Leadership And You by ctof magazine

cio & leader.com

A Question of Answers

I believe

Best of Breed

Re-Imagine IT to Create Value Pg 16

Fit Technology to Specific Needs Pg 08

Top 5 Cloud Migration Mistakes to Avoid Pg 20

01 T r a c k t e c h n o lo g y

B u i ld b usi n ess

Shape self

The State of Solid State | Monitoring and Managing IT Supplier Risk | The Tao of GRC

Leadership & You Discovering the personality types of top technology leaders Page 26

A special section on leadership designed keeping in mind the evolving information needs of CIOs Page 51 to 65

Volume 01 | Issue 01

A 9.9 Media Publication

Volume 01 Issue 01 Jan / Feb 2012 50

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE Dr Pramath Raj Sinha & Anuradha Das Mathur

Can we carve the ‘leader’ out of ourselves? CIO&Leader will help you shape

yourself in integrating newer and bigger demands in an ever-changing environment A QUESTION OF ANSWERS

I BELIEVE

BEST OF BREED

Re-Imagine IT to Create Value Pg 16

Fit Technology to Specific Needs Pg 08

Top 5 Cloud Migration Mistakes to Avoid Pg 20

Volume 01 Issue 01 Jan / Feb 2012 50

01 T R A C K T E C H N O LO G Y

THE STATE OF SOLID STATE | MONITORING AND MANAGING IT SUPPLIER RISK | THE TAO OF GRC

B U I LD B USI N ESS

SHAPE SELF

Leadership & You Discovering the personality types of top technology leaders Page 26

A special section on leadership designed keeping in mind the evolving information needs of CIOs Page 51 to 65

Volume 01 | Issue 01

Dr Pramath Raj Sinha

S P I N E

CIO & LEADER.COM

We hope the cover page of the inaugural issue of CIO&Leader hits you as hard as it hit us when we saw it first. It most certainly will if you are in the midst of any transformational journey triggered by a desire for growth or excellence or, for that matter, any other. Our motivation to launch CIO&Leader is rooted in the evolution of your role and responsibilities. When we set out 12 years ago, the CTO Forum was tagged ‘enabling the enterprise’; the very first step in establishing the importance of technology in an enterprise. Before we had even settled with this description, the expectation from you and your office grew out of simply ‘enabling the enterprise’. It began to reflect a larger footprint – from driving productivity and efficiency through technology to providing strategic inputs for the business. This created a need for alignment of technology and business and we began to incorporate relevant content into our magazines and programmes. Then came the recognition that technology had a huge role to play in ensuring good governance. And slowly but surely, you as the CIO were expected to contribute as much to the business as to compliance and ethics. Our tagline changed to ‘technology for growth and governance’. We moved to offering insights that would help you uphold your organisation’s reputation as well as its business objectives – keep abreast of technology, business and governance issues. This marked the advent of the ‘Tech CEO’ – the call of the day was to build the IT organisation as an independent unit to drive and build the business, and watch over every other element of a successful venture – profitability i.e both revenues and costs, strategy, governance, and people matters. Any observer of organisations and organisational functions would recognise how rapidly the demands from CIOs have changed. And if signs are anything to go by, this is going to be an eternal quest. This is the sweet-spot that CIO&Leader intends to occupy – to equip CIOs to lead in an ever-changing environment with new and bigger demands. While you cannot let go of your mastery of technology or of your strategic role in the business, there is a whole new dimension without which all other efforts could come to nought i.e. how you shape yourself to integrate all of these demands and live your role. Your ability to realise your own potential and help others realise theirs – come out on top in the ultimate test of leadership. And therefore the new tagline of CIO&Leader: Track Technology. Build Business. Shape Self. As the image on the cover shows, it is a journey of commitment to better ourselves every day, at every opportunity. The pain is apparent visually and metaphorically – but worth the irrevocable transition it leaves in its wake. A transition that we hope, you and us, will make together. We look forward to your reactions and feedback. With our very best wishes for 2012!

A 9.9 Media Publication

Anuradha Das Mathur

Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

editorial yashvendra singh | yashvendra.singh@9dot9.in

Time for a Change Through CIO&Leader, we intend to give shape to a new leader, one who straddles both business and technology

n one of his weekly addresses, Barack Obama, President of the US, said, “It's time to fundamentally change the way that we do business in Washington. To help build a new foundation for the 21st century, we need to reform our government so that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more creative. That will demand new thinking and a new sense of responsibility for every dollar that is spent.” While this message was specifically aimed at American lawmakers, it could very well apply to technology decision makers like you. This 21st century

will demand more efficiency, creativity, responsibility and new thinking from you. It will demand a new CIO — a leader who is equally at ease overseeing IT and managing the bottom line. Some of you are already leading your IT function in the manner of a strategic business unit (SBU). The appreciation of the revenue and cost equation of what was traditionally a support function has begun. In effect, a handful of you have already turned into your company’s ‘Tech CEO.’ For the others who are on the

editor's pick 26

Leadership & You

In perhaps the first such exercise in the country, we apply the leadership mapping tool, Enneagram, to top CIOs and discover their personality types.

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

way there, we at CTO Forum decided to become that bridge between technology and business leadership. We stood vindicated when our thoughts resonated with India's top CIOs. They too acknowledged that there is a need to link technology and leadership. Our thoughts and the invaluable feedback from you crystallised into CIO&Leader. To guide you in your journey to becoming a better leader, the magazine in your hands has a section dedicated to leadership. Each story within this special section will cater to the evolving leadership needs of CIOs. The objective is to provide an eclectic mix of leadership articles and opinions from top consultants and gurus as well as create a platform for peer learning. The inaugural cover story, which discovers the personality types of leading CIOs, also reflects our commitment to bring you insights into lead-

ership through innovative content. This cover story is, probably, the first instance of a publication applying the leadership mapping tool, Enneagram, to CIOs. Our editorial team firmly believes that CIOs stand to gain and contribute substantially by expanding their skill set. Even if we were able to support a handful of you as you evolve into ‘Tech CEOs’, we would consider CIO&Leader a success. On your journey to leadership, we offer our companionship. For those of you who successfully traverse this journey, the opportunities are endless and the rewards lasting and meaningful. We wish you luck and await your feedback on CIO&Leader.

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C o v e r D e s i g n : J aya n K N a r aya n a n

JAN/FEB 2012

26 Cover Story

26 | Leadership & You In perhaps the

first such exercise in the country, we apply the leadership mapping tool, Enneagram, to top CIOs and discover their personality types Please Recycle This Magazine And Remove Inserts Before Recycling

Copyright, All rights reserved: Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. is prohibited. Printed and published by Kanak Ghosh for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd, C/o Kakson House, Chembur, Mumbai. Printed at Tara Art Printers Pvt ltd. A-46-47, Sector-5, NOIDA (U.P.) 201301

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

RegulArs 02 | Editorial 10 | Enterprise Roundup

Special leadership section Page 51 to 65 54

53 | Top Down Grooming Talent Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero MotoCorp talks about how he grooms and manages talent

56 | Leading edge Leadership as the starting point of strategy Even the best strategy can fail if a corporation doesn’t have a cadre of leaders with the right capabilities at the right levels of the organisation

my story

60 | The best advice I ever got CIO to Business Leader CR Narayanan, CIO, Tulip Telecom shares the best advice he ever got

54 | My Environment is My Mentor

61 | ME & MY MENTEE transparency is the key to the mentor-mentee relationship

K V Kamath, Chairman, Infosys Limited shares his mentoring strategies

64 | opinion Nice is Overrated

Being the ‘nice guy’ isn’t always a great reputation for a leader to have

65 | SHELF LIFE The Path to Exceptional Leadership Transforming an average leader into an exceptional one

Columns

Features

08 | i believe: Fit Technology to Specific Needs

76 | viewpoint: NE VMUG The way a

69 | Thought Leaders: Monitoring and Managing IT Supplier Risk How

20 | best of breed: Localised Social Media = Global Commerce

72 | tech for governance: The Tao of Governance, Risk and Compliance

Technology should not be used just because either it is the cutting edge solution to a business problem

show should be

to avoid the common pitfalls of IT Supplier Risk Management

Commerce can gain global traction only when companies adapt social media

GRC requires us to discover new links and interdependencies

Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

www.cioandleader.com Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Kanak Ghosh Publishing Director: Anuradha Das Mathur Editorial Executive Editor: Yashvendra Singh Consulting Editor: Sanjay Gupta Assistant Editor: Varun Aggarwal Assistant Editor: Ankush Sohoni DEsign Sr Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Art Director: Anil VK Associate Art DirectorS: PC Anoop & Atul Deshmukh Visualisers: Prasanth TR, Anil T & Shokeen Saifi Sr Designers: Sristi Maurya & NV Baiju Designers: Suneesh K, Shigil N, Charu Dwivedi Raj Verma, Prince Antony, Binu MP & Peterson Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Photographer: Jiten Gandhi

16 A Question of Answers

16 | Re-Imagine IT To Create Value

Andrew Roswell Jones, VP and Research Director, Gartner speaks about what CIOs need to be focusing on in 2012 66

66 | Next Horizons: The State of Solid State Wide

70 | no holds barred: Downtime and virtualisation

spread adoption of solid state drives will take computing advancements to the next level

Anand Naik, Director, Symantec talks about some of the challenges and solutions for adopting virtualisation

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

advertisersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; index iOmega Schneider Vodafone Dell VMWare Aujas Network EMC Trend Micro Polycom Check Point PID Ltd Juniper Nullcon Riverbed IBM

IFC 3 7 8-A & B 09 13 15, 39 19 23 25 29 31 49 IBC BC

advisory Panel Anil Garg, CIO, Dabur David Briskman, CIO, Ranbaxy Mani Mulki, VP-IT, ICICI Bank Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions AMEA, PepsiCo India Foods & Beverages, PepsiCo Raghu Raman, CEO, National Intelligence Grid, Govt. of India S R Mallela, Former CTO, AFL Santrupt Misra, Director, Aditya Birla Group Sushil Prakash, Sr Consultant, NMEICT (National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology) Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero MotoCorp Vishal Salvi, CISO, HDFC Bank Deepak B Phatak, Subharao M Nilekani Chair Professor and Head, KReSIT, IIT - Bombay Sales & Marketing National Manager â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Events and Special Projects: Mahantesh Godi (+91 98804 36623) National Sales Manager: Vinodh K (+91 97407 14817) Assistant General Manager Sales (South): Ashish Kumar Singh (+91 97407 61921) Senior Sales Manager (North): Aveek Bhose (+91 98998 86986) Product Manager - CSO Forum and Strategic Sales: Seema Menon (+91 97403 94000) Brand Manager: Gagandeep S Kaiser (+91 99999 01218) Production & Logistics Sr. GM. Operations: Shivshankar M Hiremath Manager Operations: Rakesh upadhyay Asst. Manager - Logistics: Vijay Menon Executive Logistics: Nilesh Shiravadekar Production Executive: Vilas Mhatre Logistics: MP Singh & Mohd. Ansari OFFICE ADDRESS Published, Printed and Owned by Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. Published and printed on their behalf by Kanak Ghosh. Published at Bungalow No. 725, Sector - 1, Shirvane, Nerul Navi Mumbai - 400706. Printed at Tara Art Printers Pvt ltd. A-46-47, Sector-5, NOIDA (U.P.) 201301 Editor: Anuradha Das Mathur For any customer queries and assistance please contact help@9dot9.in This issue of CIO&Leader includes 12 pages of CSO Forum free with the magazine

This index is provided as an additional service.The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions.

cto forum thectoforum.com

07 MONTH 2010

I Believe

By N Eswaranatarajan, Head of Technology at ICICI Lombard The author has been with the company since 2004 and spearheads the operations, technology and innovation initiatives

Fit Technology to Specific Needs Technology

should not be used just because either it is the cutting-edge solution to a business problem or everyone else is using it For a CIO /CTO, innovation means usage of technology to create or maximise business impact thereby driving growth and profitability. Technology should not be used just because either it is the cutting edge solution to a business problem or everyone else is using it. Rather fitting

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

current challenge to maximise technology's Business impact thereby driving growth and profitability

technology to specific organisational needs should be the approach. In my view, innovation should be managed and nurtured systematically. First, it needs to be closely mapped with what business impact it creates. Second, ensuring business buy-in is crucial; otherwise a great idea can get killed very fast. Third, just like organisations have systems in place to manage business processes and manage resources, there is a need for managing ideas and innovations and taking them through the execution step. It is absolutely possible for a CIO to become a CEO. However, the only way they can do is to move beyond the role of ‘custodian of technology’ and moving beyond the role of aligning business and IT. The most precious skill a CIO can bring to the organisation is business knowledge and process understanding coupled with technology know-how. By helping identify how technology can change the business dynamics and move the organisation more efficiently toward its objectives, his organisation can become the foundation for competitive advantage. In other words, a CIO needs to be in the business of helping shape business strategy. This will enable him/her to not only find a seat at all strategic conversations but a key role in driving these discussions. And move him towards the CEO’s suite. While focusing on ensuring IT fundamentals are taken care of and are solid, CIO’s need to differentiate themselves by using ideas and technology to streamline operations and increase organisational effectiveness, by innovative use of technology in introducing new products, identifying new markets and potentially new business models and by identifying opportunities to refine business processes and enhancing collaboration.

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Enterprise

Worldwide PC Shipments Decline 1.4% in Q4 2011Pg 12

Illustration by photos.com

Round-up

story Inside

HP Joins Hands With IIIT-B on IPv6

Will conduct a pilot project for helping organisations in Karnataka transition to IPv6 HP has signed a partnership agreement with the

Government of Karnataka (GOK) and International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIITB) to conduct a pilot project that will help organisations in Karnataka through a smooth transition to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). The current version of IP addressing, IPv4, is reaching its theoretical maximum of about 4 billion internet addresses. IPv6 is the new internet addressing protocal with the capacity to support 340 trillion addresses. This allows for the dramatic expansion of connected devices from computers and smart phones, to household electronics, industrial appli-

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

ances, senors, vehicles and commercial systems. IPv6 also provides for improved quality and new applications like IP TV, telephony and ecommerce. For enterprises in India, transitioning to IPv6 is essential to keep up with the current internet growth, as well to develop new internet applications, new markets and to serve citizens in new ways. The aims of the pilot project are to identify major challenges for organisations in adopting IPv6, to develop solutions for these challenges through education, technology and process improvements and to provide advice and resource for enterprises and government bodies in Karnataka.

Data Briefing

32%

Indian marketers favour strong anti-spam law

Enterprise Round-up

They PAUL Said it OTELLINI

Illustration by prince antony

At CES 2012, Las Vegas, Intel CEO Paul Otellini made a surprise announcement by declaring the chip maker had formed a "multi-year, multi-device" strategic partnership with Motorola Mobility around smartphones and tablets. However, the first actual Intel smartphone would come from Lenovo.

IBM Unveils Advanced Analytics Software Solution recommends a finite set of roles for better security IBM recently announced a new identity intelligence breakthrough designed in IBM labs to provide corporations with a far more sophisticated approach to managing the information employees can access. An employee's unauthorized access to client information can leave a firm vulnerable to security breaches and audits. Many companies juggle the administration of identifying, managing and approving employee access, some of whom have roles that require different levels of access to financial, personnel or sales and customer data, and can change during the course of a year. To meet that challenge, IBM is unveiling advanced analytics software called Security Role and Policy Modeler. Based on IBM Research innovation, the software analyzes employee data and recommends a finite set of roles to better secure an organization and manage compliance. The analytics can flag abnormal behavior, inconsistencies in role access and expired user access. "With the rise of cloud and mobile access, it's no surprise that identity management has become such a hot button to clients," said Marc van Zadelhoff, vice president strategy and product management, IBM Security Systems.

Illustration by photos.com

Quick Byte on SECURITY

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The best of Intel computing is coming to smartphones. Our efforts with Lenovo and Motorola Mobility will help to establish Intel processors in smartphones and provide a solid foundation from which to build in 2012 and into the future.â&#x20AC;?

