CIO April 2011 Issue by Sreekanth Sastry

VOL/06 | iSSUE/06 sujOy bhramaChari, Hero Honda; lins paul, Honeywell; and neeraj gupta, Ballarpur industries cultivate three key traits to be future CiOs.

business

teChnOlOgy

leadership

Staffing Survey: Why attrition could hit unacceptable levelS Page 52

ONES O N S TO WATCH T Thirty of this year’s hottest IT talents and the three skills your IT staffers need to get in their shoes. Page 36

ApRiL 15, 2011 | `100.00 ww w.CIO.IN

Cover_April2011_Final.indd 84

VieW fRoM The Top V.S.S. Mani on how iT is fixing JustDial’s big problem.

Redefining Cash CRops The iT project that will transform Godrej Agrovet.

page 66

page 60

4/8/2011 8:04:38 PM

The past ten years have been a period of enormous growth for network-enabled devices. However, as the technology has advanced, the demand has increased exponentially. The truth is, without radical innovation and new thinking, the network itself is likely to break– either through the impossible operating costs of maintaining the infrastructure or by the inability of complex, proprietary, solutions to meet the demand. It’s time for a new approach. And it starts with a new philosophy.

A NEW INDUSTRY APPROACH TO INNOVATION Overcoming these challenges demands rethinking the closed, siloed approach to networking of the last ten years. In fact, the old way of doing things can prevent innovation—the investment and brainpower is locked within proprietary initiatives instead of being pooled and harnessed as a collective effort. In other words, innovation suffers and the customer pays for it.

Amazing partners like NTT Communications, Lockheed Martin and Harris Stratex have already taken our Junos building blocks and are developing next-generation network applications the will literally change the economics of networking.

Fixing this broken model won’t come from the standard practice of acquisition without integration and other complexity causing tactics of the last decade. It will only happen through an ecosystem of development in which advances come from collaboration and partnership. To do that you need a common platform. And that’s where Junos® comes in.

NEW THINKING ENABLES NEW PARTNERSHIPS

JUNOS: THE OPEN PLATFORM FOR DEVELOPMENT

Nerw technology liek the 3D network. Enabled by Junos and the Junos Trio chipset, the 3D network sees the network by category and can flex up or down to accommodate changes in bandwidth, subscribers and services. No other network router can do it like ours.

While many know Junos as the software that runs on Juniper-designed routers, switches and security devices, it’s actually much more than that. The true essence of Junos comes from designing our software to work with our silicon, our silicon to work with our software and our systems architecture to work with both. No one else looks at or designs networks in this way. And this open approach to networking is the way a Juniper solution is the perfect common design for partner innovation.

NEW THINKING CREATES NEW APPLICATIONS To help foster the next-generation of network innovation, we’ve released the Junos SDK and introduced Junos Space and Junos Pulse.

The addition of these two new extensions to Junos enables an endto-end software environment that allows for innovation anywhere the network lives.

We are proud to have Dell, IBM, and Blade Network Technologies as founding partners, who have selected Junos for solutions in their product portfolios.

NEW THINKING DRIVES NEW TECHNOLOGY

THE TIME IS NOW The Junos Platform and this new approach to innovation will enable vast business opportunity, incredible cost savings and unprecedented quality of service. Simply put, a network that’s built on Junos is a network that’s ready for innovation, ready for opportunity and ready for the future. The new network is here. And it runs on Junos.

Because right-sized data centre infrastructure is good business strategy Optimize your cash flow and efficiency with our scalable, flexible, and adaptable InfraStruxure Introducing Next Generation InfraStruxure

Whether you just acquired a new company or must increase its ever-expanding customer or inventory database capacity, you’re most likely facing pressing demands on your company’s IT infrastructure. Your existing data centre infrastructure may not be able to handle these up-to-the-minute changes. That’s where APC by Schneider Electric™ steps in with its proven high-performance, scalable, data centre infrastructure. As the industry’s one-of-a-kind, truly modular, adaptable, and ‘on-demand’ data centre system, only InfraStruxure™ ensures that your data centre can adapt effectively, efficiently, and, perhaps most important, quickly, to business changes.

InfraStruxure data centres mean business

We say that InfraStruxure data centres mean business. But what does that mean to you? The answer is simple. A data centre means business when it is always available, 24/7/365, and performs at the highest level at all times, is able to grow at the breakneck speed of business, lets you add capacity without waiting on logistical delays (e.g., work orders), enables IT and facilities to keep pace with the business in a synchronized way, continues to achieve greater and greater energy efficiency—from planning through operations, is able to grow with the business itself; and supports— instead of hinders—business.

The triple promise of InfraStruxure deployment

InfraStruxure fulfils our triple promise of superior quality, which ensures highest availability; speed, which ensures easy and quick alignment of IT to business needs; and cost savings based on energy efficiency. What better way to ‘mean business’ than to enable quality, speed, and cost savings—simultaneously?

4 2 1

Contents 1 2 7 7 9 10

The only right-sized data centre architecture engineered as a system 1 Cooling. Rack-, row-, and room-based cooling options, including new overhead InRow™ cooling units, for greater efficiency 2 Management. End-to-end monitoring and management software for greater efficiency and availability 3 Physical Security. A single-seat view for monitoring and surveillance across the facility. 4 Power. Modular power distribution and parallelling capabilities on UPS for loads from 10 kW to 2 MW 5 Rack Systems. Any-IT vendor-compatible rack enclosures and accessories for high densities

Classification of Data Centre Operations Technology (OT) Management Tools

> Executive summary

Discover which physical infrastructure management tools you need to operate your data centre…download White Paper #104 today! Visit www.apc.com/promo Key Code 87767t Call 1800-4254-877/ 272

©2011 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric, APC, InRow, and InfraStruxure are trademarks owned by Schneider Electric Industries SAS or its affiliated companies. e-mail: esupport@apc.com • 132 Fairgrounds Road, West Kingston, RI 02892 USA • 998-5038_IN

From The Editor-in-Chief

Publisher, President & CEO Louis D’Mello E d i to r i a l Editor-IN-CHIEF Vijay Ramachandran EXECUTIVE EDITOR Gunjan Trivedi Features Editor Sunil Shah Senior Copy Editor Shardha Subramanian Senior correspondent Sneha Jha CorrespondentS Anup Varier, Varsha Chidambaram trainee Journalist Debarati Roy Product manager Online Sreekant Sastry

Tech Conundrum

Most organizations have some brush with tech failures, yet little happens by way of introspection. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. —George Santayana

Over the past two decades, I have watched as rooms for data entry switched from near freezing temperatures to those that didn’t require sweaters; server rooms transformed into datacentres. I have observed precision cooling replace the esoteric practice of sticking a pedestal fan next to partly dismantled server housing. From thinking that a 9600 baud modem was cat’s whiskers to bandwidth on demand, we’ve sure come a long way. In all of this time, I have glimpsed brilliance in the way that IT is used and deployed, and I have seen some spectacular disappointments as well. Take ERP, for instance. Years ago, organizations got into it for few typical reasons: Because they believed it would transform the way they worked; because their BPR consultant told them to; because their rival was deploying it. Given that many organizations were fuzzy about what they could realistically derive from it, it’s no surprise that we saw some stunning failures. All of them could be distilled down to issues related to end-user resistance; customization; an overwhelming duration of deployment and a huge bill. And yet in most organizations where ERP had failed, I saw little attempt at introspection or at even figuring out whether it necessary at their stage of organizational maturity. Incredibly, I see the same issues even today when BI, cloud, CRM or social media come up for discussion. After going over the many deployments fair and foul that I have studied, my conclusions are thus: Business imperatives mean more than buzzwords ever will. The most expensive solution is not necessarily the best. Conversely, the least expensive might not do as well. Bad processes when automated will only produce bad results. Technology is never the big problem. People who use it are. What do you feel?

Custo m Pu b l i s h i n g Principal Correspondent Aditya Kelekar Senior Correspondent Gopal Kishore Design & Production Lead Designers Jinan K V, Jithesh C.C, Vikas kapoor Senior Designers Unnikrishnan.AV Designers Amrita C Roy trainee designers Sabrina Naresh, Visaka Vardhan Chief Photographer Srivatsa Shandilya Production Manager T K Karunakaran Ev e n t s & A u d i e n c e D e v e l op m e n t VP Rupesh Sreedharan Senior program Managers Chetan Acharya, Pooja Chhabra program Manager Ajay Adhikari Assistant Manager Tharuna Paul Management trainee Ramya Menon Sales & Marketing President Sales & Marketing Sudhir Kamath VP Sales Sudhir Argula General manager Sales Parul Singh AGM BRAND Siddharth Singh SR. manager Marketing Rohan Chandhok Manager Sales Kalyan Basu Minaz Adenwala Pooja Nayak Varun Dev Asst. Manager Sales Ajay S. Chakravarthy Asst. Manager Brand Disha Gaur Associate Marketing Dinesh P Ad Sales Coordinator Nadira Hyder Finance & Admin Financial Controller Sivaramakrishnan T P Deputy Manager Accounts Sasi Kumar V Asst. Manager Credit Control Prachi Gupta

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission from the publisher. Address requests for customized reprints to IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India. IDG Media Private Limited is an IDG (International Data Group) company.

Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief vijay_r@cio.in 2

a p r i l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

Content,Editorial,Colophone.indd 2

Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027. Editor: Louis D’Mello Printed at Manipal Press Ltd., Press Corner, Tile Factory Road, Manipal, Udupi, Karnataka - 576 104.

