CIO Strategy Summit 2011' on April 13th at the Taj Vivanta, which addressed the challenges and opportunities ahead for business leaders to finalize the roadmap for the next financial year.

Are CIOs ready to adapt to changing business models? Ashwin Khorana, Head IT Service Delivery, ING Vysya Bank kick started this conference by addressing the crowd on the topic "Leadership Lessons for CIO's". He said, "For any CIO the biggest challenge is to determine the things to be queued, which has to be well defined even before any business plan has to be executed. It is those 10 minutes that are more important than an entire day's effort of strategizing and executing any business plan.S ometimes the process engineering aspects are more important then the actual plan and its execution and delivery". He also stressed on the aspect of being more closely related to the actual code i.e writing it ourselves, which will decrease the complexity of any Infrastructure management or scaling issues that come up later. He also laid emphasis on the importance of peer networking to enhance any strategy planning for any business.

Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM):

How RIM can drive cost & value optimization through strategic initiatives to manage business successfully? This was addressed by our set of eminent panelists which included Ashwin Khorana, Head IT Service Delivery, ING Vysya Bank; Mrinal Chackraborty, Director ICS, TNT India; Prashanth Maranayakanahalli, CTO, First Source and Satish Kumar, Founder, Chairman and CEO, GLOPORE IMS. Prashanth moderated this panel and started off by talking about how we have to have a selective approach to RIM deployment keeping in mind the core activities of the company in tact! Satish took over from there and spoke about how the selective sourcing of IT should be done, he said, "We have to retain control of the critical IT functions and not outsource them all of them".

With technologies coming to CIOs desk at break-neck speed, the role of remote infrastructure management services become more imperative not only to adapt to changing pace and dynamics of technology but also to control IT budgets and to do "more with less'. Ashwin spoke extensively about Cost arbitrage and said, "We have to move from cost arbitrage to capability arbitrage, which will in turn lead to expertise and growth."

The event then moved on to an interesting session on "Technology applications in Corporate Travel"
-Process Automation & Workflow Management which was addressed by Gaurav Sundaram, Country Director from Egencia. Gaurav spoke about Egencia's travel technology solutions and how travel costs can be controlled and how customers and enterprises get better value from their travel tool. Their travel technology solution provides setting of travel goal budgets, daily and monthly reports, tracing of budgets, travel compliance automation, global and local reporting platform and many other features.

Cloud - Trends in Delivery and Pricing:

With disruptive technologies such as cloud, virtualization, third party data centers on the move, opportunities in the cloud should be leveraged by the enterprises. Uday Banerjee, CTO, NIIT Technologies who was one of our panelists highlighted on the different dimensions of security pricing and delivery. He cleverly threw the question to the panel on cloud computing and how it makes sense for any "Indian" organization. Vemuri Kasi Vishwanath- Head of Technology, Northern Trust Bank took up the question and spoke about cloud computing as a model, whereas Satyajit, DGM-IT, DTDC Courier sees and also endorses cloud computing as a social equalizer. Rudra Kamal Sinha Roy, AVP Product Management, IVIZ Security, speaking on the same subject said, "The privacy of data and the maturity of the Indian market poses a hindrance in dealing with cloud for any business compliancy. Cloud is still trying to grow up and become a platform for business-critical applications."

Panel discussion on Security:

Security concerns and privacy needs to be addressed to manage a diverse technology infrastructure. How good should the network, content and security services of any enterprise be, to tackle the current market scenario? For example an Airport security enterprise has to be constantly innovated to deal with breach of data in many cases, Aswathanarayana Rao, Manager IT Security, Bangalore International Airport laid emphasis on this aspect. Can the security aspects be out sourced? AK Basu, GM IT, State Bank of Mysore says, "There are pitfalls in out sourcing certain critical aspects of security, we have to carefully decide on which aspects to outsource".

Another challenge for enterprise security is managing customer base across the globe, Rudra Kamal Sinha Roy, AVP Product Management, IVIZ Security said, "Use of encryption and constant up gradation in securities and systems can minimize and avoid security lapses to a great extent". Gaurav Sundaram, Country Director, Egencia concluded saying that "Security requires constant vigilance when outsourced".
The event was sponsored by ZOHO, Egencia, Glopore IMS and Allied Worldwide.Overall the event addressed all aspects and challenges that any information system of today faces and how to address these challenges going ahead, and learnings for the CIOs who want to inspire the leaders of tomorrow.