CIO Asia October/November 2013

HR: Here come the data scientists 12

CIO Summit HK: Transform or be stuck in your rut 24

october – november 2013

2013 continues to Technology stress CIOs and empowers I.T. budgets women in APEC pag e 6

USD $7.00 include GST (exclude delivery charges) PPS1390/10/2012(022847)

pag e 6 MCI (P) 150/06/2013

State of Asian CxO Survey 2013:

Looking UP Rising IT budgets signify renewed confidence but growing complexity demands new skills and fortitude.

P28 Hong Kong’s Daniel Lai answers the call to public duty



Inside

october – november 2013 

Event

24 Transform or Be Stuck

in Your Rut

Hong Kong’s top information executives convened at the CIO Summit 2013 to discuss technology trends of the year and their future.

By F. Y. Teng

Departments

3 What’s On www.cio-asia.com 4 Editor’s Note 6 Trendlines

Cover Story 16 State of Asian CxO Survey

2013: Looking Up

Rising IT budgets signify renewed confidence but growing complexity demands new skills and fortitude.

By T.C. Seow

Features

12 Data Scientists, Here They Come

2013 Continues to Stress CIOs and I.T. Budgets | Technology Empowers Women in APEC | Chinese Air Travellers Vent Out on Social Media | Social Media Blamed for Riots in Indian Town | Singapore Rapidly Adopts Visa payWave | DBS Group Promotes Chip Cards | The Sound of Music, Decoded For You | Paypal Introduces Seller Protection Policy in AP

Big data application in the area of human

resource is beginning to pay dividends, especially when organisations have good quality, clean and

standardised data to begin with. Here are the struggles top CIOs in the US went through to find that data edge.

By Stephanie Overby

28 Answering the Call to

Public Duty

After an illustrious 45-year career in the private sector, Hong Kong’s CIO Daniel Lai opted for public service and is now leading the charge for ICT-enabled collaboration across borders and onto the cloud.

By F.Y. Teng

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32 Data Points

october – november 2013

What’s

N

www.cio-asia.com

FOUR websites for our enterprise I.T. magazines Executive Networks Media offers four distinct individual magazine websites to benefit you, our subscribers, and to maintain an Internet presence. They include a comprehensive range of social networking, feedback, search and multimedia features.

The magazine websites are regional publications CIO Asia (www.cio-asia.com) and MIS Asia (www.mis-asia.com), plus country-specific publications Computerworld Singapore (www.computerworld.com.sg), and Computerworld Malaysia (www. computerworld.com.my). Our greater digital media focus includes 20 weekly e-newsletters, expert blogs, features and breaking news, drawing upon the global content from more than 300 IDG magazines. Here is some of our latest Web-exclusive content:

CLOUD COMPUTING

How to lose the cloud chasm between executives and IT Cloud computing discussions abound these days, but there is a growing gap between executives and IT when it comes to assessing cloud’s potential.

Go to: http://tinyurl.com/Cloudchasm

LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT The CIO’s first order of business

Before you can be influential you need to be seen as fundamentally competent.

Go to: http://tinyurl.com/orderofbiz

Avoiding project ambiguity People will avoid making a decision altogether when faced with uncertainty.

Go to: http://tinyurl.com/projectambiguity

CAREER

and got fired quick—even if some were terminated for the right reasons.

Go to: http://tinyurl.com/pthvys

BIG DATA

How small businesses can mine big data Big data sounds like something only multinational conglomerates can afford. But the concept of analysing very large amounts of data and looking within it for patterns, trends, and insights is one that nearly any business, large or small, can use to help make better decisions.

Go to: http://tinyurl.com/bigforsmall

How social analytics can improve enterprise IT efficiency Using social analytics on previously unused data sets —reading email headers, calendar data, instant messaging logs—can deliver a lot of business value.

Go to: http://tinyurl.com/op3gs6z

Fatal distraction: 7 IT mistakes that will get you fired Here are seven true tales of IT pros who screwed up big

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From the Editor www.cio-asia.com

CIO Reboot

EDITORIAL

Does “CIO” stand for “career is over?”That’s exactly what someone meant when he asked me recently whether the role of the CIO has once again been relegated to a lesser role.

No, we’re not going over old grounds again debating the eminent death of the CIO role; in fact, it’s a debate that has been going on for the last 15 years or so. But let me digress a little ...

The successful run of this year’s CIO Summit in three countries—Singapore, Hong Kong (see page 24) and Malaysia—and jointly organised by Executive Networks Media and IDC Asia/Pacific was testimony to the longevity of the CIO. No only were there more participants this time round for the Summit in Malaysia and Singapore, the show also met enthusiastic attendance when it debuted in Hong Kong this past August.

Talking to many of the speakers and attendees alike, one thing that struck me was the wide spectrum of knowledge they all have, not just on the latest trends in technology but also the business side of things. No longer were discussions centred round the nuts and bolts of IT but there was much more talk about business value, service delivery and return on investment.

This year’s State of Asian CxO Survey (page 16) once again offers a glimpse into the varied roles that the CIO is taking on. And that continual transformation is only the result of the CIO’s resilience and adaptability to meet challenges throughout the past two decades or so. More than just keeping the lights on (and off, too), he is expected to know what makes his bosses and his business peers tick.

The many hats he wears is just like the “spiderman” illustration on the cover—a multi-tasking, multi-talented know-all who can help his bosses make wise decisions and his peers maximise the use of IT tools available to them.

So, is the CIO’s career under threat? I doubt it. Call the CIO by any other name, his is still the chief information officer who will continue to play a strategic role on the board.

It’s been an exciting roller-coaster ride for the CIO for the past 20 years. What lies ahead is going to be even more exciting, I’m sure.

T.C. Seow Editor, CIO Asia tcseow@execnetworks.com

EDITOR T.C. Seow Sub-eDITOR Subatra Suppiah asia online editor Zafar Hasan Anjum Reporter Nurdianah Md Nur Contributors Jack Loo, Stephanie Overby,

Anuradha Shukla, F.Y. Teng DESIGNer Yasin

ADVERTISING/MARKETING/REPRINTS regional Sales Director

Glen Myles Tel: +65 6395 8018 regional account DIRECTOR

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regional account DIRECTOR

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senior account manager

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how you can reach us

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Email: tcseow@execnetworks.com Tel: +65 6395 8058 Fax: +65 6339 9281 Address: 152 Beach Road, #11-06/08 Gateway East, Singapore 189721

executive networks MEDIA chief executive officer Mark Hobson Finance Manager Allan Chee Operations Manager Alison Lim

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About Executive Networks Media Executive Networks Media is the publisher of the region’s leading media brands dedicated to covering and supporting the information and communications industry (MIS Asia, CIO Asia, Computerworld Singapore and Computerworld Malaysia), the producer of events devoted to the communities they represent, and the owner of a research consultancy dedicated to studying technology industry developments as well as technology deployment trends across Asia.

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NEW : HOT  UNEXPEC TED

2013 Continues to Stress CIOs and I.T. Budgets S o fa r , t h e ye a r h a s b e e n f a i r l y encouraging to the IT community around the region, according to a new report by Forrester Research, which says IT budgets for 2013 in Asia Pacific are in better shape than in the rest of the world, but not by much.

Although 18 percent of organisations in the region will increase their IT spending by 7 percent or more in 2013, most CIOs in Asia Pacific are coming under far more budget pressures than in previous years.

Overall, less than half (45 percent) of Asia Pacific organisations will increase their IT spending in 2013, and almost onequarter (21 percent) will reduce their IT capital spending.

In addition, Asia Pacific CIOs now directly control less than 60 percent of enterprise IT spending. IT groups in Asia Pacific account

for 58 percent of IT purchases in 2012— down from 2010, when they purchased 74 percent of their organisation’s IT. In contrast, Forrester’s data shows that business leaders are often growing their IT spending at very healthy rates even as CIOs deal with budget reductions. Business leaders focused on business outcomes and innovation directly controlled 33 percent of regional enterprise IT spending in 2012—a share that is growing quickly.

Time is Running Out “Time is running out for CIOs to partner with the business,” writes Dane Anderson, Vice President, Research Director and Asia Pacific Manager at Forrester Research.

“Emboldened business leaders across Asia Pacific are increasingly driving reorganisation and retraining efforts

to ex trac t greater value from their technology.”

Consistent with the pressures CIOs face, the research findings show that the top two technology initiatives prioritised

by IT departments across Asia Pacific are budgetary related: 54 percent cite ‘improving budget delivery performance’ as a priority, while 52 percent cite ‘improving IT budget performance’.

In comparison, ‘data and analytics to improve business outcomes’ ranks as business leaders’ top IT priority for 2013, while it came in third for IT leaders.

More importantly, the top reason that business leaders are spending more on technology is because they believe that it’s too important for the business not to be involved. ­— T.C. Seow

Technology Empowers Women in APEC T e c h n o lo g y i s e m p o w e r i n g w o m e n i n A s i a Pa c i f i c E c o n o m i c Co o p e r a t i o n (A P E C ) , a c c o rd i n g to international communications company Ooredoo. Ooredoo delivers mobile, fixed, broadband Internet and corporate managed services customised for the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia.

The company has taken womenspecific initiatives in order to help women tap technology and innovation to make their communities more progressive.

Ooredoo supports APEC in encouraging women in the economy so that women can realise their potential in society. The company points out that if women can access mobile technology they can not only improve their lives but enhance the lives of those who depend on them.