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Paul Otellini, CEO, Intel

A new identity and transaction protection solution from SafeNet will address multiple levels of risk associated with online banking. eToken will enable financial services organisations to achieve the right balance of risk mitigation and usability when securing eBanking applications. Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

Illustration by anil t

Enterprise Round-up

Worldwide PC Shipments Decline 1.4% in Q4 2011 Gartner

says healthy emerging markets growth couldn't compensate for weak sales

After two quarters of positive growth, worldwide PC shipments totaled 92.2 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, a 1.4 percent decline from the fourth quarter of 2010, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc. These figures were in line with Gartner’s earlier forecast of a 1 percent decline for the fourth quarter of 2011. “Continuously low consumer PC demand resulted in weak holiday PC shipments,” said

Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner. “While economic uncertainty in Western Europe had an effect on consumer PC shipments, expectations of a healthier economic outlook in North America could not stimulate consumer PC demand in that region. The healthy professional PC market as well as growth in emerging markets could not compensate for the weaknesses in mature markets, with overall growth still negative.”

Global Tracker

IT Spending Forecast

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

Source: Gartner

Worldwide IT spending is forecast to total $3.8 trillion in 2012, a 3.7 percent increase from 2011

Hard-disk drive (HDD) shortages triggered by the October 2011 floods in Thailand had a limited impact on fourth-quarter PC shipments and prices. However, Gartner analysts said a major impact will be felt, and this is expected to materialize in the first half of 2012, and potentially continue throughout 2012. These shortages will temporarily lower PC shipment growth during 2012. “Ultrabooks were quietly introduced into the market during the 4Q11 holiday season,” Kitagawa said. “Ultrabooks didn’t seem to draw consumers’ attention. Consumers had very little understanding and awareness of ultrabooks, and only a small group of consumers was willing to pay the price premium for such models. However, as has been seen this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) show, 2012 is a big debut stage for ultrabooks.” HP retained its No. 1 position in the fourth quarter of 2011, despite a shipment decline of 16.2 percent year over year (see Table 1). While the company’s new CEO, Meg Whitman, cleared up some confusion surrounding its PC business, its 4Q11 results were affected by the noise around this issue. HP also had to battle against aggressive pricing from competitors and deal with weak consumer PC demand in the holiday season. Lenovo experienced the strongest growth among the top five vendors, as its PC shipments grew 23 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, and it further cemented its place as the No. 2 vendor in global PC shipments. The company’s growth was attributed to its aggressive pricing in both the professional and consumer markets. Dell had a good quarter with shipment growth in most regions. While the consumer market remained a weak point, Dell enjoyed stable growth in the professional sector, driven by upgrades to Windows 7. Asia/Pacific continued to be the major growth market for Dell, as it achieved 30 percent growth in the region. Asus stayed in the No. 5 position despite generally weak consumer sales. Asus’s shift from mini-notebooks to regular notebooks was successful, as close to 80 percent of Asus mobile PCs shipments were regular notebooks in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Enterprise Round-up

Illustration by anil t

Symphony Automates App Testing Ties up with HP

HP has announced that R&D services company Symphony Services has selected HP Software solutions to help its customers reduce software development times by up to 30 percent. To sustain competitive advantage, organisations in India are looking to speed innovation, while driving growth and profitability. High quality business applications that embrace areas like cloud and mobility are key to achieving this. Symphony Services provides testing services to

independent software vendors (ISVs) seeking the latest technology to deliver high quality applications to businesses and government agencies. However, the manual testing processes used by some of Symphony Services’ customers resulted in long development times and failed to ensure consistent quality for new software applications. To address this, Symphony Services chose HP’s IT Performance Suite software solutions to automate its application testing services. With enhanced testing and quality control components, HP’s IT Performance Suite will help Symphony Services improve the efficiency of its testing processes as well as the effectiveness of identifying application defects. These improvements are expected to increase quality assurance by up to 20 percent. “Businesses are required to optimize product development cycles to stay ahead of competition and continue to deliver new products with required agility while providing a compelling end-user experience,” said, Sunil Gupta, SVP and Head of Service Lines, Symphony Services. “With HP IT Performance Suite software, we aim to identify and reduce performance bottlenecks, improve resource utilization as well as accelerate the return on investment on new product releases for our clients.” HP IT Performance Suite software suite includes the HP LoadRunner, HP QuickTest Professional (QTP) and HP Quality Center (QC) solutions. This software suite offers immediate access to testing templates, process models and industry benchmarking reports. This allows Symphony Services to automate processes to improve its testing services and deliver improved quality to its customers.

Fact ticker

A Third of Enterprises Planning to Use Cloud Offerings for BI

Companies to augment BI with cloud Nearly one third of organisations either already use or plan to use cloud or software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings to augment their core business intelligence (BI) functions, according to Gartner. According to a survey of 1,364 IT managers and business users of BI platforms, only 17 percent of organisations have replaced or plan to

jan/FEB 2012

replace parts of their core BI functions with cloud/SaaS offerings. However, almost a third already use or plan to use cloud/SaaS options to augment their BI capabilities for specific lines of business or subject areas in the next 12 months. Gartner has identified some major drivers for the adoption of cloud/ SaaS offerings for BI, analytics and

Chief information Officer and leader

performance management: Time to value: The use of SaaS BI may lead to faster deployment, insight and value, particularly where IT is constrained by existing work and/or limited budget so that it cannot respond to demands for information and analysis as quickly as the business requires. Cost concerns: The cost dynamic differs between on-premises and SaaS models. Software purchased as a service can usually be expensed, rather than capitalised, on the balance sheet. Buyers often think that SaaS is cheaper, but the reality is that this is unproven.

Salesforce.com

loud software company, Salesforce.com has hired Vivek Kundra as executive vice president of emerging markets. Prior to joining Salesforce.com, Kundra served as the first United States chief information officer where he was credited with adopting game-changing cloud computing technologies, strengthening the cybersecurity posture of the nation and launching an open government movement. Kundra joined the Obama administration in March of 2009. As the first Chief Information Officer of the United States, Kundra managed more than $80 billion in technology investments and was an early evangelist of cloud computing in the public sector. Kundra also authored the ‘Cloud-First policy,’ which aims to guide government IT organizations around the world on how to be efficient with fewer resources. Before his time as US CIO, Kundra served as the chief technology officer for the District of Columbia and as the assistant secretary of commerce and technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia. “Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com. “His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise.”

Innovate: Key to innovation lies in customer experience

Andrew Roswell Jones | A Question of answers

Re-Imagine Andrew Roswell Jones | Gartner

IT to Create

Value

Andrew Roswell Jones, Vice-President and Research Director, Gartner CIO and Executive Leadership Group speaks to Ankush Sohoni about what CIOs need to be focusing on in 2012 Could you talk about what the CIO’s outlook should be for 2012? The economics are such that we’ve not seen drastic cuts in IT budgets. We’re not seeing huge increases in hiring of staff like a couple of years ago. From a resources perspective, things are settling down and we’re not seeing the type of hyper growth that we saw a few years ago. A couple of years ago, we were telling CIOs

about how to scale, and not to break what was always in place. Based on the research that we have been busy conducting over the last few months, CIOs have realised that the key to innovation is the customer experience. Today, CIOs are looking at newer and better ways of engaging with their customers and improving customer experience. One of the key things that CIOs need to do now, is to use IT to improve the customer

experience, utilising some of the tools available in the market. In this scenario, what kind of role can technologies like Social Media play? Today we are experiencing a shift in web volumes. If you look at Fortune 500 companies, over 2/3rds of these companies have seen a decline in volume of visitors to their websites. People are now accessing these

Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

A Question of answers | Andrew Roswell Jones

companies through social media channels such as Facebook. So it’s a conundrum really. The real answer is that in the social media space, it’s a tiny investment, and in most cases it doesn’t cost anything at all, to say, put up a Facebook page. It starts becoming a little more expensive if you want to analyse this data and if you want to enable social tracking and social maps into your CRM applications - that’s where it gets a little complicated. Even then, its nowhere nearly as expensive as an ERP system, or a BI system. What’s happening in the social media space is that it’s not really the CIO that’s driving these initiatives, it’s the CMO. So, it's the CIO who can guide the CMO to get meaningful results from social data. The other way of looking at social media is for internal communication and collaboration. Those are often part of the BPI (Business Process Improvement) initiatives and in this instance, the IT organisation does have an important role in getting these projects moving, simply because otherwise the achievements capability of the tools available are not immediately obvious to the non-IT people that are using them. The need is to reach out to your customers and understand how they are using the products that you build for them. Today the tools available to the CIO are much more advanced and have immense capabilities. For example, you have a number of tools like your BI platforms, social media and so on, that can allow you to zone in on your customers and see how they are using your product. I think today organisations are realising that this customer engagement is where the real value lies, which can be achieved with technologies such as cloud, mobility and social computing. This can be inferred as the companies wanting to interact more with their users. Now an enterprise has the option of selecting the channels that can connect them to their customers.

jan/FEB 2012

“It is the CIO who can guide the CMO to get meaningful results from social media data”

How should CIOs manage stagnant budgets and rising expectations? Global IT budgets have more or less been flat, and have not changed much. However, when it comes to India, the numbers are slightly higher given the current rate of inflation that exists in the country. But for all practical purposes, budgets in India are definitely not on the rise. That said, there is always a perennial problem of rising expectations and flat budgets. Now if you look at how budgets have been consumed, 68 percent of the budget is used to keep current IT systems running optimally. This leaves only 32 percent available for new projects and initiatives that the IT organisation may embark on. The good news is that it shows an element of success. For a new project, you have to spend more to keep it operational, year on year. So, when you look at 68 percent of the budget being allocated to mainte-

Chief information Officer and leader

things I Believe in I n the social media space it’s not really the CIO that’s driving these initiatives, it’s the CMO Organisations are realising that customer engagement is where the real value lies I n next 3-5 years cloud computing would be mature and secure enough to offer CIOs real value addition in terms of infrastructure

nance, you realise how good CIOs have become at shifting costs. Because if they weren’t, then this number would keep growing towards a 100 percent year on year. The problem is it doesn’t raise a lot of cash for new projects. However, the 30 percent of budget on new projects that remain provides some relief. Particularly when it comes to mobility or social computing; budgets for these are somewhat modest. This is when one can start looking at things like business intelligence. So what we are looking at now, is a tipping point, possibly in the next 3-5 years, where CIOs would optimise/ virtualise/consolidate most of their IT assets, and reach a point of stagnation. In this case, one great hope that we have is that cloud computing will be mature and secure enough to offer these CIOs a real value addition in terms of infrastructure. We believe that the economics of computing will reach a point where moving to the cloud is the only option.

Learn more at www.trendmicro.co.in

marketing_in@trendmicro.com

Best of

Breed Feature Inside

Localised Social Media = Global Commerce Commerce can gain global traction only when companies adapt social media to fit the diverse cultural needs

n June 26, 1963 John F. Kennedy announced this famous phrase in Germany “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Kennedy’s statement, which translates to “I am a citizen of Berlin,” has since become a symbol for international unity. These days, U.S. based multinationals could be saying the same thing: they are selling as much or more abroad as they are at home. More than 50 percent of the S&P 500’s growth comes from overseas, and it is standard practice for corporations to have

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Chief information Officer and leader

Illustration by prince Antony

Top 5 Cloud Migration Mistakes to Avoid Pg 22

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employees, partners and customers around the world. As Kennedy knew, when there are international allies involved, good collaboration is a must. Today’s multinational companies are driven to adopt social media out of a need for international collaboration and knowledge sharing. A 2010 survey by Jive Software of more than 300 companies found that businesses can generate and capture more ideas and be more productive when they use social media. Social media enables companies to sell more to new customers, increase brand awareness and retain a higher number of existing customers, the survey found. A 2010 McKinsey report also unearthed a correlation between social networking and increased market share. Companies gain market share “by forging closer marketing relationships with customers and by involving them in customer support and product-development efforts [as well as] … collaborating across organisational silos and sharing information more broadly.” When content is freed from IT silos like email, employees can use the knowledge therein for years; increasing the content’s return on investment. In a study by Stanford University, Senior Research Scholar Rafiq Dossani found that companies can best use social media in two ways. One is “to improve the reliability of information,” such as developing a blog to effectively communicate thought leadership to a market. The second is “to access new information,” opening the door for innovation. Social media increasingly provides an advantage to companies to more effectively use existing knowledge and gain new knowledge. Employees at all levels are adopting social media: 92M millenials (born between 1980 and 2000) are entering the work place, and these young people gravitate easily towards social media in the because they already use it so much in their daily social lives. Yet studies show that use of social media in the work place is not just limited to millenials. All generations of workers are increasingly using Web 2.0 to do their jobs. If corporations haven’t already adopted social media, it is important that they start now. UIltimately, social media will likely surpass email as a more dynamic, powerful tool for collaboration.

Where in the world is your Web 2.0? The adoption of social media not only spans employee generations, but also geographical location. Social media is exploding in throughout Europe and in countries like Indonesia, Japan and Brazil. Web 2.0 companies are meeting this trend by adapting their offerings to global regions. Google Orkut is translated into 48 different languages and localised for many of its markets. Internationally, customers are becoming highly accustomed to the adaptation of social media to their own culture, rather than as a “one size fits all” offering. For corporations to be truly global they need to work within this trend -- both from a customer-facing perspective as well as internally.

Global companies need to leverage social media to effectively communicate with their customers around the world Global companies need to leverage social media, from blogs to social networks, to effectively communicate with their customers around the world. Customer loyalty can be greatly enhanced specifically through culturally adapted social media outreach, which dramatically increases the effectiveness and impact of social media content. From an internal corporate perspective, international employees are likely to conduct the bulk of their work in their own language. Social media such as Wikis, instant messaging, Web 2.0 learning tools and communities of practice, which serve to keep employees productive and engaged, also need to be culturally adapted in order to be effective.

In tandem with the globalisation of business, the globalisation of social media in the work place allows employees to communicate seamlessly and in real time, according to their country and language. This in turn optimises knowledge and innovation, enabling global teams to accurately develop marketing materials and products that are relevant to their unique markets. As mass adoption of social media occurs around the world, increased reliance on Web 2.0 in the global workplace will naturally follow. Developing a culturally adapted social media strategy will enable companies to keep pace in areas where social dynamics are critical. As a result, companies can: More effectively establish global partner relationships. Keep a pulse on global markets. Develop localised communities of practice. Share information within and across global offices more effectively. Increase customer and employee loyalty. Efficiently work within quickly changing global markets. Enhance process efficiency. In 1963, John F. Kennedy said “I am a citizen of Berlin.” Today’s adaptation for the successful global company may well be “I am a global citizen of social media.” Social media leads to communication, and communication leads to commerce. Likewise, to globalise is really to localise. Only when companies adapt their social media to fit the diverse cultural needs within their organisations and customer base, does commerce truly gain global traction. — Rob Vandenberg is president and CEO of Lingotek. Prior to Lingotek, Rob was one of the first 20 U.S. employees at INTERSHOP Communications where he helped build its worldwide business and helped make the INTERSHOP IPO one of the most successful enterprise software company IPOs in US history ($10B market cap). Later, Rob co-founded and served as the CEO of LocalVoice, which was acquired by HarrisConnect in 2005. Rob received a bachelor's degree in political economics from UC Berkeley. — This article has been reprinted with prior permission from CIO Update. For more articles regarding IT management best practices, please visit www.cioupdate.com.

Chief information Officer and leader

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Top 5 Cloud Migration Mistakes to Avoid

A look at the top mistakes today’s organisations are making in cloud adoption, and how to avoid them it difficult to run an application in the cloud. Will the cloud meet my availability requirements? As with performance characteristics, cloud availability is an empirical attribute. Cloud providers offer service level agreements (SLA), but they often do not disclose how their clouds are architected. Therefore, it may be difficult for potential customers to calculate likely availability.

Illustration by prince Antony

he cloud is an increasingly viable infrastructure deployment option for enterprises, but is it the right choice for all of your applications? Before you take the plunge, you need to realise there are fundamental differences between available cloud offerings, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. To determine which model is right for you, you’ll need to evaluate your needs carefully. As you go through this process, consider the top five mistakes today’s organisations are making in cloud adoption, and how to avoid them: Mistake No. 1: Leaping before you look - CIOs are under pressure from business to speed time-to-market of business critical applications, while simultaneously being squeezed to accomplish this with smaller staffs and shrinking budgets. The lure of the cloud is tempting, but rather than rush in, it is in your best interest to begin with a thorough audit of your IT needs to determine whether a cloud solution will truly help you meet your business goals. Remember, the cloud is a means to an end, not the end in itself. You don’t want to throw an application into the cloud and not get the performance and cost improvement you are looking for. Moreover, not all clouds are created equal: Public clouds solve differ-

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

ent problems than private clouds. Clouds based on open-source hypervisors may have fewer/different features than their VMwarebased cousins. Here are some considerations to keep in mind: Can the cloud deliver my applications with acceptable performance? Clouds abstract two key elements of performance -- hardware specifications and network performance. Therefore, it is not possible to prescribe certain levels of performance based on choosing hardware and network elements. Do I have any compliance considerations that restrict my ability to use shared infrastructure? Certain compliance regimes make

Mistake No. 2: Thinking that you have found the one - Choosing a cloud provider is not like marriage: You may want to have the opportunity to change providers later on. Thus, it is very important to consider how you intend to manage your cloud infrastructure, and establish a Plan B based on this information. Will you use application programming interfaces to manage your cloud infrastructure? If so, will the APIs you use be proprietary to the provider or are they common across multiple providers? Proprietary APIs may have more functionality however multi-vendor interfaces such as OpenStack andVMware can allow more flexibility to change providers without having to rewrite code. The same should be applied to images and data. In the event that your service provider has a system outage, or raises rates without warning, you will need to know your options so that you can act quickly.

