The how of agility

BANGALORE, INDIA: Diversification, business changes, unstructured information and innovation imperatives; all bring along parallel CIO mandates.

And that's when they have to embrace agility and strike it effectively with technologies like SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), UC (Unified Communications), synchronization, etc.

Just how an organization can actually deliver agility, is what kept the CIOs busy at the second day of C-Change 2008 here on Friday.

The first session threw open the problems that arise when an organization diversifies into new business territories or innovates on products in a big way.

Titan cited its journey from watches to jewellery and Mosar Baer shared its experiences as it forked into areas like solar technology and pre-recorded CDs from being an erstwhile blank media company.

Lauding the benefits of SOA in this context, Naveen Gupta, VP, tech sales and services at IBM explained why SOA is raking in investments worth $ 1 billion a year in his company.

As it turned out, the key player in this change in management process is CIO, who, being the custodian of information, has a central role to drive the vision of agile enterprise.

"CIO's role is to get all the information and disseminate it quickly to the people who are at the center of decision-making process. Agility is about responding in time. “Information needs to be relevant and disseminated fast," reflected Prince Azariah, CIO, MRF Limited.

Another angle on agility came around customer-centric agile technologies. Agility starts with customer and ends with customer.

Delivery in anytime and every time is the key, Arun Gupta, CIO, Shoppers Stop observed.

Next to follow was a heated talk on innovation.

"Is innovation a mandate.” asked a CIO even as another one candidly pointed out that a CIO's time and budget operate in a reverse fashion when it come to real business problems.

Another one posed some more fodder for debate. "When CIOs are expected to innovate, are they also allowed to re-architect processes and systems to move in tandem?"

Nevertheless, there was at least a consensus on one point. Technologies drive innovations, but onus is on the people to integrate these innovations in businesses processes to make an enterprise agile.

The day also deliberated on the rampant growth witnessed by enterprises in unstructured information that is creating new issues today for CIOs.

"Today the need to make information available at a time when it is required, has gained crucial importance. However, most enterprises have software that can handle only a few applications. So the question that is in every CIO's mind is how to incorporate unstructured information,” said Kaushik Bagachi, country manager, Information Management Software, IBM India.

Manoj Paul, vice president and business head, BFSI vertical, Airtel Enterprise Services gave insights to technology options that lead an enterprise to stay agile where he mentioned merging of new systems with the incumbent system, scalability, bringing costs down with incremental revenue and product portfolio, customizing and personalizing products and ensuring quick 'Go to Market'.

In a session on synchronization, CIOs were urged to go a step ahead from being just Chief Information Officers to Chief In-Sync Officers.

This was accompanied with various dimensions like inside-out, outside-in etc that a CIO should keep in mind while steering a well-synchronised organization.

Some more presentations covered technologies like UC and their use in productivity and contextual collaboration; GoldenGate's real time infrastructure for telecom and banking and real-time integration and business softwares like SOA moving towards WOA (Web-Oriented Architecture) for agility.