IDG Offices in India are listed on the next page Vol/6 | ISSUE/06

4/11/2011 3:57:14 PM

From The governing board

gOV e rn i n g bOa r d alOk kumar VP & Global Head-Internal IT& Shared Services, TCS amrita gangOtra Director-IT (India & South Asia), Bharti Airtel

let’s Talk Business The difference between a business CIo and every another CIo is the latter’s limited ‘IT-only’ mindset. For any partnership to prosper, it is imperative that the partners in question are truly aligned. And this applies to the business-IT relationship as well. In most mature organizations, IT is a business function, not a mere enabler. I believe that unless organizations treat their CIOs as business leaders and seek their participation, they aren’t leveraging the potential that technology can deliver to both the top and bottom lines. Hence, the logical question is: How can CIOs truly align IT with business and transform into business CIOs? The answer is simple: It is extremely important for CIOs to start thinking and talking in business language and not limit themselves with an ‘IT-only’ mindset. Otherwise, the transition to a business CIO’s role can be quite painful. To alleviate the pain in such a transition, CIOs should consider the following aspects: From Technology to Sociology: In order to drive consistent business value, CIOs need to socialize more with business leaders. They need to uproot communication barriers and identify avenues to create opportunities for alignment. Generally, CIOs fail to communicate success stories. I believe strongly that both internal and external communication is important for successful alignment of IT with business. Set Up the Right Enterprise Architecture: A robust architecture removes complexities and makes driving transformation easier. It not only cuts time-to-market and costs, but also helps CIOs to create customer delight and increase operational efficiency. Drive Change and Innovation: CIOs have to evolve from Chief Information Officers to being Change and Innovation Officers. Organizations, where CIOs are catalysts of change and innovation, see IT as a business partner as CIOs gain more credibility and respect. From Cost Center to Value Creator: A successful business CIO will always look at value first and then cost. IT should focus more on supporting business results and not technology outcomes. Ideally, IT initiatives should be such that they create opportunities for IT to pay for itself. The transformation of CIOs from technology stewards to business leaders is a painful process but it is possible through consistent focus and execution. In my view, CIOs should readily embrace changes and continuously focus on transforming into business CIOs. After all, in an ever-changing world, change is the only constant.

anil khOPkar GM (MIS) & CIo, Bajaj Auto atul Jayawant a President Corporate IT & Group CIo, Aditya Birla Group C.n. ram Group CIo, Essar Group deVesh mathur Chief Technology & Services officer, HSBC gOP shukla gOPal VP-Business Systems, Hindustan Coca-Cola manish ChOksi Chief-Corporate Strategy & CIo, Asian Paints murali krishna k SVP & Group Head CCD, Infosys Technologies naV a in Chadha aV IT Director, Vodafone Essar Pra ir VOhra PraV Group Chief Technology officer, ICICI Bank raJeeV batra CIo, Sistema Shyam Teleservices (MTS India) raJesh uPPal uPP Executive officer IT & CIo, Maruti Suzuki India s. anantha sayana Head-Corporate IT, L&T sanJay Jain CIo & Head Global Transformation Practice, WNS Global Services sunil mehta Sr. VP & Area Systems Director (Central Asia), JWT V.V.r. babu Group CIo, ITC

Bangalore: Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027, Phone: 080-3053 0300, Fax: 3058 6065

Navin Chadha is IT Director of Vodafone Essar. To comment on this article go tot the online version at www.cio.in/mentor

a p R i l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

Delhi: New Bridge Buisness Centers, 5th and 6th Floor, Tower-B, Technolopolis. Golf Course Road, Sector 54 Gurgaon- 122002, Haryana Phone: 0124-4626256, Fax: 0124-4375888 Mumbai: 201, Madhava, Bandra Kurla Complex,Bandra (E), Mumbai 400 051, Phone: 022-3068 5000, Fax: 2659 2708

VoL /6 | ISSUE/06

conten ntts APRIL 15, 2011 | VOL/6 | ISSUE/06

CIO's 4th ANNuAL

ONEstO

Case Files 60 | godrej agrovet erP The IT project that increased the profits of farmers and Godrej Agrovet—and could reduce India’s dependence on imported palm oil.

WAtCh

Feature by sneha Jha

63 | Fleetwood enterprises iT managemenT T Not until filing for bankruptcy and selling off parts of the company did it realize the value of its IT group. Feature by kim s. nash

CoVER: PHoToGRAPH BY SHEKHAR GH oSH / CoVER DESIGN BY UNNI KRI SHN AN AV

36 | leadership Cover STorY | Ones TO WaTch With each phase of the IT evolution, CIOs must re-invent themselves to survive and prosper. We identity three skills—and the people that represent them—that future CIOs must have. Features by t team CiO

64 | Fullerton auTomaTion Fullerton shrank the time it took to approve a loan from 18 days to six days and saved Rs 10 crore. This is how. Feature by debarati roy

48 | Ones to Watch profiles

6 6

Cover STorY PluS | sTaff ManageMenT Our 30 Ones to Watch winners come from a wide range of backgrounds, but all share a passion and a talent for leadership. byteam team CiO t

52 | CiO Staffing Survey Cover STorY PluS | sTaff ManageMenT IT departments haven’t scaled up to meet the needs of the upturn, and as a result a sizeable chunk of CIOs say they are understaffed. Overworked and underpaid, IT staffers are likely to move. In the meanwhile, CIOs are working to check the attrition dam. But can their strategies fix the problem? byteam team CiO t vieW From The ToP:

VoL/6 | ISSUE/06

"it has helped us turnaround dynamic business needs in considerably short spans of time," says V.s.s. mani, Founder & CeO, Justdial.

REAL CIO WORLD | a p R i l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

contents

(cont.) departments 2 | From the editor-in-Chief tech Conundrum t By Vijay Ramachandran

4 | From the Governing Board CIO Role | Let’s Talk Business Navin Chadha, Vodafone Essar

16 | alert Mobile security ecurity | 9 Tips to Protect Mobile Staff | What Security Auditors Really Think Risk

56| Big Data’s Big promise

77 | essential technology

FeaTure | buSineSS inTelligenCe

Hadoop and other tools can unlock critical insights from unfathomable volumes of corporate and external data—change the way organization’s look at business intelligence. Feature by eric knorr

Columns

Videoconferencing | The Real Illusion Apps | Collaboration SharePoint Style

84 | What We’re reading Book Review | Buy-in By Vijay Ramachandran

| Tabling Strategy STraTegiC Cio | Some CIOs complain that IT department performance 24

and project status dominate discussions with the CEO. If you want to change the conversation to IT's role in innovation and strategy, consider these five issues. Column by Chris Curran

| Taking Your Team Forward

underCover oFFiCer Juggling the needs of top performers and lessseasoned team members can be difficult, but it’s critical to everyone’s growth. Column by Anonymous

| good Consultants, bad Consultants Think Tank | There are all kinds of consultants out there. But here's what 30

separates the helpful ones from the deadweight. Column by John halamka

A P R I l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

3 4

alTernaTive vieWS: should you be tablet-ready? From Apple’s iPad to RIM’s Playbook, tablets seem like the flavor of the season. Should organizations prep for it already?

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Cio online

.in CiO adverTiSer index

alcatel lucent - EMG

[ CI O NEWsLEt t ERs ]

Cisco Systems

let information Come to you

Hp Storage

32 & 33 3

Hp Converge infrastructure

Stay updated with world events and find out what's new in the world of technology. Sign up for our newsletters: CIO World, (for daily updates) and CIO Focus (specific to cloud and virtualization). Visit www.cio.in

9 & 10 28 & 29

Juniper Networks india

iFC & Flap

Microsoft Corporation (i) Cover Gate fold & pg 25 Raritan asia pacific inc.

insert

Ricoh india

Riverbed

iBC

Schneider Electric

Singapore Telecommunications Tata Consultancy Services

19 & 20 69 to 76

Trend Micro

Tulip Telecom Vodafone Essar

[ DE BAt E ]

[ BO O K CLu B ]

should Organizations get tablet-ready?

Conversation starter

We invited two CIOs to kick-start a debate on tablets. Read all about it in Alternate Views (page 34). Which side are you on? We also have more debates for you on www.cio.in Is Now a Good time to Move to the Cloud? Ayes Vs Nays Which Cloud Model is Better? Private Vs Hybrid

>> www.cio.in/cio-debates

BC 22 & 23

Books have been known to spark conversations and on page 84 you can find the genesis of one. learn what your peers think of a book and then visit the all new CIO Book Club section online and join the conversation with your peers.

>>www.cio.in/bookclub

[ Bus INEss

t RANs FORMAt ION ]

enterprise Feng shui

Find out how Intelent Global Services re-tooled its enterprise architecture and positively impacted the company's EBITDA.

>> www.cio.in must read @ cio.in 8

>> Alert: What Security Auditors Really Think >> Column: Tabling Strategy >> Feature: What Big Data Can Do For You

a p R i l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

Corrigendum In our March 15, 2011 issue, (pages 48-49) two of Tarun Pandey's views were misinterpreted. He believes that governance at a cloud providerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s end is probably better than enterprise security. And private clouds could find it hard to match the flexibility of hybrid clouds. The errors are regretted.

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

VoL /6 | ISSUE/06

SIMPLIFY your journey to private cloud with the power of convergence.

HP Converged Infrastructure simplifies and accelerates what’s next for private cloud on HP BladeSystem Matrix.

CMY

With IT Sprawl, businesses are at the breaking point. With one-touch provisioning of service in minutes-rather than days or months- HP BladeSystem Matrix powered by Intel® Xeon® Processor 5600 series can provide a self-service portal, where shared resources can be dynamically scaled to enable faster deployment on Private Cloud. Its integrated management tool delivers on the requirements for security and service availability. Take advantage up to • • • •

56% lower TCO* 80% faster application deployment* 2X the productivity of system administrators* 100% application availability*

Take a closer look with The Business Case for HP BladeSystem Matrix White Paper: hp.com/go/simplifywithblades

HP BladeSystem Matrix with the HP ProLiant BL460c G7 server powered by the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5600 series.

*See claim substantiations at hp.com/go/simplifywithblades Copyright © 2011 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. Intel, the Intel logo, Itanium, Xeon, and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP HP CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE FOR SHARED SERVICES AND PRIVATE CLOUD Santanu Ghose says that HP’s Converged Infrastructure solutions deliver the benefits of shared services which are an ideal foundation for private clouds, provisioning complex infrastructure in minutes rather than months. How can CIOs enjoy the benefits of cloud computing yet retain control over things like physical infrastructure and security policies? CIOs can start their cloud journey by building a shared services infrastructure. Shared services will lead to delivering benefits such as fast deployment, increased agility, lower cost and better resilience. Customers can leverage HP’s converged infrastructure architecture for building shared services infrastructure, and this can be extended to cloud computing by adding portal and chargeback tools. For example, HP Blade system matrix is an integrated solution which is based on the converged infrastructure architecture and includes advanced management, automation and portal tools for customers to build a private cloud. Security is one of the biggest concerns in adopting a cloud architecture and these concerns need to be addressed at all the layers viz. infrastructure, virtualization, application and processes. HP has security solutions like TippingPoint and ArcSight which customers can use to build a cloud infrastructure.

portability on industry standard platform is very essential. Do CIOs have a simplified way to map their path to the private cloud? Implementing cloud computing is a journey. HP’s consulting services like cloud discovery workshop and cloud road map services help CIOs simplify and adopt cloud computing. HP has also standardized their cloud offerings with packaged solutions like HP BladeSystem Matrix and cloud service automation for customers to adopt to cloud. The BladeSystem Matrix is a converged infrastructure platform for shared services that is ideal for private cloud deployments. It delivers one virtualized pool of network, storage, and compute resources that can be continuously optimized and instantly adjusted to meet dynamic business demands for any workload type. It unites the tools, processes, and architecture of the physical and virtual worlds to help cut costs and speed time-to-service delivery. The cloud service automation includes application performance and deployment solutions for delivering software-as-a-service. These solutions also help CIOs to deliver SaaS without changing any application code.