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Mistake No. 4: If it fits, it ships - Don’t Mistake No. 3: Believing that tomorrow make the assumption that every cloud supwill be like today - The cloud may be what ports your most complex applications. Take you need today, but in all likelihood, it won’t a close look at how your business-critical be the only thing you need tomorrow. For applications are architected. Are they complex example, many of today’s Internet businessor highly-customised? If so, they may have es were started in the public cloud. requirements that are not supported by the As they grew, they reached application cloud. In addition, there may be specialised bottlenecks or economic break-points that appliances required that are not available in caused them to move some infrastructure the cloud. If your application requires a physiinto a managed hosting or colocation cal indexing appliance or specialised firewall, facility. Similarly, some enterprises have you may have difficulty incorporating dediattempted to put their infrastructure into cated hardware with cloud components. the cloud, only to find out that significant If you have any of these complex needs portions of their business need to reside on but still want to use the cloud, look for a dedicated physical hardware. provider who can enable hybrid Because managing multiple hosting between cloud and providers is complicated you other IT infrastructure choices need to have a vendor strategy such as managed hosting and that contemplates your IT needs colocation, or your companynow and in the future. Map out of enterprise IT owned datacenter. growth projections for major expenditure applications and stay abreast of for most companies Mistake No. 5: Not leveraging your company’s strategy and will be managed the full potential of the cloud how it relates to IT infrastructure outside the IT - The cloud is a tool that opens demand. Those data points will department budget up new possibilities for your help you to make intelligent by 2015 business, but you won’t be able to choices about cloud providers.

35%

reap the benefits unless you adopt a new way of thinking. Don’t limit yourself by assuming that what’s led to success in the past can and should be repeatable in the cloud. For example, make sure that you are optimising your virtual machines for the cloud, rather than sizing them based on previous physical specifications. A significant benefit of cloud computing is the ability to scale services on-demand, and pay per use; eliminating the need to make expensive capital investments for hardware that is underutilised to accommodate spikes in demand. Furthermore, investigate whether you’ll be able to create a test/dev, staging, and production environment in the same cloud to streamline design and implementation. This, too, will save the time and cost of moving final product to the cloud, speeding time to market for your applications and ultimately allowing you to reap benefits of cloud computing. — Paul Carmody is Senior VP of Product Management and Business Development for Internap. —This article has been reprinted with prior permission from CIO Update. For more articles regarding IT management best practices, please visit www.cioupdate.com.

C O V ER S T O R Y | l e a d e r s h i p

Leaders O ne of the biggest challenges as well as a critical success factor for an enterprise today is leadership. Any organisation looking at growth and wishing to rise above the ordinary must hire, nurture and retain leaders who can steer it to the next level. That's why for those heading the IT function – the CIOs – leadership now matters more than anything else. Not only are they expected to smoothly run IT (as before), they are increasingly being asked to create business value for the whole organisation – by making the enterprise more customer-centric, more agile, more competitive. Time and again you have read profiles of technology decision makers, and how they made it to the top. We decided it was time to delve deeper. To examine what our CIOs are actually made of, we decided to map their personality. Helping us in this comprehensive exercise, through a widelyused leadership-mapping tool – the Enneagram – was Santhosh Babu, one of India's most eminent consultants on leadership development for enterprises. In all likelihood, this is the first instance of a publication applying the Enneagram to CIOs. What better way to discover the personalities of leading CIOs than in the inaugural issue of CIO&Leader! We believe you will enjoy going through our cover package as much as we did putting it together – and continue to share your leadership journey with us and thousands of your peers. Come on in...

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Chief information Officer and leader

In perhaps the first such exercise in the country, we apply the leadership mapping tool, Enneagram, to top CIOs, and discover their personality types. By Team CIO&Leader

INSIDE 28 | The Enneagram

Imaging by Jayan K Narayanan

hip & YOU Chief information Officer and leader

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C O V ER S T O R Y | l e a d e r s h i p

The ENNEAGRAM The tool enables you to identify your Personality Type and learn why you behave the way you do and how you can enhance your potential

he Enneagram is a set of nine distinct personality types, with each number on the Enneagram denoting one type. The theory suggests that everyone emerges from childhood with one of the nine types dominating their personality, with inborn temperament and other pre-natal factors being the main determinants of our type. This is one area where most of the major Enneagram authors agree â&#x20AC;&#x201D; we are born with a dominant type. Its earliest origins are not completely clear. Enneagram was mentioned in the esoteric teachings of George Gurdjieff (1866-1949). The modern version of the Enneagram personalities emerged in the 20th century, from Oscar Ichazo, a student of Gurdjieff. The Enneagram's structure may look complicated although it is actually simple. The nine points on the circumference are also connected with each other by the inner lines of the Enneagram. Note that points Three, Six, and Nine form an equilateral

Enneagram Type 9 Type 8

Type 1

Type 7

Type 2

Type 6

Type 3

Type 5

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Chief information Officer and leader

Type 4

triangle. The remaining six points are connected in the following order: One connects with Four, Four with Two, Two with Eight, Eight with Five, Five with Seven, and Seven with One. These six points form an irregular hexagram. Subsequently, this inborn orientation largely determines the ways in which we learn to adapt to our early childhood environment. It also seems to lead to certain unconscious orientations toward our parental figures, but why this is so, we still do not know. In any case, by the time children are four or five years old, their consciousness has developed sufficiently to have a separate sense of self. Although their identity is still very fluid, at this age children begin to establish themselves and find ways of fitting into the world on their own.

Understanding 'typeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; 1 People do not change from one basic personality type to another.

2 The descriptions of the personality types are universal and apply equally to males and females, since no type is inherently masculine or feminine. 3 Not everything in the description of your basic type will apply to you all the time because you fluctuate constantly among the healthy, average, and unhealthy traits that make up your personality type. 4 The Enneagram uses numbers to designate each of the types because numbers are value neutral. They imply the whole range of attitudes and behaviors of each type without specifying anything either positive or negative. Unlike the labels used in psychiatry, numbers provide an unbiased, shorthand way of indicating a lot about a person without being pejorative. 5 The numerical ranking of the types is not significant. A larger number is no better than a smaller number; it is not better to be a Nine than a Two because Nine is a bigger number. No type is inherently better or worse than any other. While all the personality types have unique assets and liabilities, some types are often more desirable than others in any given culture or group. Furthermore, for one reason or another, you may not be happy being a particular type. You may feel that your type is "handicapped" in some way. As you learn more about all the types, you will see that just as each has unique capacities, each has different limitations. If some types are more esteemed in Western society than others, it is because of the qualities that society rewards, not because of any superior value of those

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types. The ideal is to become your best self, not to imitate the assets of another type. Experts have used the Enneagram to map the personality types of thousands of people in organisations such as Bharti Airtel Ltd., Microsoft Corp., and Aon Hewitt LLC. The Enneagram has been extensively used in leadership workshops for self understanding, team-effectiveness workshops to understand each other, and in one-to-one executive-coaching endeavours. Using this questionnaire, you will be able to identify your Personality Type and learn more about why you behave the way you do and how you can enhance your potential.

The nine Enneagram Types Type One: Their physical drive is channelled into a sense of mission, of something important that needs to be achieved and which may require sacrifices. Ones identify with their sense of purpose and feel the need to measure themselves and others against a set of high standards.

Type Two: They are skilled at reading others’ emotions in order to understand and meet their needs. Twos take their identity from their ability to help others. Generous to a fault, they can be relied up to step forward and take care of others when needed. Type Three: They are also skilled at reading others’ emotions in order to influence them. Threes take their identity from their ability to win praise and recognition from large numbers of people, or of the most influential people. Type Four: They are self-aware, sensitive, and reserved. They are emotionally honest, creative, and personal, but can also be moody and self-conscious. Type Five: They have a gift for focused concentration and deep thought, able to analyse a problem, topic or situation and reach carefully reasoned conclusions. Fives take their identity from their status as guardians of knowledge and founts of wisdom. Type Six: They are hard-headed thinkers who apply practical intelligence to securing

the well being of a group - such as a family, circle of friends, team, company or country. Sixes take their identity from their position as loyal members of the group. Type Seven: They have a gift for looking on the bright side of life and thinking up exciting new options. Sevens see themselves as ‘the life and soul of the party’. Whether at work or play, they take it upon themselves to lighten the mood and help others to see the glass as half-full (and just waiting for a top-up). Type Eight: They have a powerful presence, are full of physical vigour and not afraid to take the lead and act decisively. Eights see themselves as leaders and pillars of strength, with a duty to guide and protect weaker individuals. Type Nine: Their instinctive intelligence enables them to tune into the dynamics of a group and intervene to promote harmony and balance. Nines come across as nice people, willing to adapt to others and accommodate their needs.

C O V ER S T O R Y | l e a d e r s h i p

ew things move men and women as much as the inspiring words or daring examples of a great leader. Over millennia of human history, a galaxy of leaders have led people all over the world to achieve extraordinary things. Not just in times of war to win battles but in peaceful times as well to establish business empires, create things of beauty or make planet earth a better place to be. Some of the biggest names in leadership that immediately spring to mind: Mahatma Gandhi, George Washington, Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ernest Shackleton, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr, Winston Churchill, Gloria Steinem, Buddha, Pope John Paul II, Dalai Lama, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs... Not a comprehensive list for sure, nor does it belong to a particular eon or creed or flavour – but certainly worthy of our aspiration, emulation or, simply, following. There are some key questions we have always been asking about leadership: What is leadership? What makes the people named above or hundreds of others like them across centuries so different, so influential, so long-lasting despite their limited tenure and many human frailties? What intrinsic or acquired qualities have made them win wars, inspire trust in people, heal their minds and souls, change the way we relate to society, or create organisations and objects that become the envy of the world? Questions like these have intrigued the best of human minds and the answers still continue to evolve even after relentless honing and refinement. But given that we at CIO & Leader are starting anew and cajoling you to share your own journey along the path of leadership, it may not be out of place to address its core principles and ideas. First and foremost, the very term leadership, according to Oxford dictionary, means “the action of leading a group of people or an organisation, or the ability to do this.” So the most essential thing about a leader is that he or she gets other people to achieve some goal. But a mechanical get-things-done-through-people is not what leadership is all about. Let's look at what some of the world's best minds have said about leadership. Dwight D Eisenhower: “The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible...”

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Chief information Officer and leader

The Essence of Leadership

Stephen Covey: “Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.” John Quincy Adams: “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Our chief want in life is someone who shall make us do what we can.” Warren Bennis: “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” Tom Peters: “Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.” There are thousands of such interesting, inspiring or illuminating viewpoints and opinions. But the critical thing to note is, it leaders whether of a country, a society, an organisation or even a function within a firm make things happen and inspire others to do their best. Who take the initiative to urge people to come together for achieving something. Who are always taking it upon themselves to learn new things, try new ideas and leave a legacy of innovation, creativity, and can-do spirit. They may lean towards certain personality traits (like the nine types described in our Enneagram story), but they are all distinguished by the integrity of their values and the emotional maturity of their actions. They are all, without doubt, leaders.

Revisiting the idea of leadership and the qualities that make leaders who they are

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Vigourous Go-Getter Generous

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Umesh Jain CIO, Yes Bank

The Challenger Umesh Jain is Type Eight, which signifies a powerful presence, full of physical vigour, who is not afraid to take the lead and act decisively

Photo by Jiten Gandhi | Imaging by peterson

ights see themselves as leaders and pillars of strength, with a duty to guide and protect weaker individuals. Because of their confidence in themselves and their judgment, they have no hesitation in placing themselves ‘in the firing line’ for the good of the group. Problems arise when power becomes an end instead of a means, and they focus more on maintaining the status of leadership than on discharging its responsibilities. Type Eights would feel that their job is to move the organisation forward by leading decisively, getting capable and reliable people into the right jobs, and empowering competent people to take action. Because of their exuberant energy, they are often seen to be striving for excellence and tend to be idealistic in their goals, to the extent of getting satisfaction only from perfection. Their seriousness, their being responsible for self and others, while at the same time making significant contribution by being purposeful in their work creates an aura of charisma. They manage to overcome obstacles smoothly. They are energetic, and can get impatient and agitated with slow pace. During their drive for excellence they tend to be critical and demanding of themselves and others. Their communication style is bold and authoritative. As professionals, they are highly strategic, planned and authoritative. They concern themselves with the larger picture and may not be patient with the finer details. They have a strong physical presence, even when they are silent, and give strong non- verbal signals. They may feel irked by indirectness as their preferred style of communication is be direct and

straight-forward. They have a strong sense of justice and may react very strongly when they hear of unjust actions. It frustrates them to not be in control. When in a positive state of mind, they will tend to develop excellent relationships and be optimistic, empathetic, supportive and generous. When stressed, they will become more detached, aloof, and unassertive and underemphasise relationships. Growth Areas: As a leader, they could try to be more calm and patient at work. They need to set more realistic goals and expectations from both themselves and others. They may also consider patiently differing and opposing points of view, which may enrich the team’s efficiency and satisfaction. It is suggested that they ponder in advance about what they are going to say. Smiling and laughing with colleagues may also enable positive environment and fruitful communication. Truthfulness is their asset, enhance it with a bit of a complacent attitude at the workplace.

Other Types in Umesh Jain are Type One: Their physical drive is channelled into a

sense of mission, of something important that needs to be achieved and which may require sacrifices. Ones identify with their sense of purpose and feel the need to measure themselves and others against a set of high standards. Type TWO: They are skilled at reading others’ emotions in order to understand and meet their needs. Twos take their identity from their ability to help others. Generous to a fault, they can be relied up to step forward and take care of others when needed.

POWER QUOTE

“The history of the world is full of men who rose to leadership, by sheer force of selfconfidence, bravery and tenacity.” — Mahatma Gandhi

Chief information Officer and leader

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Analytical Optimistic Instinctive

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K L Mukesh CIO, Tata Sky

The Rational K L Mukesh is Type Five, which signifies focused concentration and deep thought

Photo by S radhakrishna | Imaging by raj verma

ome of the attributes of Type Five are rational, objective, non-judgmental, analytical, private, and independent. Their energy is cerebral and they often think and construct in their mind before they speak. Fives are able to analyse a problem, topic or situation deeply and reach carefully-reasoned conclusions. They gather their identity from their status as guardians of knowledge and sources of wisdom. They often live in the mind, and the process of reviewing an event that has happened is a richer and fulfilled experience for them. Because of their patient ability to explore a subject in depth, they become authorities on whatever they set their mind to. Gaining knowledge is the focus of their attention as it also provides them a sense of safety. Problems arise when thinking becomes a substitute for action, and when they get so used to ‘living in their heads’ that they become insensitive to others. The Fives feel that their job as leaders is to create an effective organisation through research, deliberation and planning, so that all systems fit together and people are working on a common mission. They profess big picture thinking and enjoy solving the complexity present in differing point of views. Fives are analytical and insightful in their work and style. They perform and deliver well in crisis due to their persistent and systematic attitude. Being philosophical and perceptive, they strike a balance between task and people. Type Fives communicate neatly, and to the point. They look for creativity and investigative powers in their audience. Even during lengthy discussions, they are selective and thoughtful about the words they choose. They tend to share more knowledge and thoughts and often hide their own feelings and emo-

tions. Fives' appearance exhibits self-control. They are highly observant. They like to know where absolutely everything is. They may share limited personal information and posses a need for more personal space. When in a positive state of mind, they become more confident and decisive. When under stress, they tend to be impulsive, unfocussed and rebellious. Growth Areas: The Fives need to be aware that they may appear as non-communicative and secretive. They need to let go of their overly-secretive nature and hold back lesser. Rather, they must attempt to connect with people, share and enjoy interactions. Fives in organisations need to focus on team interdependence. They need to stop avoiding commitment and start sharing their knowledge and feelings with their team for better productivity and relationships. They also should start acting on the strategies they have laid out, which will help them and the team they lead. Lastly they need to practice spontaneity, take risks and experience the joy of being fully alive in the moment.

