Balu locknotes C-Change 2005

BANGALORE: The C-Change event came to a close with Balu Doraisamy, MD, HP India delivering the locknote address. Balu spoke at the event in his personal capacity amply recounting his early career experience in IT management and his vast interactions with the CIO community thereafter as an IT vendor. He termed his stint as part of the IT management team at a US company in the mid-eighties to be the most memorable.

Said Balu, " Indian CIOs are good at squeezing the last drop out of every IT investment and demonstrating deep understanding and appreciation for technology. Where they fall short is in their experience in handling business pressures, handling large virtual teams, and articulating their vision to the rest of the business".

The theme of the session was: " Managing Expectations Within Limitations". To begin with, Balu clarified the expectations CXOs had from CIOs. In summary, the expectations range from the need to make the enterprise agile to the imminent need to connect suppliers and partners, from making IT an enabler for business to using IT to reduce costs. All these lofty expectations have to be met with one rider: "do all these with a reduced IT budget". This is the greatest challenge of the CIO role, according to Balu.

Balu enjoined the CIOs to demystify technology, avoid jargon, and be more articulate about the business goals that IT could help achieve. He exhorted, " Have a clear IT strategy but more important is to be able to clearly articulate its various constituencies that matter".

Outlining some of the key trends in overall information technology landscape, Balu stressed that the emerging focus is on IT economics. This has led to the traditional IT infrastructure to become a shared services infrastructure. Said Balu, " IT would be run as a service delivery business and IT departments would become service providers". He added that CIOs would have to learn the art of managing the whole even as they deliver the parts to perfection.

As a prescription to the CIO community, Balu outlined five steps towards achieving excellence in IT projects: creating an IT strategy that is aligned to business, having a rollout plan and a structure that helps follow-through and keeps track of progress, a governance structure centred around people and processes, keeping abreast of evolving IT architecture models and examining adaptability, and a disciplined execution of the strategy with collaboration from the stakeholders.

As a final note, Balu left the CIOs with a career strategy that he calls " SLICE". It summarizes most of the behavioral changes that a CIO has to adopt to become more effective : the need to simplify everything that falls in their way, the needs to keep costs under control, the need to listen to everyone who is a user of technology, the need to include oneself in the CEO's agenda even if it is a crisis, the need to communicat copiously, and the need to educate everyone on what IT can do and deliver.