S p i n e
cioandleader.com
Tech For Governance
Viewpoint
Best of Breed
Why Awareness Training Matters Pg 74
Measuring Effectiveness of Leadership Pg 80
Power of a Corporate Centre Pg 14
Volume 01 Issue 08 August 2012 150
08 T r a c k t e c h n o lo g y
B u i ld b usi n ess
Shape self
IT Outsourcing Deals Gone Bad | Tackling Modern Malware
Managing a
Multigenerational
Workforce
Volume 01 | Issue 08
Leverage your multigenerational workforce and use it to your enterprise's advantage Page 22 A 9.9 Media Publication
CTO FORUM 210x280(TRIM) 213x283(BLEED)_29Aug2012
editorial yashvendra singh | yashvendra.singh@9dot9.in
Bridging the Divide Bridge the divide between the young and the old in your workforce and use it to your enterprise's advantage
F
or a CIO, managing his enterprise’s IT infrastructure is tough. An equally tough, if not more, task is to manage the multigenerational workforce in his organisation. A CIO not only has direct responsibility of his team, he also works closely with the various business unit heads to understand and align their business requirements with technology. In his dealings with the older employees, the issue of technology generation gap invariably crops up. This is critical for a CIO because his success is directly proportional to how fast
and how many users within the enterprise adopt new tech implementations. We, at CIO&Leader, are of the opinion that no gap is too big to be bridged. We feel the older generation’s aversion to technology is nothing but fear masqueraded as disinterest. Explaining the benefits accruing from a new technology and sustained hand-holding can yield remarkable results. There are several other age-associated differences. A young worker perceives work-style, communication, recognition, loyalty and authority
editors pick 22
Managing a Multigenerational Workforce
Leverage your multigenerational workforce and use it to your enterprise's advantage
in a different light as against an older employee. The old seldom question authority, the young believe in flexibility and a more collaborative approach. The old display loyalty to the organization, the young are fixated on personal career goals. The old prefer to keep work and family separate, the young want to strike a work-life balance. I have come across technology leaders who have managed the situation beautifully. They have bridged the divide by communicating uniquely with each age group and accommodating their differences. They have incorporated flexibility in their leadership style to suit the two generations. Most importantly, they have stayed clear of stereotyping the generations. There are several benefits of having a multigenerational workforce. As several perspectives go into it, the decisions taken by such a team tend to be stronger. With the best of both,
the young and the old, the team is more creative, innovative and can address diverse needs. Lastly, I stumbled across this company called Generations on Line, which is engaged in some interesting work. Founded by Tobey Gordon Dichter, the company’s mission is to “Overcome older persons' fear and reluctance of the new electronic media.” It offers web-based software, a simple interface, and large instructions on the computer screen. The company uses familiar icons (a clothes line, for instance) to help seniors in their progress. We will look forward to your feedback. !
August 2012
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august 2012 22
Cover Story
RegulArs
22 | Managing a Multigenerational Workforce
s p i n e
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Leverage your multigenerational workforce and use it to your enterprise's advantage
01 | Editorial 06 | Enterprise Roundup 80 | viewpoint
August 2012
Volume 01 | Issue 08
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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 Anuradha Das Mathur for Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd, 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
vIewpOInT
BesT OF BreeD
Measuring Effectiveness of Leadership Pg 80
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T r a c k T e c h n o lo g y
IT OuTsOurcIng Deals gOne BaD | TacklIng MODern Malware
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Tech FOr gOvernance
Why Awareness Training Matters Pg 74
Volume 01 Issue 08 August 2012 150
08 B u i ld B usi n ess
shape self
Managing a
Multigenerational
Workforce
Leverage your multigenerational workforce and use it to your enterprise's advantage Page 22 A 9.9 Media Publication
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Special leadership section Page 34A to 48
my story
36 | Leaders Need Agility of Thought
JS Puri, Former CIO, Fortis, believes that CIOs need to always be on their toes. He feels they also need to have a thorough understanding of xx business
35 | Top Down nurturing the team for success GG Rao, CIO, HCL Infosystems, believes that training the juniors effectively ensures success for the organisation
46 | opinion Ethics: what we can learn from the world of adventure Trust, transparency and respecting best practices — adventure sports teaches us some crucial management lessons
42 | The best advice I ever got “being a strategic CIO is crucial”
38 | Leading edge the Executive’s Guide to Better Listening
A CIO should always have the ability to strategise and come up with innovations that can drive the growth of the organisation
Strong listening skills can make a difference in the performance of senior executives, but few are able to cultivate them
43 | ME & MY MENTEE when mentee takes centrestage Understanding the potential of the mentee is key to his growth
48 | SHELF LIFE born champions? It is important for leaders to burst myths, especially long-held ones that negatively impact success
August 2012
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www.cioandleader.com Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Anuradha Das Mathur Editorial Executive Editor: Yashvendra Singh Consulting Editor: Atanu Kumar Das Assistant Editor: Varun Aggarwal Assistant Editor: Akhilesh Shukla DEsign Sr Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Art Director: Anil VK Associate Art Director: Atul Deshmukh Sr Visualiser: Manav Sachdev Visualisers: Prasanth TR, Anil T & Shokeen Saifi Sr Designers: Sristi Maurya & NV Baiju Designers: Suneesh K, Shigil N, Charu Dwivedi Raj Verma, Peterson, Prameesh Purushothaman C & Midhun Mohan Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Sr Photographer: Jiten Gandhi
14 Best of breed
14 | Power of an independent corporate centre To develop a
winning corporate strategy, you may need more muscle in your headquarters
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49 | Next Horizons: the future ain’t homogenised: Stop fud vendors There is
74 | tech for governance: why awareness training matters The prudent
no black and white in the IT world of future
step is to make training timely, frequent and memorable
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August 2012
Iomega IFC Schneider 5, 12-13 Wipro 9 VMWare 11 Gartner 17, 54-55 Sify 19 Riverbed 20-21, IBC Akamai 27 Sanovi 29 QlikTech 31 Fortinet 33 Blue Coat 55 BMC 77 Polycom 79 IBM 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 NEXT100 ADVISORY PANEL Manish Pal, Deputy Vice President, Information Security Group (ISG), HDFC Bank Shiju George, Sr Manager (IT Infrastructure), Shoppers Stop Farhan Khan, Associate Vice President – IT, Radico Khaitan Berjes Eric Shroff, Senior Manager – IT, Tata Services Sharat M Airani, Chief – IT (Systems & Security), Forbes Marshall Ashish Khanna, Corporate Manager, IT Infrastructure, The Oberoi Group Sales & Marketing National Manager – 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: Jigyasa Kishore (+91 98107 70298) 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 Anuradha Das Mathur. 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 For any customer queries and assistance please contact help@9dot9.in This issue of CIO&Leader includes 16 pages of CSO Forum free with the magazine
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07 MONTH 2010
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Enterprise
Global IT Outsourcing Services Spend to Cross $251 bn in 2012 Pg 8
illustration by anil t
Round-up
story Inside
Global Smartphone Sales Grow Over 42% According to Gartner, overall mobile sales declined 2.3% in Q2 of 2012
Worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users reached 419 million units in the second quarter of 2012, a 2.3 percent decline from the second quarter of 2011, according to Gartner. Smartphone sales accounted for 36.7 percent of total mobile phone sales and grew 42.7 percent in the second quarter of 2012. “Demand slowed further in the second quarter of 2012,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. “The challenging economic environment and users postponing upgrades to take advantage of high-profile device launches and promotions available later in the year slowed demand across markets.
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Demand of feature phones continued to decline, significantly weakening the overall mobile phone market. High-profile smartphone launches from key manufacturers such as the anticipated Apple iPhone 5, along with Chinese manufacturers pushing 3G and preparing for major device launches in the second half of 2012, will drive the smartphone market upward,” Gupta said. In the second quarter of 2012, Samsung's mobile phone sales remained very strong — up 29.5 percent from the second quarter of 2011, and managed to extend its lead over both Apple and Nokia.
Data Briefing
64%
Is the market share captured by Android in smart phone operating system category in Q2 of 2012
Enterprise Round-up
They Sachin Said it Pilot
illustration by prameesh purushothaman
The government is targeting $87 billion from IT exports in 2012-13. Elaborating this Pilot said that the government has taken a number of initiatives to enable India to become a major power in producing domestic hardware and for the growth of the sector
81% of Senior Execs Lack Digital Literacy: APAC CIOs Business leaders need to embrace IT Business leaders must embrace the true value of technology, according to CA Technologies’ new global report, “The Future Role of the CIO: Digital Literacy of Senior Executives.” The study reveals that 81 percent of the Asia Pacific CIOs interviewed believe a lack of digital literacy amongst senior executives could be hampering business growth. Only 20 percent of Asian CIOs in the study felt that their management fully understands the capabilities and impact of new and emerging technologies. A total of nine Asian markets were involved in the global survey, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. The study shows that while business leaders may lack digital literacy, they largely do understand the role of technology in their organizations. About 75 percent of Asian CIOs in the study felt their management team considers IT to be strategically important. CIOs fear senior-level digital illiteracy is causing a lack of market responsiveness, missed business and investment opportunities, poor competitiveness and slower time to market. Further, almost one fifth (19 percent) of the CIOs interviewed believe the C-suite does not understand the impact of new and emerging technologies.
QUICK BYTE Wealth Management
“A scheme to provide worldclass infrastructure for attracting investments in the Electronics Systems Design and Manufacturing (ESDM) sector has been approved by the government. A special package to attract investments has been notified.” —Sachin Pilot, Minister of State for Communication and Information Technology
Information Technology spending by the global wealth management industry will reach almost $35 billion by 2016, and will include heavy investment in digital channels, predicts Ovum
August 2012
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illustration by prameesh purushothaman
Enterprise Round-up
Global IT Outsourcing Services Spend to Cross $251 bn in 2012
Fastest segment is cloud services Worldwide spending for IT outsourcing (ITO) services is on pace to reach $251.7 billion in 2012, a 2.1 percent increase from 2011 spending of $246.6 billion, according to the latest outlook by Gartner Inc. The fastest-growing segment within the ITO market is cloud compute services, which is part of the cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) segment. Cloud compute services are expected to grow 48.7
percent in 2012 to $5.0 billion, up from $3.4 billion in 2011. “Today, cloud compute services primarily provide automation of basic functions. As next-generation business applications come to market and existing applications are migrated to use automated operations and monitoring, increased value in terms of service consistency, agility and personnel reduction will be delivered,” said Gregor Petri, research director at Gart-
Global Tracker
Digital Spending
on digital information and entertainment products and services in 2012 8
August 2012
Source: gartner
Consumers will spend $2.1 trillion worldwide
ner. “Continued privacy and compliance concerns may however negatively impact growth in some regions, especially if providers are slow in bringing localised solutions to market.” Data center outsourcing (DCO), a mature segment of the ITO market, represented 34.5 percent of the market in 2011, but growth will decline one percent in 2012. “The data center outsourcing market is at a major tipping point, where various data center processing systems will gradually be replaced by new delivery models through 2016. These new services enable providers to address new categories of clients, extending DCO from traditional large organisations into small or midsize businesses,” said Bryan Britz, research director at Gartner. The application outsourcing (AO) segment is expected to reach $40.7 billion, a two percent increase from 2011 spending of $39.9 billion. This growth reflects enterprises’ needs to manage extensive legacy application environments and their commercial off-the-shelf packages that run the business. “Change is afoot in the AO market. The burdens of managing the legacy portfolio, along with the limitations of IT budgets, have shifted the enterprise buyers to be cautious and favor a more evolutionary approach to other application services, such as software as a service (SaaS),” said Britz. “New applications will largely be packaged and/or SaaS-deployed in order to extend and modernise the portfolio in an incremental manner. While custom applications will remain ‘core’ for many organisations, the trend in the next few years to SaaS enablement in the cloud will reflect in the growth of the AO outlook.” While there will be some impact from the ongoing business slowdown due to sovereign-debt issues in Europe and slowing exports in China, Gartner expects the ITO market in the emerging Asia/Pacific region to represent the highest growth of all regions. Spending on ITO in the Asia/ Pacific region will grow one percent in US dollars in 2012 and exceed 2.5 percent growth in 2013. With the exception of Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and to a lesser degree, Singapore and Hong Kong, the countries in Asia/Pacific are quite new in terms of outsourcing usage, understanding and sophistication.
Enterprise Round-up
illustration by prameesh purushothaman
Mobility, Social, Cloud are Crucial Will be unavoidable features in enterprises’ parlance
Research firm Gartner feels that ERP and business application suites will continue to dominate application software investment. Cloud, mobility and social, it says, will be unavoidable features in enterprises' parlance. Gartner managing vice president Alexander Drobik feels that in-memory technologies are good and reduces cost via database and legacy applications offloading. "Vendor wars are increasing, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP focuses on different needs and objectives within enterprise," said Drobik.
Gartner research director Sunil Padmanabh said that ERP is no more about back office integration. "Enterprises are trying to leverage ERP in unconventional sense, while measuring customers' productivity is becoming important," he said. SMBs, in the areas of exports and trade, are jumping to cloud ERP and have actively started pursuing it. “There have been several opportunities emerging in the public sector. Government's focus to integrate public services as well as e-tendering and e-procurement are a welcome step,” Padmanabh said. Indian companies, he added, will have more choices in ERP adoption with new technology and mobility trends. "Going forward, mobile, social and cloud will be the most happening areas," opined Padmanabh. Gartner believes that SAP's mobility solution may see more traction in next one to two years. The company has been actively working with partners in this arena. SAP, he believes, is driving thought process in the mobility space in India. Microsoft, though actively involved in SMB pace, is trying to educate clients around mobility. Many large enterprises, Padmanabh said, are looking at Microsoft Dynamix as a tier-II solution. Oracle has been focusing on Fusion apps and trying to enable its early adopters. Ironically, the progress, Padmanabh said, is lukewarm. On the other hand, IBM will be able to see traction in cloud and retail in days to come. The key areas that companies should focus at, Gartner said, include roll-out innovation, leverage of analytics, competitive pricing, shared services and outsource potential. The firm also recommends that vendors should make their capabilities clear with strategic options, as well as they should provide clear roadmap to support cloud.
Fact ticker
TRAI to Go Tough on Mobile Over-Billing Keen on imposing fines for all pesky calls and SMS Concerned over increased complaints of over-billing from cellular service operators, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has decided to act tough. “We sent out notices to operators last week, after we received complaints by customers,” TRAI Chairman Rahul Khullar said here
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August 2012
on Monday. He went on to explain that some operators were sending out SMS messages to subscribers asking them to select just 'Yes' or 'No' to activate a Value Added Service (VAS). Once a subscriber selects ‘Yes’ it is not easy to de-activate the service, this is unacceptable," Khullar said, adding that there should be a simple
way to deactivate such services. “Even I had to undergo this unpleasant experience as I had opted for a service (VAS) unknowingly and was charged for that. We will sort out this issue soon,” he said. The TRAI chairman said though the operators have their own systems in place to address the consumer grievances at different levels, few subscribers may get their issues sorted out. TRAI steps in such situations though the authority is not necessarily a complaint receiver.
Exports’ target
T
he estimated revenue generated through IT export during 2011-2012 is US $ 77.9 billion. The projected target set for IT exports during the current financial year (2012-2013) is US $ 87 billion, Minister of State for Communication and Information Technology, Sachin Pilot said recently. According to him, government had taken a number of initiatives to enable India to become a major power in producing domestic hardware and for the growth of the sector. The initiatives include a policy to provide preference to domestically manufactured electronic products in procurement due to security considerations and in government procurement has been notified. “Electronics Manufacturing Clusters Scheme to provide world-class infrastructure for attracting investments in the ESDM Sector has been approved by the government. A Modified Special Incentive Package Scheme to offset disability and attract investments in Electronics Systems Design and Manufacturing (ESDM) Industries has been notified,” Pilot has stated. For the promotion of R&D, a weighted deduction of 200 per cent of expenditure incurred on in-house R&D in case of a company engaged in the business of electronic equipment, computers and telecommunication equipment is available under the Income Tax Act.
DATA CENTER CORNER Modularity
Efficient Space Organization in a DC Enclosure
The flexibility of new enclosure designs enable the implementation of best practices for efficiently organising space, cooling, power and data cabling. story roi
Crowded enclosures have a negative impact on efficiency, on uptime, and on the overall look and feel of their data centers New enclosure designs and sizes provide the flexibility and space to manage the new, more demanding data center environment There are five critical steps for facilitating the goals of improved uptime, efficiency, and physical appearance through improved internal enclosure organization
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M
any data center professionals recognize the negative impact that crowded enclosures have on efficiency and uptime. The biggest concern is the impact on uptime, which is most often influenced by human error. Fortunately, new enclosure designs and sizes provide the flexibility and space to manage the new, more demanding data center environment. There are five critical steps for facilitating the goals of improved uptime, efficiency, and space management through improved internal enclosure organization.