Other Types in K L Mukesh are

POWER QUOTE

Type seven: They have a gift for looking on the bright

side of life and thinking up exciting new options. Sevens see themselves as ‘the life and soul of the party’. Whether at work or play, they take it upon themselves to lighten the mood and help others to see the glass as halffull (and just waiting for a top-up). Type nine: Their instinctive intelligence enables them to tune into the dynamics of a group and intervene to promote harmony and balance. Nines come across as nice people, willing to adapt to others and accommodate their needs. Because of their ability to blend with a group, they can sometimes seem to merge into the background and do not always receive due credit.

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower”

Chief information Officer and leader

—Steve Jobs

jan/feb 2012

Enthusiastic

Guide

Motivator

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Vijay Sethi CIO, Hero MotoCorp

The Facilitator Vijay Sethi is Type Two, which signifies a motivator who spurs people to achieve their goals

Photo by Subhojit Paul | Imaging by Prince antony

ype Twos are the most outer-directed individuals in the Enneagram philosophy. For them, connecting with someone out there is essential for meaningful living. Some of the attributes are relationship-oriented, softhearted, supportive, true altruist, and nurturer. Types Twos are skilled at reading others’ emotions in order to understand and meet their needs. Twos feel deeply and often borrow their identity from their ability to be enabled to help others. Generous to a fault, they can be relied up to step forward and take care of others when needed. Many Twos feel that they can’t say no. They have the ability to adapt in order to connect with individuals they selectively chose. Twos effortlessly fit into several roles, to become what the other needs, so that the self is included into the role. Having no role to play is rather discomforting as that drives their sense of identity. They create an environment of personal comfort and often feel that it is their job to assess the strengths and weaknesses of team members and then motivate and facilitate people towards the achievement of personal and organisational goals. They are excellent at directing their energy to be a facilitator and help other people secure their own goals but they often feel challenged in acknowledging their own needs and may avoid asking for help. They would rather be delighted if others instinctively understand their needs as they do for them. Their empathetic attitude helps them develop excellent relationships. They are very supportive and generous and are optimistic about work and life. They are unselfish and giving by nature. They nurture others to help them achieve their potential, and can even sacrifice themselves for others. Confron-

tation is not an option for twos. This makes them compassionate and relationship-oriented, which tend to make type twos intrusive and interfering. They may also feel possessive and over protective, which may be counter-productive. In a conversation, the Twos tend to ask a lot of questions. They arouse enthusiasm, appreciation and input from others. They are usually calm and appear comfortable and relaxed. They tend to focus on the others while communicating. Their voice is usually soft, unless angry or agitated. They are relational and their giving can take multiple forms — time, attention, energy, experience, influence or money. Problems can arise when they start to give in order to receive something in return whether material or emotional. Growth Areas: The main concern with Twos is their inability to say no. So, firstly, they need to prioritise and say no. They should also help their organisation become less dependent on them. They should try to bring more objectivity and less emotional reactivity into their leadership. Also, Twos should focus on their own growth and be more objective and rational.

POWER QUOTE

Other Types in Vijay Sethi are Type Eight: They have a powerful presence, full of physical vigour and are not afraid to take the lead and act decisively. Eights see themselves as leaders and pillars of strength, with a duty to protect the weak. Type Seven: They have a gift for looking at the bright side of life and thinking exciting new options. Sevens see themselves as the life and soul of the party. Whether at work or play, they take it upon themselves to lighten the mood and help others to see the glass as half-full (and just waiting for a top-up).

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other”

Chief information Officer and leader

—John F. Kennedy

jan/feb 2012

CO V E R STOR Y | l e a d e r s h i p

Focus on 4 Quadrants For women, the key to success and leadership is to take out time for self, family, profession and society. A supportive home and office are key enablers for this

n today’s world, women are exercising power, authority and influence in all spheres. They are climbing the corporate ladder and breaking the glass ceiling. However, when it comes to sheer numbers in leadership positions, they fall woefully short compared to the opposite gender. The predominant reason for this anomaly hardly comes as a surprise. A corporate woman needs to strike the perfect balance between work and family life, which is a big challenge. So, what are the enabling factors that help a woman, aspiring for a leadership position, achieve this fine balance? “Success means influencing your environment and doing what makes you happy. The key to this is to take out time for each of the four quadrants -- self, family, profession and society. The organisation’s support is extremely important for any woman aiming for a leadership position,” says Prativa Mohapatra, Director, IBM Global Business Services. According to her, IBM is one such organisation that helps women realise their leadership potential. This is corroborated by the fact that “in IBM, US, in the top 20 people in leadership, 30 percent are women.” Mohapatra herself is part of the IBM India Leadership Forum and had been a long standing member of the India Women Leadership Forum. She has worked extensively in the US, South East Asia and neighboring countries. The IT giant provides flexibility and mentorship – two key components needed for grooming a leader, she claims.

“I have traveled for six months at a stretch just because my husband had the trust and confidence in me” —Archana Kapoor Publisher, Hardnews

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

“For women, there is an option to work from home. The company also provides extended maternity leave for women employees. For mentoring women to take up leadership positions, IBM has focused skillenhancement programmes. Programs such as ‘Taking the Stage’ for fostering leadership is a great initiative,” says Mohapatra. While it is important to get support at work, women also need a supportive home for them to turn into successful leaders. As Archana Kapoor, publisher of Hardnews magazine, an independent political monthly from Delhi says, “Women also have ambitions, goals and targets.

“The organisation’s support is extremely important for any woman aiming for a leadership position” —Prativa Mohapatra

Director, IBM Global Business Services

That they have a supporting husband is a big help in achieving their own goals.” Kapoor says it was because of her supportive and trusting husband that she was able to take on projects which would otherwise have been impossible. “Whenever I got a challenging project, my husband would say ‘why not’. I have taken up assignments that required traveling for six months at a stretch just because my husband had the trust and confidence in me. In fact, I was traveling during my daughter’s board examinations,” says Kapoor, who has experience of over 20 years in media and communication. In addition to being a publisher, she is also a filmmaker, author and an activist. Mohapatra, meanwhile, believes the best arrangement at home for a couple is to ‘Divide and Rule.’ “The couple should divide work between them and then rule time,” she adds.

Decisive

Fair

Performer

l e a d e r s h i p | CO V E R STORy

Jijy Oommen CIO, Bajaj Capital

The Achiever

Jijy Oomen is Type Three, which signifies she can read others’ emotions to influence them

Photo by Subhojit Paul | Imaging by Peterson

hrees take their identity from their ability to win praise and recognition from large numbers of people, or of the most influential people. Because they always have one eye on the public perception of their actions, they become consummate performers at whatever they choose to focus on. Problems can arise when they become so attached to their public persona that they lose touch with their own real feelings and start to deceive both themselves and others. They feel that their job is to create an environment that achieves results because people understand the organisation’s goals and structure. They lead by example, and strive for quality and perfection. They are organised but can be overly critical and reactive, and may be unaware of their own anger. They are result-oriented and efficient. They can motivate people around them with their enthusiasm and energy. They are goal-oriented and pragmatic leaders, but may get mechanical and calculating. They are dynamic and multifaceted, and may have many masks put up depending upon what role they wish to play in a situation. They are industrious in their ambition and are team players as well as team builders, but at the same time, they are political and their image consciousness can make them ignore their team’s feelings and even their own. Their impatience and workaholic attitude makes them ignore relationships for their ambitions and success. Their communication style is usually clear and articulate. They may be impatient with lengthy conversations. They respond quickly and confidently, using logic and facts. Their appearance is smart. They are constantly looking for feedback and reactions

from others, so they may modify their actions accordingly. They also manage to convey when they are no longer interested in the conversation. When in a positive state of mind, they are patient, receptive and peaceful and harmonious. When stressed, they may become dogmatic, suspecting, authoritarian and conservative. Growth Areas: The Type Threes need to pay more attention to the impact of their actions and decisions on people. They should try to curtail their competitiveness and try to be more sensitive to their own deeper emotions and to relationships. They should consciously tell the whole truth about themselves to avoid any unwanted ambiguity and to enable people to understand them better. This will lead to more meaningful relationships and communications.

Other Types in Jijy Oommen arE Type one: Their physical drive is channelled into a sense of mission, of something important that needs to be achieved and which may require sacrifices. Ones identify with their sense of purpose and feel the need to measure themselves and others against a set of high standards. They have a deep-seated sense of justice and fairness, and will not hesitate to speak up if they feel these values are being flouted. Type eight: They have a powerful presence, full of physical vigour and are not afraid to take the lead and act decisively. Eights see themselves as leaders and pillars of strength, with a duty to guide and protect weaker individuals. Because of their confidence in themselves and their judgment, they have no hesitation in placing themselves ‘in the firing line’ for the good of the group.

POWER QUOTE

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things”

Chief information Officer and leader

—Peter Drucker

jan/feb 2012

Charming

Optimistic

Strong

l e a d e r s h i p | CO V E R STORy

Amrita Gangotra CIO, Airtel

The Perfectionist Amrita Gangotra is Type Eight, which signifies someone who is not afraid to take the lead

Photo by Subhojit Paul | Imaging by Peterson

ights ee themselves as leaders and pillars of strength, with a duty to guide and protect weaker individuals. Because of their confidence in themselves and their judgment, they have no hesitation in placing themselves ‘in the firing line’ for the good of the group. Problems arise when power becomes an end instead of a means, and they focus more on maintaining the status of leadership than on discharging its responsibilities. Type Eights feel that their job is to move the organisation forward by leading decisively, getting capable and reliable people into the right jobs, and empowering competent people to take action. Because of their exuberant energy, they are often seen to be striving for excellence and tend to be idealistic in their goals, to the extent of getting satisfaction only from perfection. Their seriousness, their being responsible for self and others, while at the same time making significant contribution by being purposeful in their work creates an aura of charisma. They manage to overcome obstacles smoothly. They are energetic, and can get impatient and agitated with slow pace. During their drive for excellence they tend to be critical and demanding of themselves and others. Their communication style is bold and authoritative. As professionals, they are highly strategic, planned and authoritative. They concern themselves with the larger picture and may not be patient with the finer details. They have a strong physical presence, even when they are silent, and give strong non verbal signals. They may feel irked by indirectness as their preferred style of communication is be direct and

straight-forward. They have strong sense of justice and may react very strongly when they hear of unjust events or actions. It frustrates them to not be in control. When in a positive state of mind, they will tend to develop excellent relationships and be optimistic, empathetic, supportive and generous. When stressed, they will become more detached, aloof, and unassertive and underemphasize relationships. Growth Areas: As leaders, they could try to be more calm and patient at work. They need to set more realistic goals and expectations from both themselves and others. They may also consider patiently differing and opposing points of view, which may enrich the team’s efficiency and satisfaction. It is suggested that they ponder in advance about what they are going to say. Smiling and laughing with colleagues may also enable positive environment and fruitful communication. Truthfulness is their asset, enhance it with a bit of a complacent attitude at the workplace.

POWER QUOTE

Other Types in Amrita Gangotra are Type Seven: They have a gift for looking on the

bright side of life and thinking up exciting new options. Sevens see themselves as ‘the life and soul of the party’. Whether at work or play, they take it upon themselves to lighten the mood and help others to see the glass as half-full (and just waiting for a top-up). Type Three: They are s skilled at reading others’ emotions in order to influence them. Threes take their identity from their ability to win praise and recognition from large numbers of people, or of the most influential people.

“He who has never leaned to obey cannot be a good commander”

Chief information Officer and leader

—Aristotle

jan/feb 2012

Influencer

Purposeful

Energetic

l e a d e r s h i p | CO V E R STORy

Annie Matthew CIO, Mother Dairy

The Idealist

Annie Matthew is Type Eight, which signifies a powerful presence, full of physical vigour

Photo by Subhojit Paul | Imaging by Prince antony

ights see themselves as leaders and pillars of strength, with a duty to guide and protect weaker individuals. Because of their confidence in themselves and their judgment, they have no hesitation in placing themselves ‘in the firing line’ for the good of the group. Problems arise when power becomes an end instead of a means, and they focus more on maintaining leadership than on discharging its responsibilities. Type Eights would feel that their job is to move the organisation forward by leading decisively, getting capable and reliable people into the right jobs, and empowering competent people to take action. Because of their exuberant energy, they are often seen to be striving for excellence and tend to be idealistic in their goals, to the extent of getting satisfaction only from perfection. Their seriousness, their being responsible for self and others, while at the same time making significant contribution by being purposeful in their work creates an aura of charisma. They manage to overcome obstacles smoothly. They are energetic, and can get impatient and agitated with slow pace. During their drive for excellence they tend to be critical and demanding of themselves and others. Their communication style is bold and authoritative. As professionals, they are highly strategic, planned and authoritative. They concern themselves with the larger picture and may not be patient with the finer details. They have a strong physical presence, even when they are silent. They may feel irked by indirectness as their preferred style of communication is be direct and straight-forward. They have strong sense of justice

and may react very strongly when they hear of unjust events. It frustrates them to not be in control. When in a positive state of mind, they will tend to develop excellent relationships and be optimistic, empathetic, supportive and generous. When stressed, they will become more detached, aloof, and unassertive and underemphasise relationships. Growth Areas: As a leader, they could try to be more calm and patient at work. They need to set more realistic goals and expectations from both themselves and others. They may also consider patiently differing and opposing points of view, which may enrich the team’s efficiency and satisfaction. It is suggested that they ponder in advance about what they are going to say. Smiling and laughing with colleagues may also enable positive environment and fruitful communication. Truthfulness is their asset, enhance it with a bit of a complaisant attitude at workplace.

Other Types in Annie Matthew are Type One: Their physical drive is channelled into a

sense of mission, of something important that needs to be achieved and which may require sacrifices. Ones identify with their sense of purpose and feel the need to measure themselves and others against a set of high standards. Type Three: They are skilled at reading others’ emotions in order to influence them. Threes take their identity from their ability to win praise and recognition from large numbers of people, or of the most influential people. Because they always have one eye on the public perception of their actions, they become consummate performers at whatever they choose.

POWER QUOTE

“I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?”

—Benjamin Disraeli

Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

Ambitious Protector Goal Oriented

l e a d e r s h i p | CO V E R STORy

Neena Pahuja CIO, Max Healthcare

The Attacher Neena Pahuja is Type Three, which signifies she tends to connect people

Photo by Subhojit Paul | Imaging by Peterson

ype Threes take their identity from their ability to win praise and recognition from large numbers of people, or of the most influential people. Because they always have one eye on the public perception of their actions, they become consummate performers at whatever they choose to focus on. Problems can arise when they become so attached to their public persona that they lose touch with their own real feelings and start to deceive both themselves and others. They feel that their job is to create an environment that achieves results because people understand the organisation’s goals and structure. They lead by example, and strive for quality and perfection. They are organised but can be overly critical and reactive, and may be unaware of their own anger. They are result-oriented and efficient. They can motivate people around them with their enthusiasm and energy. They are goal-oriented and pragmatic leaders, but may get mechanical and calculating. They are dynamic and multifaceted, and may have many masks put up depending upon what role they wish to play in a situation. They are industrious in their ambition and are team players as well as team builders, but at the same time, they are political and their image consciousness can make them ignore their team’s feelings and even their own. Their impatience and workaholic attitude makes them ignore relationships for their ambitions and success. Their communication style is usually clear and articulate. They may be impatient with lengthy con-

versations. They respond quickly and confidently, using logic and facts. Their appearance is smart. They are constantly looking for feedback and reactions from others, so they may modify their actions accordingly. They also manage to convey when they are no longer interested in the conversation. When in a positive state of mind, they are patient, receptive and peaceful and harmonious. When stressed, they may become dogmatic, suspecting, authoritarian and conservative. Growth Areas: The Type Threes need to pay more attention to the impact of their actions and decisions on people. They should try to curtail their competitiveness and try to be more sensitive to their own deeper emotions and to relationships. They should consciously tell the whole truth about themselves to avoid any unwanted ambiguity and to enable people to understand them better. This will lead to more meaningful relationships and communications.