Shared services will enable fast deployment, increased agility and lower cost.

Will cloud computing help organizations move away from legacy or proprietary systems? Legacy or proprietary systems are purpose built for delivering specific applications. Though they deliver better business value, their cost is very high. Cloud computing solutions would be able to deliver legacy applications on industry standard platforms, reducing the overall TCO. However, application

Can private clouds match speed, flexibility and economies of a public cloud? Speed and flexibility in the context of the public cloud can be matched through a private cloud with a solution like the BladeSystem

SANTANU GHOSE Country Head, HP Converged Infrastructure Solutions Ghose has been with Digital-Compaq-HP for the past 15 years in various sales, marketing and business management roles. An industry veteran of 20 years, Ghose is responsible for managing the Converge Infrastructure initiative and portfolio for HP Enterprise Business Group.

Matrix. The economy of scale would be difficult to match since private cloud will never have volumes like a public cloud. However, private clouds can deliver better SLAs and security as compared to public clouds. How important is an open architecture approach while considering a private cloud? Open architecture means interoperability and conforming to industry standards. Industry standard components give cost advantage because of economy of scale, and cost advantage is a key benefit for adoption of Cloud. Another benefit of a private cloud is flexibility. This flexbility is derived from seamlessly interoperable components and layers of Infrastructure.

This Interview is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

EDITED BY SharDha SuBramanIan

new

hot

unexpected

India’s Mobile Boom: Crying Wolf

QUICK TAKE:

education: the It in ABc

I n d u s t r y V e r t I c a l The education sector is suddenly brimming with activity. With the government increasing investment— about 24 percent more than 2010—the education sector is projected to grow at a CAGR of about 16 percent in the next five years. Varsha Chidambaram spoke to Dr. Ashish Bharadwaj, CIO, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, about how he is using IT to better education at the university.

What are the biggest challenges to the education sector and how is IT helping? Quality is the biggest challenge. The number of institutes in the engineering and management space has increased, but not their quality. Technology is evolving and keeping curriculum relevant is also a challenge. IT helps us to research and track such changes. How has IT helped in developing a unique student lifecycle in your university?

Vol/6 | ISSUE/06

reporting monthly subscriber data, TRAI has started making a distinction between a home location register (HLR), a central database that contains details of each mobile phone subscriber that is authorized to use the network, and the visitor location register (VLR), a temporary database of the subscribers who have roamed into a particular area. If the subscriber is active, and is able to send and receive calls, he is available both in the HLR and VLR. However, it may be possible that the subscriber is registered in HLR but not in VLR. Bhatia says that users who may be switched off at the time the VLR data is collected are likely to be a very small proportion of inactive users recorded. Most inactive users are those that no longer use the connections. —By John Ribeiro

IllUStratIon by UnnIkrIShnan aV

M o b I l I t y India’s mobile boom may be nothing but a farce if one takes into account the large number of mobile connections that are currently inactive. Of the 771 million mobile subscribers reported by mobile operators at the end of January, only about 549 million were active subscribers, according to TRAI. Kamlesh Bhatia, a principal research analyst at Gartner, says there are a large number of inactive connections, particularly pre-paid, that still get counted by mobile operators. In many cases, users leave their previous connections idle, and move on to cheaper connections. The revelation of the extent of inactive mobile connections in the country is bound to make investors review their plans for the Indian mobile sector, says Bhatia. While

IT has helped us identify and automate all the processes in a student's lifecycle. Today, students buy our application forms online and once filled, they are electronically scanned and pushed into our SAP database. What other features have you implemented? We are the first Indian university to implement anti-plagiarism mechanisms. All projects are checked on a system against search engine public domain content to ensure they aren't plagiarised. We have also implemented a learning management system that facilitates teachers to not only create but also deliver e-learning content. We also use smartcards to provide access control, record attendance and enable financial transactions.

Dr. Ashish Bharadwaj

What are the benefits of these initiatives? This has improved process efficiency and reduced TAT by 50 percent for certain processes. It has also promoted collaboration between departments and functions. REAL CIO WORLD | A p r i l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

50 40 H

Would You Hire a Frequent Job Hopper?

60 70 80

90 100 110

20 10

120 130

vOICEs:

v.C. KUmAnAn, Director-IT, IDFC

trendlInes

“Why not? If the candidate has strong credentials then his employment history would not be an issue. And once he is hired, it is my responsibility to keep him engaged and give him challenging tasks to ensure that he stays."

DR. sAnjAy sARAsWAT, VP-IT, Reliance Globalcom “No. i am averse to hiring a frequent job hopper. in my opinion, strong credentials and a job hopping tendency can't go together. Frequent job hopping is a behavioral trait and I am wary of hiring an individual with such a trait. Also, i want to build a strong team that stays together for the long term and obvioulsy job hoppers can't be a part of such a team.”

jOyDEEp DUTTA, CTO, ICICI Securities “No. i regard them with suspicion. Such people lack a stable career track record and are not worthy of shouldering responsibility. They keep testing the waters and can hop jobs for monetary benefits. It is a considerable investment for us to take on a new hire and train him. That's why, we do not want to take on someone who has a history of hopping jobs.”

Let the Music Take Control About 300 years ago, the English playwright William Congreve wrote, "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak." Now we know it can also help hackers break into your car. Researchers at the University of California and the University of Washington have spent the past two years combing through the myriad computer systems in latemodel cars, looking for security flaws and developing ways to misuse them. In a new paper, they say they've identified a handful of ways a hacker could break into a car. Their most interesting attack focused on the car stereo. By adding extra code to a digital music file, they were able to turn a song burned to CD into a Trojan horse. When played on the car's stereo, this song could alter the firmware of the car's stereo system, giving attackers an entry point to change other components on the car. This type of attack could be spread on file-sharing networks without arousing suspicion, they believe. "It's hard to think of something more innocuous than a song," says Stefan Savage, a professor at the university. Last year, Savage and his fellow researchers described the inner workings of the networks of components found in today's cars, and they described a 2009 experiment in which they were able to kill the engine, lock the doors, turn off the brakes and falsify speedometer readings on a late-model car. In that experiment, they had to plug a laptop into the car's internal diagnostic system in order to install their malicious code. In this latest paper, the objective was to find a way to break into the car remotely. They found lots of ways to break in. In fact, attacks over Bluetooth, the cellular network, malicious music files and via the diagnostic tools used in dealerships were all possible, if difficult to pull off, Savage says. "The easiest way remains what we did in our first paper: Plug into the car and do it." With the high technical barrier to entry, the researchers believe that hacker attacks on cars will be very difficult to pull off, but they say they want to make the auto industry aware of potential problems before they become pervasive. au to M ot I V e

—By Robert McMillan

A p r i l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

Vol/6 | ISSUE/06

IllUSt ratIon by VISak a Vardhan

s t a f f M a n a g e M e n t Talent crunch in the IT industry isn’t surprising anymore and that’s why organizations keen on hiring people with strong credentials are willing to overlook their frequent job hopping trait. However, some employers often perceive such employees as volatile and instable. Serial job hopping reflects poorly on a candidate’s consistency. Would you be willing to hire a candidate who changes jobs frequently? Sneha Jha asked some of your peers and here is what they had to say:

Yours Anonymously? Tablets a new technique developed by researchers at Concordia University could be used to unmask would-be anonymous e-mailers by sniffing out patterns in their writing style from use of all lowercase letters to common typos. their research, published in the journal digital Investigation, describes techniques that could be used to serve up evidence in court, giving law enforcement more detailed information than a simple IP address can produce. "In the past few years, we've seen an alarming increase in the number of cybercrimes involving anonymous e-mails," says study co-author benjamin Fung, a professor of Information Systems Engineering at Concordia University. "these e-mails can transmit threats or child pornography, facilitate communications between criminals or carry viruses." of course some might be concerned that the technique could be used to reveal identities of whistle-blowers or others who have legitimate reasons for sending e-mails via publicly available tools for sending anonymous messages. the anonymous e-mail-cracking technique devised by Fung and colleagues in cyber-forensics is to identify patterns in e-mails written by a subject, then filter out patterns found in e-mails of other suspects, narrowing it all down until only a unique “write-print” remains. the researchers tested their system by putting it to use on over 200,000 e-mails from 158 employees of Enron, and were able to identify authors 80 to 90 percent of the time. —by bob brown

on the battlefront

Shooting turtles or attacking enemy warplanes with game apps on an iPad is child's play compared to the apps two military contractors are planning for use with lowcost, consumer-grade tablets and smartphones. Harris, a Pentagon contractor, is working on an app for Apple's iPad and other tablets that will allow a soldier on the ground to use touchscreen gestures to remotely move a camera aboard an unmanned aerial vehicle to find enemy weapons or troops, while watching what the camera sees on the tablet. The video information, combined with data about location and time, can be quickly transmitted using Harris' video technology to a network manned by intelligence commanders around the globe who could make quick decisions about military targets. Another Pentagon contractor Intelligent Software Solutions (ISS) is readying a field test for Android and iPhone smartphone apps that will tell a soldier arriving in a war zone what fighting and bombings have already occurred at that precise location. Geo-mapping on smartphones would be super-imposed with historical data sent wirelessly from a command center, showing the locations and types of encounters—from shootings and bombings to arrests—to better prepare troops on the ground. The applications from Harris and ISS rely on relatively inexpensive smartphones and tablets, company officials say. —By Matt Hamblen

deVIces

Imag Ing by VISaka Vardhan

I n t e r n e t Just because you send an e-mail anonymously doesn’t mean people can’t figure out who you are anymore.

What Metrics are You Using to Measure the Value of Your Social Marketing Activities? socIal MedIa

there seems to be more structured thinking about social marketing, but bottomline benefits aren't coming soon enough.