Step #1: Right-size the power requirement The user must select one of two methods to determine the maximum power required per enclosure: 1. Estimate the power usage of the equipment inside the enclosure. This method is commonly used when very high power loads are used such as enterprise class servers, blade servers, or high speed networking. Using the nameplate rating on these equipment may lead to over-sizing of capacity. Schneider Electric
August 2012
offers a tool to help estimate power usage which can help generate a more accurate reading. 2. Arrive at the average power consumption per enclosure, that can be supported by the power/cooling infrastructure, and then deploy the equipment in the enclosures till the capacity is fully utilized. This is the popular method for planning low/medium density equipments in Data Centers. This is easier to estimate and implement. Regardless of approach selected, the estimated power requirement will drive the electrical distribution design with respect to circuit breaker and power cable ratings. The ability to meter the power consumption of each enclosure is critical to ensure higher utilisation of each enclosure, which in turn will ensure efficient operation of the power and cooling infrastructure. Automated threshold monitoring allows the user to receive proactive alerts for situations of under utilisation or imminent overload conditions. Software suite such as Schneider Electric’s StruXureware , can provide advanced monitoring and analytics for space and asset management, capacity and change management, and energy dashboards.
data center corner
CUSTOM PUBLISHING
The most effective method for managing cables in high density environments is to implement patch panels Step #2: Plan for higher density Higher density enclosures should offer the following: • Vented front and back doors with at least 60 percent ventilated surface area • At least two cable cutouts aligned with the rear channel of the enclosure to accommodate incoming, vertically managed cables • At least 35 square inches of total area for cutouts in a standard rack and at least 70 square inches in a high density networking application • The ability to accommodate supplemental rack/rowbased cooling solution • Any open spaces inside the enclosures or in between enclosures should be sealed to prevent hot air recirculation to the front of IT equipment. • The ability to run large volume of data cables to other nearby enclosures • The ability to mount multiple vertical rack PDUs in the back of the enclosure.
Step #3: Select appropriate enclosure size Standard racks can be used for low and medium densities. For higher density scenario, an enclosure either wider than the 600mm or deeper than the 1000 mm is chosen to provide the space needed for organising additional data and power cables inside the enclosure. Overall, the wider enclosure provides better flexibility for equipments. A common width for a wider enclosure is 750/800 mm; these wider enclosures provide the extra space on each side of the enclosure which allows for placement of vertical power strips and easier manage ent of cables. In a more traditional 600 mm wide enclosure, the deeper sizes of the servers often create mechanical interference to proper airflow. A data center that has standardised on 600 mm width enclosure can consider a 1050/1200 mm deep enclosure where more internal space is needed. Slim form factor rack PDU are also available, that allow better space management and air flow for high densities without the use of wider or deeper enclosures.
Step #4: Implement smart cable management
the enclosure. This not only reduces the complexity of operation, and also prevents down time due to human–error. It is important to calculate the total amount of vertically managed cable to ensure enough space in the enclosure. Cable management accessories also need to account for space constraints and proper cable bend radius (so as not to damage the cables). This is especially important if optical fibres or thicker CAT6 or CAT6A cables are being utilised.
Step #5: Organise for efficient cooling Enclosure doors are usually designed with perforation percentages above 60 percent of the door’s surface area for enabling airflow to the IT equipment. The enclosures also offer accessories for enabling IT equipment with side-to-side airflow patterns. The empty spaces in the enclosures must also be sealed to prevent re-circulation of hot air in front of the IT equipment. A simple solution is to install airflow management blanking panels to cover all unused U spaces. Airflow management blanking panels are also available with tool-less mounting for easy installation.
Conclusion The selection of the right enclosure can have a major impact on the space, power, and cooling performance of IT equipment in today’s data centers. By following the five steps one can ensure the efficiency and uptime of their IT equipment in data centers. Planning and organising equipment and cable distribution within the enclosure can pay significant dividends in both increased efficiency (lower electrical bills), the ability to safely accommodate higher density and for the overall operation of the data center. Involving the physical infrastructure and enclosure manufacturer in the process can be very helpful as power, cooling, and cable management have a lot of interdependencies.
BROUGHT to YOU BY
The selection of appropriate enclosure size, makes it possible to manage the power and data cables within
August 2012
13
Best of
Breed Features Inside
Power of an Independent Corporate Centre To develop a winning corporate strategy, you may need more muscle in your headquarters
T
By Stephen Hall, Bill Huyett, and Tim Koller
he independent, hard-nosed perspective that executives need to make decisions about a corporation’s businesses is often elusive. It can’t be delegated to the business units, whose managers have competing interests and may lack a corporate-wide perspective. Nor can it be folded into the existing strategy process, which is frequently a bottom-up, business unit–oriented exercise that starts with the assumption that each unit’s claims on capital and resources won’t differ significantly from year to year.
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Illustration by manav sachdev
Empowering the IT User Pg 16
m a n a g e m e n t | B EST OF B REED
A corporate center does have the potential to cut through the tensions, lobbying, and logrolling that often bedevil resource allocation discussions and lead to inertia (for more on resource allocation challenges, see “How to put your money where your strategy is”). But few are well organised to play this role. Some are little more than a collection of central functions (such as treasury, legal, and human resources) that don’t fit elsewhere in the organisation. Some are more strategy focused but primarily prepare board papers and support special initiatives for the CEO, the chairman, or the board. At the opposite extreme, certain corporate centers meddle in the tactics of business units. Others revolve around a CFO who manages the balance sheet, aggregates financial reporting, courts investors, and provides tax and treasury services—but seldom gets involved in strategy. Too often missing are the intense reviews, debates, and challenges that lie at the core of value-creating corporate-strategy decisions. Changing this picture will sometimes require a reconfiguration of the corporate center—including the addition of staff and capabilities—that is beyond our scope here. (For ideas from a CFO and a business head, see “Breaking strategic inertia: Tips from two leaders.”) However, a few more modest changes can help most corporate centers stimulate better dialogue, tougher decision making, and more effective resource reallocation. Here’s what that takes: Executive ‘ownership.’ The architects of this work must be willing to bring forward recommendations that are bold—not incremental—and potentially unpopular with division or business unit heads, who in most companies dominate the group that makes decisions to reallocate capital and talent. So the effort must be led by a respected senior executive, such as the chief financial or strategy officer, who can bring an outsider’s point of view: challenging status-quo projections, establishing decision rules, and proposing concrete portfolio changes. Personal attributes that can help an executive shape these discussions are more important than titles. The main point is that someone needs to be explicitly accountable for the work. All too often, these responsibilities slip through the cracks. The right kind of ownership can be
The central team should not attempt to develop alternative strategic plans or budgets for business units. It should instead focus
on R&D spending, capital investments, or top talent assignments within the existing portfolio extremely powerful. Take the case of the “two Bobs” at the mining company Rio Tinto, in the early 1990s. Rio’s chairman, Bob Wilson, saw an opportunity to reshape its portfolio and build a series of new growth platforms through a combination of bold organic and inorganic moves. Bob Adams, the executive director for planning and development, generated many of the ideas that underpinned the company’s repositioning and supported the corporate agenda by building a world-class capability to evaluate and develop businesses. Armed with independent analyses, the two Bobs helped counteract the forces of inertia. A transparent mandate from the CEO. The corporate-strategy process and the top team that drives it have an implicit contract with a company’s shareholders to do two things: to change its portfolio of businesses (and growth platforms) and to stimulate appropriate and occasionally significant shifts in the resources devoted to each business—even well-performing ones. Both the contract and the processes should be clear to division and business unit leaders and visibly supported by the CEO. The central team should not attempt to develop alternative strategic plans or budgets for business units; it won’t have the detailed knowledge to do so. It should focus instead on the arguments for and against making significant changes in R&D spending, capital investments, or top-talent assignments within the existing portfolio. It’s also important for the team to identify— before shareholders do—businesses that should be divested. In other words, the team should set up processes ensuring that the right new businesses are seeded, nurtured, pruned, or weeded as objectively as possible. To do so, the team must include people who can help it form its own analytical views
about the performance of business units. There will be some duplication of effort in this new mandate, but it is the only way to have a constructive debate. An inquisitive posture. Stimulating a better dialogue requires a direct challenge to what may be long-held assumptions. Business unit–planning processes—and perhaps even “crowdsourced” strategy approaches such as those described in “The social side of strategy” (forthcoming on mckinseyquarterly.com)—can help leaders grapple with some of these issues. But sometimes the focus of questions at the business unit level is more microlevel and less likely to uncover a need for wholesale shifts out of one business area and into another. The corporate center is better positioned to wrestle with questions on behalf of the firms as a whole—and to propose solutions that business units would be unlikely to arrive at. How are the macroeconomic, consumer, and technology trends that drive growth and returns for our businesses likely to change in the next two to five years? In what ways do we expect our industry’s competitive dynamics to change in the next several years? For example, will maturation lead to overcapacity? Are we starving nascent growth platforms by maintaining the flow of resources to historical core businesses? How does each business unit stack up against its peers and new attackers on performance measures such as product quality and innovation, the effectiveness of distribution, and cost levels? Could other companies extract more value from any of our businesses—and acquire them for a premium that we could invest better elsewhere? — This article is printed with prior permission from McKinsey Quarterly.
August 2012
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B EST OF B REED | c l o u d c o m p u t i n g
Empowering the IT User Pranesh Babu K, CTO, Sify, believes cloud, collaboration and mobility are all about empowering the IT user What are the major challenges ahead of CTOs looking to go onto the cloud? How can they overcome these challenges? Cloud is a re-incarnation of mainframe computing with a big leap in capabality, flexibility, reliabality, usabality and reach. The advancement in the compute power and the flexibility of today’s software to work on any device, any operating system with almost identical capability has made cloud computing a really big force that no CIO can overlook. With flexibility, always comes the challenges. As per my view, The challenges ahead of the CIO's planning to move into cloud are the data integrity, availability and security. The cloud service elasticity, cost advantage and time to market far overweighs the challenges. The CIO’s can overcome the challenges by meticulous planning. Some of the suggested steps are — Go in for a hybrid approach for the business critical application in form of infrastrcture as a services (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS). This allows retaining the business critical data within the organisation and taking advantage of off-loading peak loads to a cloud service provider on demand and deriving the cost advantage. A conservative CIO can look at cloud as a disaster recovery option. Look at Software As a service for non core business applications like business intelligence (BI), CRM, sales force
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automation, collaboration, etc where the applications are very evolved and an ideal candidate for cloud adoption. Last but not the least, the choice of the cloud service provider is the key, it is important to ensure the service provider provides you the comfort in explaining their design for availability, security and data integrity and compliance. I would suggest the CIO’s to demand the service provider to establish all the three aspects before signing the contract.
What are some of the best practices that a CTO should follow while framing a mobile device management strategy within his enterprise? Today’s world is an explosion of mobile devices and we are already seeing IT users already using more than one device for their day to day usage. No CIO today can overlook the usability of mobile devices for official use. The organisation IT policy
B EST OF B REED | c l o u d c o m p u t i n g
should be inclusive of the user’s own mobile devices (BYOD is the buzzword of the industry today) and provide for taking advantage of the flexibility and thereby productivity improvement that the mobile device would provide. The extensive usage of the mobile devices in work also comes with huge security risk of the exposing the business critical data to both internet as well as on devices on which the IT has very little control. Another big risk of mobile devices is the loss of the device itself, which if gets into a wrong hands can create havoc. These risks can be mitigated by framing a solid end-user policy which includes mobile devices and also deploying a mobile management system platform which ensures control to the IT team over the device to deploy security polices and also ensures only authenticated devices have access to critical data and a possibility of erasing the data on the device as soon as a loss of the device is reported.
Is collaboration the next leadership frontier for CIOs? If yes, how should a CTO approach
collaboration to maximise its potential? Collaboration today is the most important aspect of businesses. With businesses becoming extremely dynamic where the situation changes every moment collaboration plays an important role in ensuring the teams are well informed and aligned. IT plays a very key role in enabling the business organisation by deploying tools that can help diverse teams situated across the globe come together as one team in achieving the goals. The key issues for CIO is to deploy a collaboration suite which takes advantage of the diverse knowledge base like internal data, BI, social media, etc and at the same time provide instant access to collaboration via various media like voice, text, video, mobile devices, file sharing, etc. The CIO’s job is not made easy by just ensuring the availability of tools. The effective utilisation of tools can only be achieved through developing a collaboration capability throughout the organisation. This requires the CIO to put on a hat as a business leader to bring about an organisational change.
What trends do you see in cloud, collaboration and mobility, and how is Sify helping CTOs in leveraging these trends for enterprise growth? All the three trends on cloud, collaboration and mobility are about empowering the IT user to use “IT on Demand.” In today’s dynamics of business “In-Time” is the essence and as IT leaders it is very important for us to align with this business goal. The IT usage among the organisation would be ever increasing and they would always want the applications to be delivered on demand. It is very important for the CIO’s to have the foresight to see what is coming in the future and ready their organisation for the future. At Sify, we provide solutions to all the three areas of cloud, collaboration and mobility. Our cloud platform provides for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. In addition to this, we also provide the option of virtualised security platform, server load balancing and network solution on-demand. On the collaboration front, Sify provides an hosted model of video conferencing and call center application on the SaaS model.
C I O & L E A D E R c u s t o m s erie s | R i v er b ed t ec h n olo g y
imaging by anil t
What are the key enterprise challenges when it comes to running applications over WAN?
Consolidation of data centre is challenging Anil Batra, MD, Riverbed Technology, India, talks to Varun Aggarwal about their company’s strategies
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When companies look at growth, they look at adding new products, going global. Once a company goes global, one of the biggest challenges is to provide the IT infrastructure for a geographically dispersed organisation. The simplest solution to this was to build a data centre close to where the people are, in order to get better response time and low latency in the applications. Up to a point, this approach was good. But back then (10-15 years ago), there used to be just 10-15 applications running. Today, enterprises have hundreds of different applications running in their data centres. There is a web application for everything today. With less applications, it was relatively easy to manage multiple data centres but from an IT perspective, it became a challenge. People started to have hundreds of data centres to serve every location they were present at. Managing all these data centres became a nightmare for the enterprises. Given these challenges, enterprises started to look at consolidating their data centre. This helped them reduce cost, reduce management overheads etc. While the IT was happy with this approach, the user was completely unhappy as he started receiving poor response time from the applications, since they were sitting at servers thousands of miles away. The response time depends on two key things—bandwidth and latency. Also, most applications were written were LAN and not WAN. Because of this devices were required that could improve the application performance over a WAN.
How has been Riverbed’s journey since its inception? Riverbed started in 2003. The key focus was to help enterprises utilise their infrastructure better, improve the performance of applications, improve application control for the IT manager and improve the productivity of an organisation. Riverbed came out with three key technologies to address these goals. The first such technology is deduplication makes sure that minimal bandwidth is used while transferring incremental data. The second technology increases the size of the payload
R i v er b ed t ec h n olo g y | C I O & L E A D E R c u s t o m s erie s
during data transfer, so that every time a packet transfers data, it transfers more data than it typically would. As a result, data is transferred much faster. The third key technology that we use, expedites the three-way handshake during data transfer. In 2004, our worldwide revenues were just $2 million. We went public in 2006 and in 2011, our worldwide revenues were $728 million. Usually in the Silicon Valley we say, any company that becomes a billion dollar company in less than 10 years is usually highly successful. We crossed the $700 million mark in just seven years and we are in a good position to achieve the $1 billion target in the next few years.
Enterprises are increasingly looking at consolidating their data centres to reduce costs. How are you helping such enterprises optimise their infrastructure? Consolidation of data centres is a challenging task unless you figure what applications are running on which data centres, which user is accessing which application on which data centre and it is not always easy to figure that out. For this, we have a tool called Cascade, which we acquired recently. This is the only application-aware network management tool. As a result of that, we can build a dashboard which can help you drill down to problems at the micro level. It can tell you which application is facing problem, which server is getting impacted because of that and which users are trying to access the application. We are seeing a lot of traction for this tool.
What kind of traction are you seeing in the non-appliance based /virtual solutions? We have a virtual application delivery controller tool that can run in a VM environment called Stingray. You can script it so that it spins off additional servers and adds provisions additional bandwidth when the demand goes up. The tool called Stingray Traffic manager does not require an appliance and yet it allows for bandwidth expansion and VM spun off automatically. Another tool called Stingray Aptimiser takes a new approach that builds on traditional application delivery controller (ADC) functionality and extends it by delivering
“Consolidation of data centres is a challenging task unless you figure what applications are running on which data centres and which user is accessing which application on which data centre� — Anil Batra, MD, Riverbed Technology, India
performance through web content optimisation (WCO). It can accelerate web application load times by up to 4x. We also announced a product called Granite, which is an Edge Virtual Server. Granite is designed to carry out block data transfers across WANs (wide-area networks) without the many back-and-forth exchanges that make such movements time-consuming now. Granite can essentially achieve the same thing with blocks of data that Riverbed's Steelhead appliance does with applications, slashing wait times at branches and letting enterprises centralise their storage. In addition to moving large files around the world at LAN speed, Granite will let remote users boot up virtual desktops over long distances, a process that often takes 30 minutes or more and in some cases is not even possible.
What are you doing to address the software as a service market? More and more organisations are adopting software as a service. However, application performance is again a challenge in some SaaS applications. To address this issue, we partnered with Akamai, wherein Akamai optimises the Internet path for a SaaS-based application and our devices at each end of the Akamai network further optimise the application. This way the SaaS application gets optimised manifolds, boosting the performance.