Other types in Neena Pahuja are Type Eight: They have a powerful presence, full of

physical vigour and is not afraid to take the lead and act decisively. Eights see themselves as leaders and pillars of strength, with a duty to guide and protect the weak. Type One: Their physical drive is channelled into a sense of mission, of something important that needs to be achieved and which may require sacrifices. Ones identify with a sense of purpose and feel the need to measure themselves against high standards.

POWER QUOTE

“As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.”

Chief information Officer and leader

—Bill Gates

jan/feb 2012

CO V E R STOR Y | l e a d e r s h i p

Interview | Santhosh Babu, MD, OD Alternatives

Create, Build, Reinvent Enneagram ranks amongst the most widely used personality tests worldwide. In a conversation with CIO&Leader, Santhosh Babu, Managing Director, ODA, talks about leadership and the effectiveness of Enneagram as a leadership mapping tool.

How important/effective is Enneagram as an indicator of leadership potential?

Enneagram does not measure competencies or skill set required to do a particular job. What it does is to provide a basic understanding of our core, our deep auto pilot way of thinking, feeling and behaving. The Enneagram is the single most powerful tool I've encountered to help leaders face and work through their blind spots and achieve their full potential. Leaders need to be self-aware and understand why they do what they do and this is one of the best tools for that.

Why do you prefer Enneagram over other tools?

I am trained in many other personality type tools and have also used them with large number of corporations in the initial part of my career. Most of the tools used for understanding personality types are concerned with the conscious, cognitive part of the psyche, while the Enneagram is focused on unconscious, motivating forces in the depths of the psyche, perhaps associated with its archetypal structure. So I like to help people understand the deeper motivational drives and sub-conscious programmes that are influencing their life.

How can an in-depth study of the Enneagram aid in a CIO’s professional and personal development? How effective is the exercise?

The first step towards self-development is self-discovery. Currently, this exercise is to give a glimpse into the key strengths and growth areas of each type.

Which Enneagram point or type is the best to be?

There are no types that are better than other types. As you will notice leaders are of all types. Steve Jobs who is a Type Four is very different from Jack Welch who is Type Eight. But both were able to create great organisations.

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

Aren't people likely to start putting others in boxes or sticking them in categories with the Enneagram?

What does it take for a CIO to be an effective leader?

When we learn Biology we classify animals and learn about them, and we classify plants and learn about them in Botany and we classify and study this in Chemistry also. Enneagram is a classification that helps us to understand self and others. It describes nine different sets of values and filters through which the world can be seen. It does not "put people in boxes." Instead, it actually helps people learn to recognise and expand the boxes they are already in, and ultimately to dissolve those boxes. It’s a respectful and dynamic system that provides a path of healthy development for each type, including how to build on strengths and avoid pitfalls.

According to the Leadership Model of ODA there are three traits a leaders should demonstrate. Leader creates new possibilities — This is the business outcome. Leadership is about the results one creates. This is the innovation, managing change and customer focus competency of a leader. Leaders build leaders — This is the relational, networking and empowering and coaching competency of a leader in developing others. Leading self and reinventing — Leaders are self aware and invest in developing self. A CIO should reflect on his ability in all these three areas and constantly improve and reinvent. — Santhosh Babu can be contacted at santhosh@ odalternatives.com

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ion ial ct ec se Sp ship er ad le

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” —Abraham Lincoln

the 16th President of the United States of america

Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

Introduction

CIO&LEADER This special section

on leadership has been designed keeping in mind the evolving role of CIOs. The objective is to provide an eclectic mix of leadership articles and opinions from top consultants and gurus as well as create a platform for peer learning. Here is a brief description of each sub-section that will give you an idea of what to expect each month from CIO&Leader:

54 My Story

The article/interview will track the leadership journey of a CIO/CXO to the top. It will also provide insights into how top leaders think about leadership

top down

This feature focusses on how CIOs run IT organisations in their company as if they were CEOs. It will comment on whether IT should have a separate P&L, expectation management of different LoB heads, HR policies within IT, operational issues, etc. This section will provide insights into the challenges of putting a price on IT services, issues of changing user mindset, squeezing more value out of IT, justifying RoI on IT, attracting and retaining talent, and competing against external vendors

Leading edge An opinion piece on leadership penned by leadership gurus Plus, an insightful article from a leading consulting firm

ME & MY MENTEE

Cross leveraging our strong traction in the IT Manager community, this section will have interviews/features about IT Managers and CIOs talking about their expectations, working styles and aspirations. In this section, a Mentor and a Mentee will identify each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s strengths and weaknesses, opine on each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s style of functioning, discuss the biggest lessons learnt from each other, talk about memorable projects and shared interests

SHELF LIFE

A one-page review of a book on leadership

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

The best advice I ever got Featuring a top CIO/Technology Company Head and the best guidance/ recommendation he received with respect to his personal or professional growth. The advice could relate to dealing with people, managing personal finance, and balancing work and life

Top Down

Vijay Sethi

CIO, hero MotoCorp

Grooming Talent Vijay

Photo by Subhojit Paul

Sethi, CIO, Hero MotoCorp, talks about how he grooms and manages talent Talent shortage certainly exists in the market today. This is reflected in the quality of resumes we get. Out of 100 resumes that we receive for a position, there are just two-three worth short-listing. It's not that there is no talent in the market, it is just that there isn’t the right talent. So what does this mean for a CIO? As a CIO responsible for the profit and loss of my department, my job is to retain talent. To ensure this, we have a two-pronged approach. First, I don’t spend too much time looking for new talent and training. Second, the company looks at retention as a policy. Towards retaining quality human resources, there are a lot of HR initiatives that we undertake. Apart from attractive salaries, we focus a lot on employee growth, not just professional growth but also personal growth. We look not just at the technical aspects of leadership but other aspects also — communication practices, people management, offsite and onsite training.

I also give people a lot of experimental projects that help them build their capabilities. These projects are over and above the normal work that we do. As a department head, I also have to meet the expectations of the different line of business heads. My approach to this is very clear. Usually when I take a decision, I consult everyone that is involved in it. If they have further inputs or want to discuss changes, they call me, and I involve these inputs in my plans. The key thing here is that if we promise something, it has to be delivered on that day with the same quality or delivered in a timeline where the quality has to be higher. Then, the question of expectation does not arise, because once I have set the parameter with my business users, then they will trust me to deliver at the right time. So, there is no need for expectations to be set. They know there is no point talking to me before the delivery date that has been promised and they don’t need to ask further questions. This trust has to be built over years by showing consistent delivery. You have to show results. However, in the last two years things have become easier. There was a time when CIOs had to push users into using new solutions, but now, my users are coming back to me and saying, "Can we do this and can we do that?"

Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

My Story

K v Kamath

Your Environment is Your Mentor

Pramath Raj Sinha, a student of leadership, talks to K V Kamath, Chairman, Infosys, who is widely acknowledged for mentoring some of the top corporate leaders

V Kamath started his career in 1971 at ICICI, an Indian financial institution that founded ICICI Bank and merged with it in 2002. In 1988, he moved to the Asian Development Bank and spent several years in South-East Asia before returning to ICICI as its Managing Director & CEO in 1996. Kamath was conferred with the Padma Bhushan in 2008. Below are excerpts from the interview: How did your early days at ICICI help shape you as a leader? I joined ICICI bank right after coming out from IIM. Early days at ICICI were filled with a huge learning curve. I remember my first project appraisal distinctly. We used to call it a 100-word vocabulary within which you had to fill in your appraisal. Even constructing the first paragraph of the appraisal was quite a skillful task as we were required to state in precisely five sentences what projects we were doing, who are promoting it, and how it will be financed. The first project I undertook was related to chemical engineering, which was not my field of expertise. We did a project on a dye called Synthetic Rouge, which basically is red oxide. I used the term Synthetic Rouge liberally through the 40-page appraisal form.

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

While assessing my appraisal, my boss underlined the word everywhere I used it throughout the appraisal form and he explained to me that I need to check every word or phrase that I use with other reference material. He asked me if I checked the chemical dictionary, which I had. This greatly raised his confidence in me. The meticulousness with which my superiors trained me. I wish my colleagues could follow that in training their subordinates today. How important is mentoring to you? Mentoring is extremely critical for any leader. I was fortunate to have two excellent mentors and I learnt equally from both of them. Each had a very different style and that really enhanced my learning experience as I was exposed to two completely different leaders. For example, one of my mentors was extremely good at looking at the bigger picture. He could calculate numbers faster than a calculator while my other mentor believed in thinking differently. I was looking at leasing at that time and he called me and told me that Air India was buying a few planes and they wanted to consider leasing. He asked me if we were bidding. I told him we didn’t do govern-

ment projects and we didn’t do leasing for more than `1 crore. He asked me why can’t we change, why can’t we get into the government space and look at larger numbers. This was a huge learning curve for me as we finally decided to bid for the lease and I learnt more in that single deal than I could in five years. This is precisely what a mentor needs to do. He needs to teach you not only the finer things that are critical, but also go beyond and teach you things that help you become a leader yourself. Share an interesting experience you had with technology. I believe that technology can sometimes prove very difficult in the mentoring effort. To give you an instance, I started at ICICI when there were typewriters and calculators since computers were not available then. We had different departments using different fonts and there were different set of typewriters for different departments. There was a style and usage book that everyone was well acquainted with and nothing wrong happened. Later when computers came in, there were documents in which there were different fonts for every

k v k amath | Intervie w

5points 1

I wish my colleagues were meticulous while training thier subordinates

A mentor must go beyond the conventional and teach things that help one become a leader himself

There is this human nature that intersects with technology, which can turn a well meaning technology solution into a devil you can’t control

Photo by Sumeet Sawhney

Beyond a point, if you just keep your mind open, your environment becomes your mentor

Once you observe things, you internalise them and make your own path

paragraph, making it look like a complete mess. It was not an unsolvable problem but it still took over 3 months to get such a small thing streamlined. There is this human nature that intersects with technology, which can turn a well meaning technology solution into a devil you can’t control. How should an entrepreneurial leader think about mentoring and who

should he go after to seek mentoring? Beyond a point, if you just keep your mind open, your environment becomes your mentor. I can’t say I’ve had a mentor for the last 15 years. In such a scenario it is difficult to grow. I personally think that in this case, you grow with the environment. The challenge is that are you willing to let the environment change you? Most of us would close our minds to new thoughts.

Basically, in an entrepreneur’s context, he needs to look at what is the opportunity, how he fits into that opportunity, can he dream bigger than what he dreams today in the context of that opportunity. Then he needs to look at actual implementation by looking at how others are doing it, etc. A lot can happen through observation. Once you observe things, you then internalise them and make your own path.

Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

Leading edge

Tsun-yan Hsieh The author was a director of McKinsey & Company and headed its leadership practice

Leadership as the starting point of strategy Even the best strategy can fail if a corporation doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have a cadre of leaders with the right capabilities at the right levels of the organisation

When it comes timeÂ to implement a strategy, many companies find themselves stymied at the point of execution. Having identified the opportunities within their reach, they watch as the results fall short of their aspirations. Too few companies recognise the reason. Mismatched capabilities, poor asset configurations, and inadequate execution can all play their part in undermining a company's strategic objectives. Although wellregarded corporations tend to keep these pitfalls squarely in their sights, in our experience far fewer companies recognise the leadership capacity that new strategies will require, let alone treat leadership as the starting point of strategy. This over-

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

sight condemns many such endeavours to disappointment. What do we mean by "leadership"? Whereas good managers deliver predictable results as promised, as well as occasional incremental improvements, leaders generate breakthroughs in performance. They create something that wasn't there before by launching a new product, by entering a new market,or by more quickly attaining better operational performance at lower cost, for example. A company's leadership reaches well beyond a few good men and women at the top. It typically includes the 3 to 5 per cent of employees throughout the organisation who can deliver breakthroughs in performance.

Since bold strategies often require breakthroughs along a number of fronts, a company needs stronger and more dominant leadership at all levels if these strategies are to succeed. A defining M&A transaction, for example, requires leadership throughout an organisation's business units and functions in order to piece together best practices and wring out synergies while striving to carry on business as usual. In addition, leaders throughout both companies must transcend the technical tasks of the merger to rally the spirits of employees and to communicate a higher purpose. As the number of strategic dimensions and corresponding initiatives increases, so does the pressure on leadership. Not

ILLUSTRATION BY Raj Verma

Ts u n -y a n Hsi e h | L e a d i n g e d g e

surprisingly, our work in many industries with companies of all sizes has shown that high-performers, especially those with lofty aspirations, have the most difficulty meeting their leadership needs. Of course, companies that perform poorly are also lacking in leadership capacity. The higher a company's aspirations or the more radical its shift in strategic direction, the larger the leadership gap. This rule holds true for high performers and laggards alike.

The consequences of inattention Most CEOs will agree that leadership is important, yet few assess their leadership gap precisely. Fewer still build an engine to develop the right quantity of leaders with

the right mix of capabilities, at the right time, to match opportunities. If the number of leaders needed to achieve a strategic goalâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;for example, expanding current operations or developing new businessesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;were set against the number of existing leaders, a company could uncover the numeric leadership gap it must address. Even if an organisation has enough leaders, it may discover a shortfall in their capabilities. A company expanding internationally, for example, could find that its current leaders lacked the cultural sensitivity to operate in unfamiliar geographies. Or a corporation entering new markets could find it had too many engineers and not enough business builders.

The failure to assess leadership capacity systematically before launching strategic initiatives can leave top executives scrambling to fill gaps at the last minuteâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;with significant consequences. In the short term, companies that undertake new strategies without the right leaders in place are forced to burden their existing ones with additional responsibilities. As such leaders take on the new challenges, the demands from day-to-day operations invariably increase, leaving less time for other tasks. Often these leaders drop the activities with less tangible outcomes, such as staff development, for which the effects are not immediately evident. If a company stretches its existing leaders too far, their overall effectiveness takes a nosedive. From the start, this trade-off compromises strategic objectives. Companies executing strategies under these circumstances assume either that they can get by with suboptimal leadership or that achieving just part of their initial objectives will capture a corresponding percentage of the strategy's net present value. We know from experience that these assumptions can be fatally wrong: one critical misstep can jeopardise the entire investment. In the longer term, a persistent leadership gap will be responsible for an inexorable decline in the number and quality of leaders. Companies create a vicious cycle in which good leaders become overextended or are moved haphazardly and thus have less time to develop younger talent. The day will come when they hand over the reins to a less experienced, ill-prepared group of successors. Left unchecked, this cycle can ultimately put the company's core operations and strategic growth at risk.

Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

L e a d i n g e d g e | Ts u n -y a n Hsi e h

Leadership first Given the severe consequences of a leadership gap—the best-planned strategy is no more than wishful thinking if it can't be translated from concept to reality—why do so many companies discover their leadership shortfall only when executing their strategies? This question raises another, more fundamental one regarding strategy and leadership: which is the chicken and which is the egg? Companies have taken a number of useful approaches to this puzzle. One successful US conglomerate with global operations routinely holds discussions that integrate both strategy and leadership. Any consideration of a strategic initia-

ing these requirements with the qualities of its current leadership bench. It made a number of strategic decisions to determine, among other things, which path was best for realising the strategy, whether to revise its aspirations, and whether to develop leaders internally or hire them from outside. A third approach is to plan the path toward a predetermined strategic goal by taking into account the quantity, timing, and mix of leaders that the various alternatives require. Companies using this framework may rule out some possibilities if developing the requisite depth of leadership is unrealistic in the time frame dictated by the marketplace. A leading food company in Asia, for example,

“A company must first accurately identify who its leaders are and then convince them of an opportunity” tive invariably includes the question, "Who exactly will get this done?" If the company does not have a sufficient number of the right leaders, the plan does not proceed. Another approach is to weigh a corporation's strategic options against its ability to launch new businesses, new approaches, and other forms of breakthrough performance— in other words, its leadership. Consider, for example, the global-expansion strategy for a successful resource company. The effort included identifying the leadership required to drive breakthrough performance over five years in areas such as running and expanding existing businesses, developing new ones, renovating corporate processes such as risk management, and providing overall change leadership. The company then gauged its leadership gap by compar-

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

aspired to become the dominant regional player. With five strong national brands, it had at least three clear options for how to achieve that goal: take a cautious approach by launching one brand as a pilot in each overseas market before introducing other brands; focus on China by building a beachhead with one brand in a single city, then sequentially rolling that brand out region by region within China; or, finally, acquire a player in one regional Chinese market, thus gaining outlets and local expertise, and use this opening to roll out all five brands to more markets in China over time. While many factors, including the company's appetite for risk, weigh on these decisions, in this case each option had distinct leadership requirements. The first, for example, would initially require at least five

to ten well-rounded leaders—entrepreneurs capable of establishing local networks, operating under unfamiliar conditions, and managing all five brands. The second option called for a business builder who was deeply familiar with the beachhead city to direct a team of four to six emerging leaders who could spearhead the subsequent expansion. A business-development leader would also be helpful in seeking an alliance partner to speed up the company's pace and bolster its confidence during the regional expansion. The third possibility would immediately require an expert to structure, valuate, and negotiate deals and, in the medium term, a few executives capable of operating in each of the regional Chinese markets. After the company critically reviewed its current and potential leaders, it made the decision to adopt the third of those options. These three cases illustrate how thinking about leadership up front can affect a strategy's direction, path, and outcome. But can a company bring leadership considerations into its strategic discussions even earlier, before it chooses a general direction? To do so, the company must think rigorously about its current leadership pool—the types of leaders and their mix of capabilities—and lay out the strategy accordingly. If a manufacturer's strong suit is leaders with superb marketing capabilities, for example, a market-driven strategy would be implied and might include selling another manufacturer's products. Taken to this level, leadership becomes the true starting point for strategy.