90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

s s e ws les sts lue ion ffic ers me rns on nu tor va po vie tra ve l sa ers nti olu mb etu bu r f i e e v e r v e e e e r o t l g n n r t r m a n rd n al Si ed c Co s/m be of fp ha co uc eo dc tra er ro of fan um ed ag dc ce b ot e r f e u r r n n b e o s m e d m av er do re nu rea mb nu mb Inc nu nu 2009 2010 Projected in 2011 s tric

e km

SoUrCE: bazaarVoICE Vol/6 | ISSUE/06

REAL CIO WORLD | A p r i l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

Savior App: out of troubled w waters natural disasters happen. and when they do, the first two things to go down are electricity and telephone services. the t tsunami in Japan was a perfect example. Phone lines were overwhelmed by people trying to call each other. to t keep the lines available for emergency crews, the Japanese carriers placed restrictions on 80 percent of the voice traffic. When most people tried to call, the lines were dead. that's why smartphones are so useful during an emergency. Smartphones have smart apps that can give you lifesaving capabilities.here are some smartphone apps for emergency events: BuddyGuard: think of buddyguard as a smart panic button. by clicking on the big button on the app, your camera will start taking pictures every ten seconds. all sounds are recorded constantly, and your gPS location is captured every three seconds. all this data is uploaded every 30 seconds to the cloud, and a link to that data is broadcast to your list of emergency contacts. because the data is stored in the cloud, it's still available to others even if your phone is damaged or lost. buddyguard also lets you say, "never mind, I'm ok." the function tells your contacts you're safe, and erases the data from the cloud. another nother feature lets your contacts be notified if you don't check back in. let's say you're going to try and help someone trapped in rubble after an earthquake. you y can set buddyguard in a timer mode. If you fail to check back in within the time you set, an alert goes out to your contacts letting them know you're in trouble, and where. Disaster Caster: When disaster strikes, you don't have much time to get coordinated. that's why you should plan ahead. the disaster Caster app, helps you do that. then, during an emergency, it broadcasts your plan to family and friends, telling them what to do, and, most importantly, where to meet up. disaster Caster also notifies your emergency contacts about your locationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;even if you don't know where you are. disasters happen. and you can be prepared just by downloading a few free or inexpensive cell phone apps. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;by mike Elgan

trendlInes

a p p l I c at I o n s

A p r i l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

The next-gen CIO Three factors have added up to a huge shift in the CIO role during the past five years-and CIOs who ignore these put their careers in peril, says a new report by Constellation Research. CIOs of the future will no longer oversee IT projects and lead organizational change through technology adoption, says Constellation Research CEO and analyst Ray Wang. Instead, the CIO definition will be broader, demanding that CIOs deliver more business value, profitability and market differentiation. Here are the four new personas of the new CIO and the skills you need to succeed, according to the report. Chief Infrastructure Officer: Many CIOs are already familiar with this persona, according to Wang, and transitioning into it will be easy. These Chief Infrastructure Officers focus on cost reduction, controlling 65 percent to 70 percent of the overall budget. Most projects prioritize keeping the lights on and managing legacy systems. These infrastructure officers tend to focus on the technology side and internal-facing activities, according to the report. Chief Integration Officer: Also predicted to be an easy transition, this persona is used to managing just 5 percent to 10 percent of the overall budget and must bring together various business processes, data, systems, legacy systems and newer cloud-based approaches. Chief Integration Officers tend to focus on both the technology side and internally and externally facing activities. Chief Intelligence Officer: They manage 10 percent to 15 percent of the overall budget and strive to improve business user access to information, the report says. This persona tends to focus on the business side and internally facing activities, and strives to appropriately connect the right data to the right person at the right time on the right interface. Chief Innovation Officer: Investing 5 percent to 10 percent of the overall budget, Chief Innovation Officers must drive innovation on a shoestring, according to the report. This persona typically has a business background and "moves fast, fails fast and moves on." "The Chief Innovation Officer is probably the toughest persona that CIOs will have difficulty adopting," Wang says. "This requires a good understanding of the business strategy as well as keeping up to date with a large amount of disruptive technology. Often times, these technologies are not covered in the market and require early adopter teams." cIo role

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;By Kristin Burnham

Vol/6 | ISSUE/06

compIlED BY SnehA JhA

trendlInes

gartner’s survey reveals that Crm has taken top spot in the list of technologies that will see maximum investment in 2011. 1 A global survey conducted by Gartner indicates that organizations have shown a renewed interest in Crm. So much so that it will be at the forefront of application investment this year. as the economy slips into resurgent mode, organizations are increasingly training their eyes on developing Crm applications. this helps them gear up for growth, attain customer retention and enhance customer experience. this reflects in their spending plans as well. globally, 31 percent of firms anticipate an increase in application software spending in 2011. over 42 percent of respondents indicate that they expect to increase spending on Crm in 2011, compared to 39 percent on office suites and 36 percent on ErP, which ranked second and third respectively. the survey notes that Crm will edge out ErP as a priority for enterprises. the research study reveals that the Crm market is set to rebound gradually as buyer confidence returns and as businesses begin refocusing on growing revenue as opposed to just reducing costs. the key areas driving investment in Crm apps are expected to include the online channel, SaaS-based deployments, and technologies enabling customer loyalty management, cross-sell opportunities, and more-targeted levels of customer service. the results of the survey are based on the responses of over 1,500 It leaders of organizations in 40 countries.

CRMis 42%

Of CIOs expect to increase spending on CRM in 2011, edging out ERP. ERP

C.R.M

31%

Of organizations—globally— expect to increase investment in enterprise apps this year. SoUrCE: gartner

Best practices CrEatE a robust strategy for customer data management. It is important to standardize customer data. organizations want to have a 360-degree view of customers. accurate customer data helps provide a single view of customers across platforms and systems. hence, companies should conceive a strategy to manage their customer data accurately to analyze customer behavior patterns and improve decision making.

knoW the customer. In order to formulate a Crm strategy it is important to forge an abiding relationship with the customers. Customers should be identified at all contact points. gather and utilize information from each customer interaction to analyze their behavior and understand their unmet needs.

EnSUrE executive sponsorship. Implementing Crm requires working across various organizational departments and breaking down siloed behavior. and this presents unique challenges. t to devise a successful Crm strategy it is important to gain the backing of executive peers and alignment and support of all departments within the organization.

REAL CIO WORLD | A p r i l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

IllUStratIon by VIkaS k aP oo r

Betting on CRM

alert

Enterprise Risk management

9 Tips to Protect Mobile Staff

oday’s professional is always connected, and increasingly, the office is a coffee shop, an airport, or home. With new flexibility comes new IT security risks for businesses. Basic defenses like anti-virus are important, but not enough to keep corporate data from the increasingly sophisticated hacker. How can mobile workers better protect information while they’re outside the office? Here are nine tips to keep employees—and corporate data— safe outside the office:

Use Laptop Disk Encryption

IMAGES by PHOTOS.COM

One of the first lines of defense is to secure data that sits on a laptop’s hard drive to make it difficult for attackers to retrieve data from a device that slips out of an employee’s control. As more personal laptops have entered the work ecosystem, disk encryption has become increasingly important. Without properly implemented encryption, a

password is just a polite request for an attacker to not access data.

For Laptops, Set Boot Order and Password in BIOS Most people have their Windows accounts locked down, but what about the BIOS? The first thing a seasoned attacker will try to do is boot from something other than the hard disk. There are a few techniques to make this more difficult. One is to put the hard disk first on the boot list in the BIOS and then password protect the BIOS to stop someone from changing it. If an attacker has stolen the laptop, they can still take more drastic measures such as removing the hard disk (but hopefully it’s encrypted). Changing the boot order will make it more difficult for an attacker that has brief access to the machine.

Call For Help fi n di n g s

Mobile Device Security Products in Use Encryption Network access control Mobile VPN Mobile device management Remote lock and wipe functionality Mobile anti-malware Digital rights management

71% 59% 52% 43% 42% 28% 11%

Evaluate Password Resets, Then Educate Employees The model of using biographical information for password reset is failing. The name of an employee’s favorite pet, grandfather’s occupation and mother’s maiden name are more available than ever before: attackers can mine information from social networking sites as well as public records that are now online. It’s an important exercise for employees to see how exposed they are by trying password resets on their corporate and personal accounts. Imagine they have forgotten all passwords to e-mail, their laptop, etcetera. How do they reset them? What questions get asked? Could someone find those answers online somewhere? If so, it’s time to change those questions or answers. If

66%

Of security professionals

say mobile devices are a high concern, ranking second in their list of top concerns.

Source: (ISC)2 Global Information Security Workforce Study

Alert.indd 18

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Vol/6 | ISSUE/06

4/8/2011 7:12:38 PM

#1 in Server Security

Cloud. Virtual. Physical. Securing your Journey to the Cloud

By providing security “from the cloud” with our Smart Protection Network, and security “for the cloud” with our server, data storage and encryption technologies, Trend Micro is the clear leader in securing Physical, Virtual and Cloud environments, and the best choice for Securing Your Journey to the Cloud. For more information Call : 1800 103 6778 email : trendmicro@isourceopportunities.com Delhi : 91-11-42699000 Mumbai : 91-22-26573023 Bangalore : 91-80-40965068 www.trendmicro.co.in

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4/14/2011 2:57:24 PM

alert

EntErprisE risk managEmEnt

the account simply sends a password reset e-mail then ask: what would it take for someone to reset an e-mail password?

Educate Employees on the Risks of Public Wi-Fi networks Free tools abound to sniff traffic on public Wi-Fi networks. With that in mind, it’s important for employees to take precautions when accessing or sending anything sensitive (e-mail, searches, etcetera.). Mobile workers should always ensure that e-mail is sent and received through an encrypted channel (VPN, webmail over SSL, etcetera). For corporate e-mail, this should be the only route possible to receive messages. The reality though is that sometimes policies are circumvented in the name of productivity.

unprotected till the patch could be thoroughly tested. For mobile workers, that tradeoff needs to be re-evaluated for key applications.

Protect Visual Privacy Eventually, sensitive data will likely be displayed on a laptop screen and with the rise in quality of smart phone cameras, it’s possible for data thieves or competitors to take readable pictures of on-screen data at a distance, which increases the importance of protecting visual privacy. Angling screens away from public view or using computer screen privacy filters can help reduce the risk—but ultimately working professionals need to be more careful. This is particularly important at conferences or seminars where people in the same industry are likely to be in close proximity.

Enable Automatic Patching You’ve turned on automatic update for Windows and Office, but what about the rest of the software on the system? Attackers are diversifying their strategies for machine infection and it’s important to keep up to date with patches on all software. In the past, the risk of automatically applying a bad patch—one that caused the system to malfunction— outweighed the risk of leaving the system

Beware of Social networking Information Leakage It’s easy to reveal too much information while on the road. The most common mistake employees make is to reveal geo-location data. Mentioning that you’re in a certain city for a meeting might not seem like a big deal but a competitor could easily infer that your company has a

[OnE :: LinEr]

“ii don’t think atm skimming—which iBm research says attackers are moving to—is an immediate threat, though one year from now we can expect an increase in their numbers.”

budding relationship with a company headquartered there. Beyond location, employees need to be aware that changes in business relationships on LinkedIn may reveal something about the business. If someone in M&As suddenly adds five people as contacts from a smaller company through LinkedIn it could indicate a relationship. Finally, staffers must know that what they post publically could be used against them to add credibility to a phishing e-mail. The growing personalization of e-mail attacks makes it harder to differentiate a real e-mail from a fake.