How big is the WAN optimisation market and where do you see opportunity for yourself?
WAN optimisation market in India is about $25 million, growing at a CAGR of 25-30 percent. Application delivery controller market is about $35 million, growing at a similar pace. However, the virtual application controller market is growing at a rate of about 42 percent worldwide. Whereas the appliance based application controller market is growing at a mere 15 percent. Market potential for virtual application controller is quite high. Companies are growing rapidly and the need for such products is only going to increase.
Bandwidth costs are rapidly declining. How is this impacting the WAN optimisation business? Bandwidth is just one part of WAN optimisation. WAN optimisation was initially focused on bandwidth optimisation. However, the real focus today is application acceleration. Due to a centralised data centre, users in an enterprise are required to access applications from various locations and latency and in such a situation, latency and application response time becomes critical. Our devices help minimise the latency so that the user feels as if the application resides on a local server. We accelerate the performance of various enterprise applications and protocols such as HTTP, SMTP, PoP etc. We are able to accelerate the performance of applications up to 100 times. While the products are called WAN optimisation products, the fact is that we optimise and accelerate a lot of other protocols too. People have thought in the past that increasing the bandwidth would reduce the latency issues, which is not the case.
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C O V E R S T O R Y | M a n a g i n g a M u l t i g e n er a t i o n a l W or k f orce
Managing a
Multigenerational
Workforce
Managing a multigenerational workforce is a key challenge that needs to be addressed by a CIO if he wants to get the best out of the team By Atanu Kumar Das Design By Shokeen Saifi Imaging By Anil T
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M a n a g i n g a M u l t i g e n e r a t i o n a l W o r k f o r c e | CO V ER S TOR y
Handling a multigenerational workforce has been a persistent issue for CIOs. There are issues of different mindsets, which create lots of differences and opinion clashes among employees of varied ages. In an organisation there are people in their 50s working alongside those who are in their 20s. There is a possibility that a young CIO has to manage a team with several senior members or, as is the case normally, an experienced CIO has to manage a team of youngsters. It is a challenge for a CIO to manage the aspirations of both the old and the young. While the old generally lack awareness and are not open to change, the young are restless, focus on individual growth rather than their company's growth and want fast technology changes. So, for a CIO it becomes a challenge to get both these age groups on the same page for effective and smooth functioning. We spoke to some top CIOs to find out their views on thie issue.
August 2012
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C O V E R S T O R Y | M a n a g i n g a M u l t i g e n er a t i o n a l W or k f orce
Bridging
the Gap
Handling a multigenerational workforce is one of the key challenges that needs to be addressed in order to get the best out of a team By Atanu Kumar Das
“People resemble their times more than they resemble their parents� –Arab Proverb
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h
andling a multigenerational workforce has been a persistent issue that organisations have been dealing with. Fixed mindsets are the root cause of differences among employees of varied age groups. With organisations having both, the young and old, working side-by-side, it becomes a challenge for business units heads and the CEO to create a conducive working environment that meets everyone's expectations. For a technology leader, it is no different. Enterprise technology decision makers have their task cut out. Not only do they have to add to the top line, they have to increasingly look at creating new revenue streams for their enterprises. This is possible only if they have a team that is innovative, cohesive and works as a well-oiled machine. What could come in the way of a CIO is the multigenerational workforce within his department. The younger generation is restless and wants things to move fast. The middle and the older generations have their own concerns. The middle aged, though not too resistant to adopting new technology, feel that consistent change is an irritant. The older generation, meanwhile, lacks awareness. For them
M a n a g i n g a M u l t i g e n e r a t i o n a l W o r k f o r c e | CO V ER S TOR y
to adopt cutting-edge technology, a CIO has to hand-hold the old also throws up an opportunity for a CIO himself to them and make them understand the benefits accruing emerge as a leader. from the technology. There are CIOs who don the leadership mantle and train According to Jijy Oommen, Executive Vice President the youngs members of their team in a manner that they and Group IT Head, Bajaj Capital, “The younger generaunderstand the values of the organisation. tion today is very difficult to handle. The young are fuelAccording to U C Dubey, Executive Director, IT, Iffcoing the BYOD trend. For a CIO, it is increasingly becomTokio General Insurance, “When I was working at the ing difficult to manage the proliferation of gadgets within Rourkela Steel Plant, there was a very innovative exercise the organisation." that was started by the organisation." "As a CIO, I have to understand that handling a "The company would select seven to eight youngsters multigenerational workforce is a tricky thing. Instead of who joined recently and assign them to a senior manager. forcing a technology on the user, it is important to come The latter would spend a couple of hours with the youngup with innovative technologies that can be adopted by sters every day. With each passing day, the youngsters users of different age groups within the organisation.” Oommen feels that the younger generation wants to explore more -a trait that is rarely found in the older generation. “I have seen several youngsters in my organisation bringing gadgets that the IT department has no clue about. In fact, they know many more functionalities of such latest gadgets than the IT department," she says. According to Vilakshan Jakhu, CIO and Sr. VP, BPTP Ltd, “All the prob—U C Dubey, Executive Director, lems that persist in an organisation IT, Iffco-Tokio General Insurance regarding handling multigenerational workforce is because of mindset issues. For example, people who have been traditionally Microsoft and .Net server deployers may not consider open source architectures at all. Of course, Microsoft products are good, but there are products that promise to change the IT landscape and the approach to computing these days.” Echoing Oommen's sentiment on the fast-emerging trend of BYOD, he avers, “It is because of the younger generation that organisations now allows employees to buy or bring their own iPads, Macbook would understand the older generation better and viceor iPhones. It also allows them to connect to corporate versa. I feel it is was a very good way to not only enhance infrastructure using a BYOD software like MobileIron professional knowledge but also get to know the other which secures all corporate data on these devices and when person better.” the employee leaves that data is removed from their PCs/ According to Jakhu, "Mindset, awareness and breaking tablets/mobiles. This is contrary to the traditional IT setup out of the comfort zone are things which no one is born where Windows domains, anti-virus software, exchange, with." He feels an old-aged person can also take to techWindows OS, Microsoft office applications were provided nology if he understands its benefits. by the corporate's IT department.” Giving an example, he says, “I remember seeing a 70-year old seasoned professional being forced to use Blackberry smart phone. Now he can't live without it. To Different generation, different aspirations overcome such obstacles we must make the older generaThe opportunity to bridge the gap between the young and
“I feel quite enthusiastic working with youngsters because it gives me more energy to perform”
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C O V E R S T O R Y | M a n a g i n g a M u l t i g e n er a t i o n a l W or k f orce
tion see the benefits and address their concerns. With time I have seen a fresh fondness to new technologies across all ages.” According to Paul Farmer – Chief People Officer, Qlik ech International AB, “Typically, generational differences are seen through technology used and career growth expectations. As a result, we utilise a multi-media approach for communicating within the company, as well as with our customers." "To manage career growth expectations, we encourage conversation on managing your own career, providing various opportunities for formal and informal development and discussing the need to be skilled and perform well in current role prior to looking for the next opportunity,” he says. Communicating is one of the important things when it comes respecting a employee. It is important to understand that when one communicated with the youngsters, the conversation should be short. Many a times it happens that the older generation will try and narrate history before coming to the topic and this is not appreciated by the younger generation. So, it is important to just talk about what the fact is, rather than talking about the whole context. Oommen feels that CIOs should always keep in mind that there is no point pushing a person beyond a point. “In our organisation, we have three to four people who
“I have seen that the older generation needs a lot of handholding. This is not the case with the younger generation” — Jijy Oommen, Executive Vice President and Group IT Head, Bajaj Capital
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are old and they do not want to learn anything about technology. We have to make them understand how to open a email or send it. I feel that at this age they are not equipped or interested to learn new technologies, so we have to understand and respect it. But on the whole I have seen that both the younger and older generation have leveraged a lot of benefits from technology and it has helped a lot to bridge this gap of generations,” said Oommen.
Handing ego hassles effectively One of the key concerns which can be witnessed today is that there are lot of younger bosses in the organisation and sometimes it is very difficult for a older generation employee to report to a far younger boss. According to S R Balasubramanian, Former CIO Godfrey Phillips India, “I have seen in my tenure as a CIO that there are a lot of people who are older than me and reporting to me. We have to handle each of these scenarios on a personal level and listen to the older person and make him comfortable so that he does not feel any ego as that would harm the team. I believe that as a leader it is important to understand that a person who is older than you will always have some problems in reporting to a younger boss and this needs to handled very sensibly.” Human resource also has a very important role to play when it comes to handling such issues. They can organise various sessions where there are informal discussions that can lead to bridging gaps between generations. “Human resource plays an important role in organisation dynamics. Organisational training programmes, events mixers create a feeling of camaraderie which bridges the age divide. Our organisation is quite young and has a lot of young personnel. Organisational announcements of birthdays, anniversaries, new joining, all add to bridging fences and brings people close,” said Jakhu. According to Dubey, “I feel quite enthusiastic working with youngsters because it gives me more energy. If the older generation people are understood properly and given the time frame that is required for them to adopt a particular technology then there will be very less generational challenges. Since today's youngsters are more concerned about themselves and not the organisation, it becomes difficult to bridge the gap. The best way is to mentor the youngsters in a proper
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C O V E R S T O R Y | M a n a g i n g a M u l t i g e n er a t i o n a l W or k f orce
people would rather enjoy playing gold rather than spending time on Facebook or Twitter but it is quite the opposite for younger generation. Organisations are now trying to motivate older generation to use social networking sites so that they can promote their organisations ing and reverse-mentoring differences, but don’t paint For starters, remember activities,” said Oommen. to create cross-generationthat some older workers individuals into a box. The integral part that CIOs point are savvy at using leadingal knowledge sharing. 2. Communicate. It’s imporout is there are no set of rules which tant for a CIO and other edge technology, and there 4. Provide training. Offer are required for handling a multiexecutives to promote the courses or workshops in are younger workers who generational workforce. It can be benefits of a multigenerahow to get the most out are essentially Luddites. done differently at an individual level tional workforce and the of technology and social Don’t paint individuals into but the most important thing is to need to respect differing media. Include everyone. a box. Use these five prinremember that the organisation's ciples to navigate the rocky attitudes and work styles. Even younger workers objective has to be taken into waters that come with Research shows that a can learn new information consideration. managing a multigenerapositive relationship with about technology. While there will be hiccups when tional workforce. colleagues ranks near the 5. Remain flexible. Underone a handling a new employee stand the needs of dif1. Avoid myths and stereotop for employee satisfacin his 20s and someone who has types. Some older workers ferent groups and offer tion. worked for more than 20 years. The are savvy at using leadingprogrammes and benefits 3. Encourage interaction beauty though is, both can learn and collaboration. Avoid to attract and retain them. edge technology, and there innumerable things from each other are younger workers who creating age pools based This might include flextime, and if the camaraderie happens in are essentially Luddites. on job titles or skill requirejob sharing and telecoman effective way, the solution of hanments. Instead, create muting. It also means Likewise, studies show that dling people of different generation diverse teams so that ideas accommodating workers many younger workers are is not a difficult task. The key is to and knowledge flow across and their choices in techfar more loyal than combe open to ideas and act in a manner monly thought. Respect the enterprise. Use mentornology, whenever possible. where teamwork becomes the mantra for success. Transfer of knowledge from the older to the younger manner so that they work with patience and get to know generation is also one of the most important factors that a the older generation in a better way.” CIO should always keep in mind. The knowledge can only “Human resource is the central point of contact in the be passed on to the younger generation if it is done in a organisation and they can play a very vital role in terms of manner where it makes proper sense to them. So the best organising various training sessions and other fun activiway of doing it is fostering an environment where there is ties that can help in building the relationships between collaboration between the younger and the older generadifferent age-group of people. Strong human resource tion. A CIO as a leader knows that to have a team which policies to bridge the gap between generations will go in works seamlessly, needs collaboration and that can only a long way in effectively handling people across different happen if there is an environment for the same. So when verticals in an organisation,” feels Oommen. the top management of the organisation creates such an environment then once can witness brainstorming Social media and multigenerational between the youngsters and the older generation and that workforce would result in collective creativity. This will also ensure The advent of social media has also brought across numerbetter productivity and coordination. ous challenges for CIOs in the organisations. Social media A convenient environment can be the stepping stone is today seen as a tool which can help an organisation's for seamless collaboration between different generations. cause and while the youngsters are enthusiastically using Transfer of knowledge happens on both the fronts and it, the older generations are finding it quite difficult. as the youngsters get to learn about the organisation and While some CIOs believe that older generation are social networking, the older generation also get to know using social networking to the advantage of the organisaa lot about new technologies, be it on the software or the tion, others feel that making them use social networking hardware side. The older generation also feel that their sites to the fullest is going to be impossible. skills are valued and the youngsters also realise that the “The way older generation view social media is quite organisation is open to new ideas and thoughts. different from the younger generation. Older generation
The Multigenerational Workforce: 5 Ways to Narrow the Age Gap
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C O V E R S T O R Y | M a n a g i n g a M u l t i g e n er a t i o n a l W or k f orce
Handling Generational Gap with Care In a conversation with Atanu Kumar Das, S R Balasubramanian, a veteran CIO with over 35 years of experience, talks about his experience of handling a multigenerational workforce What are the generational differences you have witnessed in your working experience as a CIO and what have you done to overcome them. Please share with us a couple of examples? Generational deference has been existent since many years and I could witness the same when I started my first job. Today also it is existent in all the organisations but the nuances might have changed, be it in terms of adopting technology or any other issues that an organisation deals with. I will give you a couple of examples. In 1991, I was involved in deploying a database system and one set of employees wanted me to implement it in COBOL and the other set wanted SQL. I did due diligence and ultimately went with SQL, but there was a lot of resistance from some of the employees and I had to convince not only the management but also the employees on a personal level that what I was doing was for the organisation's benefit. Another interesting example was when I was working with Godfrey Philips, and we were planning to implement virtualisation. I wanted to go ahead with VMware, but the management was convinced that we should use Microsoft or Oracle. People have their own notions when it comes to adopting technology, but as a CIO I have to understand that whatever technology I deploy, it has to work in the long run.
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Being a experienced CIO, how easy or difficult it is to work with the younger generation. Have you seen that the younger generation are too restless and are always on the look out to have some new platform or technology to work on? Today, the youngsters are very restless and ambitious. Young people who join work today are less committed towards the organisation and are more interested in their own growth. It is very important for the senior management to mentor them properly and make them understand that it is the organisation's preferences, that comes first and growth will subsequently happen on an individual level. I advice today's youngsters to be a little bit patient and think for the future before taking any professional decisions. When we started work, our goal was to be with the organisation and grow with the organisation, but today that feeling hardly exists. t What has been your experience in handling the older generation. Aren't they more reluctant and resistant in adopting many new methodologies in the organisation? Managing the older generation is also a problem. They start feeling insecure if they see some youngsters growing fast in the organisation. They feel that they are not at
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as a CIO I always felt that it has to be used judiciously where the organisation benefits from it. There are some enterprises, who believes in not letting their employees use social media at work, I am not for it because with technology, younger generation have many ways to use social media. Moreover, it will virtually become impossible to control anyone if they using it in their own smart phone or laptop. In terms of adoption, the older generation takes time to adopt to social media as they are slow starters, but once they are made to learn the benefits, they can use it as efficiently as any other employee in the organisation. The usage of social media at work will always remain a tricky question, but it has to be dealt with sensibility. How important is the function of human resource in ensuring that the generational gaps are addressed effectively? Human resource can play an integral role in bridging the gap between generations and that can be done via numerous activities, be it in office or outside office. The more we witness youngsters interacting with the older generation and getting to know them, the less differences are going to crop up at work. One of the important thing that we have to understand today that the aspirations of the youth and older generations are — S R Balasubramanian, Former CIO, Godfrey Philips very different. I have seen situations where older employees are reporting to a very young boss and that creates friction. So, it depends on the indipar with them. The best way to make the older generation vidual, how they handle that situation. I believe that even adopt new technologies is to make them go for trainings if a youngster becomes the boss of someone who is elder, and attend technical seminars where they understand he should ensure that proper respect is given to him. the need for that technology in the organisation. So, once they come back from the training, they will try and make What are challenges you have faced while dealothers learn what are the benefits of adopting a particular ing with multi-generational workforce? technology and this also boost the confidence level of the There are numerous challenges and the primary are older generation. that as a CIO, I have to ensure that I show the right path to the youngster and also guide the older generation to adopt to new technologies by making him understand What is your take on adoption of social media by the benefits it provides for the organisation. There is a the older generation and in comparison do you very thin line between convincing someone and annoying see the younger generation using social media at someone, so one has to be very cautious in the way we work more for their own entertainment? approach generations. Social media has today become a very important tool and
“There is a very thin line between convincing someone and annoying someone, so one has to be very cautious�
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DATACENTER EFFICIENCY
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August 2012
34A
C&L SECTION
ecial section Sp ship r de lea
“Example is not the main thing in influencing others, it is the only thing.
