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Technology depends significantly on business, which CIO supports. However, today the fact is technology quickly keeps on changing, and hence it is very important for any CIO to have an action plan as part of the strategy to align these changing technologies with business. An effective IT road map certainly helps in charting out these changes and tech- transformations.
CIOs need to have the capability to understand the changes in the technology landscape, whilst at the same time they require the foresight to correlate which of those technologies will bring the right value to the business. They should not get carried away by the bombardment of technology solutions and products, which vendors keep pushing down the throat. They should smartly choose only those which would deliver the optimum benefit for the organisation. The pace of change will also depend a lot on the culture of the organisation and the pace at which the business can adapt to technology changes.
Thus, any smart CIO should always keep an eye on the new technology trends and wait for an appropriate opportunity to adopt the technology that makes business sense. E.g., migrating to a cloud infrastructure could make business sense for a new green field project as opposed to replacing an existing infrastructure – assuming all other parameters remain unchanged.
Kamal Sharma, the Group CIO and SBU Head at Mindlance Kamal Sharma, the Group CIO and SBU Head at Mindlance has been following a strategy that helps in keeping a close watch on upcoming tech-trends, and proactively conduct POCs ensuring desired business results. He asserted, “We do tech-transformation on need basis, be it a functional need or a business demand. CIOs should be well aware about business drivers, and that gives clarity to choose and pick technology that empowers business to reach the goal.”
Some CIOs are not willing to adopt new technologies. But failing to take action to modernise your IT environment puts your entire business at risk. It lowers your competitiveness, affects the process of achieving your organisation’s goals and increases costs. IT environment needs a holistic and proactive approach. It should be given utmost timely attention. Let’s look at some of the steps that a CIO needs to take and follow to bring in IT business transformation.
Ways to achieve IT business transformation
There are no fixed recipes for bringing in an IT business transformation. But it is crucial for the CIO to do a detailed study of the various business processes involved, stake holder wise. They should identify the business challenges, and then explore how technology can help in addressing these business challenges.
Some of the steps that a CIO needs to follow to bring in IT business transformation are listed hereafter. One should start with educating business stakeholders about IT transformation, and walk through the phases to achieve the changes desired. There should be complete clarity over the plan and steps involved in the plan.
- A CIO should chart out the crisp road map to achieve the transformation. The road map should consist of risk analysis, definition of processes, implementation guide and components of the plan.
- Effective and controlled implementation is equally important for IT business transformation. During execution, important elements that need to be focused on are: business process change, system deployment, performance monitoring and change management.
- Monitoring and measuring the transformation (post implementation) provides good scope for proactive improvements to achieve required results.
Muralidharan Ramachandran, the CIO at Syntel
According to Muralidharan Ramachandran, the CIO at Syntel, the universal truth of PPT (People, Process and Technology), in the same order of priority holds true at all times for all IT business transformation initiatives. He mentioned, “CIOs need to align business teams to simplify business processes, adopt best practices that can be leveraged optimally using the capabilities and drive value creation from the technology implementation perspective.”
Dealing with existing infrastructure
While new technologies do certainly provide the ability to transform business models and gain competitive advantage, one cannot run away from the realities of the legacy infrastructure and applications that reside in every organisation. Having a structured approach and plan to leverage new technologies to keep migrating, managing and modernising the infrastructure and applications is a rigour that every CIO should have to deal with. Optimisation and best possible integration with systematic plan of migration to new technology is the safest method to handle outdated infrastructure and application.
Sebastian Joseph, Former CTO at DDB Mudra Group mentioned that the ideal situation is to define life of various IT infrastructure components – including hardware and software, and follow a refresh cycle based on this. He said, “However, this sounds good in theory. Most CIOs face pressures when it comes to Capex spending. This results in asset life getting stretched. In such cases, CIOs need to ensure that critical assets like server, network components etc., get refreshed on time.”
Harnessing new technologies
Mobility, cloud, social and Big Data are game changers and are literally transforming the business models. CIOs should evaluate the usefulness of these technologies from a business perspective before deployment. Most of these technologies can definitely help businesses be ahead of the curve. For example, there is an organisation that has deployed Video Conferencing (VC) on mobile platform, wherein VC has been democratised amongst the users. This has resulted in cost reduction as well as increased productivity. Guest link feature allows one to invite any user with an Internet connection and web cam to join the VC.
While driving the digital transformation initiatives of Syntel’s customers by leveraging social, mobility, Big Data and cloud, the company has also adopted a lot of these initiatives internally. “Syntel has a process of continuously working with its customers in evaluating risks and putting in place the business continuity plans. To manage this program effectively, we have planned some initiatives to automate a lot of these business continuity plans and reduce risks for the organisation,” said Ramachandran.
Technology is for nourishing business and not for technology’s sake. The fact that technology is changing does not mean that the CIO has to immediately embrace the new technology. One should evaluate the new technology, understand the pros and cons, and more importantly the ROI it can bring to the business. Based on this outcome, a CIO should decide whether or not to adopt the new technology. While calculating, one often tends to miss out certain hidden elements like cost of de-learning & re-learning, migration, training, skill set requirement, IT infrastructure requirements, etc.
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