BANGALORE, INDIA: C-Change 2008, the annual business technology forum, today concluded here with the Grid Lords bagging the trophy.

Grid Lords, the team led by Venkat Iyer, director - Business Technology and Distribution, at Pfizer India pipped the other three teams: Speed Demons, Butane Burners and Circuit Breakers in the final team presentation on Leading an Agile Enterprise.

Over the last three days, all the participating 100 CIOs split into four teams and made a well-researched presentation and gave the CIOs a take away that they can implement in their respective organizations.

Pradeep Gupta, chairman and managing director of the CyberMedia Group, presented the trophy to the winners.

"The victory was a joint effort of the whole team who all contributed with valid inputs/suggestions that led us to the final victory, said Iyer.

Earlier in the day, during a session on an Agile Enterprise by Ramanujam Sridhar, CEO of Integrated Brand-Comm said that innovation is the heart of agility and Indian enterprises need to drive innovations within their organizations.

On Friday, diversification, business changes, unstructured information and innovation imperatives; were part of the CIO mandates. It was an opportunity for CIOs to embrace agility and strike it effectively with technologies like SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), UC (Unified Communications), synchronization and virtualization.

The first session threw open the problems that pops up when an organization diversifies into new business territories or innovates in a big way. Titan cited its journey from watches to jewellery and Mosar Baer shared its experiences as it forked into areas like solar technology and pre-recorded CDs from an erstwhile blank media company.

CIO's role is to get all the information and disseminate it quickly to the people who are at the center of decision-making process,” the forum observed.

Agility is about responding in time. Information needs to relevant and disseminated fast," reflected Prince Azariah, CIO, MRF Limited.

Another angle on agility came around customer-centric agile technologies. Agilty starts with customer and ends with customer.

Delivery in anytime and every time is the key, Arun Gupta, CIO, Shoppers Stop observed.

Next to follow was a talk on innovation. "Is innovation a mandate" asked a CIO even as another CIO candidly pointed out that a CIO's time and budget operate in a reverse fashion when it come to real business problems.

Technologies drive innovations, but the onus is on people to integrate these innovations in businesses processes to make an enterprise agile.

On the opening day, it couldn't get more agile. Even before the sessions started rolling out, the questions, expectations, wishes, suggestions and concerns from CIO fraternity sprung up in full bloom.

May be Ajit Balakrishnan, chairman, CEO of Rediff.com, knew it well when he defined, "Agility is not about being in a hurry, but about being quick and tuned to change."

Customisation, re-alignment of processes with a technology's maturity level, and redundancy of networks were some capital concerns that came up as questions.

"The days of in-house design are gone, but how does one deploy cut-out systems is a organization that has specific business needs? How do I manage redundancy models? How can I have better uptime?" were some of the questions that were debated at various points.

Balakrishnan gave some ready tips to the CIOs, as he commenced the talk telling CIOs to learn from the experiences of the Internet industry, as a starting point to become an agile enterprise is to locate the "use case".

Prasanto Kumar Roy, chief editor, CyberMedia group, took the CIOs through the business process transformation, infrastructure upgrades and consolidation as the key priorities that worry a CIO.

It was agreed that a CIO has to play the business analyst role well. The next step for CIOs is to look beyond the data center and dig deep into the improvements brought into business functions.

People issues emerged as another area that keeps CIOs occupied. Also talked about were issues related to business processes.

There is a gap between the way the business process flows in an enterprise and the way a customer or user would actually like it to flow.

"Learn, network and enjoy," is what E Abraham Mathew, president, CIOL, said at the onset of the event. It surely turned out to be that way for all the CIOs.

(manohars@cybermedia.co.in)