Filling the gap A clear picture of the leadership gap can help guide strategic thinking, but to retain as many options as possible, companies must also consider ways to fill that gap. To reduce the risk of strategic failure, they need to direct their approach to leadership with three time horizons in mind. Long term: Position Companies need to position themselves today to meet their strategic objectives during the next three to five years. In an 18-month period, for example, a South Korean consumer goods company successfully expanded its core business into Japan, where it diversified into noncore sectors such as low-cost lodging. It achieved such deep penetration of

Ts u n -y a n Hsi e h | L e a d i n g e d g e

One successful U.S. conglomerate with global operations routinely holds discussions that integrate both strategy and leadership this notoriously closed and mature market so quickly by building its leadership bench in advance. At least five years before the initiative's launch, the company began hiring managers and sending them to Japan thereby creating a cadre of South Korean leaders trained to operate in Japan. In many of Asia's key growth markets, local leaders with a global perspective are highly sought after and often unavailable at almost any price. Returning nationals, typically trained in Europe or the United States, may be another option, but many companies have found these prospects to be expensive and lacking in the tacit knowledge needed to operate successfully in the cultures of many corporationsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and the industries they compete in. A company must hire and groom potential leaders as much as a decade or more ahead of market need and then help them build the internal networks necessary for long-term success. To cite another example, for decades a US financial-services giant systematically hired the best global talent, regardless of the market, and rotated these leaders through every critical aspect of its operations. This investment in human assets paid off handsomely. Competitors, by contrast, are forced to expand more selectively or to offer expensive packages to lure top talent. Medium term: Cultivate Companies must also begin cultivating leaders for specific roles one to two years down the road. Many executives spend years building their technical skills and industry knowledge but rarely develop expertise in areas such as managing stakeholders and building networks. In a prominent resources company, for example, top executives identified potential successors for key leadership positions. It highlighted the

measures needed to bring each one up to speed, including counseling, training, and new assignments, by considering individual profiles as well as the key success factors for upcoming leadership positions. Another company informed appointees of their next assignment six months ahead of time and then enrolled them in self-directed preparatory programs. All of the leaders wrote a personal-development contract related to the challenges of the new role and created a list of learning opportunities and developmental activities that would prepare them for their new responsibilities. These tasks could include, for instance, seeking advice from veterans or drawing up a plan for the first 100 days in the new role. The company also provided four categories of learning modules: "lead self," for selfawareness, skill mastery, and developmental planning; "lead others," for getting the best performance from colleagues in specific settings; "lead context," for understanding and identifying trends in the competitive environment; and "lead change," for aligning key stakeholders, steering the organisation to breakthroughs, and challenging conventional approaches and thinking. Short term: Match Job experiences and stretch assignments are the primary development vehicles for leaders. Opportunities to achieve performance breakthroughs are critical not just for reaching a company's performance goals but also for developing its best people. Unfortunately, corporations that are particularly risk-averse often match their people to opportunities by looking at track records and job experiences, which they see as indicators of future performance. But such an approach is unlikely to succeed, since the experience and skills needed for earlier

successes are not necessarily precursors for those required to achieve performance breakthroughs in subsequent opportunities. A better approach is to use corporate-performance objectives and personal-development goals to match current and potential leaders with opportunities. This multifaceted approach uncovers a better fit between the individual and the opportunity. For this process to be successful, top managers need to acquire a holistic understanding of each individual, including track record, and potential, as well as key personal traits, such as style and preferences, character and motivation, and current attitudes and mindset. Companies can assess these qualities through information from superiors, peers, mentors, and other sources. To help leaders develop throughout any of these three time horizons, a company must first accurately identify who its leaders are and then convince them of an opportunity's potential. At one multinational corporation with an ambitious growth agenda, the CEO asked the 20 members of his management committee for written nominations to fill leadership positions for 30 initiatives. Most committee members couldn't confidently name more than five to ten candidates, and large overlaps existed among the members' lists. Each had nominated the "usual suspects"â&#x20AC;&#x201D;managers who were well known in the executive suites. If the company pursued all 30 initiatives simultaneously, it would overload these candidates while denying other potential leaders the chance to develop and shine. Corporations must instead look out along the three time horizons we have described to build a more systematic leadership engine. Strategy will not succeed in a void, and leadership often makes the difference between merely reaching for great opportunities and actually realising their potential. Top managers must assess their company's leadership gap and find ways to close it over the short, medium, and long term. Better still, they should integrate leadership with strategy development and thoughtfully match their portfolio of leaders with opportunities. This article was originally published in McKinsey Quarterly, www.mckinseyquarterly.com. Copyright (c) 2005 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

The best advice I ever got

CIO to Business Leader The best advice that I ever got was from my Country President at ABB in 1998, where I had been working with him for five years. He was really happy with me, and looking at my business acumen and my ability to strongly motivate a team, he told me that I should think of becoming an entrepreneur. He said that I should leverage these skills in something more constructive than being a part of a cost center (that’s how he looked at IT). He even assured me that if I started my own IT firm, he’ll award me with a full IT outsourcing contract from ABB for the first two years. He said he’d also help me get contracts from other companies. The venture couldn’t kick off at all since all the people I was working with, didn’t want to quit their stable job that they were doing for many years. Initially, I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t become an entrepreneur but then I decided that if I’m not able to become an entrepreneur, I would create a similar opportunity for myself in my existing role itself. Therefore, I decided that I’d try and convert our IT department from a cost centre to a profit centre. This was my attempt to fulfil my penchant to run my own business and my management was very supportive in this move. After getting a go-ahead from my Country President, I decided to create a service catalogue for all IT services and marked a price associated with each service. There were different levels of service packages and for each service package there was a different price, depending on the number of users and services availed.

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

C R Narayanan CIO, Tulip Telecom

For the first 6 months, taking these IT services internally was made mandatory but SLA agreements were signed with each business unit to make sure they get what they pay for. Post 6 months, every department was given a choice whether to take these services internally or externally based on the price and service quality that was offered by us and external vendors. The idea became an instant hit as we were able to deliver IT services to different departments with service quality meeting, and in some cases exceeding, those offered by some of the biggest IT companies. The initiative caught the eye of ABB global and they called me to subscribe to our services. I told them that these services are only

available for Indian business units of ABB and in order for ABB global to subscribe to them, they needed to pay a premium. They were willing to pay a premium at the price we quoted since even after paying a premium, our services turned out to be a lot cheaper than most IT services providers they could find. Later, when the power division of ABB was acquired by Alstom, the latter also saw value in this model and the IT department was converted into an independent entity that was called Alstom ITC. Looking at our model, some of the other companies also decided to hive off their IT department into an independent IT company, making the CIO a Tech CEO.

me And my Mentee

MENTOR

RAJEEV BATRA CIO, MTS INDIA

MENTEE

AKSHAY LAMBA ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, MTS INDIA

“Professionalism with transparency is the key to a relationship” What qualities do you appreciate in your mentor/mentee? Rajeev Batra First and foremost, I look for a person who has the aptitude and attitude to be action-oriented, while being coachable. I look for a mentee who is high on self-confidence and self-esteem. I look for a person who is ready to take initiatives and explore new alternatives. A mentee should be open to new discoveries and possibilities that would result in a higher level of potential for both him and the organisation. Akshay Lamba I’ve realised over a period of time that Rajeev is able to showcase his intellectual leadership across multiple facets of business be it technical, people, financial, social, customer behaviour, or market understanding. Also, a number of mentors find it difficult to balance between prescriptive guidance and vague directions. Rajeev is somehow able to manage this with ease! He makes me think and work hard in understanding the root cause of an issue but let’s me get to the point of eureka on my own. He’s never gone easy on me when I need to figure something out but he will typically push me to under-

stand the situation only through quizzing me and debating the analysis with me (this does extend to a period of days at times!). The QED is all my own. How do you identify and prioritise areas the mentee needs to focus on or where the mentor needs to spend more time with the mentee? Batra Professionalism with transparency is the key to the relationship. Identifying strengths of the mentee and channelising them into specific goals aligned to career progression is important. There is no fixed role and the mentee may have specific attributes to build on for success. Lamba One of the things my mentor insists on is: if you want something to happen, go out and make it happen. There are no excuses except your own capabilities and hard work for not achieving something. The same concept is extended to time available with my mentor. In our relationship it is my responsibility to carve out my time with him to get the value I’m seeking. Of course, as a mentee I need to work around his hectic

Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

m e A n d my M e n t e e | RAJEEV BATRA & A K S HA Y LA M BA

frequently used way to increase commitment and engagement among all high potentials is to help them identify a career path. High potentials want to have a picture of where they are going and to understand next steps in terms of development, experience and movement. In addition, as high potentials receive greater responsibility, they are also looking for greater authority to make decisions that have a significant impact on the organisation. Lamba One of the key learnings I’ve gained with Rajeev is that if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards. There is no status quo in business. The only growth path available is to take on a larger scope of work and greater responsibility. Hence, it is to a certain extent left up to the mentee to identify opportunities and discuss with the mentor to take it on while agreeing on a result/outcome between them. In our case, Rajeev has continuously pushed me to increase the scope of my current divisions and take on new ones with clearly defined results and timelines.

“A successful mentormentee relationship is achieving success in specific goals” schedule. I believe the issue is not really about time but about being able to tap into the significant mind share of the mentor for a period of time. I make this happen by leveraging on Rajeev’s travel time. For example, I typically reschedule my flight to make it on the same flight as Rajeev when we are travelling since it gives me us a few hours to ourselves and no phones or emails to distract us either! How do you think the mentee can take on more responsibilities and take more/bigger decisions? Batra I think if my mentee is committed then the most

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

How do you resolve conflicts, if any, between the two of you? And if there are no conflicts, what do you think is the secret of your smooth working relationship? Batra Yes, we do have a difference of opinion sometimes. I personally believe that one should look at the different opinions holistically and then weigh and evaluate the best option available. Sometimes, it happens that I get a fresh idea from Akshay and it actually changes my earlier thoughts completely. The secret of our successful relationship is trust. The currency of a successful mentor-mentee relationship is achieving success in the specific goals and objectives. Nevertheless, there can be possibilities of ancillary benefits, reputational benefits, introductions to subsequent commercial opportunities and networking. However, in the moment or period when the mentor and the mentee are engaging, the ancillary benefits must be of secondary concern. Lamba Rajeev creates a balance between personal ease and professional decorum in the working relationship. He is easy to walk up to and discuss any topic but you better have something substantial to discuss and have thought through the topic to be able to debate its intricacies. He not only appreciates a debate but actively demands that his mentees have a vision for their own areas of work and have the conviction to disagree on any given topic. This does lead to conflicting opinions a number of times but it is mostly resolved by keeping an open mind. A mind ready to see any given topic from multiple directions, a mind ready to accept others' points of view and assimilate them as your own. On a working relationship platform — I either end up convincing him or he ends up convincing me after debating the issue!

RAJEEV BATRA & A K S HA Y LA M BA | m e A n d my M e n t e e

emotion can be clouded to be the same thing. Even the best of professionals end up getting emotional about a decision or a debate. It took Rajeev months of counselling and guidance to make me differentiate between the two. End of the day what really helped understand it was to see him react on a transactional level day after day. His passion for work is second to none but he is able to clinically see any situation as a disengaged individual and make decisions based on sound logic and data without letting his emotions cloud his judgement. What are the challenges and constraints for you as a mentor to devote more time and effort for the development of your immediate juniors? Batra The time commitment to serve as a mentor is minimal: maybe a few hours every month or every quarter. However, I try to offer a portion of my limited time that will shape Akshay for the rest of his life. The challenge for me as a CIO is whether to share the confidential information with Akshay or not. Each party must listen to the other and demonstrate through conduct some sort of acknowledgement. A good mentor does not need to have her advice followed, but if a mentee continually ignores advice and thoughts without discussing why, he runs the risk of creating for the mentor the sense that she is wasting her time. For the mentor, not listening to the mentee and modifying advice or how it’s delivered, creates for the mentee a sense that the mentor isn’t really interested in a bilateral relationship.

“Conflicting mentormentee opinions can easily be resolved with an open mind” What are the two or three key things you have learned from each other? Batra High energy and driving personality; ability to take accountability and responsibility with result orientation; and good interpersonal and social skills. Lamba I have been professionally associated with Rajeev for over 10 years so it’s difficult to identify just 2-3 key learning over the last decade. One of the biggest and most difficult learnings I’ve had to internalise in the last 6 months has been the ability to differentiate between passion and emotion. I’ve always believed that a large part of the drive to excel in a professional comes from his passion towards his line of work. However, I’ve learnt that passion and

What are your views on the role of the CIO as a mentor and the need for mentoring so that an IT manager can realise his or her full potential? Batra A good mentor knows that he couldn’t possibly know everything there is to know in any given field today. The world has become much too complex. Things change, people change, circumstances change and it’s all great. A good mentor will remain open to new ideas and even try them. The CIO has to rely on his managers and subsequently take his mentees also along with him. He recognises that you have talent and are successful already. At the very least, the CIO should see your potential or otherwise not take you on as a mentee. Lamba We live in a highly competitive world and you need every available weapon in your arsenal to succeed. These weapons include your education, experience, training, practice, etc. One might think that a mentor would just be another weapon to leverage; however, it can be the most important “source of strength” you can imagine. There no substitute for a one-on-one interaction with someone you admire. If you’re lucky you would find a mentor that would push your boundaries of capabilities and make you see that you can achieve so much more than what you even thought possible.

Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

OPINION

David Lim

Nice is Overrated Sure leaders who

understand their people and listen to grievances are great leaders. But being the ‘nice guy’ isn’t always a great reputation for a leader to have

One of the most impactful news stories recently was the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. As a personal fan of the Macintosh, and all its variants of the desktop computer, I credit him (and his teams) for shaping how we actually live and work. The next time you drag a file into the trash bin on your desktop — well, that was Apple’s creation, the famed GUI — graphic user interface. For me, my experiences with their products extend to having used them on two Mount Everest expeditions, and another 8000m peak expedition. When other Windows laptops belonging to others were seizing up in the cold and high altitude, our Macs soldiered on. Early critics laughed at Apple. In 1984, the tech reviewer of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “The new Apple Macintosh comes with an unusual pointing device called a ‘mouse’. We don’t think this will last very long.” This, in part explains the worldwide tributes to the 56-year old, who died of pancreatic cancer. With a sharp business acumen, Jobs was a CEO who thought like a CFO (with all due respect to Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO), a showman, a tech visionary and a ruthless business developer. I want to talk about the lessons we can learn from the flipside of Steve Jobs, or what I call the Dark Side. Recently, articles from the Huffington Post have painted a contrarian view of the man. In my humble opinion, we all have a Dark Side. Our success in life depends on how we manage it. Jobs himself was described by many former employees and associates as ruthless, rude, hostile, spiteful. Fortune quotes a story where he gave a half-hour dressing down to his staff. Jobs berated them: “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” He got an acceptable answer, and then continued, “So why the f**k doesn’t it do that? You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he told them. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.” He then fired the group leader on the spot. So here’s my take on managing this:

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

Understand that greatness and excellence was never derived from a softly-softly approach

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Lim, Founder, Everest Motivation Team, is a leadership and negotiation coach, best-selling author and two-time Mt Everest expedition leader. He can be reached at his blog http://theasiannegotiator. wordpress.com, or david@everestmotivation.com

Jobs knew, this, as well. You need to take a robust approach, and have great laser-like clarity in your dealings and behaviours. Sometimes, this will put off people who are less committed and less hard-working. Being uncompromising also means you are willing to affect the quality of certain relationship to achieve your vision. But the clearer they are, and the more you articulate this to your people, they and you will be better off.