I nt r o d u ction
CIO&LEADER This special section
C&L 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:
36 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
35
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
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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 other’s strengths and weaknesses, opine on each other’s style of functioning, discuss the biggest lessons learnt from each other, talk about memorable projects and shared interests
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SHELF LIFE
A one-page review of a book on leadership
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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
G G Rao
CIO, HCL infosystems
Nurturing The Team For Success
I believe that today, business managers must have a management degree or some finance background. At HCL, I am grooming two to three people within my organisation who can graduate to my level. I have told them directly that they now need to understand technology and business needs as a CIO does. Earlier, they used to take everything for granted, but now I have made sure that they keep on attending strategic meetings to understand the profit and loss of the company and try and think of ways how they can increasing the profitability and reduce cost of the organisation. At HCL, we believe in encouraging our juniors to graduate to a level where they can take their senior's position. In the past six months, I have seen a major shift in attitude among my team members as they now understand responsibility and ensure that problems are solved at their level and not escalated unless it is very tough. There have been a lot of debate about how
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GG Rao, CIO, HCL Infosystems, believes that training juniors effectively ensures success for an enterprise relevant a job of CIO is and with the change in the way a CIOs job is done, is it possible for any other heads in the organisation to take up the CIO's job. I don't ever see the role of CIO not being relevant. Even if an orgnisation transforms the business into the cloud, they will need someone to manage the same and it has to someone who has some kind of specialisation in technology. I think that today a lot of transformation is going on and the dependence on IT is increasing by the day. A CIO today needs to understand business much more. I come from a electronics background and today organisations need CIOs who have business knowledge. Today, a CIO is also the finance guy. For example, I am presently planning to de-centralise the IT budgets. I want to run the IT department as a business unit. We are using our own cloud solutions and I want to ensure that every department has accountability. We use SAP in our organisation and each SAP ID comes with a certain cost. So if I run each department as a cost-centre then they have to give a valid answer to order an additional SAP ID and that way the cost of the company will reduce. For example, when I was implementing SAP in HCL, then I realised that since I have a business background I can appreciate it much better than someone who has only technical background. —As told to Atanu Kumar Das
August 2012
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My Story JS Puri
“Leaders Need Agility of Thought & Action� JS Puri, Former CIO, Fortis, believes that CIOs need to be on their toes and keep on innovating besides having a thorough understanding of business JS Puri started his career with DCM Data Systems in the late 70s and then moved to HCL after a few years. He has held technology leadership positions in several organisations. His last stint as a CIO was with Fortis. He is presently working as an independent consultant.
What in your view is being a leader all about? The scope of leader is changing quite a bit. Today, a leader has to have the agility of thought and action. Some of the key requirements for being a leader are to be able to communicate in a proper manner, should have the ability to transfer knowledge, cooperation, collaboration and team work. What are the key ingredients that make a CIO a leader? Apart from the requirements which I mentioned in the earlier question, as a CIO it is very important to perceive the goal of the organisation and work accordingly. A CIO should have the complete understanding of business like the CEO and then only he/she can become a ideal leader in that organisation. The job of the CIO has become a management function and he should have a clear understanding about this matter. To be a leader, the CIO has to think differently and not just focus on technology. He has to be a part of decision making team. What was the point in your career that transformed you from being a technologist to a technology leader? I think it happened when I was working with Far East Technologies based out of Boston. By working in this organisation, it enabled me to imbibe the desire to learn more and more. I was also exposed to a lot of departments and functionalities which changed the way of
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my thinking. Here, I also got involved in how IT can enable other departments to work better and thus help the company's profitability. Secondly, when I was working in Fortis, I remember being encouraged to work in various verticals of the organisation and I had to put across all kind of technologies together for different requirements of the organisation. I got the kind of exposure which changed the way I perceived the job of a CIO and it is here that I leaned that a CIOs job is much more than just having the best technological solutions deployed in your organisation. Who has been the big influencer in your life? Who do you look up to as a role model for leadership? Subhash Arora of HCL has always been the biggest influencer in my life. When I was working with HCL, he would give me 10 problem to solve in a day and I will have to come with appropriate solutions. This exercise helped me a lot and it also opened up my mind and I never looked back after that. I respect him a lot as a person because he knew exactly how to make a subordinate work and also takes the best out of him. By giving me so many problems, he was preparing me for the work that I was going to face regularly and I respect this knowledge of Arora. Today I also try make the subordinates grow in the same manner and give them problems for which they will have to find solutions and I have seen people growing a lot by doing this exercise.
J . S . P u ri | I n t e r v i e w
5points 1
The job of a CIO today has become more of a manager
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To be a leader, a CIO has to think differently and not just focus on technology.
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A CIO has to understand that every organisation has its own USP and he has to work accordingly
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A CIO has to be very innovative and constantly come up with new ideas and solutions
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A CIO has to understand that he has to step out from his 9 to 5 job schedule and work effortlessly
How do you increasingly align IT to business? A CIO has to understand that every organisation has got its own unique selling proposition and he has to work accordingly. A CIO has to align all the functions, process and tasks and integrate them to be able to provide the data as and when required by the management. A CIO today has to be very innovative and constantly come up with new ideas and solutions that can add value
to the company. Technology is only a part of CIOs job, he has to be ideally a business leader in the organisation. How do you foresee leadership five years down the line in the context that information technology dynamics are changing so rapidly? A CIO needs to have complete knowledge of the business. He/she has to be a information technology leader rather than being a
CIO. A CIO should understand that he has to step out from his 9 to 5 job schedule and work effortlessly for the profitability of the organisation. He/she has to understand that what each and every function heads are going through and sit with them to find relevant solutions to their problems by using technology. If a CIO does not do this, he is on his way to be killed by the CFO. — As told to Atanu Kumar Das
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Leading edge Bernard T. Ferrari
The Executive’s Guide to Better Listening Strong listening skills can make a difference in the performance of senior executives, but few are able to cultivate them. Here’s how By Bernard T. Ferrari A senior executive of a large consumer goods company had spotted a bold partnership opportunity in an important developing market and wanted to pull the trigger quickly to stay ahead of competitors. In meetings on the topic with the leadership team, the CEO noted that this trusted colleague was animated, adamant, and very persuasive about the move’s game-changing potential for the company. The facts behind the deal were solid. The CEO also observed something troubling, however: his colleague wasn’t listening. During conversations about the pros and cons of the deal and its strategic rationale, for example, the senior executive wasn’t open to avenues of conversation
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that challenged the move or entertained other possibilities. What’s more, the tenor of these conversations appeared to make some colleagues uncomfortable. The senior executive’s poor listening skills were shortcircuiting what should have been a healthy strategic debate. Eventually, the CEO was able to use a combination of diplomacy, tactful private conversation, and the bureaucratic rigor of the company’s strategic-planning processes to convince the executive of the need to listen more closely to his peers and engage with them more productively about the proposal. The resulting conversations determined that the original deal was sound but that a much better one was available—a partnership in the same country. The new
partnership presented slightly less risk to the company than the original deal but had an upside potential exceeding it by a factor of ten. The situation facing the CEO will be familiar to many senior executives. Listening is the front end of decision making. It’s the surest, most efficient route to informing the judgments we need to make, yet many of us have heard, at one point or other in our careers, that we could be better listeners. Indeed, many executives take listening skills for granted and focus instead on learning how to articulate and present their own views more effectively. This approach is misguided. Good listening—the active and disciplined activity of probing and challenging the information
ILLUSTRATION BY photos.com
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garnered from others to improve its quality and quantity—is the key to building a base of knowledge that generates fresh insights and ideas. Put more strongly, good listening, in my experience, can often mean the difference between success and failure in business ventures (and hence between a longer career and a shorter one). Listening is a valuable skill that most executives spend little time cultivating. (For more about one executive’s desire to be a better listener, see “Why I’m a listener: Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer.”) The many great listeners I’ve encountered throughout my career as a surgeon, a corporate executive, and a business consultant have exhibited three kinds of behavior I’ll highlight in this article. By rec-
ognising—and practicing—them, you can begin improving your own listening skills and even those of your organisation.
1. Show respect One of the best listeners I have ever observed was the chief operating officer (COO) of a large medical institution. He once told me that he couldn’t run an operation as complex as a hospital without seeking input from people at all levels of the staff—from the chief of surgery to the custodial crew. Part of what made him so effective, and so appealing as a manager, was that he let everyone around him know he believed each of them had something unique to contribute. The respect he
showed them was reciprocated, and it helped fuel an environment where good ideas routinely came from throughout the institution. The COO recognised something that many executives miss: our conversation partners often have the know-how to develop good solutions, and part of being a good listener is simply helping them to draw out critical information and put it in a new light. To harness the power of those ideas, senior executives must fight the urge to “help” more junior colleagues by providing immediate solutions. Leaders should also respect a colleague’s potential to provide insights in areas far afield from his or her job description. Here’s an example: I recall a meeting between a group of engineers and the chief marketing officer (CMO) at a large industrial company. She was concerned about a new product introduction that had fallen flat. The engineers were puzzled as well; the company was traditionally dominated by engineers with strong product-development skills, and this group had them too. As the CMO and I discussed the technological aspects of the product with the engineers, I was struck by their passion and genuine excitement about the new device, which did appear to be unique. Although we had to stop them several times to get explanations for various technical terms, they soon conveyed the reasons for their attitude—the product seemed to be not only more efficient than comparable ones on the market but also easier to install, use, and maintain. After a few minutes, the CMO, who had been listening intently, prompted the engineers with a respectful question: “But we haven’t sold as many as you thought we would in the first three months, right?” “Well, actually, we haven’t sold any!” the team leader said. “We think this product is a game changer, but it hasn’t been selling. And we’re not sure why.” After a pause to make sure the engineer was finished, the CMO said, “Well, you guys sure seem certain that this is a great product. And you’ve convinced the two of us pretty well. It seems that customers should be tripping over themselves to place orders. So assuming it’s not the product’s quality that’s off, what else are your customers telling you about the product?” “We haven’t spoken to any customers,” the engineer replied.
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L e a di n g e dg e | B e r n a rd T . F e rr a ri
The CMO blanched. As the conversation continued, we learned that the product had been developed under close wraps and that the engineers had assumed its virtues would speak for themselves. “But maybe not,” said the team leader. “Maybe we ought to push it a little more. I guess its good traits aren’t so obvious if you don’t know a lot about it.” That engineer had hit the nail on the head. The device was fine. Customers were wary about switching to something untested, and they hadn’t been convinced by the specs the company’s sales team touted. As soon as the engineers began phoning their
need to help make better decisions. The goal is ensuring the free and open flow of information and ideas. I was amused when John McLaughlin, the former deputy director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, told me that when he had to make tough decisions he often ended his conversations with colleagues by asking, “Is there anything left that you haven’t told me . . . because I don’t want you to leave this room and go down the hall to your buddy’s office and tell him that I just didn’t get it.” With that question, McLaughlin communicated the expectation that his colleagues should be prepared; he demanded that
“Good listeners seek to understand—and challenge—the assumptions that lie below the surface of every conversation” —Bernard T. Ferrari counterparts in the customers’ organizations (an idea suggested by the engineers themselves), the company started receiving orders. Had the CMO looked at the problem by herself, she might have suspected a shortcoming with the product. But after some good listening and targeted follow-up questions, she helped to extract a much better solution from the engineers themselves. She didn’t cut the conversation short by lecturing them on good marketing techniques or belittling their approach; she listened and asked pointed questions in a respectful manner. The product ultimately ended up being a game changer for the company. Being respectful, it’s important to note, didn’t mean that the CMO avoided asking tough questions—good listeners routinely ask them to uncover the information they
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everything come out on the table; and he signaled genuine respect for what his colleagues had to say.
2. Keep quiet I have developed my own variation on the 80/20 rule as it relates to listening. My guideline is that a conversation partner should be speaking 80 percent of the time, while I speak only 20 percent of the time. Moreover, I seek to make my speaking time count by spending as much of it as possible posing questions rather than trying to have my own say. That’s easier said than done, of course—most executives are naturally inclined to speak their minds. Still, you can’t really listen if you’re too busy talking. Besides, we’ve all spent time with bad listeners who treat conversations as opportunities
to broadcast their own status or ideas, or who spend more time formulating their next response than listening to their conversation partners. Indeed, bad listening habits such as these are ubiquitous (see sidebar, “A field guide to identifying bad listeners”). I should know because I’ve fallen into these traps myself. One experience in particular made me realise how counterproductive it is to focus on your own ideas during a conversation. It was early in my career as a consultant and I was meeting with an important client whom I was eager to impress. My client was a no-nonsense, granite block of a man from the American heartland, and he scrutinized me over the top of his reading glasses before laying out the problem: “The budget for next year just doesn’t work, and we are asking our employees to make some tough changes.” All I heard was his concern about the budget. Without missing a beat, I responded to my client and his number-two man, who was seated alongside him: “There are several ways to address your cost problem.” I immediately began reeling off what I thought were excellent suggestions for streamlining his business. My speech gained momentum as I barreled ahead with my ideas. The executive listened silently— and attentively, or so it seemed. Yet he didn’t even move, except to cock his head from time to time. When he reached for a pen, I kept up my oration but watched with some annoyance as he wrote on a small notepad, tore off the sheet of paper, and handed it to his associate. A smile flitted almost imperceptibly across that man’s face as he read the note. I was already becoming a bit peeved that the executive had displayed no reaction to my ideas, but this little note, passed as though between two schoolboys, was too much. I stopped talking and asked what was written on the paper. The executive nodded to his associate. “Show him.” The man leaned across the table and handed me the note. My client had written, “What the hell is this guy talking about?” Fortunately, I was able to see the humor in the situation and to recognise that I had been a fool. My ego had gotten in the way of listening. Had I paid closer attention and probed more deeply, I would have learned that the executive’s real concern was finding
B e r n a rd T . F e rr a ri | L e a di n g e dg e
ways to keep his staff motivated while his company was shrinking. I had failed to listen and compounded the error by failing to keep quiet. Luckily for me, I was able to get a second meeting with him. It’s not easy to stifle your impulse to speak, but with patience and practice you can learn to control the urge and improve the quality and effectiveness of your conversations by weighing in at the right time. Some people can intuitively grasp where to draw the line between input and interruption, but the rest of us have to work at it. John McLaughlin advises managers to think consciously about when to interrupt and to be as neutral and emotionless as possible when listening, always delaying the rebuttal and withholding the interruption. Still, he acknowledges that interrupting with a question can be necessary from time to time to speed up or redirect the conversation. He advises managers not to be in a hurry, though—if a matter gets to your level, he says, it is probably worth spending some of your time on it. As you improve your ability to stay quiet, you’ll probably begin to use silence more effectively. The CEO of an industrial company, for example, used thoughtful moments of silence during a meeting with his sales team as an invitation for its junior members to speak up and talk through details of a new incentive programme that the team’s leader was proposing. As the junior teammates filled in these moments with new information, the ensuing rich discussion helped the group (including the team leader) to realize that the programme needed significant retooling. The CEO’s silence encouraged a more meritocratic—and ultimately superior— solution. When we remain silent, we also improve the odds that we’ll spot nonverbal cues we might have missed otherwise. The medical institution’s COO, who was such a respectful listener, had a knack for this. I remember watching him in a conversation with a nurse manager, who was normally articulate but on this occasion kept doubling back and repeating herself. The COO realised from these cues that something unusual was going on. During a pause, he surprised her by asking, “You don’t quite agree with me on this one, do you? Why is that?” She sighed in relief and explained what had actually been bugging her.
“I have developed my own variation on the 80/20 rule. A conversation partner should be speaking 80 percent of the time, while I speak only 20 percent of time” 3. Challenge assumptions Good listeners seek to understand—and challenge—the assumptions that lie below the surface of every conversation. This point was driven home to me the summer before I went to college, when I had the opportunity to hang out with my best friend at a baseball park. He had landed a job in the clubhouse of the Rochester Red Wings, then a minor-league farm team for the Baltimore Orioles. That meant I got to observe Red Wings manager Earl Weaver, who soon thereafter was promoted to Baltimore, where he enjoyed legendary success, including 15 consecutive winning seasons, four American League championships, and one World Series victory. Weaver was considered fiery and cantankerous, but also a baseball genius. To my 18-year-old eyes, he was nothing short of terrifying—the meanest and most profane man I’d ever met. Weaver wasn’t really a listener; he seemed more of a screamer in a perpetual state of rage. When a young player made an error, Weaver would take him aside and demand an explanation. “Why did you throw to second base when the runner was on his way to third?” He’d wait to hear the player’s reasoning for the sole purpose of savagely tearing it apart, usually in the foulest language imaginable and at the top of his lungs. But now and then, Weaver would be brought up short; he’d hear something in the player’s explanation that made him stop and reconsider. “I’ve seen that guy take a big wide turn several times but then come back to the bag. I thought maybe if I got the ball to second really fast, we could catch him.” Weaver knew that the move the player described was the wrong one. But as ornery as he was, he apparently could absorb new information that temporarily upended his
assumptions. And, in doing so, the vociferous Weaver became a listener. Weaver called his autobiography It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts. That Zen-like philosophy may clash with the Weaver people thought they knew. But the title stuck with me because it perfectly states one of the cornerstones of good listening: to get what we need from our conversations, we must be prepared to challenge long-held and cherished assumptions. Many executives struggle as listeners because they never think to relax their assumptions and open themselves to the possibilities that can be drawn from conversations with others. As we’ve seen, entering conversations with respect for your discussion partner boosts the odds of productive dialogue. But many executives will have to undergo a deeper mind-set shift—toward an embrace of ambiguity and a quest to uncover “what we both need to get from this interaction so that we can come out smarter.” Too many good executives, even exceptional ones who are highly respectful of their colleagues, inadvertently act as if they know it all, or at least what’s most important, and subsequently remain closed to anything that undermines their beliefs. — This article is published with prior permission from McKinsey Quarterly.