Ooredoo has previously worked with the GSMA and the Cherie Blaire Foundation

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to empower women through enhanced connectivity.

Leveraging Mobile Tech Indosat, an Ooredoo company, established the Wanita Mentari programme designed to encourage women to increase their access to information and business

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services with mobile technology. Women comprise about two-thirds of the country’s entrepreneurs in Indonesia. The next stage of the programme is already planned out to boost entrepreneurial spirit through interconnectivity and the exchange of ideas.

Ooredoo is leveraging mobile technology across its markets to empower women and claims its initiatives have been commercially successful in addition to addressing the needs of women. Indosat also hosted the Indonesia Womenpreneur Competition Award (IWC) this year in partnership with the LTO-PA (Ministry of women’s empowerment and child protection). The 10 finalists recognise the importance of ICT and online media for promoting their products while creating virtual networks and building communities both online and at home.

— Anuradha Shukla

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Chinese Air Travellers Vent Out on Social Media Thirty-five percent of Chinese travellers complain on social media when an airline disruption occurs. This is according to a newly released study written by Norm Rose of travel industry research authority PhoCusWright, and commissioned by Amadeus.

Thirty-five percent of the respondents in China “avoid booking the airline whenever possible” due to irregular operations.

Seventy-four percent of Chinese travellers said they experienced at least one moderate delay over the last 12 months, and 22 percent of these travellers are less likely to contact an airline representative directly than other travellers.

One third of all passengers surveyed in China could not fulfill the purpose of a trip booked in the past year.

Amadeus points out the growing Chinese market and advises global carriers to make efforts to understand the expectations and behaviour of Chinese travellers in order to tap this lucrative region. “ W h e n t r a ve l l e r s p o s t n e g a t i ve messages on Twitter or decide never to book with a particular carrier again after being kept waiting for several hours at the airport, this results in an indirect loss of revenue for airlines which is often difficult to measure,” said Norm Rose, Senior Technology and Corporate Market

Analyst, PhoCusWright. “A passengercentric approach requires a re-evaluation of irregular operations management, to enable airlines to better serve customers and protect revenues.”

Journey Disruptions Venting out frustration is common with Chinese travellers and 60 percent of those surveyed said they were most likely to share their journey disruption with friends and family.

The global study ‘Passengers first: Rethinking irregular operations’ includes a survey of 2,800 travellers from Australia, Brazil, China, the UK, and the US. The study is focused on providing airlines with strategies to improve responses to irregular operations.

The most common frustrations among

passengers was found to be insufficient communication, and the study emphasises this may significantly impact a traveller’s loyalty to a particular airline in the future.

Airlines should shift social media strategies from promotional activities alone, and adopt analytical tools to understand the impact of social comments made in relation to disruption. “ There is a strong argument that passenger insight and choice should be integrated into the irregular operations process,” said Patricia Simillon, Head of Airlines Operations Strategy, Airline IT, Amadeus IT Group. “We will continue to work hand-in-hand with our global airline partners in order to help them to refine, refocus and maximise their irregular operations procedures.”

— Anuradha Shukla

Social Media Blamed for Riots in Indian Town A video circulated through social media led to violent clashes over the weekend in Muzzafarnagar, a town in Uttar Pradesh in North India, about 105 km northeast of Delhi, Indian media have reported.

The provincial government, led by the Samajwadi Party, has blamed social media and a particular video for the violence in which 28 people have died so far.

The purported video inciting violence was posted online and it wrongly claims to

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show two men being lynched by a mob in the state, government sources have said.

Old Video “Rumours through bulk SMS, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp was the reason for the spurt in violence,” said the Inspector General of Police (Crime, STF) Ashish Gupta.

The irony is that the video which is being circulated through WhatsApp is two years old, and that the video was made in a

neighbouring country, according to Gupta.

Because of the violence, the Indian army has been deployed in the area. So far, 56 people have been injured in the violence while 90 preventive arrests have been made by the police.

The video in question has been blocked and an investigation is trying to locate the person who uploaded it, said Arun Kumar, a senior police officer. (Sources: Tehelka.com, NDTV.com) ­— Zafar Anjum

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Singapore Rapidly Adopts Visa payWave Singapore is now the fastest growing Visa payWave market globally, announced Visa in a press statement in early September.

In August 2013, more than one million Visa payWave contactless transactions were made, representing 14 percent of all domestic face-to-face transactions.

Ooi Huey Tyng, Visa Country Manager for Singapore and Brunei, said the growth is the result of increased acceptance by retailers as well as increased consumer acceptance.

Convenient Option There are now more than 1.5 million Visa payWave cards issued in Singapore and more than 12,000 Visa payWave retail acceptance points across the republic. “ With strong suppor t from the industry, the increase in the number of

Visa payWave cards issued and acceptance points has provided consumers in Singapore with a more convenient payment option than cash. This upward trend will continue to gain momentum as we expand Visa payWave acceptance among small ticket merchants like food courts, fast food chains and cafes,” said Ooi. Today, Visa payWave is accepted at major supermarket chains including Cold Storage, M a r k e t Pl a c e, G i a n t , NTUC Fairprice, as well as Golden Village and Subway restaurants.

— Nurdianah Md Nur

DBS Group Promotes Chip Cards T h e D B S G r o u p has unveiled an awareness campaign to encourage its cardholders under its DBS and POSB bank brands in Singapore to upgrade their magnetic stripe-based cards to chip cards.

Through the “Great Singapore ATM Card Upgrade” campaign, the banking group aims to raise awareness on the safety aspects of chip cards and entice cardholders who choose to upgrade to more secure chip cards earlier with a lucky draw.

“As the leading bank in Singapore, we have continuously stepped up on our security measures and systems to protect our customers against fraud. We see it as our role to also educate our customers on the latest technology available to them,” said Anthony Seow, Head of Cards & Unsecured Loans, DBS Bank Singapore.

“With the industry moving towards the adoption of chip technology, it is important for customers to prepare themselves and upgrade to chip cards earlier so as

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to enjoy peace of mind,” added Seow. In May this year, the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) announced that retail banks in Singapore replace their customers’ magnetic stripe ATM cards with new plastic that contains an embedded chip to better safeguard against fraud. The move affects all ATM cardholders in Singapore. The entire industry exercise is expected to be completed by end 2014.

All of the bank’s point-of-sale terminals have already been upgraded to accept chip cards and by the fourth quarter of this year, all ATMS under DBS and POSB will also be fully upgraded to read chip cards for all transactions.

Cash Prizes Under the “Great Singapore ATM Card Upgrade” initiative, POSB said it will be giving away a total of S$1.2 million (US$0.94 million) worth of cash prizes to reward cardholders who upgrade to chip cards.

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“Over the years, being neighbours first and bankers second, POSB prides itself on giving back to the community. Through this campaign, we hope to raise awareness among our 4.5 million customers on the enhanced benefits they will get to enjoy when they upgrade to chip cards,” said Derrick Goh, Head of POSB. Starting from September 2013 to December 2014, the bank will give 100 DBS/POSB cardholders who upgrade to chip cards an opportunity to win S$1,000 each, every two months. This leads to a grand draw in January 2015 where one lucky upgrader will win S$500,000.

DBS and POSB customers holding existing magnetic stripe ATM cards can simply upgrade to a DBS Visa debit card and POSB GO! debit MasterCard, or link their current/savings accounts to their DBS or POSB credit cards. Cardholders can upgrade via iBanking or at any DBS or POSB branch.

— Jack Loo

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The Sound of Music, Decoded For You What could be music to your ears is also a milestone in multimedia search development.

Researchers at the Baidu-I2R Research Centre (BIRC) in Singapore have developed a music search technology using query-byexample music search to help users obtain song information from just a sound clip.

The technology identifies music playing over the air by its “unique music fingerprint” made up of its audio waveform and returns the song title, the name of the artiste, and the album art within seconds.

BIRC is a joint laboratory between A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) and Baidu, China’s leading Internet

search engine provider. According to a statement from BIRC, the lab came up this innovative product for smart mobile device users in May 2013.

Embedded in App Launched this year, the Baidu Music Search technology, - ting ge shi qu, which literally translates to “hear a tune and know the song”, is embedded within the Baidu Music App that has been downloaded over half a million times on both Google Play Store and iTunes (China).

Users can also share song information with their friends through various social networking platforms.

According to the lab sources, Baidu Music App shows 99 percent accuracy through continuous technology advancements and optimisations and it taps on several million music items with copyrights from Baidu Music database which synchronises with 17 music lists, including Billboard Hits, the UK Chart and accessed by tens of millions of music lovers worldwide daily.

The Baidu Music App returns results with at least 10 percent higher accuracy when searching for songs falling outside the regular charts in China for both normal and acoustically challenging environments. ­— Zafar Anjum

Paypal Introduces Seller Protection Policy in AP on the multi-billion-dollar cross-border trade opportunity in Asia’s fast growing economy.”

The policy will be available to PayPal merchants in Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, India, Hong Kong, China, Australia and New Zealand.

How it Works

To help protect merchants against fraudulent transactions, PayPal will be providing an expanded Seller Protection policy in Asia Pacific from 11 October 2013.

According to Paypal, fraudulent transactions are costing online businesses a significant amount of time and money,

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indirectly hindering offline businesses from embracing e-commerce. The Seller Protection policy thus acts as an additional layer of security to reduce this risk.