Set Up Remote Wipes What happens when an employee reports a mobile device is missing? In most cases, data contained in the device is much more important (and valuable) than the device itself, especially when it comes to corporate data. Most smart phones support remote wipes. By setting up remote wipe on corporate-issued devices (and if possible, on employee-owned devices that have access corporate e-mail) you’re taking insurance against the loss of a device.

Lock Mobile Devices In the battle of convenience vs. security, convenience often wins. When employees use a mobile device to access corporate data it’s important to educate them about the importance of locking their devices. Locking the device is a delay mechanism if the device is lost or stolen. It buys you time to either remotely wipe the device or do something more elaborate like find it via GPS. Many devices can also be set to wipe themselves after a set number of incorrect login attempts. Even if a device is setup for remote wipe, leaving it unlocked can sometimes allow thieves to disable those settings before you’ve had a chance to issue a wipe command. CIO Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson is Chief Security Strategist at people Security and a consultant for

Sanjay BelSare, Head-IT Infra InfraSTrucTure, KoTaK KoTa T K MaHIndra Ban Ta BanK

3M privacy Filters. He is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

a p r i l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

VO l/6 | ISSUE/06

Enterprise Risk management

What Security Auditors Really Think

hat do auditors involved in making sure companies meet compliance requirements really think? For starters, they think that companies don’t care much about privacy and security, and that encryption gets applied at a minimum to meet rules, according to a study of 505 security auditors by Ponemon Institute. “It was sometimes a jaundiced view,” acknowledges Dr. Larry Ponemon about some of the more cynical responses that came in answer to questions posed in the Ponemon Institute’s research survey What Auditors Think about Crypto Technologies. Just over half of the security auditors in the survey—working across numerous industries including banking, retail, the credit-card industry, insurance, technology, energy, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and automotive—indicated that business unit leaders owned the budget for audits and assessments. And slightly more than half said that more than 50 percent of the audits they had conducted “had serious deficiencies or failed data security compliance requirements.” The top three areas listed as security failures were applications, laptops or desktops, and “external service providers.” In this regard, cloud computing, especially software-as-aservice, topped the list as “the greatest threats or risk to an organization.” Some answers to the survey, which was sponsored by security firm Thales, reveal deep cynicism about what are believed to be corporate management’s attitudes towards security. Only 32 percent of the auditors in the survey said the organizations they audit are “proactive in managing privacy

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Alert.indd 23

and data-protection risks,” while 60 percent also said the organizations they audit don’t believe compliance improves their data security effectiveness. More than half of the auditors in the survey said crypto security tools were only used to achieve compliance and that, in any case, the organizations they audit do not have sufficient resources to achieve data compliance requirements. Some 71 percent of the auditors also said organization’s information assets could not be fully protected within the corporate boundary without the use of crypto solutions and 81 percent said a “best practice” is to encrypt sensitive or confidential information whenever possible. More than half said end-user convenience should not be considered in deciding what sensitive information needs to be encrypted.

Mobile: No Idea

alert

But at the same time, more than half of these auditors expressed uncertainty about whether encryption applied in certain ways, such as databases or storage, can reduce the scope of audits under rules for compliance. “The auditors are unclear about it,” said Ponemon, adding that this indicates that it would be beneficial if influential standards bodies, such as the PCI Security Standards Council, provide more guidance on the benefits of encryption in taking networks “out of scope” for purposes of a security compliance audit. “There’s a hunger for more guidance,” he concluded. CIO

Ellen Messmer is senior editor Network World, a sister publication of CIO. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

The majority of IT departments lack control when it comes to the security of mobile devices, according to a survey by researchers Vanson Bourne commissioned by Mformation, which provides mobile device management technology. The survey found that 78 percent of respondents don’t know what devices are connected to the corporate network. In addition, 76 percent said that employee-owned mobile devices create security headaches, while only 56 percent said they would be able to secure a device that has been lost or stolen. “Enterprise IT is really flying blind,” said Todd DeLaughter, CEO of Mformation, blaming it partly on a lack of tools to manage the devices. Most CIOs (77 percent) said that unlike the management of traditional computing devices, limited time and budgets have led to a lack of maturity with regards to managing mobile devices. The survey also found that 77 percent of companies do not know what data is on these mobile devices, with a third admitting that they are not able to track data on devices that the company itself has issued. A key issue is how organizations are having to deal with the shift from smartphones to tablet devices. “Smartphones just access enterprise data, but now with tablets, it’s become a content data creation device,” said DeLaughter. —By Anh Nguyen

REAL CIO WORLD | a p r i l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

4/8/2011 7:12:47 PM

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4/13/2011 4:49:09 PM

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4/13/2011 4:49:13 PM

Chris Curran

Strategic CIO

Tabling Strategy

ost CIOs I know have their hearts securing buy-in at the top and ongoing change Some CIOs complain and minds in the right place. management leadership. It requires fully that IT department They recognize that they need understanding the details of the strategy and performance and to be accountable for more than having a clear roadmap for executing that project status dominate a well-run IT shop. They also aspire to help the strategy. We find that the CIOs who help create discussions with the CEO. company use information to drive innovation innovation, increase revenue, and help deliver If you want to change the and strategic advantage that fulfills the CEO's superior customer service have more influence vision. Here are five issues that CIOs can discuss within their company. Have a conversation with conversation to IT's role in to capture the CEO's attention and raise the level the CEO about earning his or her full support in innovation and strategy, of discourse to a more strategic level. mobilizing the resources, support and processes consider these five issues. Imagine if everything was mobile. If required to undertake a strategic initiativeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;well every key function and interaction across the before the spending starts. company's value chain was able to operate anytime, anywhere, You should expect "ambidextrous innovation" from IT. what would be the impact on your customers and your business? Eighty percent of CEOs believe innovation will yield efficiencies What if your competitors got there first? Companies today and lead to competitive advantage, according to PwC's 14th annual have unprecedented opportunities to capture a greater share Global CEO Survey. Technology is an important way of capturing of customers' wallets: Wire transfers, account maintenance, both. Yet when it comes to conversations with the CEO, often subscriptions, digital content, and location-specific advertising they don't explicitly acknowledge that they expect the CIO to are just a few of the opportunities. Inventory management, contribute to both sides of the equation. In fact, according to our logistics, risk management and even talent management may have most recent Digital IQ study, only 25 percent of CIOs said their mobile potential. Take some time to look across your business for primary role in business innovation was focused on priorities opportunities to add mobility to your operations and assess the such as creating new products and services, reaching new potential impact. Then help your CEO imagine the possibilities. customers and improving customer service. Listen carefully to the Let's take enterprise IT funding off the table. The battles CEO's expectations from the IT department in terms of support about which departments will contribute budget to help fund for innovation. Reset expectations about IT capabilities so that enterprise or multi-business unit IT functions have killed many they are aligned with the CEO's priorities. worthwhile innovative IT initiatives. Time, trust and goodwill Technology is a barrier. Unfortunately, technology and its invested by all parties in planning for strategic initiatives is application can create barriers that stop a company from reaching squandered on debates about who will pay for them. Propose its goals. Too much process, inflexible governance, rogue IT creating a separate funding source for those IT initiatives that initiatives, and the like can take IT resources off-course. Don't cross organizational lines. wait for the CEO to tell you how IT is hampering your company's Mobilization will be the difference between success and performance. Listen carefully to other business leaders. Dig into failure. Our Digital IQ research consistently finds that the firms the analytics about IT performance. Then, initiate the conversation with the strongest financial performance not only had strong with the CEO about your ideas for removing the barriers. alignment among the Every CIO-CEO relationship is different. But for the CIO who business and IT leadership, aspires to contribute even more to the success of the organization, Sailing Together but also had strong to create greater opportunities for the rest of the IT team, and To find out how a CIO works mobilization capabilities. ultimately fulfill the CEO's strategic agenda, conversations about closely with the business read In That means anticipating these issues can be a good place to start. CIO Lock Step With the Business. the change implications for Chris Curran is a PwC principal and leader of technology strategy and innovation for Visit www.cio.in/mustread c o.in different business functions, PwC's Diamond Advisory Services. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in 24

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Vol/6 | ISSUE/06

4/8/2011 7:22:44 PM

Undercover Officer

Anonymous

Class Wars Juggling the needs of top performers and less-seasoned team members can be difficult, but it’s critical to everyone’s growth.

he e-mail was from one of my best engineers, and it began, “I don’t understand why you keep giving these important projects to people with a track record of not performing. John hasn’t completed a task yet without someone coming in to bail him out. I can deliver this task in less time and give you a better product and you know it! I’m concerned about how you are managing this team.” My first reaction was “What! You’re concerned about my management style? I’ve been doing this leadership stuff longer than you’ve been alive and I think I know what I’m doing.” My second thought was “Uh oh, I have bigger problems than getting this individual job done. Now I have to nurture two people, but only one of them is the real issue and the other one is my best guy!” The Dangers of Class Warfare You know the drill. If you are lucky and have recruited well, you have a couple of people who are always ready for a new challenge and are willing to tackle literally anything. In fact, they thrive when the stress is high and the challenges are significant. The positive aspect of such employees is that they are typically successful and you can always count on them for their best effort. The negative aspect is that it’s easy to find yourself overloading 26

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Anonimous_colunm.indd 2

these “A” players. Because our days are filled with crises and stress, these go-to guys are the folks you can absolutely count on for success. That’s the problem though. The nullifying outcome is that your “B” players will eventually grow resentful if a few superstars seem to be getting all the important projects. Unless you’re careful, you’ll soon find yourself being criticized by both groups because you’ve created a class war. The A players will eventually be unhappy because you’ve given them too much to do, and the B and C players will be mad at you for ignoring them. The A, B and C player analogy is obviously a rule of thumb, but it’s necessary to have some combination of these different people in your organization. Too many of one without the others leads to an imbalance that can overwhelm your ability to manage them. While it’s interesting to contemplate, can you imagine an entire team of Vol/6 | ISSUE/06

4/8/2011 7:27:54 PM

Undercover Officer

Anonymous

alpha geeks? Yikes! The point is that while you’ll always have a range of skill levels across your organization, you will definitely have varying levels of maturity, loyalty and dedication. Achieving a Blend of Skills Alpha geeks tend to have an arrogance about their technical skills. This also gives them the false confidence that they must obviously be good at everything. I occasionally comment to up-andcoming leaders that there are many facets to running an operation and they only see things at their level of the organization, just like I tend to only see things at my level of the organization. A key ingredient of good leadership is the ability to look beyond that level and attempt to see the larger picture. So, your standard alpha geek thinks he can do everything better than everyone else. But what about the rest of your staff—those B and sometimes even C players who make up the majority of your team? They may not be superstars but you count on them to help do the daily jobs that are the bulk of your work. This is especially true in the public sector, where I work as the CISO for a government agency, and the workforce tends to be fairly static and less prone to taking career risks. Unlike the private sector, where you can cut people loose for underperforming, in most public sector organizations you have a civil service and organized labor to be concerned about when dismissing, counseling or disciplining employees. I’ve found the hard way that it takes a lot more time and emotional effort when you handle a personnel performance situation poorly than when you take the time to do it right. That might sound ovious, but not many people do it.