Be ruthless on outcomes, as well as acknowledging failure Remember the failed Apple product, the Newton? Hailed as a step forward, the tablet that came out in 1983, was a market failure. Jobs took the blame and moved on. Mukul Deva, a friend of mine, is a technothriller author in India. He says that once a book is written and sent off to the publishers, he moves on. He doesn’t waste too much time basking in success or wallowing in failure. When we are ruthless for outcomes, we push our people — not that we want to break them, but so that we can help them find what they are capable of. Not everyone you deal with is as committed as you are. You can choose to be ‘nice’ or you can push them hard when the situation demands. You may be surprised at the outcome. Many CXOs could be much more effective if they were brave enough to have clarity about this and fired more toxic workers. Many years ago, I used to be given a dressing down in college by my English professor who hated the word ‘nice’ when I used it in literature. To her, nice was the vaguest of descriptions of just about anything. When I die, I’d like to be described in a variety of ways: driven, motivated, decisive, but never ‘nice’. So, get in touch with your Dark Side. Nice is overrated.

SHELF LIFE

“Leaders are bombarded with unprecedented quantum of information, leaving little time to comprehend the whole picture.” —Ravi Chaudhry

The Path to Exceptional Leadership An insight into

how to take the tough climb from being an average leader to an exceptional one By Sanjay Gupta

Charting out the background, context and path for becoming an exceptional leader is a humongous undertaking. Almost akin to taking an expedition to Mount Everest. That's the kind of journey Ravi Chaudhry undertakes in the expansive stride of his book Quest for Exceptional Leadership: Mirage to Reality. And he does it with the poise, preparation and panache of a veteran mountaineer. No wonder, in his book, he has used the metaphor of climbing a summit for traversing the “path of progress” from being an average leader to an exceptional one. At the start of this meandering, tough and uphill path is the starting point with certain physical traits (basic intelligence, energy and drive, professional will); the base camp is characterised by mind traits (realistic visionary, transactional skill, perseverance); and the summit is reached with traits of the heart (wholeness, compassion, transparency). But that comes much later in the book. He begins with the recent failure of business and political leaders, especially in the western world, in

preventing the economic crisis that continues to plague us to this day. He minces no words in lambasting the moral bankruptcy of the supposedly best and brightest people – “the alumni of the most prestigious institutions of the world, who joined the financial sector en masse, in preference to any other sector, and became proactive accomplices in complete degeneration of whatever was left of business ethics.” Chaudhry then goes on to get to the root of the leadership crisis, the seven prime realities of business that shape the decisions of leaders today: business–political nexus, short-termism, corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a PR exercise, corruption of the mind, information overload, leaders blinded by power, and misdirected GDP growth. A good thing about the book is that the author doesn't get bogged down by the moral or ethical rot he sees around. Or turn this book into a gigantic lament (like many others writing on such issues often do). Instead, he shows the reader a way from turning the apparent mirage of exceptional leadership into a reality.

ABOUT THE author Ravi Chaudhry is the Founder Chairman of CeNext Consulting and Investment Pvt Ltd, a firm that provides strategic advisory services to CEOs and corporate boards on global competitiveness and internal growth, and to governments on issues related to investment promotion and development strategies

One of his suggestions, for instance, is the need for organisations to shift their stance from CSR to ISR – individual social responsibility, in which the CEO of a company is answerable for the decisions it takes. A far cry from the generic nature – and muddiness – of collective corporate accountability. (Something that Joel Bakan dealt with extensively in his excellent book, The Corporation: the Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.) In the book, Chaudhry describes seven allies “who have the capacity and muscle to initiate meaningful change” today: consciousnesspromoting institutions, consumers, media, educators, role-model CEOs, women, and independent legislators and ex-bureaucrats. While these agents of change can collectively steer the future course of history, argues Chaudhry, the task of creating synergy among them cannot be left to chance. The path from average leadership to exceptional leadership, like the track of a high mountain, is strewn with difficult choices. But there is a path, all right. And Chaudhry's book, thankfully, illuminates it with ample light.

Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

Illustration By anil t

HORIZONS

The State of Solid State

Wide spread adoption of solid state drives will bring computing advancements to the next level

By Ken Lee

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

Feature Inside

IT Trends for 2011 and Beyond Pg 68

or many years solid state drives have been reserved for technology enthusiasts, hardcore gamers and those with deep pockets. The performance advantage of SSDs over traditional, spinning-platter hard disk drives, or HDDs, has never been a point of contention. SSD's transfer rates typically double or triple the speed of their mechanical counterparts. However, the high retail price for even low-capacity SSDs prevented the average computer user from experiencing the benefits of an SSD.

stor a g E | N E X T H O R I Z O N S

As the cost per gigabyte for SSDs has come down in recent years we are finally seeing SSD prices straddling the line of affordability and consumers and manufacturers have taken notice, and you should too. In addition to becoming affordable, added features and improved technology have SSDs making a strong case to replace the aging HDD in your computer or laptop.

As the cost per gigabyte for SSDs has come down in recent years we are finally seeing SSD prices straddling the line of affordability

Reliability It is a common fallacy that SSDs are less reliable than HDDs. This is actually pretty New Technologies far from the truth. In 2010, the percentage As with any new technology, SSDs expeof component returns to retailers was very rienced their fair share of growing pains close between the top 5 SSD manufacturers as they matured. And like with so many and top 5 HDD manufacturers, about 2-3 problems that occur with new technology, percent. So we know that SSDs aren't being these problems were fixed using technoreturned at a higher rate than HDDs. logical innovations. This misconception may be the result of Native Command Queuing (NCQ): OrigSSDs growing pains through its early years. inally designed to increase SATA HDD Early SSD adopters were plagued by issues performance by optimising the order in like poor firmware, degrading flash memory which read/write commands are executed, and other issues typical to new technology. NCQ reduces latency on mechanical This resulted in an initial negative drives by grouping commands that would response from the tech community which be read/written to the same area on the may be continuing to haunt SSDs, even disk. However with solid state drives, though the reliability of SSDs has become since there are no moving parts, there is better than HDDs on several levels. extremely low latency and the opposite Fundamentally solid state disks are more occurs. NCQ ensures that a SSD has comreliable because SSDs do not contain any mands to process while the host system is moving parts. There are no read heads, actuprocessing CPU tasks. ator arms or spinning platters that can break TRIM: NAND flash memory cells are down in an SSD. SSDs can be moved around grouped into 4KB pages, which are then freely while in use and have a higher tolerfurther grouped into 512KB blocks. Cells ance against shock and vibration than HDDs. can only be written to if they are empty, and In a mechanical HDD platters spin at though write operations can occur on the thousands of rotations per minute, and any page level, erase commands affect entire shock or vibration can cause data to become blocks. So in order to overwrite a page, the corrupted or a mechanical comcontents of the entire block ponent to malfunction. have to be moved to cache When a mechanical hard drive before the block can be erased, with spinning platters crashes it and then rewritten. This causes of enterprises often results in physical damage a dramatic decrease in write will make proof of to the platters which store data. performance when pages need independent security to be overwritten. The TRIM Physical damage to these plattesting a precondition command allows the SSD to ters could cause data to be lost of using any cloud permanently. SSDs do not suffer handle garbage collection overservice by 2016 from this vulnerability. head in advance. Typically if a SSD crashes, it usually occurs with an electronic Power Consumption component like a transistor or Without any moving parts, capacitor which may cause the drive to be SSDs provide an enormous advantage over inoperable, but the memory should remain HDDs in power efficiency. This is especompletely intact and recoverable. cially beneficial for road warriors who are

40%

looking for ways to squeeze more life out of their laptop battery. Although an SSD actually increases system power consumption, since the CPU and memory utilisation rises in response to increased I/O activity, an SSD based system will always finish operations faster and ultimately will allow you to go longer without having to plug in.

Price At the end of the day, price is what your typical consumer looks at when looking to update their computer. However you cannot base the total cost of an SSD on price per GB alone. For businesses, upgrading to SSDs in your workstations means faster system boot up times which allows your employees to spend less time waiting for their systems to start and more time working. Then there is time saved waiting for applications to load, reduced deployment time and less downtime for IT support. When you factor in all these variables, you can see how an SSD is an investment that pays off over time. The future of data storage is solid. Although the technology has needed time to work out the kinks, we are now witnessing an evolution in the way we process data. The time of mechanical, spinning hard drives is drawing to an end, and I for one welcome the change. Wide spread adoption of solid state drives will bring computing advancements to the next level and you would be well advised not to get left behind. —Ken Lee is a product manager at Kanguru Solutions specialising in data storage and duplication equipment. —This article is printed with prior permission from www.infosecisland.com. For more features and opinions on information security and risk management, please refer to Infosec Island.

Chief information Officer and leader

jan/feb 2012

N E X T H O R I Z O N s | it tren d s

IT Trends for 2011 and Beyond A list of some emerging tech trends that will affect your IT decision making process

Illustration By shigil n

IOs and senior IT business decision makers maintain a constant focus on specific trends that will affect the industry in which they compete. You should already be thinking about how technology is going to help shape your business far into the future. CIOs have to be forwardthinking executives to make sure enterprises are leveraging technology in the most efficient manner. Big changes are starting to emerge on the IT landscape that will require even more dilligence than before from the IT professional. Increasing popularity of cloud computing and the adoption of Apple are perhaps two of the most significant. Here is a list of some of the emerging tech trends that will ultimately affect your IT decision making process: 1. Cloud Computing: We recently reported on how cloud computing supported by inexpensive sources of electricity and low power consumption processors are two major themes in the future of computing. Companies across all industries are adopting cloud for everything from daily tasks to keeping in touch with the office. Many of your software and solutions will be purchased as cloud based solutions. Cloud storage options are growing as companies keep more data. Data storage in the cloud provides flexibility as well as another disaster recovery option. 2. The Social Web: Social networks are continue to grow in popularity among employees, especially the younger ones. We reported that for a whole new generation of tech-savvy young professionals, having access to social media or the right smartphone in the workplace is at times more important than earning a higher salary. For business, that means adapting to this change in priorities. Younger workers demand access to Facebook and iPhones while on the job. These new channels are opportunities to be used by compa-

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

By James Finnan

nies to promote their brands. While social networks can create security issues we must find ways to implement safe policies and best practices. 3. Consumerisation of IT: This has quickly become the most common employee tech issue in the enterprise. Products like the iPhone and Android-based handsets are turning up all around the office. It is the job of the IT professional to provide the most secure heterogeneous environment to enable the broadest range of adoption across the organisation without compromising increasing securtiy threats from these devices. Adoption of Apple devices the biggest change in consumer technology selection by employees. 4. The Proliferation of Mobile Apps: Enterprise apps are available on iOS, Android, and BlackBerry OS. Some companies choose to create their own proprietary apps for internal use to make certain processes more efficient. 5. Windows 8 is Coming: Which desktop operating systems will you deploy in the future? Microsoft’s Windows 8 will be released next year. Did you ever get around to upgrading to Windows 7? Many organisations have made the upgrade and report overall positive results. Be prepared though as PC computing trends show, IT departments will be purchasing more netbooks and tablets and fewer PCs and laptops in the next few years. 6. A Depressed Global Economy: The economy could have a direct impact on your tech plans for the future. As the global economy improves you may see budget increases to enable the adoption of new technologies. If global economies slow you may have to make further cuts to your infrastructure. —This article is printed with prior permission from www.infosecisland.com. For more features and opinions on information security and risk management, please refer to Infosec Island.

Thought Leaders Munjal Kamdar

Munjal Kamdar works with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Private Limited.

Monitoring and Managing IT Supplier Risk How to avoid the common

pitfalls of IT Supplier Risk Management There are classical models of managing Supplier risks but what we also want to cover in this article are the lesser known sides of IT Supplier risk. Attrition are symptomatic of the fact that customers are increasingly dependent on vendors to deliver large portions of their day to day operations and that has created a heated war for talent in the marketplace. If you look at fields such as telecom services, which are large for the domestic Indian market, you are more likely to find niche telecom experts with vendors rather than Telecom service providers since most work is outsourced to vendors! The high level of dependence on vendors will compel corporates to analyse vendors’ risks more strategically. Vendors have grown in size and scale to support outsourcing requirements of clients. In order to meet the lower price but high quality expectations of clients, vendors are compelled to structure their operations in a manner that can support client expectations. Costs are driven lower due to economies of scale. Therefore vendors are building facilities that house upwards of 20,000 people. This trend has two implications for clients: 1. Client control over process execution is reduced 2. Clients become overly dependent on particular sites and cities

What are the Risks with IT Suppliers? In the classical model of Supplier risk management, 9 risk categories are to be covered. This includes high level risks such as strategic risks, organisational risks that include compliance/ legal, contractual, financial stability and reputation risk and finally operational risks that include confidentiality of information, transactional, data integrity and contingency planning. In terms of coverage, the above mentioned risk areas provide comprehensive coverage. The 7 domains that help cover the above mentioned risks are strategy, governance; policies, standards and procedures; risk management process, tools and technology; metrics and reporting; and communication, training & awareness.

How does an organisation deal with these risks? The 4 Step Risk management model mapped to the 7 Domains listed above: 1. Select the right supplier Selection of the right vendor is most important. Our experience has shown that ending a supplier relationship is a difficult process. 2. Ensure that business lines apply adequate control – Line function Supplier relationships are entered into by business functions. The business

“To complement the risk management activities of the business functions, organisations should establish an independent supplier risk management function.”

functions have the best view of their outsourcing needs, skill evaluation of vendors and most importantly commercial terms that they can afford. Organisations have to ensure that business units just outsource the process and not the control ownership. 3. Establish & implement a supplier risk management function to work with business staff – Staff function To complement the risk management activities of the business functions, organisations should establish an independent supplier risk management function. This function should assess vendors on a continuous basis and make sure that a strategic view of supplier risks is available to the Executive Team. Concentration risk is a major area where this function adds value. It does not duplicate activities performed by business functions but complements them. 4. Monitor, monitor, monitor The importance of monitoring supplier activities is critical. This can be implemented through a combination of defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Key Risk Indicators (KRIs), Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Project (specific) Metrics, Human Resource Metrics, Customer Satisfaction Metric, Financial Metrics, organising joint governance forums & committees and independent reviews & audits.

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jan/feb 2012

DOSSIER Company: Symantec Established: 1982 headquarters: Mountain View, California products: Security, storage and systems management solutions Employees: Over 18,500 worldwide

Downtime and virtualisation Anand Naik, Director – Technology Sales (India and SAARC), Symantec talks to Varun Aggarwal about some of the challenges and solutions for adopting virtualisation

jan/FEB 2012

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What do you think are the challenges in the adoption of virtualisation model among CIOs in India? Virtualisation is gaining ground in terms of the interest towards its adoption sees an increase. According to the India findings from the 2011 Symantec Virtualisation and Evolution to the Cloud Survey. Enterprises must take into account how the dynamic nature of virtualisation may actually increase management complexity. Some of the additional issues are as follows: Managing the virtual machine sprawl as the number of machines increase. According to the 2010 Symantec Disaster Recovery Study, 50

A n a n d Na i k | N O H O L D S B A R R E D

percent of the data within virtual systems is not regularly backed up-this Backing up virtual servers with solutions not designed for virtualisation, which can overload servers and require twice as much storage as the amount of data being backed up leading to increase in the IT budgets While virtualisation decreases server costs, organisations are realising virtualisation is simultaneously increasing management costs, and without a plan to protect these environments, they may not realise the full ROI Avoiding loss of network and storage resources with large amounts of duplicate data across virtual machines Some of the challenges are with minimising downtime associated with application failures within virtual machines. This becomes a huge area of concern when it comes to mission critical applications In a typical datacenter, data is spread across platforms and this leads to a huge issue with running applications within virtual machines in a heterogeneous set up Virtual machine images consume storage; and when deploying images for every single virtual machine created, the storage consumption costs can become a deterrent Virtual machine images consume storage; and when deploying images for every single virtual machine created, the storage consumption costs can become a deterrent What best practices, when followed, can ensure high availability and protection of virtual applications? In order to mitigate the inherent risks and ensure high application availability, IT staff needs to carefully consider their organisation’s approach to virtualisation. By taking a proactive approach to application management, rather than simply reacting to problems as they occur, one can significantly improve uptime by avoiding problems before they occur. Finding the right management software is the simplest way to ensure high availability, but most solutions from virtualisation vendors fail to meet full the scope of an organisation’s needs. It’s also important to keep in mind few of the following points while looking at the approach towards ensuring high-availability:

Extensive support: One needs to implement solutions that provides support support for not just the hardware, but also for the different operating systems you run, including UNIX, Windows, Linux, and virtual platforms, as well as a wide range of heterogeneous hardware configurations. This reduces the additional benefit of minimising costs related to training and administration. Automated failover: An effective solution will detect faults in an application and all its dependent components, including the associated database, operating system, network, and storage resources. In the

“By automating as much of the process as possible, and improving visibility into virtualised applications, businesses can avoid the pitfalls.” event of an outage, the solution must be able to restart the application, connect it to the appropriate resources, and resume normal operations. Automated disaster recovery testing: With servers and applications constantly changing, the regular testing of a disaster recovery strategy is critical in order to guarantee a successful recovery in the event of a system or site-wide outage. Non-disruptive testing is necessary in order to maintain productivity while identifying potential issues. Multi-cluster management and reporting: Visibility is one of the most important goals in virtualisation, but it remains difficult to achieve. Administrators need to be able to monitor, manage, and report on multiple clusters on different platforms, ideally from a single location.