Rohan Mahadevan, Vice President of Asia for PayPal, said: “Seller Protection... will help merchants to manage their risk ...[while] empowering them to capitalise

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Whenever a customer files a Claim, Chargeback or Reversal, PayPal will te m p o r a r i l y h o l d t h e f u n d s i n t h e merchant’s account to cover the full amount. Merchants are then required to submit the appropriate documents via the PayPal Resolution Centre for Paypal’s review.

If the transaction meets the eligibility requirements for Seller Protection, Paypal will restore the funds to the merchant’s account. Otherwise, the funds will be returned to the buyer and a Chargeback fee might be charged.

No subscription or extra fee is required for the Seller Protection policy as long as the merchant meets the eligibility criteria.

— Nurdianah Md Nur

www.splunk.com/goto/listen

big data: business analytics

Data Scientists, Here They Come Big data application in the area of human resource is beginning to pay dividends, especially when organisations have good quality, clean and standardised data to begin with. Here are the struggles top CIOs in the US went through to find that data edge.

By Stephanie Overby

When General Motors

was looking for someone to lead its global talent and organisational capability group, the US$152 billion carmaker clearly wasn’t looking for a paper-pushing administrator. Michael Arena, who took the position 18 months ago, is an engineer by training. He was a visiting scientist at MIT Media Lab. He’s a Six Sigma black belt. He’s got a Ph.D. This is not your father’s human resources executive.

But it is a sign of where the corporate HR function is headed. Arena is dedicated to the hot field of talent analytics—crunching data about employees to get “the right people with the right talent in the right place at the right time at the right cost,” he said.

“Talent management is a soft space. Historically, we haven’t been able to measure definitely the things that we intuitively believe to be true,” said Arena. “But businesses are mandating it.” The age of “trust me, this will work” is over, said Arena.

“HR is being held accountable to deliver business results. And the language of the business is analytics.”

The growing importance of sophisticated analytics to HR— not simply reporting what already exists in an organisation but predicting what could or should be—is a result of “the

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recognition that the efficient use of labour and deployment of resources is critically important to the business results of the company,” said Mark Endry, CIO of Arcadis U.S. He recently spent six months as interim Senior Vice President of HR at the US$3.3 billion company.

In recent years, enterprises have developed more mature techniques for applying analytics to customer information.

“They’ve been able to see—with relatively little data—how much they can do and how powerful the results can be,” said Ben Waber, author of People Analytics: How Social Sensing Technology Will Transform Business and What It Tells Us about the Future of Work. “When you think about what’s going on within companies, you have potentially billions of records generated every day about each person. They’re starting to see how valuable and important that data is.”

IT must be at the centre of the unfolding data-driven transformation. Not everyone has an HR data scientist like GM. Arena emphasises the importance of his partnership with Bill Houghton, GM’s CIO for global corporate functions. “A big piece is integration—ensuring the right systems are connected so we know where to draw the data from,” said Arena. “IT has to play a role in that.”

Michael Arena (left) and Bill Houghton

staffing new projects, uncovering the characteristics of highperforming individuals or teams, and even predicting who’s likely to head out the door.

“The way I think about it is using data to understand how people get work done,” said Waber, CEO of Sociometric Solutions, a management-services firm that was built on his work at MIT Media Lab and that helps companies in one niche of the talent analytics field: collecting and analysing sensor data to improve workforce performance.

Companies have collected employee data for years—from satisfaction surveys to ethnography. But, said Waber, this “next generation of stuff is moving away from those qualitative assessment modes into much harder behavioural modes, using digital data from email or sensors or ERP systems. That gives us radically more powerful information.”

Historically, HR used data to report headcount or turnover information. “We’re so far beyond that now,” said Crumley of Coca-Cola Enterprises. “HR wants to expand its capabilities to help the business grow. To do so, we need to be able to be more precise and surgical about our interventions. That’s where workforce analytics is huge—helping you determine where to place your bets.”

Laying the Foundation

Indeed, GM’s CIO is counting on a new enterprise data warehouse, and hiring more IT professionals with a business intelligence background, to support HR’s efforts. “Right now the analysis is being done by a small group of smart people,” said CIO Houghton. “The next step is how do we make the analytics more available to the everyday manager or the organisational leadership. We want to get this out of the hands of the rocket scientists and into the hands of managers.”

CIOs are the key to helping the organisation figure out what data matters, said Terry Sullivan, Director of Applied Research and Consulting at office furniture maker Steelcase. “Everyone is thinking about big data and collecting all kinds of data to try to figure out how to create smarter people. CIOs can drive this effort.”

IT leaders are uniquely qualified to help their corporate counterparts navigate the minefield of issues associated with these nascent technologies and processes—including data quality, systems integration, security, privacy and change management. “The partnership with IT is critical,” said David Crumley, Vice President of Global HR Information Systems for Coca-Cola Enterprises.

There’s a broad array of uses for talent analytics: screening new hires, figuring out who should get promoted, efficiently

Employees generate petabytes of data about themselves every day, said Waber. But that data sits in disparate systems in different formats and is often messy. “To make it work, you need access to all of this information in real time,” Waber said. “IT is the backbone for this entire process.”

Implementing a single version of an HR information system itself may not sound revolutionary, but it’s a critical first step for companies interested in more advanced analytics.

Jo Stoner, Senior Vice President of Worldwide HR for Informatica, knew predictive talent analytics could benefit the growing data-integration company. “A lot of companies don’t make it past a billion [in revenue]. We were starting to hit those awkward teenage years,” she explained. Managing the company’s assets would be critical to maintaining momentum.

But “we don’t own buildings or raw materials,” said Stoner.

“Our greatest asset is our talent.” First, though, the company had to bring all its HR data together, applying the master data management services Informatica delivers to clients to its own internal employee data in order to layer analytics atop it.

For most companies, just arriving at a single version of the HR truth can be beneficial. Paul Lones, Senior Vice President of IT at Fairchild Semiconductor, said that two years ago, managers at the chip maker lacked a single system that could provide an accurate tally of employees worldwide, let alone show the amount of employee turnover. Reports had to be compiled from multiple systems. Succession planning took place in Microsoft Word documents. Compensation decisions might be made in isolation.

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big data: business analytics Now that the company has implemented cloud-based Workday, managers can access data on all 9,000 employees in one place, including succession plans, turnover trends and salary information. “A manager in the Philippines considering a raise and promotion for an employee can see in seconds how that will compare with others in the group and with local compensation trends and make that decision,” said Lones.

It may not be rocket science, but it’s a start—one that’s been a long time coming for many HR groups. Chiquita Brands, for example, had multiple homegrown and manual HR systems.

“It was a cobbled-together thing,” said Kevin Ledford, Chiquita’s CIO. “People spent 90 percent of their time figuring out where the data was and 10 percent on analysing it.”

In 2008, the company moved to a global HR system, which came in handy when Chiquita moved its headquarters from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Charlotte, North Carolina in the US and lost 75 percent of its corporate employees.

“It was very tumultuous. We threw all of our monkeys in the air, and they all came down in different buckets,” said Ledford. “It would have been a nightmare [without the global HR system].” Now that the company is exploring predictive HR analytics, that success with master data management “is everything,” said Ledford.

At Arcadis, Endry has connected his cloud-based workforcemanagement system to 11 other pieces of software, including ERP, learning management, payroll and an active directory. The combined data helps the company, which provides engineering services regarding infrastructure, water, environment and buildings, to staff client projects more efficiently and effectively.

“In the past we couldn’t tell who was mobile,” said Endry.

“Now when we have a giant project in Ohio, we can see on a dashboard that we’ve got these three people in Boston willing to move there.”

Marc Franciosa, CIO of Praxair, has tied the company’s HR and employee performance systems to non-HR systems like SharePoint as a foundation for the company’s talent analytics initiative—no small task for the US$11 billion industrial and medical gases company with 26,000 employees in 50 countries.

“The underlying data and processes have to be consistent to be able to do any real analytics with confidence,” said Franciosa. “For companies that are fairly mature that haven’t had a global environment before, it’s going through that initial normalisation and standardisation process to make sure that this certification, for example, means the same thing around the world,” said Franciosa. (He implemented SumTotal’s HR management system and ElixHR platform to link disparate data.) “The cleanup has been a challenge.”

Now, when Praxair wants to make a bid or sign a new customer, managers can analyse HR implications first. Do they have people who speak Portuguese, have the necessary certification, and are willing to relocate to Rio de Janeiro? “We can

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Kevin Ledford

do some modelling of the skill sets to determine if it’s doable or if we will have to recruit externally,” Franciosa said.

At GM, Arena has been implementing a three-phase analytics plan. First, integrate systems in a way that ensures highly accurate data is available. Next, push much of that data into standardised reporting tools and dashboards that business managers can use on their own. Then start building models.

One of the first projects Arena implemented was a meansbased comparison analysis of the top talent pool. The model examines every employee data field in the PeopleSoft database to look for important insights, Arena said. “Five or six experiences may jump out. Having international experience may statistically matter. Then we dig deeper. Are there certain types of international experiences that matter more than others?

Does that need to happen earlier versus later?”

Divining Interventions The real power is in applying predictive analytics to a corporate population. “Everyone’s talking about it,” said Chiquita’s Ledford, “looking at all this data you have and trying to figure out the future.”

