Lesson 7: Hypes and Risks

MY favourite word all through these years, like any other sharp businessman would agree, has been ‘risk'.

It may have a different swashbuckling sound to it in the eardrums of business decisions but the connotations have always been amusing for me whenever I pasted this word on IT pages. Do we take enough risk?

Manish Bahl,Vice President and Country Manager, Forrester India has taken the bull by horns in a report he let me read during our flight to Delhi last year. It showed that CIOs must help the business mitigate the risk of this transformation by devising, implementing, and operating a risk management strategy for the adoption of cloud services, mobility, and social technologies.Their data showed that Indian organizations are comparatively less mature in this area. They're typically at the repeatable stage for risk management but act only when the need arises; managing risk is not a well-documented or institutionalized process.

It's easy to forget the basics while aiming for the stars. But sooner or later one realizes the mistake.

I have learnt one thing for sure whenever I have tried to take a leap of risk with something new. That's something that I owe to some precious advice from friend across the shores. Rob Enderle: President and Principal Analyst of the Enderle Group reminded me in time that assuring skills is something that one should not goof up on. IT is often over worked and under resourced. This typically means that needed training is put off indefinitely and that employees are often increasingly poorly trained for the systems and software they are asked to manage and support.

This can add significantly to the number and duration of outages because this staff is learning on the job and often must call for external help for situations that might not have even occurred has these newer systems been managed by trained techies.The CIO that doesn't assure the skills of their staff is building a time bomb that will increasingly damage their organizations performance.

Son, Sunil Padmanabh from Gartner is another wise head you should keep around you. He is quite seasoned as an analyst as you will discover in your future surely. But do not forget to note his candour. He told me frankly enough to not chase some latest version of tech-craze or try to fool-hardily buy a piece or kind of technology just to align everything with the company's global branches.

Never to force-fit a popular tech trend or brand. Never fall for erroneous judgements. Specially when you have white elephants to worry tending for.

Sreeram Vijay Maddury, Vice President - IT at Reliance Power Limited, was one of those well perched minds who knew both sides of the coin well. He always wondered about the sheer need of risk-taking ability that needs improvement with CIOs. As he would passionately say, "Somewhere you need to understand that you can't wait for all answers. Because by then, new questions would have arrived. "

Technology and obsolescence run a funny loop for sure son. People jump to technology but without counting in the business need of it, as he cautioned also. No one these days spends time on understanding the advantages, the real benefits if any, of technology in business terms.

There is no point in jumping to something big for the sake of it.  I used to ask him at such junctures that how many pilots are too many and he would amusedly answer, "Do passengers take a demo when a new airline is launched? Then why do we IT folks do not trust technology enough?To the point of being too cynical at times? Pilots are not going to help much and always. Vendors cannot put all the minute functionalities in a standard product. Some working around and customization is inevitable."

So you make sure you are not caught on the wrong side of this balance son.  Son what would we do with the in-memory, analytics or Big Data noise that greets us everywhere now? We couldn't finish our discussion last time because of that impending launch of the new township I wanted to gift your sisters. Though in passing, I wonder if that was indeed a good idea. Diamonds are any day better if not cheaper when it comes to girls (and you remember that!)

Anyways, so as I was saying, you know better than what I could decide but while you take that call there's something interesting that Dinesh Jain, Country manager. Teradata told me. Globally lot of customers are investing in futuristic-and-emerging things like analytics or Hadoop which is not so much the case in India.

Analytics, for instance, is still relegated and apart from telecom verticals does not see much adoption. Telecom is smart enough to see it as a long term back bone. Analytics is something that needs a larger participation from business side too. Point solutions should be passé now. We need businesses to look at holistic picture. Point-based approach is probably the reason why a much-talked-about thing like Analytics is not growing too much in the Indian market, Jain had observed.

Young blood runs the heat of risk taking as old fogies like me should have absorbed by now. But I have a hunch that you will take the leap when it is right and will land in good shape on the other side whenever you decide to jump.

Needless to say, wear your jogging shoes. Leather is for other occasions if you know what I mean. By the way, do not let your brothers wear my grandpa's shoes. They are a terrible fit I have always observed.

Your great grandpa always used to rebuke me: It's not about the shoes; it's how you wear them.