Leadership Lessons To learn more about mentoring, read 9 Skills CIOs Must Hone on www.cio.in

c o.in Vol/6 | ISSUE/06

Anonimous_colunm.indd 3

Call it mentoring, call it training or call it succession planning—working to make our people better is critical not only to our own success but to the success of our organization. Saving Careers Through Leadership A big part of our job as leaders of our security organizations is to grow our people. Call it mentoring, call it training or call it succession planning—working to make our people better is critical not only to our own success but to the success of our organization. And I also believe it’s a moral obligation to the people and society in general. This doesn’t mean that when an employee has a lack of aptitude or a lack of desire we pour endless amounts of time or money into training him, but it does mean that we make a good faith effort to help our people be productive. It costs a lot more to hire a new employee than it does to make an existing employee productive if the ability and desire are there. For example, I recently took over an organization that had “leadership problems” at the operational level. Its manager had come in with a great reputation as a technical wizard but was floundering as a manager. The organization simply wasn’t getting things done and morale was headed south. What I quickly discovered was classic: While a savant and clear A player in the technical arena, he was a mediocre C player in his management role and didn’t know how to prioritize tasks. He was used to having a defined role with clear technical responsibilities, and my predecessor just assumed this guy could figure it out. So as this young manager started being inundated with issues, he tried to time-slice each of them into his daily schedule without delegating anything, and the result was that nothing was getting done. My response was to begin providing defined tasks that allowed him some small management successes. This

increased his confidence and also increased the confidence of those working for him that he was going to make a successful transition from technician to manager. A less effective reaction to this situation would have been to simply write him off as a bad manager and put him back into a technical role without attempting to remedy or understand the problem. The Payoff With quality management time, a little hands-on mentoring and encouragement, I helped him recover, and he has become a very successful technical manager. He’s not an A player in the management role yet but that comes with experience. I now have confidence that he will definitely grow into the role. Another thing I’ve learned is that while you can’t salvage everyone, especially those who don’t want to be saved, we probably need to make a greater effort to save some of those C players in our organizations. Fortunately, if you’ve done the right thing in trying to grow your employees, in the event that things just don’t work out, you have a documented trail of performance weaknesses and your attempts to remedy those gaps. That should satisfy any HR administrator or union honcho, and sometimes it’s in everyone’s best interest to just move on. CIO

This column is written anonymously by a real CSO. Send feedback on this column to editor@ cio.in

REAL CIO WORLD | APRIL 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

4/8/2011 7:27:54 PM

CASE STUDY

ESSAR GETS AFFORDABLE

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choice for midrange iSCSI storage. AT A GLANCE Company Essar Group Industry Manufacturing Offering Midrange iSCSI Storage

s one of India’s largest business houses and a multinational conglomerate, the Essar Group is a leading player in the sectors of Steel, Oil & Gas, Power, Communications, Shipping, Ports & Logistics, Construction and Minerals. With operations in more than 20 countries across fi ve continents, the Group employs 70,000 people, and has revenues of over USD 15 billion.

Using High End Storage for Quality and Development The Information Technology Team in ESSAR Group provides a full spectrum of IT services. Combining business and technical expertise, the firm offers complete business solutions in areas ranging from IT strategy formulation to infrastructure planning and implementation, including support. It pioneered the implementation of multiple SAP instances across the group which is now an integral part of several departments such as HR, payroll and material management. Every Production Instance comes with a development and quality instance and the technology team was storing the data of all the three SAP instances (production, quality and development) on its mission-crit-

ical, high performance HP StorageWorks XP24000 Disk Arrays. These are large enterprise-class storage systems designed for organizations that simply cannot afford any downtime. The XP combines a fully redundant hardware platform with unique data replication capabilities that are integrated with clustering solutions for complete business continuity.

Optimizing Storage Resources Despite the inherent benefits of the XP24000, the technology team realized that storing the data for the SAP quality and development instances on enterprise-class storage systems was not an ideal way of utilizing precious storage resources. Since the cost of mission critical storage is high, the team was looking to optimize the storage landscape with a cost effective storage solution which would eliminate single points of failure, offer application data high availability and reduce risks without driving up costs. Further, as per best practices defined by the Essar’s senior management, high end storage such as the XP24000 could only be used for extremely business critical environments where downtime could just not be permitted. Says Jayantha Prabhu: Head IT – Infrastructure and Technology, Essar

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP HP STORAGEWORKS

Group, “We wanted to avoid up-front cost and potential performance constraints, at the same time we wanted to purchase only what’s needed today, then scale up the performance, capacity, and redundancy of the storage as our requirements evolve. Buying storage only when needed simplifies planning and relieves budget pressures.” After carefully analyzing the existing architecture, the technology team decided to use medium-end iSCSI storage for the quality and development instances of SAP which could support SAS, SSD, and SATA drives. HP had previously helped Essar set up their converged IT infrastructure, a flexible IT model where resources can be provisioned on the fly as per business demand. In order to meet the above requirements, Essar selected the HP LeftHand P4300 4.8TB SAS Starter SAN Solution.

Enabling enterprise-class functionality After implementing the P4300 4.8TB SAS SAN Solution, Essar reduced costs associated with high-end storage, creating

OBJECTIVE Cost effective, scalable and reliable mid-level Storage to support quality and development instances of SAP. APPROACH Install HP P4300 4.8 TB SAS Starter SAN Solution BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY IMPROVEMENTS Increased Storage capacity and scalability Robust disaster recovery capabilities Ability to upgrade and expand storage “on the fly” – without taking systems off-line Thin provisioning and Snapshots capabilities BUSINESS OUTCOMES Free up high end storage resources for SAP production servers Simplified administration reduces management cost Flexible storage enables fast response to changing business environment

We concluded that the HP LeftHand P4300 4.8TB SAS Starter SAN Solution offers the best mix of cost, performance and management.” JAYANTHA PRABHU Head IT, Infrastructure and Technology, Essar Group

more storage space on the XP 24000 for the production servers. Advanced features such as clustering allowed Essar to consolidate multiple storage nodes into pools of storage. All available capacity and performance is aggregated and available to every volume in the cluster. The Snapshots feature is useful to create thinly provisioned, instant point-in-time copies of data on a per-volume basis. Administrators can access these snapshots to recover individual fi les from the volume, or rollback an entire volume. As storage needs increase, the HP P4000 can scale performance and capacity on-line. The Network RAID stripes and mirrors multiple copies of data across a cluster of storage nodes, eliminating any single point of failure. Thin provisioning increases storage effi ciency by allocating space only as data is actually written without requiring pre-allocation of storage. This raises the overall utilization and effi ciency of the storage, reducing costs, and ultimately increasing the ROI.

Scale performance and capacity simultaneously For Jayantha, the ease of administration of the HP P4300 helps ensure that scal-

ability is no longer an issue. He adds, “With the HP P4300 storage, we are able to scale performance and capacity simultaneously. Each time a storage node is added to the HP P4000 SAN, the capacity, performance, and redundancy of the entire storage solution increases. It is just like adding more bricks to a wall. This also helps to avoid disruptive upgrades as the applications have continuous data availability in the event of a power, network, disk, controller, or entire storage node failure, hence providing for best-in-class availability. The integrated replication simplifies management with simple failover and failback.”

This feature is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

John Halamka

Think Tank

Good Consultants, Bad Consultants There are all kinds of consultants out there. But here's what separates the helpful ones from the deadweight.

Illust ration by visaka vardhan

n 1998 when I became CIO of CareGroup, there were numerous consultants serving in operational roles both there and at its Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. My first task was to build a strong internal management team, eliminate our dependency on consultants, and balance our use of built and bought applications. Twelve years later, I have gained significant perspective on consulting organizationsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;large and small, strategic and tactical, mainstream and niche. One of my favorite industry commentators, Robert X. Cringeley, wrote an excellent column about hiring consultants. A gold-star idea from his analysis is that because most IT projects fail at the requirements stage, hiring consultants to implement automation will fail if business owners cannot define their future-state workflows. I've been a consultant to some organizations, so I've felt the awkwardness of parachuting into an organization, making recommendations, then leaving before those recommendations had an operational impact. I've also known consultants, of course. Some of the ones I've worked with are so good that I think of them as partners and value-added extensions of the organization instead of as vendors. Here, then, is my analysis of what makes a good or bad consultant. Project Scope The Good: They provide work products that are actionable without creating dependency on the consultant for follow-on work. There are no change orders to the original consulting assignment. The Bad: They become self-replicating. As they build relationships throughout the organization outside their constrained scope of work, they identify potential weaknesses 30

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John Halamka

Think Tank

and then convince senior management that more consultants are needed to mitigate risk. Two consultants become four, then more. They create overhead that requires more support staff from the consulting company. Knowledge Transfer The Good: They train the organization to thrive once the consultants leave. They empower the client with specialized knowledge of technology or techniques that will benefit the client in operational or strategic activities. The Bad: Their deliverable is a PowerPoint of existing organizational knowledge without insight or unique synthesis. This is sometimes referred to as "borrowing your watch to tell you the time." Organizational Dynamics The Good: They build bridges among internal teams, enhancing communication through formal techniques that add processes to complement existing organizational project management approaches. Adding modest amounts of work to the organization is expected because extra project management rigor can enhance communication and eliminate tensions or misunderstandings among stakeholders. The Bad: They identify organizational schisms they can exploit, become responsible for discord and cause teams to work against each other as a way to foster organizational dependency on the consultants. Practical Recommendations The Good: Recommendations are data-backed, are prioritized by relative value (cost multiplied by benefit), reflect current community standards and take into account competing uses of the organization's resources and time. The Bad: Recommendations lack depth. They are products of uncorroborated interviews. They lack factual details and are a scattershot intended to create fear, uncertainty and doubt. They focus on parts rather than systems. Implementing these recommendations causes energy to be drained away from more strategic and beneficial initiatives. Balancing Priorities The Good: Complex organizations execute numerous projects every year in the context of their annual operating plans. Although consultants are hired to complete very specific tasks, good consultants take into account the environment in which they are working and Sound Advice balance their project against the other organizational priorities. For more tips on consulting, read The Bad: Meetings are consistently Need Advice for Enterprise IT on scheduled with little advance www.cio.in/mustread notice and often conflict with c o.in other organizational imperatives.