“The typical data warehouse approach is looking back, but what we wanted to do was start looking forward,” said Praxair’s Franciosa. “What are the leading indicators we should be looking for? What are those metrics or data sets we don’t have but, if we did, would it really help us? What external data sources could we use to drive better decision-making?”

For example, Praxair is growing by double digits in China.

“Rather than hiring a ton of people and trying to recreate the wheel [there], what I’ve been driving is how do we replicate rapidly those things that have made us successful in our mature geographies,” said Franciosa. “There’s a huge opportunity to use predictive analytics based on where we’re best-in-class.”

The predictive analytics market for HR is nascent and wideopen. “We partner with them all, from IBM to SuccessFactors to PeopleSoft,” said GM’s Arena. “They’re all trying to play

in the space, but I don’t know that any of them have figured it out.”

Arena’s team has built a model that predicts what changes in attrition rates will mean for GM’s workforce. Previously, if someone proposed hiring a bunch of young engineers, no one could be certain if that was the best decision. “Now we can say, let’s see what that looks like five years from now,” Arena said.

“What are the dividends if we hire 200 entry-level engineers?

Might we be better off hiring 50 advanced engineers? We can take that information to the head of engineering and say, ‘Here’s what it will cost you.’”

Arena thinks that analysing the interactions of networks of employees holds the most promise. The process starts with a survey. “We ask questions of a given network: Who do you go to when you want to shop a new idea? Where do you turn when you need resources to get things done? Then we run the analytics,” Arena explained. “We can tell you who the brokers are, who’s central in that network, who are the bridges across silos. We can even predict who’s a flight risk based on where they sit in the network.” And by identifying which employee networks are most productive, Arena said there’s a chance to improve performance across the company.

At Coca-Cola Enterprises, Crumley is integrating business data with HR data for predictive purposes. “That’s where you can really get sexy with it,” he said. While working with IT to clean and standardise all the data, Crumley is partnering with each corporate function to find out what business metric might be the key measure of success for their employees. By combining those business metrics with people data, he hopes to be able to “reverse engineer what a successful employee is, so we can get the best candidates in the future.”

Employee engagement is a leading indicator of talent retention at Coca-Cola Enterprises. And one of the biggest boosters of employee engagement numbers is access to on-the-job learning, so Crumley’s team is trying to figure out how to make training opportunities more universal. For example, why are folks in this shift at this plant not taking classes as much as other employees in that line of business?

With answers to questions like that, HR can intervene to address the core reason, whether that’s an accessibility problem or a manager who needs more coaching. Crumley said the effort will gain even more steam when HR is able to show, through data analytics, a correlation between taking a specific training course and an improvement in sales or productivity.

At call-centre provider NOVO 1, CTO Mitchell Swindell has implemented a predictive hiring tool from Evolve. Applicants complete a Web-based application that screens for attitude, propensity for customer service, and voice capabilities. The software also shows the candidate what it’s like to work in a call centre in hopes of screening out those who would be a poor fit in the high-turnover industry. The tool then gives the candidate a red, yellow or green rating, at which point candi-

dates rated green or yellow are invited for in-person interviews.

The hiring decision is still in the hands of a human, but the system has predicted with 80 percent accuracy the company’s top performers, based on 90-day follow-up data on the hired employees.

Since introducing the algorithm-enhanced hiring system, tenure is up by 25 percent, agent productivity has increased 30 percent, and the overall staffing budget has decreased 11 percent. Swindell has integrated Evolve with the company’s payroll, workforce-management and proprietary quality systems to help develop a more nuanced profile of the best employees.

At Chiquita, Ledford is exploring predictive analytics to help the company find, train and retain its “bananaeros”— experts in growing bananas. “Those guys are really hard to find, as bananas have taken a backseat to coffee and tourism,” said Ledford. Analytics could enable managers to predict which lower-level employees “could become our next wave of banana folks,” said Ledford, and determine the right training and grooming to make that happen.

The People Business “What’s really happening right now is a shift in HR from an art to a science,” said Crumley of Coca-Cola Enterprises, who’s currently exploring how social network data and gamification might become part of his HR analytics platform. “A lot of HR teams are trying to figure out how to make that shift quickly so it’s no longer HR sitting around waiting to be pulled in, but HR coming to the table with nuggets of wisdom.”

Data analytics could enable HR to elevate itself from a tactical support function to a business partner on strategy, which ought to sound pretty familiar to CIOs. But there are limits to HR’s data-driven transformation. “[Analytics] are all about probability, and there’s just so far you can go with probability,” said Crumley. “If you want to figure out how many employees you need to launch a new product, it can get you in the right ballpark. When it comes to predicting turnover, it’s not an exact science. People are people.”

“It’s never black-and-white when you’re talking about people,” said Stoner of Informatica. While some folks get stars in their eyes when talking about big data, Stoner often sees a bigger haystack to sift through. But analytics, she said, help point companies in the right direction. “In HR, we live in a world where data brings more questions. You always have to look beneath it,” she said. “It’s not an exact science. But at least it gets us looking at the right part of the haystack so we can get to the answer faster.”

That’s why GM’s Arena said his talent analytics will never be fully automated. “Sometimes we get projections wrong for all kinds of reasons. It can take several iterations. But HR still loves it, because it equips them to make intelligent decisions for their business partners.”

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cover story

Looking UP

Rapid changes notwithstanding, the Asian CIO is still expected to be malleable and flexible enough to be in the driver’s seat to champion the use of IT in his or her organisation.

By T.C. Seow 1 6

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his time last year, our State of the Asian CxO survey results showed a brightening trend that seemed to have cleared some of the gloomy clouds that had formed in 2011. This year’s results, although still presenting a more or less similar trend in general, show some bright sparks in some areas, particularly where disruptive technologies are prevalent.

Like last year’s, the 2013 State of the Asian CxO survey also spanned across seven countries, namely Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and India.

First off, a bright spark for the year: the IT budgets indicated by the respondents this year again show a rising trend (see Table 1). Last year, 54.9 percent of respondents said their budgets would be increased, while 34.8 percent said theirs would remain unchanged, and 10.3 percent said they would decrease their budget for 2013.

That touch of optimism could likely be attributed to the better economic outlook for this year, considering that the threat of recession happening in Europe and the U.S. has somewhat abated. Nonetheless, organisations still remain wary of their own performance for the rest of the year, which again will depend on how the regional markets perform.

Table 1: Your IT budget in 2014 will…

Be increased

63.8%

Be decreased

11.6%

Remain unchanged

24.6%

Next, let us look at the technology concerns of CIOs in the region (Table 2).

Table 2: Top technology priorities 2012

2013

Mobility/wireless

Business continuity planning

Business intelligence

Business intelligence

Business continuity planning

Mobility/wireless

Integrating/enhancing existing systems & processes

Integrating/enhancing existing systems & processes

Business process optimisation

Business process optimisation

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cover story

Cloud computing, social media, disruptive technologies have all contributed to the reshaping of the CIO’s role which is increasingly perceived as less “IT-focused” but more “business-friendly”.

As far as technology priorities are concerned, the same old issues still remain on the top of the Asian CIOs. While last year’s key concern was with mobility and wireless, this year so far has been keeping CIOs busy with business continuity plans, chiefly because of the maturing cloud computing models that we have been seeing developing over the last two to three years. No longer is cloud considered an emerging technology; it is now a viable platform for some industries to seriously save some costs in terms of service deliveries. Coupled with maturing service models and knowledge on the part of the providers, the early adopters are beginning to see the fruits of their cloud ventures, although some industries like the financial services and healthcare sectors are still hampered by compliance issues to fully embrace the cloud evolution.

Business continuity planning hence now plays a bigger role, in that CIOs are looking at ways and means to co-locate, or at least tap on public clouds to ensure some form of disaster recovery at lower costs. Vendors are also beginning to be more transparent with their offerings by going for certification and audit to show that are more willing to share their “trade secrets” in order to win new customers.

Business intelligence, and that includes business analytics and the tidal wave of big data, is still one of the top five priorities. Clearly, this area is likely to see a lot of changes and challenges are organisations grapple with exponential data growths, and new thinking to derive deeper knowledge out of the whole data deluge. It is an area that requires a new kind of skill sets, particularly in the area of statistical analysis and modelling.

More than one-third of Hong Kong enterprises still have no plans to implement big data technology despite recognising its benefits, according to a recent survey commissioned by storage solutions vendor EMC in Hong Kong.

The company conducted the poll in July with 133 registered participants of Hong Kong’s EMC Forum. The poll results indicate 83 percent of IT and business executives agree that big data will lead to better decision-making. Many also recognise that big data is the key to becoming industry winners (45 percent) and achieving competitive advantage (31 percent), while 51 percent agree that the technology helps protect their businesses by identifying and preventing cyber attacks.

Therein lies the dilemma: vigorous statistical analyses in the form of business analytics is a goal many organisations are aiming to achieve but success will depend largely on finding the right skills to unravel the statistical morass piling up in data silos.

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How Are We Doing?

How busy have the Asian CIOs been so far this year? If Table 3 is any indication, the picture should be quite clear. CIOs are still very much involved in planning and strategising for their organisations. Perhaps they are doing this more than before, as they are required to deal with not just IT-related issues but also those that span across the entire company. In fact, spending time interacting with other senior executives and business counterparts has become one of the top five priorities. This is because of their facing pressure from other non-IT departments who probably are circumnavigating the IT department to have things done, or worse, implementing their own IT solutions without the prior knowledge of the CIO office.

