Learning from India's Top CIOs

Saturday, December 09, 2006

What is the Indian CIO most concerned about? We talked it out with India's top IT decision makers from myriad streams like Aerospace, Business Services, Market Research, Real Estate, Pharma & Healthcare, Banking, Retail, Media, Communications and so on. The adjacent graph charts the trends in present IT deployments in various verticles and what the CIOs intend to deploy in near future.

They might differ at the business table, but all of them agreed to one thing-an IT project merits deployment if it brings great business benefits to the organization. Inside are some exclusive insights to what 10 IT stalwarts had to say.

	Amit Kumar Group CIO, Max New York Life Insurance and Max Healthcare Keen golfer, an engineer from IIT Kanpur and Masters in Computer Sc from University of Kentucky, USA. He is with MNYL since June 2002. His previous assignments include TCS and Citibank
"At the time of implementation of a technology, the foremost concern is the system integrators. Choosing the right implementation partner is the key as resources deployed sometimes lack the competency to implement in a real life scenario. While getting and retaining qualified staff is a key issue, creating awareness about info security amongst users is also of paramount importance. In today's context, data analytics and making sense of that data for business benefits is fast catching on, the trick in this business is to be a step ahead in providing the right data analytic capabilities to organizations."
	Jyoti Bandopadhyay Vice President - IT, Torrent Pharmaceuticals MS in Industrial Engg (MIS) and BE, NIT Jamshedpur, he has to his credit a good 20 years of experience in handling various IT projects. His experience profile mainly spread around Britannia, Glaxo India and Pfizer India
"A CIO should be a change leader. While he must be aware of technologies and trends therein, he must be convinced about what he has to deploy. Later day compatibility and convincing the top management about the business deliverables of a particular technology are two other issues he should primarily look at. In today's dynamic decision support environment, Business Intelligence solutions are headed to make it big. While ERP can provide you a quality database, its usefulness in the business environment can be understood only with online analytical tools rendered by BI."
	K M Asawa DGM-Projects & IT Infrastructure, Bank of Baroda PMA from IIMA, B.Tech and Certified Associate of Indian Institute of Bankers. Currently heads BoB's most amibitious 'Business Transformation Project'
"In framing the policies, rules, licenses etc, technology has never been an important consideration up till now. Today technology is demanding its recognition. The customer needs, and the business potential offered by technology would force the review of existing policies in the context of technologies of today, which offers the customer and Bank to set up mutually benefiting relationships beyond the confines of geography and time."
	Peeyush Agrawal GM (Broadband) MTNL, Mumbai and COO, Millennium Telecom B Tech (IIT, Roorkee), a gold medalist in marketing mgmt. He has been associated with Telecom industry for over 27 years with wide experience of working with MTNL, BSNL and TCIL
"New technologies are generally expensive due to R & D cost absorption and low sales volumes. In telecom service context, even if the user can afford, he does not normally do so. Enormous marketing efforts are required to create awareness of premium products. Pricing is market driven and not cost based. This does not make a business case most of the time and poses real challenge for decision makers. So a well-structured documentation and detailed study of the customer process and anticipation of future requirement are what would help today's CIO to meet implementation challenges."
	Pravin Savant Vice President-IT, Star India A swimming buff, this mechanical engineer, PG in Systems and Masters in Finance has 17 years of total work experience in Manufacturing; FMCG and Media industry
"One needs to define the scope before embarking on the initiative and then consolidate requirements to choose the best solution and platform. In the coming months, getting and retaining good talent is going to be another issue which the CIOs need to handle. Managing schedules, cost and deliverables simultaneously is a primary challenge for us. There are technologies available but what we need to ensure is that the deployed solution is aligned with users' needs, and is flexible enough while maintaining all standards."
	Rajesh Kurup Research Director, eTechnology Group, IMRB An MBA in Marketing, and a Market Research specialist by now with as much as 15 years' of experience in the field, he has previously offered his services to Market Probe, MARG, IRIS Research and ORG
"Organizations should be able to customize IT solutions as per their needs. Pre-sales consultation can solve this problem, which is largely driven by vendor programs today.  Secondly, a modern organization should look at using BI for predictive analysis. Disaster recovery is another area that will see a lot of implementations in near future, as regulatory bodies are enforcing (we follow SEBI) it too. And since DR is only a subset of BCP, it is for the decision makers to convince the top management to invest in this so that there is no downtime."
	Sreedhar S General Manager-Software Development Siemens Public Communication Networks B E(E & C), REC Surathkal. 17 years of experience in IT industry. Currently handling Software Configuration Management, Test Lab Management, etc. Has previously worked with HCL and TCS
"As a decision maker you must look at deriving ROI, all pervading applications and infrastructure. You also need to explore capabilities of your current infrastructure to maximize its value for business. Complexity and data keep growing and if you don't manage it, you can soon go out of control. Therefore, DR and BCP, change mgmt, centralized storage and process re-engineering will save a lot of grease in managing the infrastructure dynamics. Virtualization is going to be another key aspect in optimizing & increasing the ROI."
	S R Reddy Assistant Vice President (IT), UTI AMC Total 15 years of experience in handling IT implementations of mutual funds industry. Prior to UTI Mutual Funds, he was with Andhra Bank where he worked on many important IT projects
"Maintaining a single view of the customers, ID mgmt and access mgmt are three main challenges for us. While solutions are available in this space, there is a need to consolidate data across multiple channels and multiple business units. Single Sign On and SOA are two promising solutions that are sure to catch on. Further, to maximize business returns, a CIO must identify information assets, find reliable vendors who provide end-to-end solutions and convince top management of the benefits of any deployment."
P Valsakumar ADIG-CTC (Telecommunication & IT), CRPF CRPF has been his karmabhoomi for past 32 years. Of these, he has dedicated past 26 years to the IT and communication at even the most remote locations across India
"Approval of Project takes a lot of time resulting in obsolescence of technology. Another issue that we face is that in the age of turnkey projects, there is no single vendor who can do it all. The letting and sub-letting various project modules to vendors and to sub-vendors by them creates a mismatch. Along with that keeping the network up and running at all times, and at places as remote as North East and Kashmir is a big challenge too. Keeping all this in mind, you need to plan for 20 years ahead. So there needs to be proper understanding and planning. More importantly, industry should publish some guidelines specific to the government sector as the needs and infrastructure here are different than the private sector."
CIO of a housing Bank (Name withheld on request)
"Managing change is the first and biggest concern for us. A large number of technologies are coming simultaneously and we do not have complete reviews to evaluate these technologies. Thus, there is a need that the industry associations provide us a platform to test these technologies before deploying them. Also, in light of dynamic IT environment, decisions need to be taken faster. So the space for a second tier system that can do the initial data modeling and support in decision-making is soon going to become a more important issue than anything else."

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