Action packed

GOA: The day began with the Pradeep Gupta, Chairman and Managing Director, Cyber Media India Limited, addressing the audience on "Aligning IT strategies with business strategies." Using anecdotes and parables, Gupta indicated the need for CIOs to look at providing workable, innovative solutions and not necessarily expensive solutions to problems while keeping in mind the goal of the business, which is to make money. He also pointed out that globally IT has become a part of the plumbing to some extent, but in India it is yet to get there. Until it gets there, the debate around IT as a strategic asset and not cost will continue.

Gupta’s keynote session was followed by an address by Francis Pedro D’souza, Minister for Information Technology, Govt of Goa, on CIO as a Change Agent. He likened the role of a CIO as a change agent to that of a missionary who goes about the task of conversion single-mindedly. He also highlighted the dangers of flawed Information Systems, which may appear to deliver a solution but may not be solving the problem in its entirety. He also wished the CIOs a pleasant and productive stay in Goa.

The session of "Creating Business Value-Moving Towards Business Technology" by Arun Gupta focused on how Pfizer managed to not only engage the business and functional heads to participate in an IT implementation but also feel a sense of ownership through methods of co-opting. The second part of "Creating Business Value–Measuring IT Performance" by N Kailasanathan, CIO, Titan Industries, highlighted how projects need to be reviewed with reference to time, cost and returns. Kailsanathan touched upon the assessment of financial, project management, operations, user satisfactions and a less addressed issue of employee retention as a means of measuring performance of a project.

The panel discussion that followed centered on "What percentage of the budget must be allocated for enterprise architecture?" While the focus of the discussion was to get an idea of the numbers that companies invested into creating an enterprise architecture, none of the panel members came forth with the numbers, despite focused efforts by HS Sai, CIO Thomson Press, who moderated the discussion, to get the numbers.

Deepak B Pathak spoke on "Selecting new standards/architectures for maximizing competitive advantage," where he addressed the need for choosing standards for the long term and insisting on Application Programming Interface availability among other things such as use of configurators.

Imagine a CEO getting sacked. Yes, they have been sacked and will continue to be sacked if you don’t read ‘Sack the CEO’. Penned by Jitendra Jain, the book contains all ingredients of unethical corporate initiatives taken by various CEO’s. Speaking at the CIOL event he enthralled the audience by some verbal quotes being used by him in book.

CIOL Bureau