This is entirely possible. With the commoditisation of IT and the ease of procuring cloud services, some departments are likely to take their own route to rapidly adopt usable tools without subjecting to cumbersome approval procedures done in the conventional IT procurement process.

Table 3: Top five activities where you spend the most time 2012

2013

Strategising and big picture planning

Strategising and big picture planning

Interacting with vendors/ outsourcers/service providers

Budgeting

Designing/optimising business processes

Interacting with your company’s CxOs and business executives

Budgeting

Leading projects

Leading projects

Interacting with vendors/ outsourcers/service providers

Table 4: Are you a member of the executive team?

Yes

69.6%

No

30.4%

Nevertheless, CIOs do call the shots, as can be seen in Table 4. Almost 70 percent of respondents claim they belong to their executive teams. While they may be in positions of power, perhaps they should be spending more time not just communicating and exchanging ideas with their peers from various business units but also to close ranks with their superiors too.

Management Issues Two years ago, the top management priority was about aligning IT and business goals. Today, and just like last year, this is still very much the top concern of CIOs in Asia (Table 5). In fact, the pressure to ensure that is alignment is felt even more strongly, as non-IT departments are already challenging the traditional role of the IT department, long the domain of the CIO, in procuring and utilising IT for their own purposes. In the grand scheme of things, such unilateral decision-making might not be acceptable to senior management but CEOs today have begun questioning the very role of the CIO in helping their organisation to grow as quickly as they can.

What went wrong? Disruptive technology is to be blamed, shouldn’t it? Depending on who has your ears, the answers will be varied no doubt, but the gist of the matter is that, consumerisation of IT, coupled with mobility and the BYOD trend, is causing a lot of pain to the once well protected and well guarded wall of the IT department. At the very top, bring your own device route has an immediately gratifying effect on the powers to be, to be able to remain in touch at all times through their mobile devices wherever and whenever they are.

Interestingly, business continuity and risk management have climbed one notch up, compared to last year’s findings. This is largely due to the risk exposure brought about by BYOD and mobility plans organisations have forced upon the IT department which now has to struggle to ensure the walled garden of security is not breached by increasing freedom other departments seem to enjoy more and more by the day.

What about the case for enterprise architecture? Again, the big deal is in coming up with one that can accommodate urgent but reasonable requests from top management while keeping processes under control so as not to be exposed unnecessarily to risks.

Underlying all this is again the need to improve on processes in the pursuit for higher efficiencies all round. This priority seems to be a perennial one, since that is what traditional IT is perceived to bring to the table.

Table 5: What are your top five management priorities?

2012

2013

Aligning IT & business goals

Aligning IT & business goals

Controlling costs

Business continuity/risk management

Business continuity/risk management

Controlling costs

Improving internal customer (user) satisfaction

Enterprise architecture

Process improvement

Process improvement

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cover story CIOs live an exciting life, judging from the challenges they face in their jobs. If Table 6 brings you a message, it has to be this: the role of the CIO needs to change to suit the new organisation. The top challenges are different (except budgets) from last year’s, and this essentially signifies the difficult task CIOs face in ensuring that IT will still tick like a clock as before, yet malleable and flexible enough to meet drastically different demands coming from all angles.

Take proving the value of IT for instance. It’s an old issue but given today’s context, the value of IT has to be its adaptability to suit the needs of not just traditional IT users but also the businesspeople who want to be as close to their customers as possible. IT has to be seen as an enabler to help drive the business, not just for ensuring processes run like smooth silk.

Perhaps more perplexing is the issue of proving ROI on deployments like BYOD or big data, where risk management on the one hand poses great difficulties, and the dearth of analytical skills makes it hard to see where the money should be put. And on top of all this, the pressure to keep costs down, or worse, a tightened budget caused by funds flowing into nonIT departments.

The question about the lack of key technical skill sets with IT is another tough nut to crack. Technical training, especially in software development and project management, is widely available, yet CIOs continue to face a shortage of qualified personnel to join the IT department. Part of the reason perhaps is the changing outlook of the younger generation of workforce entering the IT profession. No longer keen to commit to long hours of training, they often lack the attention span nor the tenacity to stick around in a job for long to gain the necessary experience for more rewarding jobs further down their IT career.

But who is to blame for unrealistic expectations of the IT department? As mentioned earlier, accessible technology is easy to procure and adapt, even without the blessings from the CIO. The perception gap is bound to grow wider so long as

Table 6: What are the five biggest challenges to your effectiveness in your role right now?

the IT department does not pander to demands from business or other users who want to possible improvements disruptive IT can bring.

What do the CIOs have to say? Table 7 lists their five biggest concerns, and they are not surprising. At the top are the unrealistic expectations from superiors and possibly from their peers too who hold on to the belief that the CIO should be the one to enable possibly anything they want.

CIOs too have to shoulder the blame to some extent, since they see increasing complexity of the business environment as a concern. They shouldn’t.

Table 7: What are your five biggest concerns about your specific enterprise role right now?

Unrealistic expectations of my ability to further cut costs Increasing complexity of the business environment Inadequate budgets Difficulty in achieving IT integration Overwhelming pace of technology change

Close below these top five concerns are two others: the lack of executive teamwork and sharing of responsibility, and risk and uncertainty due to volatile economic conditions. Executive teamwork is possible only if there is good understanding of one another’s roles—an issue that the CIO has to address. As for accountability, project sponsorships are a way to assign ownership and accountability, but this will again rely on how well understood are all the parties concerned in implementing a project to full success.

Table 8: What are the key roadblocks to IT’s involvement in innovation at your organisation?

2012

2013

IT execs are involved too late in the decision making process

IT execs are too busy maintaining existing systems and infrastructure to innovate IT execs are involved too late in the decision making process

2012

2013

Increasing complexity of the business environment

Difficulty proving the value of IT

The corporate culture does not give enough responsibility to IT to innovate

Difficulty in achieving IT integration

Pressure for cost management and reduction

IT execs are too busy maintaining existing systems and infrastructure to innovate

Inadequate opportunities for IT to communicate innovative ideas

Overwhelming pace of technology change

Inadequate budgets

Risk and uncertainty due to volatile economic conditions

Lack of key technical skill sets within IT

Inadequate opportunities for IT to communicate innovative ideas

The corporate culture does not give enough responsibility to IT to innovate

Inadequate budgets

Unknown/unrealistic expectations from the business

Lack of C-suite confidence in IT’s ability to generate ideas and to innovate

Lack of C-suite confidence in IT’s ability to generate ideas and to innovate

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What hinders the CIO’s path to success? Table 8 tells more or less the same story as last year’s, except that the IT people are seen as being too busy to care about innovation. Again, given the plethora of issues they have to tackle—BYOD, security, mobility, consumerisation of IT—not to mention the push to keep costs down by migrating to cloud services, CIOs can hardly be blamed for not giving others the time of day.

The good news is, late involvement in a key decision-making process has come down a notch, and that augurs well for CIOs’ more intimate relationships with their peers and superiors in the whole flow of things.

On the flip side, CIOs are also spurred on to excel by different factors. Table 9 lists five. Interestingly, interaction with other senior colleagues and business unit leaders is cited as the top catalyst to success, while interest in new technologies is a natural fuel to the CIOs’ interest in all things IT. Only 15.9 percent say their CEOs are the ones directly aiding them forward.

Table 9: What is the primary catalyst for the IT department’s most successful ideas for innovation?

Interaction with CxOs and business unit leaders

49.3%

New technologies

18.8%

Directive from CEO

15.9%

Industry or market forces/trends; competitive pressure

11.6%

Interaction with external customers

4.3%

The View Ahead Last year’s survey was the first time participants were asked about cloud computing in the enterprise space. Table 10 lists the progress CIOs have made in their cloud journey. More than 40 percent of respondents said they would be adopting cloud solutions, since some divisions within their organisations are already cloud-enabled. Still about a quarter of the respondents are holding out on adopting cloud, perhaps because their businesses are of highly regulated nature.

Table 10: At what stage do you think you are at in the adoption of cloud solutions within you organisation?

I will be adopting cloud solutions as some parts of the organisation are already using such solutions

41.2%

No plans to adopt cloud solutions at present

23.5%

I believe I am an early adopter and I am leading the organisation’s adoption of cloud solutions

22.1%

Many parts of the organisation are using cloud solutions and I will be adopting cloud solutions

7.4%

Everyone — as cloud solutions are now common across the organisation

5.9%

Table 11 shows some agreement with the earlier findings on the challenges faced by CIOs and the reasons behind them. The cloud revolution has obviously been an impetus for CIOs to look for more efficient hosting solutions, while business intelligence and analytics remain high on the priority list. Mobile computing is the other, as can be seen with the disruption BYOD trend brings to enterprise IT.

Table 11: Which three technologies/ solutions are you under the greatest pressure to implement?

1.

More efficient hosting solutions

2.

Big Data solutions like business intelligence and analytics

3.

Mobile computing for tablets and hand-held devices

Lastly, Table 12 shows the impact of social media on the enterprise. Not surprisingly, no one is denying the potential that it can bring to enhance the image of the organisation and its brands but legitimate concerns still abound. Security is still number one, and the potential adverse impact social media might bring due to misuse is also another major concern. As for staff productivity, that could be a double-edged sword, as any restriction to access to social media during office hours might backfire.

Table 12: What are your top three concerns in the use of Social Media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogs) within your organisation by staff?

1.

Security

2.

