Lesson 9 and 10: CIOs and Business

YOU know son what your grandma used to say? It takes great skill in doing anything: even in making porridge.

I never dared to challenge her hypothesis in the territories of kitchen but have often found a grain of truth in her simple convictions.

You and I, are one of the rare breed who knows what IT really stands for, even when it is taken so much for granted, and is accorded its Budget and seat almost condescendingly by other CXOs at many places and times.

We know just how easy or intricate things can get with this so-called porridge depending on how much rhythm beats between IT and business. Like a heartbeat, a pulse where it is difficult to tell which is which.

You have been trying to meet me over that jet plane for a while. I know I have been inappropriately impolite to greet you with a closed door last few days, but in my defense, I have been trying to figure out this complex equation between business and technology.

Of the several enlightening reports that have been keeping me busy in this pursuit, I also read one by our Forrester friend Manish Bahl who chalked out something with John Brand from a survey of 130 IT leaders in India in 2012. It talked about this slow but relentless global revolution that is sweeping traditional technology management. Historically, only IT organizations delivered technology for employee use. But this is changing: Technology use is pervasive; technology management is increasingly outside of IT's direct control; and companies measure technology success by how much it boosts business results.

Forrester prefers to define this revolution as business technology (BT), and it is as relevant for Indian companies as it is for their counterparts in the West. In the survey, more than 90 per cent described BT as a mechanism for improving alignment between IT and the business - specifically, that BT should provide the basis for more business value and greater business growth.

Turns out that the two sides may be aliens but not foes at times. Or at least that is how things would be in a utopian world.

Shrikant Kulkarni, Senior VP & CIO, KPIT Cummins Infosystems Ltd is one such guy who would always emphasise on how support of top management, ownership of business/ functional leaders in the organization is key to the success of ERP implementation. It is essential that nominated functional representatives are available full time for the project activities. In reality they are unable to give enough time, attention to project activities mainly providing functional process inputs. Such situation which is commonly observed is a sure recipe for project delays/overruns. You will find the incidence of change requests is very high in such ERP projects.

So in the Forrester report I found that Indian CIOs have started to realize that if they continue using traditional approaches to maintaining and supporting the technology infrastructure and applications as simply a business support service, then the importance of their role will diminish.

CIO will have to gear up for the new era that is already blowing new winds. The growing complexity and competitiveness of business in India makes it more challenging to understand what can be done to help improve the bottom line. Indian organizations believe that technology and business should work hand in hand to extract optimum value from technology and business assets as a means of improving profitability.

Given that margins can be extremely low in India, extracting further costs from business processes - let alone IT - can be extremely challenging. BT in India is seen as a mechanism to maximize the value of IT infrastructure using more flexible and efficient applications and platforms, as Bahl wrote there.

Isn't it amusing son how something as fascinating as IT can become a barricade rather than an enabler. I had an interesting conversation with international analyst Rob Enderle, from the Enderle Group on this one. He helped me see how CIOs can often become overly concerned with setting rules and forcing compliance. However line managers own their own budgets these days and there are an increasing number of services, mostly cloud that can provide the capability those managers are asking for at a very low cost. CIOs that say no, rather than trying to find a way to cost effectively address the request find themselves losing budget and authority within their own companies as line managers increasingly bypass them.

I always had my own guesses about it, but they were corroborated by Bahl when his report estimated that around 60 per cent of Indian CIOs spend most of their time managing infrastructure and applications instead of focusing on innovative ways to create new revenue streams and cost savings for the business.

At the same time they cannot let the argument of ‘not enough authority' from top management or boardroom work as a pothole. As Sreeram Vijay Maddury, Vice President - IT at Reliance Power Limited, often says it without mincing any words, there is no time for such excuses now.

Bahl also observed how Indian firms consciously try not to be too negative in their self-assessments. Indians see the tendency to lean to the positive side as more acceptable; they view a response that's too negative as an admission of failure. This makes it incredibly difficult to measure any form of maturity through a self-assessment process. Instead, the only reliable way of assessing maturity is typically for a third party to conduct an independent audit.

If a CIO wills, there is a way.

That's the will and the way I am leaving you with my son. I have all the confidence that you will leave a better technology legacy to inherit when you write your Diary for my grandsons.

If it doesn't sound spooky, may I say that I will be watching you with all my curiosity and time at my disposal now. Have fun!