Five years from now, will there be brand new CIOs?

BANGALORE, INDIA: As leaders of change and drivers of innovation, the world of CIOs is changing dramatically. It has evolved over the years and it will certainly continue to become more competitive and strategic. While capitalizing on industry trends, CIOs need to connect the business with the mission and the vision of the organisation with a focus on bringing in a transformation in the organisation.

That has been happening, but if we have to see the future, what would be the changes a CIO expects to his role in the next five years? There is no 'one size fits all' answer to that question. There are myriad thoughts, if we ask the CIOs who seem to be quite prepared for their changing roles.

Drawing competitive advantage

Bhupendra Pant, Head IT, L&T-EWAC Alloys Ltd

The role of CIO will continue to evolve. As enterprises become more virtual the CIO's ability to provide consultancy and advice on getting strategic information from fragmented data sources across owned and third-party IT resources will be critical to business.

The front-end CIOs will shift their attention to business strategies, business models, helping their enterprise expand into new marketplaces, helping create new customers, new products and new sources of raw materials. Whether his designation is 'CIO' or something else but essentially he will continue to be the one who connects the business, the mission, the goals and objectives, the strategy and the strategic plan with the IT agenda. He will continue to leverage technology in more innovative ways for competitive advantage.

INVOLVEMENT IN LINE MANAGEMENT                                                    Anuradha Roy, SAIL

Essentially earlier the business was MIS oriented and CIOs used to analyse data and update the management. Their role has evolved over the years and now they are more involved in business transactions. They understand that they are shouldering huge responsibility. Certainly, in future, the management will truly understand the value of CIO's contribution to the business and make them more involved in line function.

HIGH EXPECTATIONS

G S Rao, CIO, KSK Ventures

We will see a lot more business alignment, workflow integration and intelligent information analytics considering all of the devices, applications and systems around with an improved business users expectations. The result of which will be a major value addition to the top management for effective decision making.

We will be challenged with high expectations in terms of IT organizations service support, analytical skills and to increase IT's value to the rest of the organization based on highly volatile technological advances which in turn will pose implementation challenges. Both technological and business growth should be considered as an enormous user satisfaction which seems to be a moving target, but enabling higher levels of service and support from IT ensuring that users meet their goals and objectives will ensure the next 5 years growth.

CIO as ICT REVOLUTIONIST

Samir Chaudhury, Powergrid India

The CIO needs to play a complete strategic role, guiding the CEOs and bringing in the right transformation in the organisation. As part of the management, the CIO needs to be an IT revolutionary aligning the programmes with the organisation's vision. Be it new technologies like cloud, the CIO needs must ensure right tech implementation to further the growth of the organisation.

 

 

CIO AS AN INNOVATION SPECIALIST                                                                    Prakash Pradhan, Head-IT & CIO, Jagsonpal Pharmaceuticals Ltd

Now, Edp/IT manager works to compile the data and prepares MIS reports from the silo information block. However, the advent of Internet in '90s brought information to the portfolio,i.e deriving information from the organisational data along with provising internet to the users. Getting the silo data, information and then translating them into intelligence was the priority. Infrastructure to maintain the data movement in the organisation became the IT's main role. Hence a lot of innovations, change management and deployment stratagies came into picture. All the above points were feasible only by aligning IT into the business.

Hence the CIO has been compelled to become an innovation specialist, agent of change and agile in his thinking. IT governance shall take its position only when the less previledged user has the right to access the information repository in a democratic way.