Staff productivity

3.

Corporate branding

Conclusion This year’s survey has taken a slightly different path from the previous ones. As can be seen, cloud computing, social media, disruptive technologies have all contributed to the reshaping of the CIO’s role which is increasingly perceived as less “ITfocused” but more “business-friendly”, if that is the right term to refer to taking a bigger stake in how business should be IT-enabled.

So, given all the signs shown in this survey, the Asian CIOs and CxOs are likely to be facing another challenging year ahead, albeit a little more exciting and more rewarding—if and only if they could be sitting at the same table, seeing eye to eye with their counterparts and solving problems together.

Next year’s survey will have another interesting story to tell.

Definitely.

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cover story

State of the Asian CxO Survey 2013: Demographics Percentage of respondents by country

IT budgets for 2014

1%

Singapore

11%

4%

6%

US$50 million and above

7%

Malaysia

38%

US$5 million to US$9.9 million

23%

Philippines

9%

16%

India

US$1 million to US$4.9 million US$500,000 to US$999,999

7%

Indonesia

32%

US$10 million to US$49.9 million

17%

Hong Kong

28%

US$100,000 to US$499,999 Less than US$100,000

Length of service

6% 1% 3% 13%

To whom do you report?

Board of directors

< 1 year

19%

1 - 5 years

10%

CEO

6 - 10 years

49% 28%

COO

9%

11 - 15 years 16 - 20 years

29%

23%

> 20 years

CFO Group CIO

10%

Others

Percentage of industry types Finance and insurance Healthcare Information technology Manufacturing Transport & logistics 0%

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7.5%

15.0%

22.5%

30.0%

cio summit 2013 hong kong

Transform or Be Stuck in Your Rut Hong Kong’s top information executives convened at the CIO Summit 2013 to discuss technology trends of the year and their future.

By F.Y. Teng here are five big, big trends that CIOs and their ICT organisations have to watch and respond to almost immediately. Failure to act would render them less than strategic to their businesses, and they stand to become purely support organisations with little or no input into what is adopted across their respective enterprises. That’s the message that more than 100 of Hong Kong’s most progressive senior information executives got from Claus Mortensen, Director, Emerging Technology Research, IDC Asia/ Pacific, the first speaker of the day at the second leg of the CIO Summit 2013—a CIO Asia, MIS Asia and IDC Asia/Pacific event for CIOs by CIOs—held at The Mira Hong Kong on 27 August 2013.

Mortensen adumbrated developments Claus Mortensen in the enterprise ICT landscape in the

recent past through the immediate future, elaborated on the challenges these developments bring to ICT leaders, and urged ICT professionals to begin to, if they haven’t already, effect their own transformation, by aggressively tying ICT solutions to business outcomes, and promoting innovation across their organisations.

Citing the latest data from IDC research, Mortensen started his presentation (2013: The Last Call for CIO Transformation) by talking about what his research firm refers to as the “3rd Platform” for IT growth and innovation, which is built on mobile devices, cloud services, social technologies and big data—what IDC refers to as the “four pillars”—and their significance in a world that is increasingly connected and marked by intelligent devices, infrastructures, networks and markets. He followed up by drawing

Data, Networks and Applications

D

irector of Cloud/IT and Enterprise for Asia Pacific at Equinix, Eric Hui, kicked off one of the Thought Leadership Sessions, ‘The DNA of Flexible IT’, with a presentation on what goes into putting together a platform that delivers flexibility, high-performance, security and cost efficiency to the DNA (Data, Networks and Applications) of an organisation’s IT setup.

Hui cited Equinix’s own platform as an example of a highly “flexible IT architecture” that delivers on this DNA promise—not a small feat, considering globally 31 markets, more

2 4

than 900 networks, more than 1,050 cloud and IT providers, and more than 4,000 other enterprise customers actually rely on it for their operations.

According to Hui, the Equinix Platform has data residing on a hybrid cloud, an internal network performance hub that ensures network intelligence and optimisation, and runs applications off a cloud; all of which yield the company “control, flexibility and choice.”

Adrian Dominic Ho, Principal, Telecom Practice, Mobility Lead, IDC Asia/Pacific, followed up with a presentation that covered the maturity of cloud services in Asia, and

o c to b e r - n o v e m b e r 2013 • C I O • w w w.cio - asia.com

the intended results that organisations gain by having in place a “flexible IT” setup: cost optimisation, business agility, the ability to deliver flexible business models, and the realisation of B2B2C opportunities.

Two senior executives—Group IT Director of the Emperor Group Kenneth Lam, and, Assistant Vice President of Technical Services at Sun Life Hong Kong Limited Doris Cheng—rounded up the session when they recounted their personal journeys toward flexible IT at their organisations in the panel discussion.

—F.Y. Teng

up a dichotomy between the current thinking of top business executives and that of top ICT executives. According to the IDC APeJ C-Suite Barometer study: the three top of mind issues for C-suite business executives were finding new customers/ segments, handling the escalating cost of operations and finding new innovations to compete in the wider market; and, that of their ICT counterparts were managing with limited budgets, dealing with growing complexity and varied user needs, and countering the problem of lacking skill sets to effectively execute ICT.

“The World is Changing” The second speaker of the day was Kevin Beck, Worldwide Competitive Analyst with the world’s top PC company, who job it is “to understand Lenovo’s quality, engineering and development and to tell the story of Lenovo’s strengths” and as such meets up with ICT executives “on a weekly basis” to keep close tabs on user trends as they develop.

“The way Lenovo looks at the market going forward is in terms of ‘smart connected devices’—TV sets, phones, tablets and traditional PCs—[and] we encapsulate these things under the term PC+,” he said. “The cloud is also a key element of PC+. Having a smart cloud that is device-aware and enabled for security is a key element of the strategy, as well as other software partners in critical areas like manageability and security.”

Beck moved on to spell out exactly PC+: it is a philosophy in product design that gives users, particularly the new genera-

tion, what they want and their enterprise ICT departments what they need. “Users expect to be connected all the time, and not just connected in the network sense, but also connected via social media to their larger personal networks. They want technology that is easy to use…they want to use devices that work like the ones they have at home.

They want to carry something that looks good,” said Beck, who then went on to cite Kevin Beck the concerns of corporate ICT, as they relate to issues of device manageability, quality and reliability, staff productivity and security. As such, the CIO and his ICT organisation has to “find a provider that provides the right balance,” said Beck, arguing that what was once viewed as a “conflict” between user and ICT should now be viewed as a “confluence” of their requirements.

Cloud and Mobility The main keynote of the day was delivered by Daniel Lai, Government CIO, HKSAR Government, who gave his views on the transformative effect of the cloud and mobility on the way all organisations will be handling ICT provision and management, moving forward. After running through some charts indicating just how rapidly mobile devices will be moving into the enterprise environment in the next three years, and how quickly cloud services spending and adoption will rise in the near future, Lai talked about what he referred to as the “new IT paradigm—Mobile Cloud Computing.”

This new paradigm is one that sees the integration of “cloud computing into a mobile environment,” one that sees “power-

Managed Services Expectations

A

s the first speaker of another Thought Leadership Session, ‘From Flexible Outsourcing to Managed Services’, Kenneth Ma, General Manager, Hong Kong Sales of CITIC Telecom International CPC Limited, talked about the reasons for the typical objectives of outsourcing strategies—to increase agility, to overcome short-term capability deficiencies, and to accommodate the impact of hiring restrictions—and the benefits of running with them— flexibility in hiring cost for temporary requirements, minimal impact on the existing operating model, minimal

contracting effort with a simple cost model, and the ability to scale up or down quickly.

Ma discussed some of the deficiencies of a purely outsourcing model, and shared some mighty “impressive facts about [the] cloud”.

He then spoke on the virtues of going with a managed services model of information services delivery, and showed how doing so with a trusted cloud service provider can yield significant ROI. Next came Adrian Dominic Ho of IDC Asia/Pacific, who talked about how senior information executives consider

managed services to be important to their organisations’ efforts at achieving strategic goals, particularly with respect to lowering operational costs, getting better financial management, driving overall innovation, improving customer satisfaction and hiring top talent.

Ken Chan, Director-Information Technology, Philips-Van Heusen Far East Ltd, then came on stage for the panel discussion during which he recounted his experiences with managed ser vices and his expectations of a provider.

—F.Y. Teng

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cio summit 2013 hong kong ful and centralised cloud computing platforms” that deliver information services to mobile devices anytime and anywhere, he said.

As such, Lai said, the expectations and behaviours of all who are touched by this new paradigm will change dramatically. Customers will expect to have access to “context-aware, location-based services and applications, instant updates and rich content, [and to be able to] complete all daily businesses via mobile phones.” Information workers will expect to “work anytime, anywhere using [their] preferred devices.” And business sponsors will expect to gain “more business opportunities, innovations and agility.”

Business processes will be impacted by these two trends together, said Lai. Cloud and outsourcing strategies, particularly those to do with contractual management and service level monitoring, will have to be reworked to be sufficiently effective. Strategies and policies in the following areas will have to be changed to accommodate the mobile workforce and BYOD: human resource management and talent sourcing; IT provisioning, asset control and management; and, security and privacy.

Lai went on to look at the challenges to do with the technology architecture that is needed to enable Mobile Cloud Computing at an enterprise. These included those of managing the diversity of application platforms and end-user devices and the use of a mobile network for mission-critical and content-rich services, which altogether must add to requisite demands of a standard enter-

prise security framework. He then talked in depth about how a senior information executive can go about addressing all these issues on the people, processes and technology fronts.

