Top CIO challenges for 2009: Hexaware

BANGALORE, INDIA: What is the year going to be like for the CIO? And, what better for a CIO to address this situation!

Several trends are clearly visible as we draw closer to the new year. Here, N. Nataraj, Chief Information Officer (CIO), Hexaware Technologies, the Top 10 CIO challenges for 2009 would be as follows:

• Focus on Operational Excellence. There has been an excellent opportunity for CIOs to influence business success. Current economic challenges demand maximum performance, risk mitigation and cost savings and control. By focusing on IT operational excellence, CIOs can both manage short-term demands and achieve long-term goals. This is true for all segments and will be the key to stay in business. CIOs have tremendous pressure of doing more with less (Less can in form of infra investment or resources).
• Innovation is a company challenge as well as an important CIO challenge, given that technology is increasingly embedded in every aspect of an enterprise and is constantly changing.
• Aligning information technology and IT mission goals to the current business scenario to strengthen internal systems by managing or re-architecting older systems. There will be immense pressure from top management to implement the performance dashboards/Balance Score Card for every function within the organization.
• Funding IT programs and projects that best correspond to the overall goals of the organization thereby enabling IT in most efficient way to improve service to customers/ stakeholders/ employees. Some of the CIO’s may also have pressure to transition the IT from cost to profit centre.
• Keeping in mind the current financial environment characterized by mergers and acquisitions it is becoming increasingly important that we respect the value of the acquired company and preserve that value thereby working towards bringing the two organizations on the same level of data and communications.
• The significant increase in our focus on cost control/consolidation and complementary strategic efforts is certainly indicative of the challenges.
• In an environment of globalization and intense competition from overseas, CIOs need to be able to deliver flexible IT solutions that will enable their businesses to compete in an international market place.
• The challenge before each CIO is to make sure that he/she makes a clear distinction between the demand side of IT and the supply side of IT. The fact that manpower is becoming such a scarce resource in a country of a billion people-thanks to India's status as the global IT services superpower-means going forward in the near to medium term it will be far more difficult to attract technical talent to user companies.
• Formulating or implementing enterprise architecture for business continuity plan. Now the disaster is not a rare thing and every major & critical IT project should have the fall back option. The other critical challenges are: Implementing and controlling IT capital and Operational planning and securing the investment; Balancing information sharing and security/privacy; Consolidating common IT business/ mission functions.
• CIOs can't afford to ignore some major trends: cloud computing, virtualization, light systems, and analytics, and it would be a challenge to integrate those systems to best suit the company needs.
• Green IT is increasingly evolving as the need of the hour.  CIOs will play a major role in implementing this initiative.