Bernard Ferrari is an alumnus of McKinsey’s Los Angeles and New York offices, where he was a director; he is currently the chairman of Ferrari Consultancy. Elements of this article were adapted from his upcoming book, Power Listening: Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All (Penguin, March 2012)
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The best advice I ever got
“Being a Strategic CIO is Crucial” Oliver Bussmann, Executive VP, CIO, SAP advised me to be a strategic CIO. Alongside, I should also wear the hat of being a functional and transformational CIO. One has to be on top of all the three roles. You can’t be strategic without performing a functional role in a nice way otherwise the operations go for a toss. At the same time, playing a transformational role is important, where a CIO is transforming the business, especially fine tuning the processes for the business to do more. Last but not the least is the strategic CIO’s role, but the most important advice I got from him is how to be a strategic CIO. Oliver shared the way to becoming a strategic CIO in a programme, which we have now started globally in SAP called ‘SAP Run SAP.’ The programme essentially means, we should be the first ones to deploy our own products. SAP is a large enterprise application company and we sell solutions to the global enterprise community to run their enterprises. He said we should use every product that suits in our LOB and be a success story for that. We test the products coming straight out of SAP labs. Hence we are the first ones to experience the bugs in the system and devide the work around to overcome them. The information about the bugs and resolution is feeded back into our labs. So, we are co-innovating with the labs. This is the first step towards becoming a strategic CIO. After all issues, bugs are resolved and it’s a
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Anil Khatri
Head IT- South Asia, SAP successful implementation internally, the product is showcased as a success story. Customers are wary about new product implementations and they want references from other customers who have used the products. This is where we become the first reference customers. SAP being a large enterprise, we are present in 218 locations with 70,000 users of our systems including partners and consultants. That’s a large footprint for other customers to be assured of the viability of our products in a large IT environment. So we become a big first reference customer. One of the key question that comes to my mind is, how can I convince Oliver about the fact that I have followed his advice? I
keep him informed about the number of customer meetings I am doing, how many customers I am showcasing our products to and giving reference on, the kind of technologies we are sharing etc. This also includes improvisation feedback in terms of providing insights on where we need to enhance when we are benchmarking for our customers. It’s not only inside out but also outside in. As you fit yourself in this working engagement, you create a lot of confidence in the customers. As a result, the business is ready to engage more and more with you. —As told to Abhishek Raval
me & my Mentee
MENTOR
Sanjeev Kumar
Group CIO & Group PresidentBusiness Excellence, Adhunik
MENTEE
Sanjay Bardiya GM- IT, Steel Business, Adhunik Group
When Mentee Takes Centrestage
What according to you is mentoring? Sanjeev Kumar Mentoring and coaching are two very different practices but at times are used interchangaebly. A coach is a senior person with higher skillsets and can help in polishing the mentee's skillsets to make him perform better in a given situation. Mentoring is entirely different. A mentor has a different picture in mind and can be able to co-relate many things from his personal, social, professional and all aspects of life. Coaching is for a particular task, job and game. Mentoring is overall. There is a difference in mentoring and coaching. They are different areas but complement each other. Providing guidance on IT projects like SAP, CRM, BI, automation etc is mundane. They are all project-related. Mentoring is about overall grooming of a person. When you make the person more effective in whatever he undertakes, then you do mentoring. Why did you suggest Bardiya to pursue an MBA followed by a degree in Computer Software? Sanjeev Kumar Sanjay Bardiya was a young engineer. He was a promising person with many qualities and a deep understanding of the subject. But he didn't had that business orientation to complement his skills. One has to understand the context of the issue, because quiet frequently, we forget the spirit and start talking about the text. For e.g. What is the purpose of a particular BPR exercise, why the company is driving it. To come up with a complete analysis with the pros and
cons of the subject and then giving recommendations are the essentials of the job that Bardiya had acquired. In Bardiya, I noticed these strong analytical capabilities, working as an engineer in the production planning and control department. I suggested him to join an institute, locally in Pune, do an MBA and get a wider perspective of a situation in addition to the current technical stance. He joined and passed out as a MBA. I was able to get the company to fund his education. After the MBA degree, he understood the commerical side of business. It’s not only about production but there is cost of conversion involved before selling and finally earning profit. He got that view of the business. MBA triggered a different thought process in him. He started talking about topline and bottomline. At that time, we both were working for Kinetic Engg., an automotive component company. However after passing out as an MBA, he still missed one more skillset i.e understanding the creation of a software. It’s a totally different world altogether. In case he is asked to develop a software for the company, how would he verify whether the software developed will fit the requirements of the company. There are multiple methods to evaluate how good the software is. When asked, I suggested him to do Advanced Diploma in Computer Software (ADCS). He joined the course and studied C Programming, data structure techniques etc. After passing out, he is not only skilled and equipped to understand business process, do commercial analysis but also has a grip on how software estimates are done.
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“After the MBA degree, Sanjay understood the commerical side of business” How has Kumar groomed your skills? Sanjay Bardiya Kumar regularly deputed me to scheduled meetings with the heads of production, purchase etc. I represented the IT department. The meetings gave me a good exposure to the requirements of various departments and what do they expect from IT. According to specifications provided by the HODs in the meetings and thereafter, I started designing and implementing the systems. This gave me the confidence to further collaborate with HODs and Kumar played a key role in enhancing my skills.
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What are the strengths and weaknesses of Bardiya Sanjeev Kumar He can manage change very well, which others often find difficult. He proved this during the Rourkela plant’s weigh bridge integration with SAP (weigh bridge is a robust steel structure to measure the weight of the incoming and outgoing trucks loaded with raw materials). A direct integration with SAP will eliminate manual intervention of data collection of the weight of the trucks and improve operational efficiency. It was a very crucial project for a steel company because about 60-70 percent cash outflow was on raw materials. When there are thousands of incoming and outgoing trucks from the plant premises, even a small error in weight measurement can result in losses that can run into crores. When this idea was pushed to the employees, they came up with a variety of excuses on how this cannot be done. They raised issues like — there will be a big queue of trucks; loading will be a problem etc. This was a big ticket item and I was trying to convince various teams about the money involved and the benefit that the company will get from the initiative. The pilferage and manipulation will be annihilated from the process releasing 40 employees involved to other productive purposes. It was difficult to convince them. Sanjay handled this transition successfuly. He started a dialogue with the employees including the weigh bridge in charge, explaning them on how the integration will help. The weight of every truck will be measured in 30 seconds. Thus, there are no long queues at the gate. He convinced and managed the whole process nicely. He co-ordinated with the logistics dept, purchase, stores and the concerned heads of all the nine weigh bridges. Sanjay manouevered well with all genre of employeesfrom an MBA to uneducated employees. What have you learned from your mentee / mentor? Sanjeev Kumar I have learned more from my colleagues — past and present, then what I have taught them. As far as Bardiya is concerned, he is a very patient person. I was not like that but thanks to Bardiya, I am a lot more patient than what I was before. In spite of juggling with multiple tasks, he will never loose his cool and answer the phone calls, employee queries in the most appropriate way. To me patience is about balancing between losing nerves and taking hasty decisions. You can't keep patience forever and allow things to suffer. For me, if I have set a target that is based on somebody else’ commitment, I am ruthless about it without being patient. I also give my colleagues enough time to do homework, take the potential hurdles/obstacles into consideration and then commit me something. But after they have a set a deadline, it has to be achieved except if there are certain genuine reasons for the delay. When it's about
S a n j e e v K u m a r & S a n j a y B a rdi y a | m e A n d m y M e n t e e
to distribute electricity, rejection cost for every component. He taught me the ‘cost conversion concept.’ The second project was about calculating the utilisation of the electric cutting shop. Whether it is running at full capacity or what is the amount of utilisation of the shop. It was for the components for motor and motorcycle division. He personally involved himself in the design, development and guided us in computing the plant utilisation. What’s your technique of mentoring? Sanjeev Kumar My style of mentoring is very indirect in nature. It’s more about maintaining an informal channel of communication rather than a formal channel. Practically, it means calling your mentee to the conversation table and discussing issues, situations, happenings, which he is not directly entitled to know. For any interesting happenings in other departments, issues cropping up, how were they solved. The trick here is talking about incidences with no direct relevance to the mentee. The mind is more open and receptive when listening to third party occurences. On the contrary, an official meeting organised for a mentoring session will create a mental block and often does not work.
“Kumar played a key role in enhancing my skills and gave me the right advice when required” a task, I am tough about the deliverables but when it’s not about a task and just about dealing with people, I exercise patience.. Sanjay Bardiya Let me highlight a few projects where Kumar’s guidance came in at the right time. The first project is from our experience at Kinetic Engineering, where we were delivering a ‘cost of conversion’ concept i.e the cost at which the auto components are manufactured at the production plants. While manufacturing, we have to calculate each and every element that goes into manufacturing the auto parts. I was unable to compute the cost of manpower required; how
Can you share with us an interesting incident? Sanjeev Kumar We were on a video call with the MD on how the automated SAP credit management helps us. There was a big resistance from the marketing team. They were against continuing with the SAP based online credit management system and vouched for a manual system of credit management precisely because they can dole out discounts and extended credit limits and improve sales figures thus achieve sales targets. However an automated SAP system would not accept such entries because it does not meet the set controls on credit and discounts. The marketing team wanted to provide discounts to certain parties to increase the sales figure, which can be entered later if it has met the set controls. Basically, the marketing team wanted the flexibility to provide discounts and thus note entries manually and post them later after in the system only if they meet the set controls else they remain as manual entries. I was trying to explain that if we allow goods to go out and don’t receive money on time, how are we going to pay suppliers, vendors and people if our own receivables are coming in slow pace. At that juncture, Bardiya gave a distinct example of how a particular vendor defaulted three times on a payment. An absence of the system would have resulted in this event going un-noticed. Thus the MD was convinced about it and he gave a go ahead to keep the system on.
—As told to Abhishek Raval
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OPINION David Lim
Ethics: What We Can Learn from the World of Adventure
Truth, transparency and respecting best practices — adventure sports teaches us some crucial management lessons IN 1968, Donald Crowhurst was part of a flotilla of yachts competing in a round the world race. After crossing the Atlantic from the start of the race from Britain, he began falsifying his logbook and radio transmissions to give the impression that he was doing well in the race. When his plan began to get exposed, he could not bear it and threw himself overboard, never to been seen again. Only his notes and papers found on his abandoned yacht revealed the true nature of his ‘achievement’. In the 1990s, ace Slovenian climber Tomo Cesen claimed to have solo-climbed the much-attempted and stupendously difficult 2000m high south face of the 8500m-high Lhotse. Feted for a while, discrepancies soon arose from studies of his photographs and other evidence. He is now discredited. Quite a few years ago some climbers were written about in newspapers after they claimed to have summitted Shishapangma, an 8046m peak in Tibet. The team enjoyed accolades before their claim was challenged. It seemed they had climbed a lower, subsidiary point along the 2km-long summit ridge known as Shishapangma Central, and that they did not climb to the top, as claimed in the media. In their defense, the team submitted a ‘certificate’ by the Chinese Mountaineering Association that deemed that any team that climbed Shishapangma Central was considered to have summitted the peak. This, to some, flew in face of common wisdom – if one has not climbed to the top, then no certificate in the world, surely, can assist you to do so after the fact. There are some written ‘rules’ in existence in the adventure-sports world, such as the English Channel
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Lim, Founder, Everest Motivation Team, is a leadership and negotiation coach, best-selling author and twotime Mt Everest expedition leader. He can be reached at his blog http:// theasiannegotiator. wordpress.com, or david@ everestmotivation. com
Swimming Association’s rules about the actual amount of assistance a swimmer is allowed to receive. In climbing, there are a few written rules, but many unwritten ones that dictate how an ascent be categorised. Tomo Cesen was just another climber who got caught. More complex issues surround achievements based on doing something in a particular style. In order to distinguish milestones in a sport, you need some yardstick to sort them out according to their quality of achievement. By doing so, you can sort out the best achievements and those who are pushing the sport’s limits in terms of endeavour and skill. So climbing a challenging peak with minimal gear and support counts for more than a standard ascent involving porters and such aids. However, if people do not pay heed to style issues, such claims only serve to demean the achievement of those dedicated to quality results – very much like how people who have earned their doctorates feel about people who literally ‘buy’ their PhDs from degree mills with minimal academic study and challenge. John Barnes, Australian sociologist and author of the book, ‘A Pack of Lies’, reflects how society expects sportsmen and women to somehow aspire to higher level of existence – that they are above crass commercialism and cheating. But with greater emphasis on sponsorship, money, spectator interest and expectations have grown as well. And so, society is disappointed when a sportsperson is found wanting. If we can fib about not stepping on that steel bolt to help us gain a few inches in order to complete a particular rock climbing route on a Sunday afternoon climb, what else might we be capable of?
Ultimately, the integrity of adventure sports achievements, done out of the glare of TV cameras, depends on the ethics of their practitioners. There is often too great a temptation to say ‘we did it’ especially after suffering for days or weeks for our goal. Yet, it is the stronger soul who says “we nearly made it, but for….” The beauty of sports such as mountaineering is that it embraces all – from those who find challenge in a blank 20m piece of vertical granite, to those who like to suck thin air over 7000 metres. However, the climbing community expects that its practitioners be completely transparent about the style in which a challenge is achieved. What can we apply from the world of adventure to the corporate world? The lessons are simple: 1) Ensure your claim or achievement is beyond reproach or doubt 2) Be absolutely transparent about how you achieved a specific objective in the workplace 3) Respect best practices in your field of endeavour 4) You are responsible for your workplace and public announcements The current game of climbing the really big peaks in the world, such as the 8850m-high Mount Everest, sees fewer dedicated mountaineers, and more dilettantes or list-tickers attempting it for the privilege of having said they did it. The mountaineering world embraces all of them, although it does expect that climbers be honest about how they did it as much as whether or not they got to the top. However, one rule remains: summits have to be reached. Exceptions include certain sacred summits, like Kanchenjunga, where for local or religious deference, one might stop some metres from the actual top. But you can only say you have climbed a peak like
image BY photos.com
D a v id L i m | o p i n i o n
There is often too great a temptation to say ‘we did it’ especially after suffering for days or weeks for our goal. Yet, it is the stronger soul who says ‘we nearly made it, but for….’ Mount Everest when you have… uh… climbed it! Reinhold Messner, the first to complete climbing all the 14 peaks in the world over 8000-metres in height, said, “All the 8,000-ers have one, nothing else, and that is a main summit. No certificate issued by any manmade organisation can say otherwise.” That is the ultimate truth. DAVID LIM IS A LEADERSHIP AND NEGOTIATION COACH AND CAN BE FOUND ON HIS BLOG http:// theasiannegotiator.wordpress.com, OR subscribe to his free e-newsletter at david@everestmotivation.com
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SHELF LIFE
“The talent theory of expertise is not merely flawed in theory; it is insidious in practice, robbing individuals and institutions of the motivation to change themselves and society.” —Matthew Syed
Born Champions?