On the “people” front, his advice is to accept that change is a constant (and forever will be), that continuous improvements and updates will be the “norm” and that collaboration is “the key.”

On the “processes” front, Lai said to put in place an “agile process for enhancing the business running model,” to take on an “iterative approach with constant reviews and refinements,” and to go by a “strategic plan” that “embodies an iterative launch cycle, focusing on small, progressive but specific targets.” On the “technology” front, he argued for the adoption of “an open, standard-based architecture” that delivers “generic and transparent access”, placing emphasis on focusing “limited resources on the best opportunities,” and the adoption of “a risk-based approach in selecting the technical solutions.”

Real Time, Visible Transformation

Daniel Lai

In his presentation—Turn Machine-generated Data into Real-time Business Insights—the second sponsor speaker on stage, Andy Ho, Product Marketing Manager at Splunk, took the audience on a journey through the use cases of some of the world’s most successful companies.

“There are four macro forces shaping the IT environment—the cloud, mobile, the Internet of Things and big data,” he said. “[And] Splunk is in a unique position to take advantage of these forces, and our commitment is to deliver significant value to our customers so that they can

New Security Landscape

O

ne of the Thought Leadership sessions was themed, ‘Growing Business in New Security Landscape’. Jones Leung, Systems Engineering Manager, Greater China, of Palo Alto Networks, took the stage to talk about new approaches to enterprise security, and emphasised four key areas to focus on.

Given that virtualisation and cloud computing are transforming the business landscape, there is urgent need to move away from conventional ways of tackling IT security. Leung proposed that organisations first look at innovative solutions that could

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“safe-enable” applications for certain services but still remain separate from one another in accessing different types of data.

The second is simplification and consolidation of user policies so that the entire security platform is not overburdened with complex and difficult to manage policies.

Third is working with security partners who could provide good coverage with superb assistance. He cautioned that organisations should work with those with consistently good track records.

Claus Mortensen of IDC Asia/

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Pacific next touched on the key ICT challenges confronting CIOs in the Asia Pacific. While limited budgets and growing complexity and varied user requirements are the top two issues, he said security is still amongst the top three concerns of CIOs and business owners alike.

Carol Lee, Cyber Risk Manager with CLP Holdings in Hong Kong, joined the stage during the question-and-answer session with Jones Leung and Claus Mortensen. When asked about getting users trained on security issues, Lee said it should not be overlooked. ­— T.C. Seow

benefit.” Ho soon after homed in on his main topic. “Machine data contains a rich vein of information–but you have to be able to connect the dots,” he said before moving onto the case study of one of his customers Vodafone, which managed to gain real-time visibility across its operational infrastructure, and dramatically improve its first call resolution times, reduced escalations by 90 percent and delivered 67 percent faster problem resolutions than previously.

The case of salesforce.com was cited next. “Salesforce had limited visibility and slow response to inbound customer calls,” Ho said. “The support team relied on a legacy log mining system that took hours to run queries.” With Splunk, salesforce.com reduced the time taken to troubleshoot support issues by 96 percent, heightened application performance substantially and delivered better experience to its more than 100,000 customers.

Another customer that Ho talked about was the global food and beverage maker, Pepsico, which was rolling out a new distributed order management infrastructure that leveraged handheld mobile computers for its more than 6,500 representatives. Salespeople were to be given the ability to confirm pricing, deal, and place orders for refills or returns in real time.

Today, the setup sees to 7.5 million new orders a day and gives relevant executives complete visibility across Pepsico’s various order management systems.

Growing the Next Generation Rounding up the main plenary session was Dr. Andy Chun, CIO of the City University of Hong Kong (CityU), whose presentation ‘Nurturing Next Generation Professionals: Challenges of a Higher Ed CIO’ took the audience through the objectives

Andy Chun

Andy Ho

of higher education today and the challenges associated with meeting them.

Specifically, he explained why fostering a new generation of knowledge workers requires a reevaluation of how teaching/learning should be done, and why future business and government leaders will need a different set of skill sets. He also shared CityU’s vision of continually using enhanced technology to create a new learning experience for Hong Kong’s future professionals.

CityU’s vision has moved through quite a few rounds of transformation through the years, according to Dr Chun. In 2006, it was focused on outcome-based teaching/learning; in 2008, 334 New Curriculum—which is student centred, and stressed whole person development, offering multiple pathways and avenues for life-long learning; and, in 2010, on a Discovery-Enriched Curriculum.

In all that time through to the present, CityU has rolled out services across its infrastructures, using advanced technologies such as those in mobility, as well as cloud capabilities.

The New Cloud Economics

W

hile the intent to invest in the cloud is strong, foundational gaps still exist when it comes to how organisations architect for the cloud, develop skill sets to handle it, build governance models and security frameworks, said Manish Pratap, General Manager, Cloud Business Unit, at Dimension Data Asia Pacific at another Thought Leadership Session, ‘Cloud—The New Economics of IT’. “When CIOs look at moving into cloud, they are looking at apps and what can be moved into the cloud. The trick is to find the right model with the right work

environment,” he said. According to Manish, CIOs are increasingly looking at cloud computing and IT as a service where dashboards provide comprehensive views of various resources. One differentiation of a dependable cloud service provider is its willingness to be audited by third parties, because “when you get into consistent audit of a cloud provider, that kind of shows its willingness to expose its architecture, policies, and operations to scrutiny,” he said.

Claus Mortensen of IDC Asia/ Pacific next talked about how new business demands are driving new

ICT infrastructure. In particular, the need to accelerate business, simplify IT, reduce costs and reduce risks is forcing CIOs to look at various ways to move to the cloud to realise these goals. He said based on findings by IDC, one could save money with cloud.

Liven Varghese, Group IT Director with SgT Group, joined the stage during the question-and-answer session. When asked why some organisations are still reluctant to move to the cloud, he said the main reason is security, followed by a lack of understanding of the technology.

—T.C. Seow

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the interview

Answering the Call to

Public Duty After an illustrious 45-year career in the private sector, Hong Kong’s CIO Daniel Lai opted for public service and is now leading the charge for ICT-enabled collaboration across borders and onto the cloud.

A

By F.Y. Teng

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very short biography of Daniel Lai would tell us that he is a veteran ICT professional who worked in the utilities, gaming and transport industries and the number of years he spent in each, before taking on the job of the CIO of the Government of Hong Kong in 2012. That would not do justice to the man’s body of work throughout his career. For starters, it leaves out the sheer volume and quality of initiatives he has seen through completion in Hong Kong and across borders for 45 years now, and his role in changing the landscape of the information and communication technology (ICT) industry, in the construction of essential ICT infrastructures and in the development of ICT talent in the Special Administrative Region (SAR).

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By the time Lai entered his office—located on the 20th floor of Central Government Offices in Tamar, Hong Kong—he had racked up a decade at the Hong Kong Electric Company Ltd, two decades at the Hong Kong Jockey Club, and 13 years at MTR Corporation Ltd. These are timeframes within which he had accomplished more than a few massive projects, including but not restricted to: setting up a complete operations infrastructure for the HKJC in Australia in the 1990s; spearheading a slew of initiatives at MTR, which all produced award-winning (for e.g. multiple CIO Awards by CIO Asia, IT Excellence Awards by MIS Asia) and more importantly business-generating solutions in deployment to this day; and leading the complex and difficult ICT integration and consolidation works behind the MTR and Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation (KCRC) merger.

In that time, through his active involvement in the Hong Kong Computer Society, he had also played key leading roles in the development of ICT talent, the promotion of enterprise and personal ICT deployment and use, and the growth of the ICT industry in Hong Kong. Indeed, given his standing and contribution to Hong Kong all these years, it always seemed inevitable that he would be called for the SAR’s top ICT job.

Given his noble aspirations and desire to contribute to Hong Kong, it was only natural that he would accept that call. And so he did, finally, almost two years ago.

We had the honour of an interview with him a few months back, wherein he told us about the state of ICT in Hong Kong, challenges in his new role, his plans moving forward, some key lessons he’s learnt in his professional career to date, and why he accepted the role of the Hong Kong Government CIO (HKGCIO).

Below is the expurgated transcript of that interview.

In your evaluation, how is Hong Kong’s ICT industry doing?

In terms of IT infrastructure, Hong Kong is doing extremely well. Mobile phone penetration is at 23 percent (Note: Latest figure as at June 2013). Household fixed broadband penetration is at 85 percent (Note: Latest figure as at June 2013—www.gov.hk/en/about/abouthk/factsheets/docs/telecommunications.pdf). And very recently, Hong Kong’s average broadband peak connection speeds became the fastest in the world, at 57.5 megabits per second, beating South Korea [which registered 49.3Mbps]. (Akamai State of the Internet Report Q4 2012.)

In terms of ICT talent, we have 78,000 ICT professionals.

However, we are seeing a drop in the number of students taking up IT-related subjects in secondary schools. So we are continuing our work on encouraging more secondary school students to pursue a career in the industry.

In terms of application development, I think Hong Kong has been doing very well in the area of mobile apps. We are seeing a

lot of very innovative ideas coming from startups. And we have companies like Cherrypicks [mobile marketing firm], which is gaining a lot of global recognition.

What are you charged with doing as the HKGCIO? One of my responsibilities is to promote the ICT industry in Hong Kong. I do that in a number of ways through my office.

