In 
It’s not easy to handle the position of a CIO. Who knows it better than the CIOs themselves? So, when they evaluate senior IT Managers who aspire to be CIOs,
it goes without saying that the evaluation is quite a grilling task.
T G Dhandapani, Chief Information Officer, TVS Motors says, “Very enthusiastic learner Industries who took the process very seriously. One of the candidates passionately explained the project. It showed the ownership and devotion”
“One of the interviewees was so eager that he called me three to four times and convinced me to hear him beyond the questions I had for him. He also wanted my feedback about him and asked me if I could become his mentor. My suggestion to applicants would be to get out of the project mode, and talk about how they can manage themselves and their targets, “says Tamal Chakraborty, Global IT Director, Bata Shoe Organisation.
Yagnesh Parikh – IT, ICICI Securities observes, “I find most candidates having command on the domain with sufficient knowledge and quite mature to be the Next CIO. However, they need to work on managerial skills a bit.”
Aruna Rao, CTO, Kotak Bank says, “Candidates come prepared, they know results of psychometric and managerial capability tests and they do thorough homework as to who will conduct the interview. They guess intelligently what the questions could be and what possible turns in the answers are. They delighted me really in the Q&A sessions. One of them really impressed me when he narrated his story. This gentleman was working as an IT manager of a hospital. He was called upon when a CEO of an organisation, a patient in this case, wanted to set up a virtual office to carry on his operations. The CEO was impressed. Later, the interviewee was offered a job in the CEO’s organisation at a senior level. This shows how a junior IT manager can walk that extra mile to make an impression not only within the periphery of is work but also outside his call of duty. This is definitely a good example of managerial skills.”
Girish Rao CIO, Marico says, “Post award engagement with the candidates and further assessment to ensure that the winners stay on course to becoming a CIO is important. I felt that most of the candidates needed to have more of an all-round appreciation of IT from different aspects and a 360 degree view of their portfolio; technical depth is one of the aspects for and a pre-requisite to becoming a CIO. Most of them felt that it was almost like a job interview and treated it like one. They should look at the entire Next100 award process as more of a career gap assessment. The other aspect that needs to be drilled into candidates is that the Next100 award does not mean that one can become a CIO immediately but a stepping stone towards it.”
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