It is important for leaders to burst myths, especially longheld ones that negatively impact success Matthew Syed’s
book convinces us to shed our close-kept notions of the makings of a champion or, for that matter, anyone acclaimed for their superlative feats. After you read this book, you'll think a thousand times before making statements like “How talented that guy is; excellence is in his genes.” Or, “Oh, she's such a gifted child—no wonder she won the figure skating championship.” (Or similar remarks in a corporate setting.) Among the myths Syed, himself a Commonwealth table tennis champion, bursts: the popular but ill-conceived idea of talent as a mystic, elusive thing; the myth of the child prodigy (Mozart, Tiger Woods, Shakuntala Devi, among others); and the geographic stereotypes that once again surfaced during the recent London Olympics (the Chinese have to excel at table tennis; the Africans are born runners, etc). What sets this book apart is the meticulous research and extensive groundwork Syed did before putting it together. Not only did he travel to various parts of the globe to meet and confer with performance experts
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and virtuoso players, he drew upon a sizeable body of literature on the subject. For instance, he quotes from the book that has played a key role in sustaining our false myths about human achievement, Hereditary Genius by Victorian polymath Francis Galton (who was the half-cousin of Charles Darwin.) Sample these lines from Galton’s work: “I have no patience with the hypothesis...that babies are born pretty much alike and [that] the sole agencies in creating differences...are steady application and moral effort.” Contrast this with results from the most extensive modern investigation into outstanding performance by the psychologist Anders Ericsson and his colleagues in the early 1990s. After thoroughly studying the performance of violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin, they were astounded to find that all the violinists who had devoted, on an average, ten thousand hours to serious practice excelled in their domain—without a single exception! (Malcom Gladwell had also highlighted this so-called 10,000hour rule for excellence in his widely
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Matthew Syed is a British journalist and 3-times Commonwealth Champion in table tennis. Syed was one of the co-founders of TTK Greenhouse, a charity which “empowers youngsters through sport” and which supports more than 10,000 young people on 31 school programmes. Syed now writes for The Times in London.
read book Outliers, though there are critics who find fault with the argument or its singular focus on numbers). Syed cites several inspiring examples of world-class performers and players to drive home the point that nurture, not birth, is behind great success. Having established this “fact”, he then lays down the factors associated with extraordinary achievement, including relentless practice, motivation and overcoming obstacles, among others. Unlike many schmaltzy self-help books piling up the bookshelves these days, Bounce does not make dubious emotional appeals. Instead, it unravels the makings of champions in beautiful precision. What's more, the author relates how “purposeful practice” followed by champion sportsmen can be applied to business or society—and what a lot of good it can achieve. This book can indeed change the way we look not only at the wonderkids of sport but also at the defining principles of education and success. — By Sanjay Gupta
NEXT
illustration by manav sachdev
HORIZONS
Features Inside
The Future Ain’t Homogenised: Stop FUD Vendors There is no black and white in the IT world of the future By Ben Kepes
Mobility Solutions Drive Productivity Pg 51
Hybrid Security For Enterprises Pg 53
I
n recent weeks we’ve had perfect examples of people preaching perspectives from both ends of the cloud dogma spectrum. First up comes JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce who proclaimed that the concept of private cloud was essentially flawed. In discussing the term Rangaswami contended that private cloud doesn’t deliver the scalability and flexibility that organizations need to survive in the modern age. He said that: "Whenever anyone uses that
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Cloud is about business outcomes, the only world in which one type of cloud would rule all would be a world in which all businesses were carbon copies of each other – with the same drivers and the same risks infra – there’s no “equity to build” Over on the HP blog, Rafal Los has done an awesome job of discounting these assertions – but here’s my take anyway: Cheaper to own than to rent. Maybe it is, but have you really taken into account all the financial factors – human resources, heating and cooling, general operational costs etc etc. And even if, at the end of the day, it does prove slightly cheaper to own your hardware than to rent it, the fact is that if in doing so you have to spend time focusing on technology when you could be instead focusing on your core business, then that cost saving pales into insignificance when compared to the real value that pure focus can bring. The cost issue is a complete red herring but for those who want to delve into the economics of the cloud, then this report is for you Public cloud vendors don’t care. PistonCloud, are you out of your freaking mind? AWS, Rackspace, and all the other cloud vendors live and die by recurring revenue. They absolutely have no option but to care deeply for their customers. In the case of on-premise IT? Meh, once the servers have been bought, racked and stacked then the organization is locked in – what better recipe for an IT provider (internal or external) to give up caring about their vendor? The intermingling bogey. I had this argument recently growth of application with Chris Hoff. I accept that development conceptually and from an absosoftware market in lutism perspective that there is India in 2012 a potentially greater risk from multi tenant than single tenant infrastructure. But this is
phrase to you, just ask them who are you sharing costs with. If all the costs you’re sharing are just with you, you’re just kidding yourself, it ain’t a cloud." On the other end of the spectrum, and in an unfortunate and ill advised reaction to a recent outage that Amazon Web Services suffered, PistonCloud, the vendor building OpenStackpowered private clouds, came out saying that the AWS outage proves once and for all that it’s better to own than to rent. In a statement that is reminiscent of McCarthyism at it’s worse, Gretchen Curtis from PistonCloud tells us that: “The Amazon Web Services outage last night highlights the largest risk to betting on public cloud: you don’t own it. Any of it. Which means you’re at the whim of whatever vendor you have entrusted to protect it. How much do you really know about where your data and applications are being housed?” There are two distinct responses to these dual statements – the first answers PistonCloud’s specific economic arguments for private cloud as a sole strategy, which the second takes a bigger picture look at the debate. So here goes…
The Economic issues The PistonCloud argument is split into four distinct areas; 1. It’s cheaper to own than to rent 2. A public cloud vendor doesn’t care about individual customers 3. Public cloud risks intermingling data between tenants 4. With public cloud there is less chance of investment in the
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23%
conceptually. Now lets get to the real world – why does data loss happen? Because people have passwords written on PostIt notes on their laptop, or because the security on the on-premise data center is shoddy, or because an organization can’t afford the best infosec operatives. I challenge anyone to give me a concrete example where a customer of a public cloud provider of repute has suffered a loss because of multitenancy. No equity to build. FFS – servers don’t appreciate in value. they get bought, they get deployed (maybe) and they depreciate until they’re decommissioned. if an organisation thinks of their servers as a core piece of the equity of their business… well hell, they should go into the public cloud computing game. This is just dumb
The Public is better/Private is better debate Anyone who jumps up on their soapbox preaching dogmatically that the future is either stark black or stark white is wrong. Cloud is about business outcomes, the only world in which one type of cloud would rule all would be a world in which all businesses were carbon copies of each other – with the same drivers, the same risks, the same pressures and focuses. The reality is very different, one type of cloud (along with one type of employee, one type of office set up, one type of, well, everything) does not fit every business. Buddy Rafal puts it into perspective when he says that: "If you’re going to have a cloud strategy you need to have a pragmatic approach which has you doing your due diligence, proper risk analysis, and understanding your cloud vendor. If your provider fails… do you have a strategy? If you’ve transformed all those applications of yore to cloud applications then the answer should be yes, and your applications should be resilient across multiple clouds, vendors and environments… this is the magic of cloud." The future is one where organisations use infrastructure, platforms, applications and whatever else of lots of different flavors – take some public infra, mix it with some legacy infra for those ancient workloadsand throw in a bit of private cloud for when you want it. A little CloudFoundry, some Heroku if
e n t e r p r i s e m o b i l i t y | NE X T HOR I Z ONS
you like and cloud applications from a million and one different vendors – while that is a complex scenario, it’s one that actually matches technology to particular business outcomes – and that is the way IT SHOULD be. Cloud godfather and founder of enStratus, George Reese puts it correctly when he says: “The bottom line is that nothing Piston Cloud offers will protect you from what happened with AWS this week. What will help is a redundant architecture that ideally spans multiple clouds. A private cloud may be PART of that approach, but it isn’t the
answer to the outage this week… Unless you think you never will experience an outage in your own data center. In which case, you probably are the ideal Piston Cloud customer–a dupe.” Now anyone who doesn’t know Reese might suggest that his comment is self service. Of course anyone who knows and respects him realizes that the very reason his company exists is because he innately understands that this is the future. There is no black and white in the IT world of the future. Rather it is a complex amalgam of heterogeneous solutions…
Summary We all, commentators, vendors and customers, need this cloud thing to happen safely and consistently. Dogmatic messages like these ones do nothing to increase the comfort level of prospective or actual cloud customers. Vendors, please stop it now. That is all. — This article is printed with prior permission from infosecisland.com. For more features and opinions on information security and risk management, please refer to Infosec Island.
Mobility Solutions Drive Productivity Sunil Lalwani, Director, Enterprise Sales (India), RIM discusses emerging mobility trends What are the key trends that you've observed in the enterprise mobility space? With the proliferation of mobile devices in the workplace, there has been a paradigm shift in the way employees and employers approach and leverage the power of smart devices at work. Enterprise mobility solutions are now looked upon as key enablers to drive employee productivity and improved collaboration to drive enhanced customer satisfaction. In fact, with over 60 percent of CIOs globally contemplating the deployment of mobility solutions at work, BYOD or ‘Bring Your Own Device’ has become an extremely popular concept. Acceptance of this trend is expected to gain further momentum with the mobile Internet penetration that allows social media to be leveraged for greater collaborate with business partners. Resonating with this trend, RIM currently has some of the strongest and most robust enterprise services and solutions in the market that allow greater mobility. BES Express, BlackBerry Mobile Fusion,
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Having moved beyond the ‘Push Mail’ image, we currently have some of the strongest enterprise services and solutions – BES Express, BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, BlackBerry Balance and Mobile Voice System are some of our key services in the enterprise segment BlackBerry Balance and Mobile Voice System (MVS), are some of our key services in the enterprise segment, in addition to customisable Enterprise Applications developed by our eco-system of 30,000 developers in India.
In order to effectively allow BYOD policy, one needs to have the ability to manage multiple devices. What all devices do you support with your MDM solutions? How can these devices be effectively managed? RIM’s MDM or ‘Mobile Device Management’ solution, which is BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, allows the seamless in tegration of mobile devices, enabling faster and easier manageability. From a single, unified web-based interface, IT administrators and CIOs are now enabled in managing multiple platforms such as BlackBerry, Android, iOS and even BB10 in the future. This consolidated approach helps provide secure mobile access to work email and data in a costeffective way. These devices can be effectively managed through BBMF features such as BlackBerry Device Service, Universal Device Service and BBMF Studio. These help manage PlayBook tablets, provide management features for devices that use the iOS and Android operating systems and a web app that provides a single console for the management of mobile devices, users, configurations and policies and more.
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With multiple devices in the network running on multiple platforms, how can enterprises ensure that if they allow an enterprise application on these devices, the policies can be effectively enforced on each and every device? As mentioned above, the introduction of BYOD and the growing demand from employees have been changing the way in which organisations deliver mobility solutions to the workforce. IT organisations are forced to create mobility programmes or policies that support corporate email and other applications across multiple platforms and devices such as Blackberry, iPhone, Android and iPad. These bring a host of new challenges that range from security to compliance and management. RIM addresses these challenges by defining policies that regulate the usage of consumer and personal mobility for employees, applying the appropriate tools to enforce policies, regulate behaviors, contain costs and manage risks. In fact, until last year, companies could only secure a fully-loaded BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), which comes with a customisable menu of 450 IT policy options. With the launch of BES Express, we now have 90 Key IT policy options out of the 450 in the full service cycle. Employees using BES Express can access it for a monthly fee as low as Rs 399 offered by some leading carriers against the usual Rs 899 that most carrier partners charge for full-service BES.
Leveraging BB Mobile Fusion, IT administrators now have the ability to create and securely manage an Enterprise Catalogue for Corporate applications that are mandated for employee use.
The difference between personal and business devices is blurring. How can enterprises ensure that the corporate data is under their complete control without putting restrictions on the employee's personal data? RIM’s core area of strength is security. We have a robust enterprise solution in place that meets the corporate needs without compromising on any important data. RIM’s BlackBerry Balance is a key differentiator that addresses the security pain points for the enterprise. BB Balance allows IT heads to secure information on personal devices by partitioning personal and corporate data. The solution allows BlackBerry smartphones and tablets to be used for business and personal purposes without putting vital data at stake. It offers smartphone flexibility to the workforce while having complete control over business data security and prevents any business information from being shared externally - without putting restrictions on the employee's personal data. The ability to remotely wipe the Corporate partition on BlackBerry Devices thru BlackBerry Balance ensures that the Corporate data is not at risk, even if the device is lost/misplaced.
What is your product/technology roadmap? What are the key areas you're focused on? At RIM, we have adopted a two-pronged approach: one that is focused on the enterprise and the other on the consumer. In India, our forte is enterprise solutions and we are moving aggressively into that space targeting large, mid-level and small businesses alike. Having moved beyond the “Push Mail” image, we currently have some of the strongest and most robust of enterprise services and solutions in the market – BES Express, BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, BlackBerry Balance and Mobile Voice System (MVS) are some of our key services in the enterprise segment.
s e c u r i t y | NE X T HOR I Z ONS
Hybrid Security for Enterprises Ambarish Deshpande, MD, India Sales, Blue Coat, talks about the changing security landscape The usage of applications and social media is on the rise within enterprises. How is the security landscape changing in such a scenario? Both Internet penetration and applications have witnessed a fast-paced growth in enterprises. However, growth is much faster in applications and social media space as compared to the growth in internet penetration. Enterprises are using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter for branding and communication purposes. Human resource department is banking on professional social networking site Linkedin for recruitment purpose. Technology, on the other hand, has enabled connectivity across geographies, resulting in the growth of mobile workforce. This workforce needs to access intranet and applications from office premises as well as from outside. The access platform could be a laptop, smart phone or a tablet. This new-age workforce wants ease of access and security from different geographies and varied platforms. This changing scenario is exposing enterprises to new threats.
What are the top three emerging trends in Internet security? Bring Your Own Device or BYOD is a rising trend among enterprises. The biggest issue with BYOD is to track and control access to corporate and private networks. As a result, an enterprise allowing BYOD has to utilize a secure wireless protocol, which could
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include over-the-air encryption, to ensure its traffic is protected while in transit. User and network authentication are required to ensure an authorised user is accessing the right network. As a result, there has been a rise in demand of hybrid security amongst enterprises. The security requirement has migrated from premises level to cloud. As an enterprise needs to control, manage, secure and provide seamless access inside and outside the office premises for its workforce. We have also witnessed negative day attack as another security trend. In 2012, we expect that nearly two-thirds of all new attacks will come from known malnets. The best protection against these attacks is a negative day defense that can proactively block them before they launch. Blue Coat Security Labs map the relationships between malnet components to identify and block new subnets, IP addresses and host names when they come online. Once the malnet infrastructure has been identified, it can be blocked at the source before attacks are launched.
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The role of a CIO is changing vis-a-vis security. Earlier, he had a situation where everything was in control. Now he is confronting a situation where everything is mobile — be it the devices or the workforce What are the challenges confronting CIOs in the Internet security space? What steps should a CIO take to ensure his network remains malware free? The role of a CIO is changing vis-a-vis security. Earlier, he had a situation where everything was in control. Now he is confronting a situation where everything is mobile – be it the devices or the workforce. The requirement
has, therefore, moved from a vanilla security solution to a hybrid security solution, which can enable a CIO to control, consolidate and monitor the network, both inside and outside the premises. Security of devices and data, especially mobile, is another challenge confronting a CIO. I would suggest that a CIO should go for a consolidated reporting system to help him plan his enterprise security in a better and effective way.
C I O & L E A D E R c u s t o m s erie s | G ar t n er S y m p o s i u m 2 0 1 2
G
artner Symposium/ITxpo is the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives. Designed to deliver realworld insight, actionable advice and executive-level skill-building for a variety of roles and responsibilities, it is the only IT event that takes full advantage of the authority and weight of the world’s leading IT research and advisory organization.
Gartner
Symposium 2012 The agenda will offer the insight and information CIOs and senior IT executives need to drive their organizations’ IT success.
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What is Symposium? Symposium is Gartner’s flagship conference and Industry’s leading event for CIOs and senior IT and business strategists globally. It is held in six locations around the world, Orlando, Barcelona, Cape Town, Tokyo, Sao Paolo and Goa and is typically the most important event for CIOs and IT leaders in those regions.
Why is it the “Davos of IT”? Just as Davos is the world’s leading gathering of global economic and political thought-leaders, Gartner Symposium is a collection of the leading IT thought-leaders from within Gartner and from our clients and the broader industry. It is unparalleled in its ability to provide a strong forum for CIOs and IT leaders to meet with opinion makers from around the globe, and thus
G ar t n er S y m p o s i u m 2 0 1 2 | C I O & L E A D E R c u s t o m s erie s
“Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT Executives. It serves as an invaluable forum to help CIOs establish their strategic, tactical and even operational plans for the near term to long term futures.” — Mr. Partha Iyengar, VP Distinguished Analyst Country Manager – Research, India
gain leading-edge insights which will help guide their strategy for their enterprises.
the content is tailored to the unique local needs of an Indian audience.
Why should one attend Symposium
How is it different from 2011?
Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT Executives. It serves as an invaluable forum to help CIOs establish their strategic, tactical and even operational plans for the near term to long term futures. It provides insights that marry the best of global best practices, adapted to local realities, to allow attendees to walk away with a wealth of ideas and inputs that can be immediately applied to enhance the business value that their IT organization delivers to the enterprise. No other event can justifiably claim to deliver this. Symposium/ITxpo features keynotes from leading CEOs and innovators, hundreds of sessions spanning the depth and breadth of IT, and the opportunity to consult with Gartner Analysts. Symposium/ ITxpo also provides invaluable networking opportunities with leading IT solutions providers as well as your industry peers.
What sets it apart from all other IT events IT Delivers independent and objective content with the authority and weight of world’s leading IT research and advisory organization and provides access to the latest solutions from Key technology providers. The entire event is dedicated to pure content that is focused on imparting decision making insights and inputs to our attendees. With a process that starts with a detailed CIO & IT Leaders survey conducted with Indian attendees to understand key pain points and technology interest areas, to an advisory board comprising of some of the leading Indian CIOs,
Last years theme of ‘Reimagine IT” set the stage quite successfully for CIOs in India to understand and define the very different value proposition that IT is expected to deliver to their enterprise. This years theme of ‘Focus. Connect. Lead’ picks up from last years theme and will provide more granular and targeted inputs in the context of today’s increased emphasis on a laser sharp focus on driving business outcomes and enhancing business core competence (FOCUS), helping to drive collaboration within the enterprise across stake-holder communities across all levels, as well as outside the enterprise with external stakeholders, and most importantly, customers (CONNECT), and using these levers to establish a business leadership role for the CIO and embed IT in the enterprise with the credibility of being a key ‘front office’ enabler and business partner (LEAD). We do this in this years event with 5 IT role based tracks and 1 track dedicated to the Financial Services vertical.
