Strategic alliance between IT, business mooted

BANGALORE: “Customers are in a hurry and technology always makes you proactive”, said L Ramnath, GM-Consulting, Wipro Infotech.

Delivering the keynote address on the theme here, "Getting More for Your Business from Technology", Ramnath said, “a strategic alignment between IT and the business is a critical factor. It should become a profit sector. Each organization must select and adopt the categorization scheme that is most relevant for it.”

CIOL Enterprise Connect is an exclusive program for CIOs/CTOs/IT Heads of large Indian enterprises and organizations. CIOL has launched the programme in July 2002.

Ramnath further said that if an organization has to benefit from IT, it has to look at, and align two sides — strategic and operational.

The Enterprise Connect, the third in a series of eight events, is specifically designed for CIOs. Over 50 CIOs from various organizations across the verticals participated in the event here. The first two in the series were held in Mumbai and Delhi.

Rajiv Sreekanthan, product manager, system and technology group, IBM India, spoke about cost reduction through server virtualization. He said that today many organizations run a single application on one or more servers.

“Virtualisation is a tool, which is a real cost saver and optimize resources,” Sreekanthan said. He added that organizations 25-30% of total costs could be saved through virtualization.

The event also witnessed a panel discussion on "Adoption of Latest IT Solutions in Enterprises: The Pros and Cons."

Participating in the discussion, Jayachandran B, IT head, Gokaldas Exports Ltd, said that IT gives an advantage in businesses. “Technology changes very often and in the last nine years, we have changed application platforms three times.”

EK Vijayan, GM-IT, DTDC courier and cargo Ltd said that IT is adopted only when customers benefit. Today you can see IT in almost all sectors. The best example for this is banking and finance. Even in the logistics, IT is playing a major role.”

TS Purushotaman, corporate manager, IT & Systems, Britannia Industries Ltd said that IT is for surviving. He pointed out the paradigm shift in technology adoption among the enterprises.

N Suresh, Editor of BioSpectrum, a leading biotechnology magazine from the CyberMedia group, was the moderator for the panel discussion.

Some of the collective opinion that came up at discussion was that introduction of technology will improve the internal process of an organization, which would translate into the customer satisfaction.