CAIRO: If the CEO is really keen on his organization embracing automation and benefiting from it, he should get involved, at least to some extent, in hands on implementation.

For it becomes easier for the CIO to drive an IT project across the organization, if the CEO is seen to be visibly pushing it. This seems to be the most essential message coming out of the deliberation on “Crossing the Digital Divide: Challenges Confronting a CEO” that took place at C-Change 2006 organized in Cairo. Even the presentation by Prasanto Kumar Roy, President, Publishing, CyberMedia and Chief Editor, Dataquest that preceded the panel discussion reiterated the same idea.

The point that CEOs could play a crucial role in determining the success of an IT project was emphatically driven home by P Sadananda Maiya, CMD, MTR Foods who cited an incident that took place in his own company.

“A few years back our CIO had come up with a proposal to implement an ERP solution in the organization. However, our CFO sounded reluctant to take the plunge: he kept on insisting that given the same budget, he could devise other ways to grow the company. It was then that I put my foot down and overruled our CFO and went for the implementation. The result was not only did it enable us to derive strategic business benefits, it also directly helped our business grow.” The incident also reiterates that in the face of resistance from other CXOs, it is the CEO who could become the most ardent supporter of the CIO.

Satish Kaura, CEO, Samtel India who braved indisposition to attend the discussion reiterated the importance of the CEO in devising a plan that would enable the organization to ride on the technology wave to either modify or design its products and processes. Agreeing with Roy's views, he too felt that the CEO needed to project himself as a role model or the driver for technology automation, though that should be interspersed with process innovation for growth to take place.

Citing CyberMedia's own example of Project W to get Wi-fi going across the organization, Roy had earlier dubbed the CEO to have a bigger impact than a dozen techies.

The other two panelists, H Srikrishnan, Executive Director, Yes Bank and Bob Hoekstra, CEO, Philips India Software, were also vocal about the importance of IT in devising their business strategies. “Being a new economy bank that is driven primarily by technology, IT is the very raisond'etre of Yes Bank,” explained Srikrishna.

Yes Bank's ability to use technology as a business enabler has been a foundation for the establishment of the bank, which is evident by the quick market traction it has achieved. He claimed to have been deeply involved in the bank's novel approach to IT outsourcing too, whereby it evolved a strategic outsourcing model in consultation with Gartner before entering into an asset outsourcing arrangement with Wipro.

While Hoekstra agreed that the CEO could visibly impact the technology adoption pattern in an organization, he lamented the paucity of CIOs who could convince his CEO to actively lead the grind. On a lighter vein, this could perhaps be a challenge for the CIOs present to try out their luck in Philips India.

Generally, this view coincided with Roy's postulation that whether the CIO is reporting to the CEO or an IT savvy CFO could go a long way in strategic tech transformation of an organization. The moot question as Roy worded it is whether the CEO agrees that IT could be as strategic and core as finance and if so whether he would get as deeply involved in IT as he would do in finance. In an interesting format, industry veteran Anand Sudarshan, President, Adea International, moderated the panel discussion.