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"IT has become a strategic partner"

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CIOL Bureau
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In a tête-à-tête with Sudesh Prasad, Kifer talks about the changing role of CIO and other issues. Excerpts: 

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How has the role of IT in Applied Materials changed over the years?

IT’s role at Applied Materials has come a long way from the earlier focus entirely on bottomline, cost reduction and sustaining and maintaining business enablement. We want to play more of a strategic role in management of IT and we are accomplishing that. We are doing that through business transformation and through the IT transformation for a high performing value add. Our company has go to be a market leading world class organization that has the benefit of world class IT organization. So there are tremendous opportunities at Applied Materials. If we do things that we are going to do around business enablement, building real core competencies, change leadership, and business process optimization, I think our company's senior leadership is beginning to understand the value of IT and beginning to support the business initiatives that were put In place. We have been able to reduce our cost by about 30 per cent, allowing the organization to spend that money back that will create competitive advantage.

What according to you Is an Ideal CIO expected to do?

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There are certain traditional things that CIOs are expected to do and deliver stable production services, application system availability, manage Information risk, ensure business continuity. The role, however, is dramatically expanding. He is expected to provide leadership support, business process optimization, and vendor enterprise service management and also business transformation Initiatives because IT is the thread that runs through the entire business. A CIOs have to find ways to fund business enablement. Budgets will continue to be constrained and they have to create mechanism for resource optimization and taking the cost out to be able to reallocate those resources to business enablement. and change initiatives. He can do this through managed services to reduce ROI.

What about the NextGen CIO?

The NextGen CIO will be an equal, strategic partner. There will be a blurring of line between business and IT and IT would just be another functional area of the business. There will be a respect for IT's ability to be able to drive competitive advantage and their ability to support the topline of the organization not just the bottomline. through cost reduction.

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How challenging is the role of CIOs in the fast changing in IT and communications technology landscape?

As CIOs role become more strategic and more business focused and they are not just close to the technology and they will have to form a team of professionals and they have to have a function whose responsibility is technology innovation to make sure that they understand the opportunities available in the emerging technologies and also to be networking with academic institutions and other organizations so that they don't miss an opportunity to deliver competitive advantage to the organization.

What challenge does the tremendous growth of wireless bring to CIOs?

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Enterprises are going to become more mobile in future and have to be an integrated part of their strategy. We have to ensure the integrity of information and intellectual property will become very challenging.

Are you in favor of enterprises outsourcing their IT Infrastructure?

It is a critical component of our overall IT strategy. We want to focus our internal resources on core value add business enabling activities, change leadership, project portfolio management, architecture. We want to outsource those component which the outsourced provider can provide not only skilled resources but also the process maturity, the tool , the matrix. This has to be a very strategic relationship and it has to be a very well managed relationship. As we evolve our own internal capability and continue to evolve our own knowledge management capabilities, the managed service providers will have to do the same thing.

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We have been able to cut our cost by over 30 per cent by using managed services. It is not just for the purpose of having that money back into the organization but to have but to reinvest that money for a competitive advantage.

Which are some of the emerging technologies that would create an impact on an enterprise?

Technology is just a tool and enterprises have to decide how best to use those technologies can be used in overall strategy and make them use to the advantage of the organization. New technologies are a challenge for us to leverage their capabilities. SOA is one technology, which has not lived up to its hype but I think the potential is there and it is also part of our strategy for reengineering our business processes and implementing end-to-end SAP ERP to eliminate 70 per cent of our legacies. We will use SOA to leverage the remainder of those legacies.

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