The risk of downtime to business-critical applications keeps many enterprises from realising the full benefits of virtualisation. While there are increased risks due to the consolidation of resources and lack of visibility, these can be managed by implementing a virtualisation solution with robust features. By automating as much of the process as possible, and improving visibility into virtualised applications, businesses can avoid the pitfalls and enjoy increased productivity and efficiency in the data center. What kind of evolution are you seeing in the adoption of virtualisation? IT organisations started virtualising servers to cut infrastructure costs and more easily provision and manage both the servers and the applications they run. Most quickly realised those benefits and more: lower capital and operating expenses, less downtime, and faster delivery of applications from streamlined test and development processes. Their early successes raised the priority organisations gave to virtualising a growing proportion of their infrastructure and applications. But virtualisation’s promise extends beyond economy and efficiency. Virtualisation has the potential to dramatically raise IT’s service levels and ability to meet changing business requirements, while reducing development, deployment, and management costs of application infrastructure and operations. IT leaders also see virtualisation as the first step in moving their data centers to a cloud model of IT service delivery. Implemented properly, virtualisation helps consolidate and automate infrastructure and processes more effectively than the technologies and architectural approaches it replaces. Virtualisation offers a way to transform islands of disparate application infrastructure into a highly automated platform for delivering mission-critical IT services. This service model—the private cloud— also makes it faster, cheaper, and safer to adopt external cloud services such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and public or virtual private platform-asa-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-aservice (IaaS) solutions.

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jan/feb 2012

TECH FOR

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GOVERNANCE

10% Data Briefing

Per year growth in financial impact due to cybercrime through 2016

The Tao of Governance, Risk and Compliance GRC requires us to discover new links and interdependencies that may threaten our business 72

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By Danny Lieberman

GRC | TECH FOR GOVERNANCE

“I have heard of military operations that were clumsy but swift, but I have never seen one that was skillful and lasted a long time” ~ Master Sun (Chapter 2 – Doing Battle, the Art of War)

The GRC (governance, risk and compliance) market is driven by three factors: government regulation such as SarbanesOxley, industry compliance such as PCI DSS 1.2 and growing numbers of data security breaches and Internet acceptable usage violations in the workplace. $14bn a year is spent in the US alone on corporate-governance-related IT spending . Here is a practical approach that will help the CISOs/ CSOs in any sized business unit successfully improve compliance and reduce information value at risk. We call this approach “GRC 2.0” and base it on 3 principles. 1 Adopt a standard language of GRC 2 Learn to speak the language fluently 3 Go green – recycle your risk and compliance

GRC 1.0

GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) was first coined by Michael Rasmussen. GRC products like Oracle GRC Suite and Sword Achiever, cost in the high six figures and enable large enterprises to automate the workflow and documentation management associated with costly and complex GRC activities. GRC – an opportunity to improve business process GRC regulation comes in 3 flavors: government legislation, industry regulation and vendor-neutral security standards. Government legislation such as SOX, GLBA, HIPAA and EU Privacy laws were enacted to protect the consumer by requiring better governance and a top-down risk analysis process. PCI DSS 2.0; a prominent example of Industry regulation, was written to protect the card associations by requiring merchants and processors to use a set of security controls for the credit card number with no risk analysis. The vendor-neutral standard, ISO27001 helps protect information assets using a comprehensive set of people, process and technical controls with an audit focus. The COSO view is that GRC is an opportunity to improve the operation: “If the internal control system is implemented only to prevent fraud and comply with laws and regulations, then an important opportunity is missed…the same internal controls can also be used to systematically improve businesses, particularly in regard to effectiveness and efficiency.”

GRC 2.0 The COSO position makes sense, but in practice it’s difficult to attain process improvement through enterprise GRC management. Unlike ERP, GRC lacks generally accepted principles and metrics. Where finance managers routinely use VaR (value at risk) calculations, information security managers are uncomfortable with assessing risk in financial measures. The finance department has quarterly close but information security staffers fight a battle that ebbs and flows and never ends. This creates silos – IT governance for the IT staff and consultants and a fraud committee for the finance staff and auditors. GRC 1.0 assumes a fixed structure of systems and controls. The problem is that, in reducing the organisation to passive executives of defense rules in their procedures and firewalls, we ignore the extreme ways in which attack patterns change over time. Any control policy that is presumed optimal today is likely to be obsolete tomorrow. Learning about changes must be at the heart of day-to-day GRC management. A fixed control model of GRC is flawed because it disregards a key feature of security and fraud attacks – namely that both attackers and defenders have imperfect knowledge in making their decisions. Recognising that our knowledge is imperfect is the key to solving this problem. The goal of the CSO/CISO should be to develop a more insightful approach to GRC management. The first step is to get everyone speaking the same language. Adopt a standard language of GRC – the threat analysis base class We formalise this language using a threat analysis base class which (like any other class), has attributes and methods. Attributes have two sub-types – threat entities and people entities.

Threat entities Assets have value, fixed or variable in Dollar, Euro, and Rupee etc. Examples of assets are employees and intellectual property contained in an office. Vulnerabilities are weaknesses or a lacking in the business. Threats exploit vulnerabilities to cause damage to assets.

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POINTS

RC is an G opportunity to improve business process T he goal of the CSO/CISO should be to develop a more insightful approach to GRC management t he first step is to adopt a standard language of GRC – the threat analysis base class E ffective GRC management requires neither better mathematical models nor complex enterprise software o outside g the organisation to look for risks you’ve never thought about and discover new links and interdependencies that may threaten your business

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TECH FOR GOVERNANCE | GRC

For example – an earthquake is a threat to the employees and intellectual property stored on servers in the building. Countermeasures have a cost, fixed are variable and mitigate the vulnerability. For example – relocating the building and using a private cloud service to store the IP.

50%

CFO, CIO and CISO since these are familiar business terms. The application of our 8 word language is also straightforward. Instances of the threat analysis base class are “threat of Global 1000 models” – and can be used in the entire gamut of companies will have GRC activities: Sarbanes-Oxley, which requires a top stored sensitive down risk analysis of controls, ISO27001 – controls are People entities customer data in the countermeasures that map nicely to vulnerabilities and Business decision makers encounter vulnerabilities and public cloud by year threats (you bring the assets) and PCI DSS 1.2 – the PAN threats that damage company assets in their business end, 2016 is an asset, the threats are criminals who collude with unit. In a process of continuous interaction and discovemployees to steal cards and the countermeasures are ery, risk is part of the cost of doing business. specified by the standard. You can document the threat Attackers create threats and exploit vulnerabilities to models in your GRC system. damage the business unit. Some do it for the notoriety, some for the Go green – recycle your threat models money and some do it for the sales channel. Leading up to the Al Qaida attack on the US in 9/11, the FBI investiConsultants assess risk and recommend countermeasures. It’s all gated, the CIA analysed but no one bothered to discuss the impact of about the billable hours. Saudis learning to fly but not land airplanes. This sort of GRC disconVendors provide security countermeasures. The effectiveness of nect in organisations is easily resolved between silos, by the common, vendor technologies is poorly understood and often masked with politically neutral language of the threat analysis base class. marketing rhetoric and pseudo-science.

Methods

Summary

The threat analysis base class prescribes four methods: Set Threat Probability — estimated annual rate of occurrence of the threat Set Threat Damage To Asset — estimated damage to asset value in a percentage Set Countermeasure Effectiveness — estimated effectiveness of the countermeasure in a percentage Get Value At Risk Speak the language fluently A language with 8 words is not hard to learn, it’s easily accepted by

Effective GRC management requires neither better mathematical models nor complex enterprise software. It does require us to explore new threat models and go outside the organisation to look for risks we’ve never thought about and discover new links and interdependencies that may threaten our business.

—This article is printed with prior permission from www.infosecisland.com. For more features and opinions on information security and risk management, please refer to Infosec Island.

Process to Improve Change Management

Change management requires a process in some sort of scalable, organisation-wide framework By Rafal Los

ecently my media team suggested I pose a question to my Twitter followers to "ask me anything HP security related"... for a live "from the conference" webcast we were going to do. I got the usual softballs on HP Enterprise Security products,

jan/FEB 2012

Chief information Officer and leader

services and strategy... but like clockwork I got one that was really difficult to answer off the cuff. If you follow the broader security community on Twitter, you probably already follow my friend @ChrisJohnRiley and know he's a snarky Austrian to begin with,

but when given the opportunity to stump me he couldn't pass it up. I'm willing to be there are a fair number of you out there that are going to read Chris's question and say to yourselves - "I was thinking that too"... which is only fair. So what was the question that prompted me to write an entire blog post ?

"Why should companies spend money on vendor products when what they need is better processes and basic hardening?" Well Chris, let me answer that in multiple parts. First off, your question seems to imply that you feel there is a mutual exclusivity between the very fundamental problems you see organisations facing and purchasing products/services from vendors. I believe helping our customers develop better processes and basic hardening is what our Enterprise Security Services business is focusing on. That being said, this isn't exclusive to our services businesses. Your question was worded towards vendor products; however, for many vendors that are strictly services based, consulting is the 'product' per se. Continuing along that thread, building stronger processes requires good software, no matter how you stack it. You simply can't have great process management that relies on spreadsheets - it's not operational, it won't scale, and won't survive your promotion. Now, I'm not saying that you have to spend a million dollars on software to improve your processes, that simply doesn't track - but many organisations that I've worked with in the past 3 years struggle, at their core, with change management as a broken process. I don't know of a bigger detractor to security than a broken enterprise change management process... whether you work for a million node global corporation, or a company with 100 laptops and an outsourced IT - poor change management will be the death of your security posture, period. There's no denying that improving change management requires fundamental grounding in things like ITIL, and other sound change management principles but more than that it requires a way to manage change in some sort of scalable, organisation-wide framework. Again, your solution to poor change processes which hinder security needs to be a piece of software that is accessible by the right people, at the right time, with the right information - and allows them to do the tasks (and only those tasks) which they are authorised to perform within the change management capabilities. This is a sound ITIL change management process but it requires great software which

Illustration by shigil N

C hange m anage m ent | T E C H F O R G O V E R N A N C E

Building stronger processes requires good software, no matter how you stack it in all likelihood won't be free. So here you may have to spend some money on process - but it's not necessarily on security tools... but rather on technology like change management software that integrates change management with your traditional security controls, dashboards, and Security Information and Risk Management platform. Now, as far as "basic hardening" goes... I agree this is desperately needed as well. Absolutely, undisputed. Here's the gotcha... Try and go do basic system, network, or application hardening manually in today's complicated IT environment - even in a small company. See 'basic hardening' sounds simple. Just make sure you apply consistent patches across all your boxes - servers and workstations... and tablets, and smart-phones and what-not... oh and don't forget all those cloud platforms right? Look, even in a relatively small show you've probably got >100 system devices, >10 network devices... and that also means you have significantly less manpower to do the job. This problem of scale means you need automation - or at least some tools - to help you keep your environments sane and 'basically hardened'. Let's not even take this to the typical enterprise level where the idea of basic hardening takes on a level of scale

only automation can touch. Now let's talk cloud and mobile devices or maybe let's not because the story goes horribly badly. Look, it's easy to say we need to return to basics - I say it in nearly every one of my talks. You can't just shut out your vendors though... otherwise you're left with manually trying to re-invent the wheel every time and while there are brilliant people throughout IT out there, there just aren't enough of you to invent a new wheel in every single company - trust me, this is a fact. I'm not saying every vendor out there is worthy of your money, and I'm not even saying trust my sales teams implicitly. I want HP to earn your trust. I want you to be able to know that when you have an issue, big or small, you can call someone from one of our many business units who will offer honest advice, industry experience, and a helping attitude. I've been in your shoes, for many years. In the end - the IT Security industry needs to return to fundamentals, but you can't do it without the support of vendors who earn your trust every day with honesty, technology and service. —This article is printed with prior permission from www.infosecisland.com. For more features and opinions on information security and risk management, please refer to Infosec Island.

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jan/feb 2012

VIEWPOINT Steve Duplessie | steve.duplessie@esg-global.com

Illustration by Raj Verma

NE VMUG

The way a show should be

I spent yesterday at the N VMUG at Gillette Stadium. In short, while it had flaws, it was awesome. I’ve been to well over 8 million of these types of shows. This is my unabashed favorite of all time. Why? Because it really is social networking 1.0. People are there because they want to be.They weren’t bribed, cajoled, or threatened. The NE VMUG is the only VMUG (I think) that has NOTHING to do with the mothership – VMware or the national VMUG (which is controlled by the mothership). It’s truly independent. It’s a family affair (the Maine Harney family, to be specific). Built by users, for users. Not built by a corporation with designs first and foremost on controlling everything you see or hear, with the intent of lining their own pockets.

I loved it I love it so much that I intend on doing everything I can to make sure it continues to improve (better and better user content, less and and less vendor bullshit), and most

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importantly, continues to remain independent. I love VMware, but they should leave this alone. This works. This is by the people, for the people. I hope others will take up the cause as well, and offer suggestions on content they would like to see, or even better, to deliver and teach their peers how to progress to higher levels. When that happens, everyone wins. Users win. Vendors win. VMware wins. I met users from London I met users from other parts of the US – and when I asked (two different people) why they came here, they both said “because our VMUGs suck.” People know the difference between value and bullshit–it insults their intelligence when it’s all contrived bullshit. VMworld is awesome, by the way. It’s the regional VMUGs that seem to suck. They have become “commercialized,” it appears. 1,200 people had registered when they closed it down. On

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About the author: Steve Duplessie is the founder of and Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. Recognised worldwide as the leading independent authority on enterprise storage, Steve has also consistently been ranked as one of the most influential IT analysts. You can track Steve’s blog at http://www. thebiggertruth.com

Wednesday, the day before the show – Dawn Harney had over 300 additional requests to join. When does that ever happen? By 9am, there were over 1,000 people already there. The venue leaves a bit to be desired, as cool as it is. It’s chopped up and hard to really support the right number of larger rooms for all the breakouts – and you had to go outside to the other side of the stadium (it was freaking cold!), but otherwise, it was a superb event. Sponsors love it because A: they are charged effectively nothing to be there, and B: because there are 1,000+ legitimate, valid, not made up/fictitious actual IT end-users who buy things. If this was a normal industry event, we would have already been told that over 400,000 IT buyers were in attendance, with the buying power of China. Lying liars. So bravo to the Harneys for keeping it real.

YOUR CLOUD PRIVATE, PUBLIC OR HYBRID. OPTIMIZED FOR PERFORMANCE. With Riverbed, you’ll get breakthrough performance –whether yours is a private, public or a hybrid cloud environment. You’ll have greater flexibility to implement your cloud strategy and business goals. And you’ll have resilience when you need it the most. You’ll have your cloud on your terms. Go to: riverbed.com/hybridcloud For any queries, please contact marketingindia@riverbed.com