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Any attention paid to organizational demands outside the consulting engagement are escalated to senior management as being "uncooperative." Managing Project Risk The Good: Risk is defined as the likelihood of bad things happening multiplied by the impact on the organization. Real risks to the project are identified, and solutions are recommended/developed collaboratively with project sponsors. The Bad: There is greater concern about risk to the reputation of the consultants than the risks to project success. Respect for the Org Chart The Good: Work is done at the request of the project sponsors. The chain of command and the hierarchy of the organization are respected, so that consultants do not interact directly with the board or senior management unless directed to do so by the project sponsors.

When it comes to knowledge transfer, a bad consultantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s deliverable is a PowerPoint of existing organizational knowledge without insight, like borrowing your watch to tell you the time. The Bad: Governance processes are disrupted, and consultants seek to establish the trust of the organizational tier above the project sponsors. Sometimes they will even work against the project sponsors to ensure dependency on the consultants. Consistency The Good: Transparency, openness and honesty characterize all communications from the consultants to all stakeholders in the organization. The Bad: Every person is told a different story in the interest of creating the appearance of being supportive and helpful. This appearance of trustworthiness is exploited to identify weaknesses and increase dependency on consultants. The best you can do for your organization is to think about the good and bad comparisons above, then use them to evaluate your own consulting experiences, rewarding those who bring value-added expertise and penalizing those who bring only PowerPoint and suits. CIO John Halamka is CIO at CareGroup Healthcare System, CIO and associate dean for educational technology at Harvard Medical School. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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Advertorial

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CMY

Alternative Views

IT MAnAgEMEnT

Should Enterprises Get Tablet-Ready? From Apple’s iPad to NotionInk’s Adam and now RIM’s Playbook, tablets are the flavor of the season. Should organizations prep for it?

nterprises need to realize that tablets have a coolfactor attached to them. They are slim, easy to carry, and also make it easy for employees to work while on the move. It’s true that it is difficult to measure the improvement in productivity that it brings, but it definitely makes organizations customer-ready by providing their staff with better accessibility to information. Sure, technology is constantly evolving and it doesn’t make sense to provide every end user with a tablet. But it is up to the CIO to equip employees who are constantly on the move, and are business drivers with tablets. As far as its features are concerned, I think that the processing power of the device is not so much of an issue, as vendors today are coming up with Web-

based applications for ERP and CRM, that can work with appropriate bandwidth. I also feel that enterprises need to look at tablets not as laptop killers but as smartphone killers. The screen size of a tablet—which is around 10 inches—is much better than that of a smartphone, for example. Also, some of the newer models of laptops come in these sizes. This provides better visibility than the three inch-screen of a touchphone. And once 3G-enabled tablets become more popular, I think it will be capable of replacing smartphones. In terms of security, its fair to say that any device can be misplaced. Moreover, the security issues have got little to do with the device and more with the applications running on it. At TIL, for example, we do not have data residing on the device. It’s Web-based with mandatory passwords, and over-the-air data wipe features.

“The processing power of the device is not so much of an issue, as vendors today are coming up with Web-based applications for ERP and CRM.” —Abhijit Chaterjee, Head-IT, Tractors India 34

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Alternative Views

IT MAnAgEMEnT

think the choice of whether or not to ready your enterprise for the tablet depends on the type of business that you are in. We are a manufacturing company and data security is a major concern for us. Forget tablets, even laptops are an issue for management. We prefer employees working on desktops as long as their jobs don’t require them to be mobile. And as for the mobility argument—in terms of accessing e-mails etcetera—I think smartphones are sufficient, though working on spreadsheets is not easy. Also, using tablets for engineering design and heavy computing isn’t feasible as these devices may not have the processing power to support it. Also, tablets are more expensive than desktops and today they are being sold— comparatively—at laptop prices, hence it becomes really difficult to justify the investment. We are also reluctant to invest in tablets till our existing enduser devices become obsolete. I also feel that tablets make sense to advertising companies that depend on presentations and collaboration but not for a hardcore manufacturing company like ours. Currently, tablets are appealing to students and users who are into

“Using tablets for heavy computing is not feasible as these devices may not have the processing power to support it.” —Vinay Mehta, CIO, Escorts Construction Equipment gaming and multimedia applications. But in order to use them in the organization, these devices need to be Windows-compatible and not all devices are configured for such integration. The American economy works on the fundamentals of replacement, meaning as soon as something new comes up, they dump the old and buy the newer version. But we haven’t reached that stage yet, except for low-end mobiles. We need to have the ability to upgrade and squeeze the most out of our investments before we think of replacing the old. And the speed at which technology is evolving also plays on the mind of the buyer because he knows that as soon as he buys a tablet, better versions are bound to follow. That’s why, I feel, it isn’t an intelligent investment. CIO

As told to Anup Varier Anup Varier is correspondent. Send feedback to anup_varier@idgindia.com

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IN THIS ISSUE

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69| RELATIONSHIP MATTERS! A Siebel CRM implementation helped the Kotak Mahindra Group companies tohave a single view of their customer.

74 | A SOUND IT ROADMAP IS KEY Johny Paramian, CIO, GMR has positioned IT as an internal consultant to its own organisation.

AN IDG CUSTOM SOLUTIONS INITIATIVE

The FOurTh annual CIO Ones TO waTC wa h award

NES TO WATCH With each phase of the IT evolution, CIOs must re-invent themselves to survive and prosper. We identify three skills—and the people that represent them—that future CIOs must have.

By Team CIO

30 36

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Of Indian IT’s most promising talents gather in a room. Imagine that. Now imagine one of them making a a joke about mainframes. No picture? We’re not surprised. Mainframes existed so far back in history even the jokes around them don’t seem funny anymore.

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The hardcore tech stuff hasn’t been the purview of the Change Customer People\ rganization People\o CIO for a long time. That’s because with every wave of Leadership Impact Development technological evolution, the CIO’s role has changed, from technical, to tactical, and now to strategic. The These CIOs-to-be Future IT leaders It’s the first last decade has seen the best CIOs metamorphose —those that that with this second important attribute from superb technocrats into business-oriented possess this third of a rising star. and vital attribute, leaders whose aim is to align IT with business key attribute—are those who possess know that an goals. Today, aligning IT with business is no longer devising ways organization’s it will tell you that a priority; it is the fundamental principle behind all to train staffers fluid ability to the customers are IT projects. to ready their adapt is key to its always right and As we step into a new decade, IT is getting ready organizations success. In their that customer for another makeover. As cloud computing and for tomorrow’s hands change insight is a source outsourcing gain popularity and technologies are merging to create new business models, the role and management is art. growth. for innovation. the expectation from IT are shifting. And it’s time for Pg 38 Pg 41 Pg 44 CIOs to change, again. The next generation of CIOs, today’s ones to watch, will be at the forefront of the business. They will read the pulse of the customer and be ahead of the latest market trends. They will acquire and manage the skills to ensure the holistic prioritized by a panel of CIOs and HR experts including development of their organizations. They will lead Alaganandan Balaraman, former vice president HR change throughout their enterprises. & process architect, Britannia Industries, Hariharan These leaders are already in the ranks of IT Sankaran, former Sr. VP at Oracle Financial Services departments everywhere. But it takes a discerning Software, Ravi Dasgupta, VP-HR, Biocon and editors CIO to spot them. The task of today’s CIO is not at CIO. The nine competencies include the ability to only to spot tomorrow’s IT leaders, but to create an impact customers, the ability to develop people skills environment that will nurture these talents. CIOs for long-term organization development, the ability are not just mentors to their teams, they are also to initiate and manage change, market knowledge, responsible for shaping tomorrow’s rising stars, team leadership, result orientation, commercial people who will be capable of taking up the mantle orientation and vendor management. of IT in a business world that’s ever more complex Of these nine traits, we identified customer and intricate. impact, people and organizational development, and This year’s Ones to Watch, who you will be change management as the most crucial introduced to in the following pages, skills for the next generation CIO. In the show some of this promise. They are next few pages, we take a closer look people who have the requisite skills to Reader ROI: at why these traits topped our list and be the CIOs of the future and already what to look for in a future indications a CIO must look out for to play a major role in shaping and driving IT leader spot and manage the next generation broad company goals. how to spot and nurture a talent in his team. These winners scored and selected rising star in your team The future is now. And here are the a scale of five on nine competencies. Our 30 Ones to watch folks who represent it. The competencies were identified and winners

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NES O TO WATCH 2O11

In This Story:

Customer Impact

Religare Asset Management Motilal Oswal Securities Tata Sky HyperCity Ballarpur Industries

At Your Service These rising stars of IT will tell you that the customers are always right and that customer insight is a source for continuous innovation in IT.

Definition Customer impact is about serving and building value-added and mutually beneficial long-term relationships with customers or clients, whether they are internal or external.

By Varsha Chidambaram “There is only one boss; the customer.” – Sam Walton The average Indian CIO spends only 12 percent of his time with external business partners or customers. Not really the most customer-facing group of people. But if this year’s Ones to Watch winners become CIOs, they will probably change that. That’s because a fair number of this year’s winners have customer impact as one of their key strengths. They have a keen understanding of their customers and will tell you how “price fairness” has a larger impact on customer satisfaction than customer services or that SMSes improve impulse buying more than calls. They’ll also tell you brand loyalty is harder to build today because customers spread allegiance across providers.

Knowing Your Market It’s that last thought that pushes customer-oriented Ones to Watch winners to stay upto-date with their market—including rivals, suppliers, customers and regulators. Few do that better than OTW winner Dixson Almeida, AVP, Religare Asset Management. His market knowledge came handy three years ago, says his boss Deepak Shivathaya, SVP and head IT, Religare Asset Management. “When I joined Religare three years ago, I had no experience in the mutual fund industry and no time to start at the bottom of the learning curve. We had to set up an IT framework that had to get SEBI approval—in six months,” he explains. The greenfield project demanded a sound understanding of customer needs, and required Shivathaya to deal with a complex network of customers, from internal 38

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Cover Story

“Very often IT leaders develop technical blind spots and overlook issues related to end user experience. That’s why domain knowledge and customer insight are more important than technical expertise. That’s the advantage a CIO brings; that’s the advantage Almeida brings,” says Shivathaya.

