Are CIOs using information for business strategy?

CAIRO: Referring to the resistance of politicians against the Information Bill, which was passed to bring about participation in governance, Subodh Bhargava, Chairman, VSNL asked CIOs if a similar situation exists among corporates.

He was delivering the introductory keynote at the CIOL C-Change 2006 being held here.

Bhargava urged CIOs and CEOs to turn data and information into knowledge that can be used effectively for business strategy. “In the past, 'experience' was knowledge. But today you have to manage `today' with `today' and have strategies for tomorrow with today,” he said.

“There are new dimensions to knowledge management — it is data put in a context with a relevance of purpose. Information would develop into knowledge and when shared across the organization enables in making judgments,” he added.

He said that Indian companies have failed to use information as a management tool. “Despite investment in packages, it still remains as data. This is where the breakthrough has to come—not so much among large enterprises but among the thousands of SMBs in the country.”

Bhargava said that while larger companies have deployed R&D for product development, they are not using it for day-to-day operations. He urged CIOs to don the role as change agents in the organization.

“As a change agent the focus should be on processing information, R&D and quality, deploying IT and creating an information network across various functions and stakeholders in the organization,” he said.

He said that manufacturing can contribute to create social equity. For that, he said that IT can help the industry surge ahead.

Amit Sinha, Director-Marketing, Avaya Global Connect, was heartened by the fact that most enterprises worldwide were investing in re-engineering. “Every year $52 billion will be spent on re-engineering. Out of this, $40 billion alone is spent on IT. It is very expensive and volatile. In my view, it is coming of age for CIO, he said.

Highlighting hardware trends, Jyothi Satyanathan, country manager-pSeries, IBM, said, that the storage market is seeing more growth than storage. “Last year Unix server market for IBM grew 78%-80%, but storage saw a growth of 175%,” he said.