CIOs: The 'Change' agents

BANGALORE: The popular adage — 'Change is the only constant' took center stage at the recently concluded C-Change event held at the sprawling Golden Palms Hotel & Spa in Bangalore. Around 90 CIOs from India's leading enterprises came together and debated on a plethora of issues ranging from the role of the CIO to grappling vendor hype to adopting new and emerging technologies.

The ball was set to rolling by Pradeep Gupta, MD, CyberMedia who walked the CIO's on creating knowledge and interactive platforms. Citing instances from CyberMedia and the key values that guided the company to evolve into a multi-dimensional media house in the country with a slew of print, online, and interactive offerings.

Gupta also pointed out the instrumental role being played by CIOL in bringing the CIO's closer to various technology issues through forums like enterprise connect and C-Change. He said that organizations have to adapt to the changing business dynamics by strategically using IT, which is the key element of the knowledge economy.

However, the creation of the knowledge economy has various elements that have to be managed. In terms of IT, it boils down to the CIO, who has now become the center of attraction.

Quips Inder Thukral,Director-Strategy & Business Development, IBM (India), “ The role of the CIO is constantly changing. The CIO today is not only a technology driver, but also he needs to be a strategist. As a part of the enterprise IT demands, the CIO today has to address a range of technology circumstances and with every technology changeover comes both comfort and pain.”

The message conveyed here to the IT heads is that most of them struggle to manage change, because they are unable to respond to it immediately as they need to factor issues relating to uncertainty- like whether that technology is relevant to them are not. And they also need to factor the cost aspects like whether that technology will deliver the RoI and take the enterprise IT infrastructure to a much more defined level of maturity. "Technology can either be a enabler or inhibitor as well,” added Thukral.

Data matters

As enterprises adopt newer technologies and with their business diversifying their IT resources obviously gets choked and leads to information overload. Quips L.V.Sastry, Associate Director, Xerox, “ More than 75% of the enterprise data is unstructured and this leads to data reaching the threshold limits. For instance if we take the emails alone, enterprises generate close to 10 billion mails annually and close to 50% of it gets printed. Billions of new documents are added every day.”

To manage the data explosion and the output demands that are increasing by the day, enterprises need to manage its output demands through a defined policy. Says Sastry, “ Most of the enterprises do not know what they are spending on in terms of output devices. So to map the existing document demand patterns the CIO needs to do a through analysis by asking certain key questions like- How to evolve a document infrastructure? How to manage work productivity and growing output demands? These and whole lot of issues are addressed by Xerox's Office Document Assessment (ODA) concept which provides a standard method to identify and analyze office output requirements.”

According to Xerox sources, its ODA brings in measurable cost savings to the enterprises on the document management front to the tune of 40%.

Growing unstructured data is a key pain area and a challenge to most of the enterprises. With data spread over in a distributed environment leads to various security issues. Both structured and unstructured data on a web environment is prone to hawkers and people with malicious intent will bring down data integrity on the network.

Reflecting on that B.V.Jagadeesh, President, and CEO, NetScaler says, “ Data over the web environment demands high degree of network security. Information has to be delivered over a secured environment. IT security issues have come into center stage post 9/11 and CIO's across the world are trying to grapple the magnanimity of the issue. For instance on the one hand the CIO's has to factor internal and outside threats and on the other one should pick the right kind of technologies that secures the entire network.”

Jagadeesh also touched on aspects like managing chatty protocols like TCP/IP and with improper network management brings in a high degree of latency on the network. Given the plurality of issues cutting across technology change, data management, network security, and whole lot of issues, the solution lays in a pro-active IT strategy that a CIO has to put in place. Here the CIO has to think beyond their cut roles as a technologist and don the shoes of a business strategist.

Strategy pays

This is what Subrato Bagchi, COO, Mindtree Consulting, pondered over. He raised certain fundamental questions like who is the strategist? When does one become a strategist? How strategic decisions are taken? He said that strategy is a set of choices that expands an individual's horizon. Strategy is part science and part art, it is like warfare. For instance the very term —Strategy originated from the Greek word 'Strategia'- meaning office of the general.

While elaborating on the role of the CIO in modern day enterprise, Bagchi drove home the point that the inability to communicate in simple terms is a major challenge for technologists. Moreover one's affection for the business determines the kind of strategy coming into play. “So when the rubber meets the road, the strategies and choices made will be put to the ultimate test,” added Bagchi.

Touching on the same topic, Prof.S.R.Raghunath, IIMB, Corporate Strategy. Raghunath, walked the CIO's through couple of case studies from the Cement industry. He showcased how a CIO as a business strategy made IT work for one of the leading cement manufacturer of the world — Camex Mexico. Information has to be a premium product, if it is not, nobody will pay for it. Hence a CIO has to do a lot of innovation that adds value. And value is the key to profits. “The success mantra here is the intelligent use of IT and making it scalable so that it can meet future demands” said Raghunath.

Innovation breeds success

After hectic discussions on making strategic technology decisions and the role of the CIO, the deliberations came to a very important aspect that actually is the catalyst to all the above. It is innovation. Despite innovation being an oft-used term, it is the motor that drives the enterprises technology initiatives. Where does true innovation start? The answer would be — at the intersection of invention and insight, feels Girish Vasudevan, country manager, IBM India. Vasudevan spoke about “ Evolving Landscape — Computing In the Future” and considered that innovation is the fusion of new developments and new approaches to solve real life problems. And the pace of innovation is also accelerating with newer technologies taking hold at double or triple the previous rates known.”

Talking about innovation at IBM, Vasudevan said that the On Demand Innovation Services enables IBM clients' access to the world's best experts and business scientists. “The On Demand era has to look at accelerating advances in technology, deeper integration of IT with business systems, the emergence of industry ecosystem. We have to ensure that technology delivers the growth we are looking for,” he said. IBM has evolved in the autonomic computing cycle from relying on reports, products and manual actions to manage IT components to a level where IT components collectively and automatically are managed by business rules and policies.

Innovation in Storage

The ubiquitous disk drive that sits on every PC is under going a sea change. Riding on the innovation factor disk drives are getting smaller, new interfaces are coming in a deluge: the result - it is putting the consumer in the drivers seat. According to B.S.Teh, MD, Asia Pacific, Seagate, while speaking on 'Innovating Storage' said: “ Disk drive applications are spilling out from the PC territory and getting absorbed rapidly in the consumer electronics space. But at the same time, the storage demands are ever increasing and many struggle to manage the storage requirements in the enterprise and one often hear voices saying — I ran out of storage.”

Moreover Seagate is putting in place some leading technologies in the realm of storage as per the industry expectations and demands. To begin with, the longitudinal recording currently in vogue will be replaced by perpendicular recording (PR) in time. And the first PR based drives are expected to hit the market in about 18 months from now. The next major transformation is happening in the realm of form factor. The shift from 3.5 inch to 2.5-form factor has already begun and this is making the disk drives smaller and reliable. According to B.S.Teh the disk drive market is poised for big growth and if we take the case of Seagate alone, it has shipped close to 115 million units amounting to 6.6 petabytes in 2004. With consumer electronics demand on the incline, disk drive market is all set to grow in leaps and bounds in the next two years.

What emerged at the end of C-Change event are lots of insights and learning for the CIO. Many new issues came up and that sets the tone for the next event that demand different answers. The event is evidence to the growing role of the CIO's in the enterprises. Moreover the enterprises ability to grow and expand largely depends on the kind of IT systems it has in place.

In that line events like C-Change enables the CIO to interact with their community and handshake with the vendors, in that bargain they found some pointers and clues that will aid them in solving some of the pressing IS issues confronting them.