Important Tracks / Sessions.
Some of the key sessions across the various tracks are:
Bank of the Future — Why It Won’t Be Apple, Google, Orange or Facebook Insurance 2017: Digitalization Meets Consumerization How Religion Impacts IT How Disruptive Vendors are Threatening Your Incumbent Vendors How Mobile Changes Everything And What To Do about It The Future of Human: Get Ready for Your Digitally, Mechanically and Chemically Enhanced Employees and Customers Realizing the Promise: Six Critical Steps to Successful Outsourcing
What can we expect next? This event will provide a platform to really guide your plans and strategies for the coming year, and help to build in the agility of decision making that is critical in this uncertain economic climate. We provide a continued forum for interactions with Gartner Analysts as well as with your peers in the Indian IT industry, through the strong networking links that we help establish at the event. Through our ITEXPO sponsor pavilion, you are likely to walk away with new insights as to how some of the leading vendors (“picked”
as sponsors to resonate with the event agenda) in India can assist with your technology initiatives, and you can continue to extend that dialogue and interactions with them as well in a meaningful and productive manner. .
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Collaboration, Innovation and Negotiating Skills The 13th Annual CIO&Leader Conference betted on these three themes. According to CIOs, we hit the nail on its head Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, CTO, Reliance Capital, expressing his views during a session
T
he 13th Annual CIO&Leader Conference was attended by 125 top CIOs and tech decision makers from across India and the SAARC region at the prestigious Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. Pre-eminent international speakers and renowned faculty delivered high quality keynotes and the conference was supported by more than 20 leading technology companies. 9.9 Media launched its Leadership Institute on the occasion. The conference was co-chaired by Anuradha Das Mathur – Founder and Director, 9.9 Media, Dr. Pramath Raj Sinha - Founder and MD, 9.9 Media, and Harvey Koeppel – Head - Centre for CIO Leadership.
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Jeff Sampler, Fellow of Strategy and Technology, Oxford University, giving his keynote address
‘Track Technology, Build Business and Shape Self’ – the magazine’s tagline suggested the overall learning theme. CIOs found great value in sessions by Dishan Kamdar – Associate Dean, ISB, Hyderabad, Jeff Sampler – Fellow of Strategy and Technology, Oxford University, Harvey Koeppel– Head - Centre for CIO Leadership and Hari Mundra – Advisor, Wockhardt, Former Director HUL and Deputy MD, Essar Oil. The conference saw leading CIOs such as Prashun Dutta of Tata Power, Sandeep Phanasgaonkar of Reliance Capital, Chandrasekaran N of Ashok Leyland, Amrita Gangotra of Airtel, Annie Mathew of Mother Dairy, Vijay Sethi of Hero Honda participate
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Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero Motocorp putting across his point during a session on Big Data: Boon or Bane
Dr. Pramath Raj Sinha, Founder and MD, 9.9 Media, chairing a session
and share their experiences. Popular emerging themes included: the importance of collaboration, the revenue-focused CIO, the importance of Big Data and Analytics and the criticality of enterprise security. The delegates heard in rapt attention as Prof Dishan Kamdar spoke about the art of negotiating and Prof Sampler spoke about the CIO’s understanding of the overall business vision. Harvey KoepCIOs listening to Jeff Sampler, Fellow of Strategy and Technology, Oxford University, during his keynote address pel in his remark about conference said, “The enterprise and to their industry...” 13th annual CIO&Leader Conference held at the This apex conference for CIOs upped the bar, Indian School of Business in Hyderabad on August yet again, in terms of offering the right mix of learn11th - 13th was truly a world-class event. The thoughting and fun – with the Drumberries and an enthrallful agenda, topical content and compelling speakers ing performance by the award-winning Qawwal provided participants with insights and related experiEhsaan Bharati. ences of significant value to all.” ‘We betted on three themes for CIOs this time – colHe said, “The mix of academic thought leadership, laboration, innovation and negotiating skills as busipractical perspectives shared by industry executives ness leaders and these were reflected in our agenda. and latest technology trends presented by sponsors The CIO community’s response suggests we hit the created a perfect context for networking and establishnail on the head. On our part too, at 9.9 Media, we ing new relationships with more than 100 top CIOs must continuously innovate to stay ahead in offering and IT executives. I would recommend this event to exponential value to our readers and delegates,’ Anuanyone interested in advancing their role as CIO and radha Das Mathur said. IT leader, and in enhancing their contribution to their
events highlights
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Number of CIOs from India and SAARC who participated
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Keynote speakers
Days of networking discussions, debate and entertainment
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Harvey Koeppel, Head, Centre for CIO Leadership, delivering his keynote address
Collaborate to Lead Harvey Koeppel, Head, Centre for CIO Leadership, feels CIOs are increasingly accepting collaboration as the foundation of competitiveness, business growth and development Harvey Koeppel is an accomplished and highly‐ esteemed information technology executive with years of experiences working with technology CIOs. As a former CIO himself, Koeppel’s insight into CIO priorities and concerns is inimitable.
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he role of a CIO has continued to change over the years. The emergence of new business and technology drivers are again transforming this role. Historically, IT has created business value through enabling process efficiencies and reducing expenses. However, now businesses are beginning to leverage IT as a revenue generator. IT is enabling community and collaboration on a global scale and is increasingly accepted as the foundation of competitiveness and new business growth and development. This change has been brought about the changing business and technology landscape. “From a business perspective, enterprises are today confronting global economic challenges and competitive pressures on a worldwide scale. To remain ahead of competition and sustain growth, corporates are focusing on delighting the customers,” said Harvey Koeppel, Head, Center for CIO Leadership, while delivering the key note address on ‘The Changing Role of the CIO: From Command & Control To Community & Collaboration’ at the 13th Annual CIO&Leader Conference. “Meanwhile, the key technology drivers are Broadband / mobile computing, consumerisation of IT,
August 2012
social media / networks, cloud computing / ‘X’aaS, explosive growth in data generation (unstructured), data-driven versus business process-driven, real-time analytics / action, and cyber-security,” he said. “For an enterprise technology decision-maker all these developments imply that collaborative relationships and partnerships is the way ahead.” For a CIO, the mandate to leverage collaboration is also coming from top-down. Even corporate CEOs are increasingly acknowledging the benefits brought about by collaboration. They are changing the nature of work by adding a powerful dose of openness, transparency and employee empowerment to the command-and-control ethos that has characterised the modern corporation for more than a century. “As many as 73 percent of CEOs are investing significantly in ways to better gain meaningful insights from their customers,” said Koeppel. Quoting Charles Darwin, he said, “‘It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent — it is the one that is the most adaptable to change...’ Companies that outperform their peers are 30 percemt more likely to identify openness – often characterised by a greater use of social media as a key
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Similarly, Frito-Lay decided to maximise the use of collaboration when it was finding the next potato chip flavour. Ann Mukherjee, CMO, Frito-Lay, later said, “We have now had 30 different countries around the globe create ideas for our consumers and some of the flavor ideas have been fantastic, everything from Caesar Salad to Builders Breakfast, we have even had a flavor called Cajun Squirrel.”
Collaboration relies on maximum use of cooperation and assertiveness, and requires that all members feel satisfaction and value from their participation
enabler of collaboration and innovation – as a key influence on their organisation.” Collaboration relies on maximum use of cooperation and assertiveness, and requires that all members feel satisfaction and value from their participation. According to Koeppel, “The dimensions of collaboration include shared vision and shared power, member-driven decision-making, stakeholders linked horizontally not vertically, effective leader / convener, clear and efficient structure, trust and respect for all, ungrudging participation, and activities and programs that evolve over time.” He also highlighted how some enterprises had leveraged collaboration to come up with stellar results. Eli Lily, for instance, explored the application of internet to business in 1998 and created a concept of ‘InnoCentive’ (open innovation platform). The platform was launched in 2001 and spun out in 2005. Making the most of this platform, Eli Lily partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation in 2006 to generate solutions to pressing problems in developing nations. It also partnered with Prize4Life to launch a $1 million ALS Biomarker Prize to measure progression of Lou Gehrig's disease. The prize was awarded to Dr. Stewart Rutkove in 2011.
Harvey Koeppel, Head, Centre for CIO Leadership, interacting with the audience
Giving yet another example, Koeppel said, “New York City BigApps 3.0 offers $50,000 in cash and other prizes to software developers for the best new apps that utilize NYC Open Data to help NYC residents, visitors, and businesses. BigApps 3.0 continues New York City’s ongoing engagement with the software developer community to improve the City, building on the first two annual BigApps competitions through new data, prizes, and resources. Submissions can be any kind of software application — for the web, a personal computer, a mobile device, SMS, or any software platform broadly available to the public.” Harvey also revealed the results of a collaboration survey, on Indian CIOs, during his keynote address. He said, “An overwhelming 86 percent of CIOs have said ‘yes’ when asked if collaboration was the next leadership frontier for CIOs. The remaining 14 percent didn’t deny it. Their response was ‘maybe.’”
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CIOs Discuss Enterprise Technology Trends, Issues The three-days conference saw CIOs deliberating on top trends and issues confronting their enterprises
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Ashish Chauhan - Deputy CEO, BSE, addressing a session on New Frontiers: The Growth CIO
he 13th Annual CIO&Leader Conference witnessed thought-provoking presentations and discussions on a range of issues and technologies. Giving a sneak peek into the future of digital media, Padmanabha T K, CTO, IMEA, Wipro said, “Everybody’s lives are increasingly moving to digital platforms, which will give rise to digital disruptions in terms of what this will entail and how enterprises will have to customise their interfaces to fulfill customer demands.” “The increasing proliferation of digital mediums will bring sweeping changes in the lives of end con-
sumers. Wipro is better positioned to partner the enterprise CIO community in serving their customers,” he said. According to Padmanabha, Wipro was working on several technology themes to better manage the digital lives of the consumers. Customers expect personalised products and services. As a consequence of the evolving digital paradigm, technologies will also have to gear up and offer bespoke experiences to them. He gave examples of enhanced digital experience gadgets like multi touch desktops with stereo depth camera and Google eye, a glass frame that offers augmented reality. Padmanabha spoke about how the highly used shopping and banking experiences will leap to a totally different level after accessed on digital platforms. “Although these experiences have become main-
Dishan Kamdar, Associate Dean, ISB, during his workshop on Learning the art of Negotiation
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CIOs listening to one of the keynote sessions at the conference
event highlights Jeff Sampler, Fellow of Strategy and Technology, Oxford University, brought strategy and technology together to enhance CIOs’ learning curve
Amrita Gangotra - CIO, Airtel, partcipating in a panel discussion
stream, the next phase will be more context-aware and fit to purpose to individual customers. These experiences will generate heaps of data that can be used for more targeted offerings in future,” he said. The Wipro CTO also showcased, 'SPOT' Analytics, Wipro's product that enables businesses to engage with potential customers at the early stage of buying cycle; increase lead conversion through targeted reach-out and increase market penetration in thesetroubled economic times.
The Growth-Driven CIO CIOs are now being asked to generate revenue opportunities for the company and his role has not remained restricted to keeping the lights on. Richard Duggan, Head, South Asia, Telstra Global presented on how technology leaders can become 'Growth CIOs' and thus have a wider contribution to the top line of the company. Duggan was also a panelist in the panel discussion titled 'New Frontiers: The Growth CIO'. Amrita Gangotra, CIO, Airtel; Ashish Chauhan, Deputy CEO, BSE and Sanovi were also a part of the panel. Duggan focussed on how Information Technology can be converted to business technology by adopting various 'Innovation Models'. The resources are still stuck in keeping the lights on. 77
Neena Pahuja, CIO, Max Healthcare, raising a point during one of the keynote sessions
percent of the organisation's resources are consumed in managing the existing infrastructure and only 23 percent is invested in developing new capabilities and there is hardly any focus on innovation. He explained how Standard Chartered bank's 'Standard Chartered Breeze' mobile application helps in managing finances while on the move. This was a result of the bank's initiative of 'Innovate from Within'. The mobile app enables the bank's customers to carry out transactions on the move and with ease and security. This was one of India's first mobile banking applications. Duggan gave the example of how Myrna Padilla of Mynd Consulting in Philippines created a BPO concept that helps people to work from home without leaving their loved ones. Duggan also spoke about Telstra Global’s Virtual Contact Centre (VCC). It combines the latest in cloud innovation with world class voice and data networks, enabling contact centres to deliver state-of-the-art, multi-channel customer service experience.
Harvey Koeppel, Head, Centre for CIO Leadership, provided insights into the importance of collaboration for a CIO
A large dose of entertainment offered by Drumberries, Comedy Store and Ehsaan Bharati ‘Ghungroowale’ Technology leaders relived their lives as students at the ISB campus
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Prashun Dutta, CIO, Tata Power, takes part in a panel discussion on The Truly Mobile Enterprise: What Next?
Sunil Kunders, CIO, Arvind Lifestyle Brands, adressing a query from the audience during a panel discussion
Sanjeev Prasad - CIO, Genpact, expressing his views during a session on “Social Media: Doing the Balancing Act”
The Threat Landscape
CIO Passion
The winners of CIO Passion Awards
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“Traditional contact centre technologies are not agile nor smart - they are complex, expensive and take days, if not weeks, to change. In contrast, Telstra Global’s VCC enables forward-thinking businesses to take control of their contact centre technology and create an agile, state-of-the-art service experience with greater business control and commercial flexibility,” he said. Tarun Sareen, Senior Director, EMC, said that there was a big opportunity in-waiting for CIOs to transform their enterprises. “Cloud Transforms IT and Big Data Transforms Business. CIOs today have the opportunity to transform their organisations, increase the agility and customer experience as well as enable the business to transform through cloud and big data/analytics. It is all about recognising the landscape,” he said. “Cloud computing can provide the much needed agility to today’s businesses by providing scalable, flexible, and cost-effective IT. Cloud storage platforms have the potential to let you store, manage, and protect globally distributed, unstructured content at scale. To the CIO, big data is all about harnessing the volume, velocity or variability of data from many sources to support business objectives. Depending on the approach that a CIO takes, Big data could be a massive headache or a huge opportunity,” he added.
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Vishak Raman, Sr. Regional Director SAARC, Fortinet, gave a deep down on the emerging threat landscape highly characterised by Advanced Persistent Threat (APT), which is evolving and gaining dangerous proportions. He vouched for a security solution that has a unified approach with all important solutions packaged and rolled into one. Calling for enhanced security management in India, Raman lamented the fact that a low priority was given to security solutions among other IT products in the enterprise. “Moreover, the onslaught of enterprise mobility devices, faster bradband speeds, burgeoning number of internet users and varied media formats is a contributing factor for better security preparedness. These factors also expose the enterprise IT far beyond the physical boundaries of the company,” he said. India is also witnessing the growing influence of cyber activist groups like Anonymous, who lately came to the limelight. The group overpowered and hacked the websites of AICC, Supreme Court, Copyright labs, MTNL. This is another kind of cyber threat. Throwing more light on the serious nature of APT, he said, “APT stands out as the biggest threat. Compared to an ordinary threat which targets all internet users and assets, APT targets specific establishment. The threat perpetrator uses multiple threat vectorsas against a single threat vector used in an ordinary attack. Another strategy of an APT attacker is changing the attack mode on the basis of the response while a conventional threat is uni-dimensional irrespective of the attack mode. Finally, an APT is launched on
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high value assets and a simple attack has the attitude of ‘whatever we can get.’” According to the statistics available from the Computer Emergency response Team, India (CERT-in), website compromise and malware propagation topped the list of security incidents in 2011. In 2011, April was the month in which the highest numbers of Bot infected systems were reported. As far as spamming is concerned, India sends the largest amount of spam with 12.2 percent of the total spam sent globally. Giving a snapshot of how the varied nature of threats can be tackled, Raman said, “The existent security approach of companies is absolutely standalone and non-integrated. Besides, it has the highest TCO and is difficult to deploy, manage and use. Whereas the newly evolving, unified solution approach responds to threats in real time with a integrated security intelligence. It operates with a low TCO and is easy to use, manage and deploy.” Digging further deep into the unified approach, Raman provided a granular picture on how the approach has a tool for every threat vector. In case if the user clicks on a malicious video link that redirects him to a malicious website, the unified approach has an integrated web filtering solution that blocks access to malicious sites. In the second instance, if an out of date flash player downloads a malware file, a network antivirus solution blocks the download. Thirdly the IPS blocks the spread of worm in case if an error message installs on the system and tries to propagate. Elaborating on the details of Fortinet's integrated security product, 'Adavnced / Adaptable Persistent Defense' (APD), Raman said it offers effective protection against threat vectors like mail, application, malware and botnets. Its robust asset hardening feature
protects networks, web apps, databases, laptops and servers. Fortinet also collaborates with managed service providers to mitigate mass attacks with early detection. Raman said, “APT is an evolution and not a revolution. The overall threat landscpae is getting tougher. The hackers are more organised and focused in their objectives. Some recent breach incidents, which were massive in nature have refreshed the need to be in a state of constant vigil and multi disciplined and consolidated security approach will provide the answer.”