My mission, the mission of the government, is to first of all deliver effective and citizen-centric services for the public.

Second is to cultivate and develop ICT talent in Hong Kong, ensuring we have continued competency and professionalism.

Third is to develop a vibrant ICT industry. Fourth is to develop Hong Kong as a prime spot on the globe for data centre location, cloud computing services and mobile application development. And last but not least is to help build a digitally inclusive and knowledge-based society; digital inclusion, bridging the digital divide, is a significant part of my job.

The typical term of the HKGCIO is three years, so you no doubt must have been approached for the post numerous times before in the last decade, without accepting it, of course. Why did you say yes to it this time around in 2011?

This time I felt that in my 13 years with MTR, we had done a lot and gone through a lot. When I started with the company it was fairly staid, institutional. Then it went IPO. Then the merger with KCRC happened, even as we expanded overseas running operations in Melbourne, Stockholm and further into China. Along the way, as our business grew and evolved, we made sure technology not only worked to support but in part drive its growth and transformation.

As this government post came up again in 2011, I thought about what had been done in my 13 years at MTR and wondered that if I were to stay on for another 13 years at the company what else we would be doing. Also, at the time I had done almost all the recommendations for the China projects, so pretty much we had done what we set out to do, and most of what was left was running another round of system replacements, which would not have been as exciting.

In turn, I looked at the Government CIO position. It was much, much broader and the scale it offered was larger. For instance, at MTR we typically ran about 60 projects concurrently, and in government we are now running concurrently more than 600 projects—so the scale we are dealing with now in government is 10 times that of one of the private sector’s most aggressive ICT users.

Then there’s the appeal of pursuing a public mission. Public service is something I had been doing for a number of years, and I believed that if I were to put all my energy into it, I could do a good job of helping to steer Hong Kong’s ICT. Also, I asked myself one question: Should I be retiring?

No. I think I’m still too energetic and I still want to continue working. So why not use my next few years to do something

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the interview

“The role is more gratifying to me on a personal level because I get to contribute a lot more from what I know and what I’ve learnt in my career to Hong Kong society and to the ICT industry here.”

— Daniel Lai, CIO, Government of Hong Kong

different, where I can exercise bigger positive impact on the community?

Certainly, that’s the biggest reason for my decision to move.

The role is definitely not financially more rewarding, but it’s more gratifying to me on a personal level because I get to contribute a lot more from what I know and what I’ve learnt in my career to Hong Kong society and to the ICT industry here.

For instance, I believe that with my recent experience in the mainland, I can more effectively help foster better cooperation and collaboration between the ICT industries of Hong Kong and the mainland. Another area in which I can be more effective is in driving ICT adoption by small and medium enterprises [SMEs] in Hong Kong, getting them to improve their competitiveness and productivity through the smart use of ICT. By extension that would also help Hong Kong’s economic development as a whole.

Have you found your experience and the skills you acquired through the years at HKJC and then MTR particularly useful for your present job?

Yes. For starters, I’m comfortable working with volume and scale. If we’re talking about HKJC, there we had a million punters, our customers, people our IT served. At MTR, initially we were serving around 2.8 million passengers a day, but with the KCRC merger in 2007, that’s increased to four million. So then I was responsible for ICT systems that were highly elastic and scalable to serve a sizable portion of the mass public. Now with the government, the job is a matter of serving all the seven million citizens of Hong Kong.

My previous appointments at both HKJC and MTR provided me with the ability to lead large-scale projects and design very reliable, resilient and secure ICT infrastructures that can support large volumes of transactions. Those skills, again, are very useful in the government context, because

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most of our systems are pretty large systems and our ICT infrastructure is by necessity robust and secure. I recall my time with HKJC, where we at one point built very advanced, state-of-the-art ICT infrastructure and systems meant to withstand very high stress and volume. My experience there has helped me design systems that are very robust and secure for the public.

Then there’s the way we ran projects at HKJC and MTR and the culture of both organisations—they are similar to the government context now. The two organisations were pretty institutional, after all, when I joined them. At the HKJC, we worked under very strict discipline and integrity was of primary importance. MTR started out as an organisation wholly owned by the government, and—even though it went IPO in 2001—is still majority owned by the government [with a 77 percent shareholding].

At these two organisations we worked through papers and committees—just as we do in government. In fact, the papers that we submit, the formats are very much similar. So I already had that sort of experience. Of course, before joining government, I had already sat on quite a lot of government committees in an advisory role, and that made me even more familiar with how government works.

Talk about your first year as Hong Kong’s CIO and your transition from MTR to government.

The job deals with a much broader set of issues because of the diversity. Consider the work involved in seeing through ICT initiatives. Of course, when it comes down to doing actual implementation work, I think it has not been different here.

In terms of ICT implementation—dealing with the vendors, dealing with service providers—I’m handling more or less the same set of issues here as elsewhere. So it hasn’t been too difficult with respect to that.

But you cannot simply conclude by saying that IT projects are after all just projects. The truth is the discipline can be

the scope of related laws and regulations”], which we completed last year.

Right now, one particular area we’re particularly keen on exploring together is cloud computing—we’re constantly looking for opportunities to collaborate on the cloud.

very different when you’re working in government. Within a company, you’re essentially working with different parts of the same organisation, and each department or division is aligned with one albeit broad set of corporate goals. But the scale and complexities within a government setup makes that alignment work more demanding. Within government, there are multitudes of departments, and their nature of work and cultures can be very different. So it’s even more intensive work coming to an understanding of their needs and getting to know the people you’re working with.

Then there are other responsibilities that you would find very rare opportunities to learn in the private sector. One example is the work of facilitating data centre development in Hong Kong. Of course, it is nothing like building a data centre for ourselves. It is coming up with appropriate measures to attract overseas companies to set up data centres here, and facilitating their efforts here—such as helping them find land or convert buildings into data centres. We have a dedicated team providing a one-stop shop to do that work, which goes beyond facilitation and support and actually extends somewhat into marketing, promoting Hong Kong as a data centre investment destination.

Another example is in the area of Mainland collaboration, working with our counterparts in the Mainland through a Hong Kong-Guangdong cooperation framework. An instance of this is the Hong Kong/Guangdong Expert Group on Co-operation in Informatisation, which is jointly led by my counterpart in Guangdong and I, and which crafts measures that facilitate the entry of Hong Kong IT companies to the Mainland and that of Mainland companies to Hong Kong, and other collaborative efforts, such as the facilitation of mutual recognition of electronic signature certificates [that sees to the legal protection of such certificates in Hong Kong and Guangdong “within

Please tell us more about what you’re spearheading on the cloud front.

The government is taking the role of leader, facilitator and sponsor when it comes to the cloud. We have established an expert group on cloud services and standards. In the past year, we have done quite a bit. The response from the public, the market, has been good. We put out a call for proposals for public cloud services last year. In the middle of this year we already had a catalogue of more than 300 types of services by 40 service providers for the various agencies within government.

Another initiative is putting e-government services onto a cloud platform—essentially an infrastructure-as-a-service platform. Because this platform is more elastic, we can provide increasingly more services off it as we move forward. We have already started this.

The third initiative is creating the government cloud platform, which is a platform for shared services. This is a private cloud from which we’ll be providing services to around 30 departments, and from where they can share common applications, such as human resource management, electronic information management, e-procurement and e-invoicing. We awarded the tender in March to Atos, which will be the service provider for this platform.

Beyond just enabling government to provide better public services, these three initiatives that I’ve been pushing along are also intended to facilitate the growth of cloud adoption across the different sectors of Hong Kong. Through them government sets an example in successful cloud deployment, communicates that to the citizens and industries of Hong Kong, and then connects the providers with the users and customers.

We have developed a portal—InfoCloud [infocloud. gov.hk]—through which we are doing a lot of things, from organising seminars, workshops and conferences on the cloud, to hosting content on checklists and best practices for cloud deployment, including a practice guide for SMEs that we actually spent a lot of time developing.

And through the expert committee on cloud services we are always working with our counterparts in Guangdong, exploring how we could use the cloud to benefit our respective communities. We consider matters such as having a cloud standard that applies to both Hong Kong and Guangdong—that’s facilitating industry, giving industry from either territory the opportunity to gain market entry into the other.

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DATA

points A total of 25.2 million phablets, or smartphones with screen sizes between five and seven inches, were shipped in Asia Pacific excluding Japan in the second quarter of 2013, as compared to 12.6 million tablets, and 12.7 million portable PCs. — Research firm IDC

Eighty percent of cities in China have failed to strike a balance between economic growth, resource efficiency and sustainable development.

— Study by Accenture and the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Worldwide China was ranked second in disruptive breakthrough technologies and 37 percent of technology executives surveyed worldwide said the country displayed the most potential for disruptive breakthroughs. Ten percent of technology executives selected India placing it at the third position. Only three percent of global respondents see Singapore as a country for disruptive technology-breakthroughs.

— KPMG 2013 Global Technology Innovation Survey

The Asia Pacific excluding Japan’s connected machine-to-machine market ecosystem is predicted to grow 127 percent from US$3 billion in 2012 to US$6.8 billion in 2017.

— Research firm IDC

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Malaysia’s smartphone penetration has increased 300 percent since 2011, when just one in 10 Malaysians owned a smartphone, as more than one out of three now own a smartphone. ­ Research by Google, — conducted by Ipsos MediaCT