Does IT matter in business?

NEW DELHI: While CIOs often lament that they are not part of business strategy and planning at the highest level, it is up to them to make their value felt by their CEOs and MDs. ONGC Ltd CMD Subir Raha brought this point to the fore in his speech on the topic, 'Role and importance of IT in business strategy' at the Enterprise Connect CIO dinner hosted by CIOL in New Delhi.


'IT should aspire to become an indispensable part of the whole business, it is only then CIOs will be invited to board meetings along with CFOs and sales heads,' he added.

Speaking at the gathering, Escorts Heart Inst. & Research Center Advisor-Systems MP Singh educated the audience on the role of IT in medicine sector. 'The staff should be able to interact with the systems with minimum effort, and the time spent on clerical work should be minimized, so that they are free to do all that is more important, is the biggest challenge facing us', he added.

Talking of powering users, Singh also acquainted the audience with the high degree of interaction which is part of the hospital’s website, as users are able to view and download their reports online after they have come to hospital once for tests.

Can IT move from being merely a business function to become enabler of business? The next speaker on the panel Hero Cycles Ltd VP (Systems) SP Arya raised this question. Talking of importance of IT as a tool to institutionalize knowledge dissemination in the organization, he pressed upon the need for a seamless mix of IT with business strategy.

'IT should be an enterprise wide activity and responsibility for implementing an IT project should be shared by other CXOs along with the CIO of the enterprise,' said Arya.

While highlighting the importance of connecting IT with the end user, Pradeep Gupta, CMD of Cyber Media Group said that information holds strategic importance in today’s age. He pointed out that the key challenge before today’s CIOs is to bring a synergy between the end user needs and deliverables. "IT for the CIO is different from what IT is for the end user in a company. A CIO should understand the requirements of the end user and give the right information," he added.

"The screens showing information have to be more visual, to facilitate easy decision-making," said Gupta. He also compared to the complex IT infrastructure consisting of hardware, software and networks as a black box, adding, 'the users should not be bothered with what is inside the black box, they should only get the right information at the right time.'