"Business leaders need to take the lead"

BANGALORE: “We are going to get more and more CIOs who have never been core IT professionals. We would also have a lot of IT-savvy people in business. That's the complex world,” expounded Manish Choksi, VP-Strategic Planning and IT with Asian Paints, at the CIOL C-Change forum. The role of the CIO will therefore be that of a most trusted adviser on technology projects of his company rather than being the lead implementer for IT.

Business and IT, he said, have been always at loggerheads. “We have never found the balance between what business or IT should do. If you have too much of committee business — and if everything that is managed by consensus, you land up extending the time for implementation, time for decision making and at times, vested interest also creeps in. IT soon looses focus and plays catch-up to somebody within or outside the company,” he added.

There is, therefore, a need for change. Business leaders should take more responsibility for technology projects, he said. “We certainly have a role to play — that of selecting the right technology, that of selecting the right vendor or helping the business select the right vendor. Ultimately, business benefits of overall completion of the project must be owned by a representative from the company,” he explained.

In companies where particular IT implementations have been successful, this has happened on account of companies being able to marry these two functions together. “There is a business leader who is the project manager for a function and there is a supporting IT cast to play along, especially if it is a project where business plays the lead role. Business leaders need to play more of a supportive role in core technology projects that I would want to manage,” he said.

The critical learning: business is here to stay. So business people in an organization must take the lead, must sponsor the projects and must own the benefits at the end of it. IT can't own the benefits. And reporting to two bosses wouldn't be uncommon either. “As Indian companies, we are used to uni-directional reporting relationships. A dual reporting relationship is something necessary. IT people need to come from the world of business and vice versa. If you have IT people who understands business and have domain expertise of that, the quality of the solution is significantly enhanced,” he opined.