Business Service Management According to Gartner CIO Survey, the top priority among enterprises in 2011 was cloud and virtualistion. But Gartner's full list of CIO tech priorities in 2012 shows that priorities have shifted in the past year. Analytics and business intelligence (BI) have now become the top priority which was pegged at number five in 2011. Mobile technologies and cloud computing follow closely which were rated number three and one in the 2011 survey. Interestingly, virtualisation which was rated as number one in 2011, finds its place at number 10 in 2012 survey.
“Traditional contact centre technologies are not agile nor smart — they are complex, expensive and take days, if not weeks, to change” –Richard Duggan, Head, South Asia, Telstra Global
Chandrasekaran N, IT Advisor, Ashok Leyland, providing insights during one of the sessions
CIOs from across verticals proactively participated in the discussions and raised pertinent questions
Akanksha Pundir, Consultant, during the innovation workshop for the CIOs
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“Cloud computing can provide the much needed agility to today’s businesses by providing scalable, flexible, and costeffective IT” –Tarun Sareen, Senior Director, EMC
With information technology getting complicated, enterprises are now trying to find out new innovative approach towards technology deployments. Unprecedented economical conditions across the globe has decreased the top line and has started eroding the bottom line among organisations. Most of the CIOs are now thinking how they can get the maximum out of a new technology. The user expectation has increased a lot and instant gratification, self-service and personalised content are the three key issues that are being sought for by the enterprises in today's environment. According to Sachin Chawla, Director-Sales, BMC Software (India), “I feel that today the buyer persona is changing. Cloud has crossed the “chasm” and consumers today want reliability, low-cost and great user experience and we at BMC are offering this to our customers.” “Every large technology provider is building up a stack and will try and create a lock in which leads to higher costs, tendency to use sub-grade solutions, low-flexibility and degradation of service,” he said.
Hari Mundra, Advisor, Wockhardt, adressing the CIOs during his keynote
Shailesh Kekre, Partner, McKinsey, delivers his keynote address on Tech Outlook for the Next 12 Months
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One of the important trends being witnessed by BMC was that enterprises should focus less on depreciating assets (hardware, infrastructure) and more on appreciating assets (applications, people!). “Applications today are becoming more complex. For example a Google search query employs 700 to 1000 servers. More so, applications are becoming computation hungry and storage hungry, more than 200 million photos are uploaded to Facebook everyweek,” Chawla said. According to Chawla, some of the other key things that are going around this domain include -- monolithic application are now being broken down into multiple smaller components, application release cycles are decreasing, agile practices are taking the release cycle time from yearly/quarterly release to monthly/weekly releases with multiple release streams being worked on in parallel. Chawla also highlighted that information technology was getting more complicated in today's environment and enterprises are chalking out new ways to manage their technology infrastructure in a better way. Expectations from cloud are changing and vendors now need to come up with innovative packages to excite the customers. Some of the other key trends that are developing are hyper-heterogeneity, need for application management and consumerisation of IT. “If IT departments stay where they are, they’re headed for trouble, like the auto industry of the past. Change in the call of the hour and IT departments also need to adopt to change. Today the power is in the hands of the consumer and success will come to only those who believe that customers are in a no lock-in to any vendor mode. They need instant gratification and real-time cost optimisation. Vendors who
Anuradha Das Mathur, Founder and Director, 9.9 Media chairing a session
will be able to satisfy these needs, will come up on the top,” he said. “The future of IT management will be consumerdriven. Heterogeneity will reign across providers, be it hardware or software. Enterprise IT will become a broker of internal and external services and integrated service management will be a prerequisite,” he added.
Why niche companies win Large companies often take an extended period to react to customer needs due to lengthy chain of command, complex bureaucracies filled with all sorts of policies and procedures. Customers know that they can get in touch easily with MAIA Intelligence to help them with their requirement with their products or service. According to Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA Intelligence, “MAIA Intelligence is a company committed to developing and continually improving powerful BI reporting and analysis products to meet the needs of corporate implementations, application service providers and value-added resellers.” “The bigger the companies are the slower they move. An extremely important advantage of being niche is that we are in a better position to provide a more personal service to our customers. They trust niche companies that offer them sincere personal attention. Large companies are less likely to care,” he said. “Being a niche company, we are experts in our
CIOs listening carefully during a session at the conference
Sankarson Banerjee, CIO, IIFL, at a panel discussion on Managing the Data Centre
field. Customer gets to harness quality work, combined with reasonable fees - two important aspects that creates value. Our clients see us as a specialist despite our size,” added Mehta.
CIO Passion
The Hyperconnected World In a world which is hyperconnected, managing web presence is one of the key challenges that are faced by the enterprises. Today enterprises have to manage web servers, local load balancers, application servers, SSL and authentication servers, video streaming infrastructure, managing third party content, compression and connection, management servers, IDS and IPS servers, DNSSec & IPv6 support, mobile app infrastructure and redundant data centers and failover. All these devices need to be managed on a regular basis and having an effective solution can only help enterprises to achieve this goal. “By using Akamai solution, enterprises can achieve the best possible solution in terms of managing the web. Akamai powers online success and helps organisations' revenue to grow by 50 percent and it saves millions in infrastructure investments. Akamai cloud platform offers 108,000 servers, 1,100 networks, spread over 650 cities and 80 countries,” Pedro Santos, Global VP – Mobile Business, Akamai Technologies said. “In terms of challenges, mobile performance is also a key issue. In terms of expectations, 71 percent of users expect m-sites to load as quickly as desktop sites. Sixty percent will only wait 3 seconds for a page to load. The reality is that leading m-sites take 9 seconds on average to load and 57 percent of users have problems accessing m-sites. The result is 43 percent of users are unlikely to return to a slowloading m-site and 57 percent will not recommend the site. The challenge is that mobile internet access is slow because the mobile network architecture was not designed for the Web,” he said.
Lucky winners of CIO Passion Awards
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A Musical Night to Cherish The 13th Annual CIO&Leader Conference offered entertaiment programmes ranging from Qawwali to comic shows
An enchanting evening of Qawwali with the renowned Ehsaan Bharati ‘Ghungroowale’
Participants enjoying the Qawwali performance
Delegates sharing a lighter moment over cocktails
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CIOs take the ‘Green Pledge’ to reduce carbon footprint in their respective organisations by deploying Green IT
CIOs reinforce their commitment to Go Green by leaving their hand imprints on canvas
Participants enjoying a performance by live stand-up comedy group — Comedy Store
Drumming in a group is a great way of bonding and team building. CIOs partcipate in interactive drumming during a session by ‘Drumberries’
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“It was really a pleasure to meet the 9dot9 team and attend the event at ISB. Hats off to you and your team. I really appreciate all the efforts taken by everyone.” —Yogesh Zope, CIO, Bharat Forge, India
“We are glad to have partnered this forum and really thank 9d0t9 team for giving us this opportunity. Will look forward for more such engagements in future.” —Manoj Khilnani, Country Marketing Manager – Enterprise Products, Research In Motion, India
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$9bn Data Briefing
Will be the size of advertising in social media revenue in 2012
Why Effective Awareness Training Matters The prudent step is to make training valuable, timely, frequent, and memorable By Brent Hutfless
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s ec u r i t y | T E C H F O R G O V E R N A N C E
Dave Aitel of Immunity Inc recently wrote an opinion for CSO
Online regarding the value of awareness training as part of an information security programme. His view, in so many words, amounted to “scrap it” and build the walls higher elsewhere. To say that he took a beating from the InfoSec community at large is probably an understatement. I hope that he was writing the post in a tongue-in-cheek style and that he took the stance he did to provoke reaction more than to espouse his personal belief. That said, I want to argue in defense of security awareness as a vital cultural issue that few organisation can do without, particularly in the dangerous climate we find ourselves today. Training and education are key elements to securing users and data, because even the best technical solutions are incapable of protecting both in every situation. The advances in detection and monitoring solutions have placed more capable tools in the security professional’s toolbox, but APT attacks have grown both in sophistication and perseverance – often leading to successful attacks and subsequent data loss. Should organisations abandon their current solutions because they fail to halt determined, well-funded, statesponsored hackers? Of course not, the tools are still effective against 80 percent of what lurks on the web. Similarly, some research only places endpoint security effectiveness at around 30 percent, but very few organisations stop deploying it. Why? It catches the known dangers, and may aid in discovering the unknown threats at a later date. Training may not completely remove a risk like social engineering or the bad link masquerading in a phishing email, but if evenone user recognised a threat for what it was and reported it, that may mean the difference between taking immediate action to remove a back door versus waiting for the FBI to knock on the front door with far worse news. As security professionals we create layered solutions to mitigate, not eliminate, risk. Despite the glossy brochures, I would wager that few solutions providers could argue that there is a panacea to the problems we face today. The reality is that we rely on several layers to keep bad things from happening where possible and several more to alert us when they do, so that we can implement quick and effective incident response measures. This is not a technology exclusive area however, and better-educated people can be both lines of defense as well as alert mechanisms for when those technical defenses fail.
Training and education must extend beyond the five minutes spent discussing what users can or cannot do during employee orientation. Annual refresher training often required by a check box on your compliance model is not sufficient either, particularly if it is the canned PowerPoint or web-based presentation with content that does not target or connect with the user. Mr. Aitel calls out this type of training for what it is, and I cannot fault him with his assessment. However, the prudent step is not to abandon training altogether, but to make it valuable, timely, frequent, and memorable. Organisations need to immerse users in regards to information security on a fundamental level. It needs to become second nature, and part of the organisational culture. This works best when themes apply to people on a personal level; when the topic resonates beyond the workplace and touches home, family and personal data security. Does your organisation have enterprise licensing? Perhaps a home use programme promoting personal use of office productivity products and endpoint protection solutions will engage users to communicate with IT and IS staff more often. Remind users of any personally beneficial IT programme offerings such as software or free training, and cover timely security topics through email that is readable in two minutes or less. Consider starting a short newsletter, or simply make the effort to increase personal interaction with the user base. Demonstrate a smart phone tool like Genius Scan and explain how it can be abused for data collection in the workplace. Stop talking about APT and show a video where users can see it in action. Visual examples of real-world attacks can have a tangible impact on the audience, who will immediately have a better understanding of the threat. Arrange to have local law enforcement or the FBI come to your site and give a presentation on cyber-crime or intellectual property theft. While these techniques do not replace traditional training mechanisms, they serve to supplement them and make the programme more effective. When I took over the information security programme at a previous organisation, few people were aware of any risks and any malicious activity was considered a "virus". There were useful tools and training available, but few took advantage of them. We incorporated many of the recommendations I
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POINTS
Training and education are keys to securing users layered solutions will eliminate risks Show a video of APT for users to see it in action security awareness needs to be part of mindset visual examples are more effective
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have listed above, as well as less discussion fodder and broke up conventional options. By the the monotony. time I left, we were routinely giving out 200+ HUP licensed The result? endpoint suites for Windows Suspicious email and web and Mac platforms a year. Many activity was routinely reported amount that social staff members had purchased for action. Employees referred media could add to US steeply discounted productivity those who were new or unfarevenue software that mirrored what we miliar to either IT or IT security used in our business environfor relevant topics. Users were ment. Although typical indocmore conscious and aware of trination and annual refresher social networking hazards and training were required for compliance, relrisks to their personal information. Supervievant topics from the news made for good sors and leadership included information
$1.3tn
security in business planning and projects. Although these combined efforts could not completely cure user-induced woes, it cut down on the noise levels and let us focus our energies on less-reactionary aspects of securing and monitoring the network. In short, security awareness had become part of the mindset. That is time and resources well spent. — This article is printed with prior permission from infosecisland.com. For more features and opinions on information security and risk management, please refer to Infosec Island.
Shared Ownership for Success Military models tend to work in the military but they often do not work so well in business world
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ot many compliance practitioners will think of Silly Putty as an aid to their compliance programmes. This is particular in companies where the hierarchy is very military in discipline. Orders were pronounced from on high and they were expected to be followed. Military models tend to work in the military but they often do not work so well in the business world. In these types of organisations, creative thinking is usually not rewarded or even appreciated. I have certainly worked for such organisations. I was reminded of this example when reading this week’s Corner Office in the Sunday New York Times
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(NYT) Business section, entitled “Tell Me Your Idea (and Don’t Mind the Silly Putty)”, in which reporter Adam Bryant wrote about an interview with Laurel J. Richie, the
President of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). Prior to her assuming the Presidency of the WNBA, Richie was a Vice President of Ogilvy & Mather, an international advertising, marketing and public relations agency. After returning to work from a vacation, she found that her entire team had gone to HR and said “We can’t do it anymore. It’s a great account, but we don’t like working for Laurel because working for her feels like it’s all about her and not about us. So we want to work on another piece of business.” In the more military based organisations where I work, the employer would have simply fired all the employees who dared to
illustration by manav sachdev
by Thomas Fox
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go to HR. However, such was not the case at Ogilvy & Mather where Richie used this opportunity to learn a insightful lesson, which she said was “I learned very profoundly in that moment that if there is not shared ownership of the work, both our successes and our failures, people aren’t going to have a satisfying experience.” Recognising that she need to make a significant change, Richie redefined her job as a leader to “to create an environment where good things happen, and where people feel good about their role on the team, and they feel acknowledged, they feel empowered, and they feel visible.” To help facilitate and accomplish this goal, Richie said to her team “I got the feedback. Thank you for doing that. I had no idea. Can I have another chance and can we work together on this?” She then initiated a program where she sought from the team the things they wanted to be involved in. More importantly, she asked them to identify situations where they felt that their input had been marginalised by her and she then asked them “to talk to me in the moment when I was heading down that path again.”
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The next thing she did was to ance simply institutes requirebring out Silly Putty. It was not ments without even talking to to copy the Sunday Comics and the people they affect the most, then reprint the image somethe business unit employees. where else, nor was it for her This is certainly the tradition team members. Richie brought that I have observed where an business school out the “little pink egg” to play outside law firm drafts an initial pass-outs are with while her team members unemployable, states compliance programme which were talking to remind her is written by lawyers for lawa survey that she needed to let her team yers, with little to no relevance members present their “points about how business is actually of view or share work that may accomplished by the company. have been not exactly the way This leads to great frustration I would have done it.” From this exercise by business unit folks who are trying to she learned that there can be “many ways do the right thing but probably cannot get to get to the end point.” I found Richie’s through the legalese in which the complileadership lesson to be applicable to the ance programme is written. A company will compliance arena. I came into complithen have to bring in someone like me to ance from the corporate legal department, actually rewrite the compliance programme, where things were not only top down in policy and procedures, translating legalese terms of a command structure but where into plain English. Richie’s experience in pronouncements where made from the law leadership re-emphasised to me the collabdepartment on high: Do it this way. This is orative nature of compliance. not the problem where the legal department — This article is printed with prior permission or compliance department is viewed as the from infosecisland.com. For more features Land of No, inhabited by only Dr. No. It is, and opinions on information security and risk instead, the perception that legal or complimanagement, please refer to Infosec Island.
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VIEWPOINT Sandeep Phanasgaonkar
illustration by shigil n
How to Measure Effectiveness of Leadership Showing the Way to Move Forward
Leadership is the ability to lead at many levels of functioning. It starts at a higher level, setting up the vision and strategy for technology of the company. The CIO should be looked upon as the obvious top level leader for technology for the organisation. Employees should have trust and faith in CIO’s articulation of technology strategy for the company. Second is the CIOs ability to execute and deliver on that strategy and vision with the help of the cross functional teams. They should look upon the CIO as a leader. Employees from other teams should also subscribe to the leadership position. So, the CIO is also responsible for the execution and delivery. Thus success in the committment to deliver has to be ensured. After charting out the vision and strategy, the CIO should not leave the execution and delivery to other functions. The definition of leadership entails a leader is wholly responsible for whatever comes under his role both on vision and strategy side and
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on execution and delivery side. The CIO should also hold a series of consultations with the respective teams like operations, sales force, vendors etc to spread the rationale behind the vision and strategy.
Decision Making Given the wide impact of the CIO’s decision on various top functions followed by a tricle down effect on the teams, he is also being communicated information back from these sources. Decisions are taken responding to these communication cycles. The CIO has to take a sound decision on the basis of the collaboration that precedes the decision making process. It has to be beneficial to the organisation and can be delivered upon. No longer are decisions taken in an arbitrary and dicretionary manner. They have to be taken in a collaborative and a well informed environment. Decisions should be beneficial to the customers, organisation and the employees. This is just one part of decision making.
About the author: Sandeep Phanasgaonkar is President & CTO for Reliance Capital. Sandeep has extensive experience in applying IT solutions to finance, banking, BPO and ITES.
The second part is around delegation. The work undertaken by organisations is growing by leaps and bounds. It’s giving rise to increased complexity and thus the requirement of people with high skillsets at all layers of the organisation. Hence CIOs should procure for the organisation, a team with the right mix of skillsets to effectively deliver as per the commitments. As I have served in leadership positions for a long time, the extended period of exposure on the leadership pedestal has been a revelation for me on how a leader can impact people, society, organisation and customers. That’s how the effectiveness of leadership is measured. It’s not only based on executing tasks, how good is he technically. Of course, technical knowledge is important, but what matters is the impact of CIO’s actions on the entire ecosystem that gets affected by the decisions taken.
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