CYOT: CIOs are thinking beyond BYOD

MUMBAI, INDIA: You can not just buy a laptop and a software and tell your employee to use it. We know that already, thanks to the BYOD

hangover. But it's more serious and deep than what it appears to be.

CIOs today have to facilitate a device, or an app and let users decide what tools they want to pick. "The users have to deliver but once both

sides know that, the user's discretion applies on how to do that. IT is no more 'pushing' its choices."

Christoph Baeck, CIO Asia, Hilti etched this point at Nasscom India Leadership Forum here while speaking at a session titled 'Are

Technology Predictions Redundant?'.

Manu Parpia, MD, CEO, Geometric seconded his argument citing how product design tools too are becoming more intuitive and changing user

experience. The main question, as Gerald Hoehne, CIO, SMA Solar Technology AG, added next is that IT has to be a consultant and

influencer as well in the course of business.

When business counterparts share the mindset, Christopher added, it becomes easy to achieve the user-oriented direction and still balance

business expectations.

In another session called 'Disruptive Innovations and the Future of Enterprise', Darryl West, CIO, Lloyds Banking Group, laid out how the

mobile user is impacting the banking major's strategy and reach-out tools. The bank has two user-inclined apps like the one where customer

can track 'where my money goes' and another augmented reality app for home-finder situations.

With nine million active users, 35 per cent of who are mobile users and a 120 per cent uptick in mobile app usage growth, his team seems

to be aligning IT in response to customer directions.

Managing three-pronged pressure of shareholder-customer-regulator expectations is giving a new drift to his IT strategy for now. On one

side regulators stress on fair customer treatment, while customers want an integrated seamless experience across many mediums; and on the

other hand shareholders expect efficiency and productivity. That again iterates that IT is on its way to reinventing itself as the market

changes.