Different roads to innovation

BANGALORE, INDIA: The importance laid on innovation among companies varies. For some, it is a question of what difference it makes to the bottomline, while for others it is a compulsive mandate to do things differently and effectively.

These were some of the views that came up in an interesting panel discussion on Innovating the Enterprise during the first session of Day 2 of CIOL C-Change 2008.

The concern of adapting IT to meet the ever evolving and diversifying enterprise of today was a point that cropped up often in the discussion.

For Moser Baer's 50-member IT team, it was about managing manufacturing complexity and different distribution set-ups for various parts of the company's business.

Manoranjan Kumar, CIO, Lanco Infratech, was of the opinion that innovation happens when it changes the bottomline. "Innovation starts from each employee, not just from the management or IT."

He cited an example of how a call for entries within the company for innovative ideas to improve the bottomline drew many ideas and the best one saved the company considerable tax liability.

On the best practices followed in companies to ensure Business at the Speed of Thought, participants shared their experiences. Titan Industries' CIO N Kailasanathan emphasized that IT should work closely with business.
"It is important that a lot of business issues come to IT earlier. When IT is part of the core team, starting early and being involved makes a lot of difference," he said.

V Muthu Kumar, GM- IT, Moser Baer, said that at his company, the IT team is trying to synergize various SBUs to go on a common platform. "We are looking at a shared unified application architecture that has common processes and also different approach for specific units."

Panelists differed on an enterprise's stand on innovation. While Muthukumar held that innovation is a de facto mandate for a CIO, Kailasanathan opined that it should not be a mandate, but part of the company culture.

Before the panel discussion, Naveen Gupta, vice president, technology sales and services, IBM India, highlighted the trends driving Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

"The entry points to implement SOA are people oriented interfaces; processes that need automation; common database and reuse of data."

He added that in India most enterprises opted for SOA to improve business processes.

(cmn@cybermedia.co.in)