Analyze This Customers are not a homogenous lot; they exhibit a wide, often stupefying variety of behavior—and yet they demand personalized attention. Therefore, an effective customeroriented CIO needs an analytical mind that can sense gaps, read between the lines, and understand the unsaid.

And when their analysis provides new insights, these IT leaders then need to find ways to tap it cost-effectively. A big challenge in acquiring customers is ensuring that the cost of getting and keeping them is lower than the revenues realized from them. That can get quite tricky in a mall where discounts and sales are no longer a seasonal occurrence. That’s a reality at HyperCity, which operates with relatively low margins and

Customer Impact

Shivathaya, SVP & Head-IT, Religare Asset Management, (left) says unlike many IT leaders OTW winner Dixson Almeida doesn’t have technical blind spots, which helps him better understand customers.

PhoTograPhS by foToCorP

business users to external dealers, and regulators. Shivathaya says he would have been lost without Almeida. Together, Shivathaya and Almeida set up the company’s infrastructure in record time and minimal cost. Dixson’s background explains his effectiveness. Having started working at 19, Dixson learnt his skills on the job. He spent 12 years in the mutual fund industry before moving to Religare. In between, he took a brief hiatus from work to pursue his MBA. “He’s not a techie who understands business, he’s a business guy who knows IT,” says Shivathaya, who also comes from a nontechnical background.

ones To Watch

Cover Story

Ones To Watch

was unable to afford large promotions or offer loyalty programs to attract customers. This really bothered senior manager-IT at HyperCity and OTW winner Archana Sinha. Left on her own, Singh confesses her favorite pastime is visiting local markets and getting a feel of them. At work, she spends hours pouring over analytical reports of customer data trying to understand their buying patterns, demographic profiles, and psychological responses to promotions. That’s when she spotted an opportunity for HyperCity. Typical loyalty programs assign a low discount rate across all products so that customers benefit only when they accumulate a lot of points. Using the insights she gained, Sinha figured that HyperCity should offer high discounts on a few items. By doing that Sinha expects to stimulate impulse buying because customers see greater value instantly, says Veneeth Purushotaman, headIT, HyperCity. But to make the system work, item selection was crucial. “Using a customer’s purchase history, we can predict what he or she is more likely to buy,” says Sinha. “And by offering them discounts on those products we can lure them to buy more.” These insights have also helped HyperCity design more targeted campaigns, promoting the sale of select products to select groups. It was this analytical ability that also brought OTW winner Hara Prasad Kar, SVP-IT operations and architecture, Tata Sky, to his COO’s notice. Operating in the fiercely competitive satellite television space, COO K.L. Mukesh, Tata Sky, underlines the importance of responding speedily to customers needs. “You can think a lot quicker than you can deliver software. Kar was quick at both,” he says. Kar’s insight into customer behavior is remarkable. He knows that during the World Cup, he is likely to get 200,000 customer requests for a cricket package—two minutes before the start of a match. And he also know the quickest way to convert that impluse. “Customers are impulsive, they demand instant gratification and they prefer getting their demands met over SMS rather than

Later

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Coverstory_Ones_to_Watch.indd 34

“Customers prefer getting their demands met over SMS instead of speaking to a call center agent.” Hara Prasad Kar, OTW winner and SVP-IT Operations & Architecture, Tata Sky

picking up the phone and speaking to a call center agent, “says Kar. Acting on his insight, Tata Sky created a whole variety of services that could be accessed simply by sending an SMS to a number that flashes on a customer’s screen. On Mukesh’s part, it was commendable that he gave Kar the opportunity to flourish. That’s not always an easy thing to do, says Ravi Dasgupta, group head-HR at Biocon. “Highly-talented people often tend to be harder to deal,” says Dasgupta. “Very often team leaders prefer to have a good ‘yes’ man, rather than a highly talented individual who might create challenges for them,” he says. That’s a risk M. Shankara Rajan, VP-IT, Ballarpur Industries, took when he decided to bring in OTW winner Neeraj Gupta, DGM-IT. Rajan says he was impressed with Gupta’s functional knowledge. “You do not see such deep understanding of customer behavior normally in a tech guy. That’s why when we opened our retail division, I knew Gupta had to be moved there. It was in retail that he would do justice to his talents. “ And sure enough Gupta thrived in retail. His business intelligence solution has become the lifeline of sales people. “The sales team is willing to suffer downtime with their e-mail but cannot function with out the BI apps that Gupta designed. That’s the best testimony to his talent,” says Rajan.

Building Lasting Relationships “For an individual to have a high-impact, long-lasting relationship with customers, he has to have a high communication capability, should be sensitive to human problems, and must have infinite patience,” says Abhimanyu Acharya, lead associate at AA Associates, an HR, education and training consultancy.

That’s why Anuragi Raman, SVP, Motilal Oswal considers himself lucky to have OTW winner Pankaj Purohit, VP, Motilal Oswal on his team. Purohit first came to his boss’ notice when Raman headed the company’s business process excellence team. Whenever he wanted any customer-related data everyone pointed him to Purohit. “He was the guy building trading apps for a living. I was amazed at his ability to anticipate the needs of our traders and build solutions catering to those needs,” says Raman. Which is why, when one of Motilal Oswal’s top franchises was unhappy with its trading system, and threatened to terminate their association, Raman sent Purohit to heal the fractured relationship. “Customers can be very unforgiving; especially if it is a problem they don’t comprehend. Purohit has the exceptional ability to communicate technical problems and build a rapport with customers,” says Raman. His belief in Purohit paid off, he says: today, the franchise has become one of Motilal Oswal’s top 50 clients. When you ask Purohit what provoked him to tweak the system for this customer, he says, “I was disturbed, but at the same time very curious to know why my applications— which I had built so painstakingly—were giving him trouble. More importantly, if they were affecting him, they could be affecting others as well.” So Purohit went to Rajkot, spent time with the franchise and got the application running to the franchise’s wishes in no time. That’s a customer CIO for you: He’ll always believe that the customer is right. CIO Varsha Chidambaram is correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to varsha_chidambaram@idgindia.com

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In This Story:

Change Leadership

Hero Honda Motors ING Vysya Bank

NES O TO WATCH 2O11

Safexpress Radico Khaitan

Champions of Change These future IT leaders know that an organization’s fluid ability to adapt is key to its success. and have raised change management into an art form.

Definition Change leadership requires influencing and aligning an organization and its people to move towards a new and demanding goal.

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By anup Varier Change has, for the longest time, been the fuel for growth, innovation, debate—and failure. Which is why, more often than not, once a leader figures out change is inevitable, they also realize it’s not something they can merely ‘manage’. It has to be proactively put on the agenda. The trouble is, leadership cannot be thrust upon an individual. They have to come forward and take it up. “A change leader accepts authority and responsibility to make changes rather than doing something about it once the change has occurred,” says Farhan Khan, AVP-IT, Radico Khaitan. Khan found that quality in his right-hand man and OTW winner Naveen Sharma, DGM-IT, Radico Khaitan. It shone brightly when the company had the unspoken need for a business continuity plan and Sharma stepped up and implemented a disaster recovery center with very little outside help—saving the company approximately Rs 50 lakh in the bargain. In the process, another quality of a change leader came to the fore: The ability to sell an idea. Despite his technical background, Sharma realizes that business users generally see IT as a black box. He understands that users need to be shown that IT can help them do their tasks better and that this message needs to be communicated in a way that gets their cooperation. “Sharma not only approaches a potential problem with that undisturbed calm but he, with his excellent communication skills, is also able to sell his ideas to both his teammates and the business,” says Khan. REAL CIO WORLD | a p r I l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

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“It is not enough to merely see the need for change,” echoes C.V.G. Prasad, CIO, ING Vysya Bank, “A change leader also has to be able to sell the need for change.” That’s a quality Prasad observed in his direct report and OTW winner Aniruddha Paul, VP change delivery, who was instrumental in laying the foundation for SOA by convincing stakeholders. Paul says he decided to introduce an enterprise service bus because he spotted the long-term benefits to the organization. But it was his ability to sell the potentially-dynamite idea—given that SOA has enterprisewide

ChangeLeadership Shalabh Raizada, Head-IT, Safexpress, (sitting) says that OTW winner Irfan Khan’s keenness to share knowledge wins him friends in both the end user and vendor communities.

effects—to the organization. “His initial work in documenting the reference architecture for the bank brought in structured thinking and helped various change initiatives in the organization,” says Prasad. Thousands of kilometers away, OTW winner and head of IT infrastructure and CISO of Hero Honda, Sujoy Bhramachari was also making his CIO proud of the same attribute. “Change leaders are those who can usher in a fresh outlook with the consent of the business users and help them accept new solutions as their own,” says Vijay Sethi, VPIS & CIO, Hero Honda Motors. Bhramachari’s approach to IT fits well with his CIO’s definition of a change leader. Sensing the changing financial environment and increasing information risks in the recent years, Bhramachari initiated the move

to make the world’s largest two-wheeler motorcycle ISO 27001 compliant. “I wanted to ensure the efforts of the organization put in towards information security were backed up with credibility and consistency,” he says. Bhramachari knew well that security is not just about technology, but involved another, equally important element: people. “I stressed on implementing the controls needed internally for this certification to ensure that people understood security to its core,” he says. Just as important as the ability to sell a concept is a deep understanding of the industry. According to CIO research, 60 percent of Indian CIOs attach an importance between seven-10 (on a scale of one-10, with 10 being the highest) on industry knowledge when hiring a new recruit.

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Change is a Repeatable Process While a single show of change leadership is worthy of praise, it is the ability to consistently pull it off that CIOs should look for in rising stars. “If there is a method then the success of one implementation becomes repeatable,” says ING Vysya Bank’s Prasad. And for this a change leader needs to have an organized system in place. At ING Vysya Bank, OTW winner Paul delivers change through what he calls an engagement model which relies on constant interaction with end customers. At the center of this model is a nine-point strategy that includes managing resources; business value management, and IT change management. Of the nine, he feels constituency management is vital. Constituency management, he says, is about managing an entire ecosystem of people affected by change. “It’s not just a question of involving end-users; but all interested parties so that there is efficient risk management in place,” says Paul. At Hero Honda, OTW winner Bhramachari reinforces the company’s continuous change program. He has a business solutions group (IT staffers embedded in user departments), which interacts with the business to help identify new opportunities or understand

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existing pain areas. Their report—replete with detailed analysis of the task at hand including risk identification and mitigation procedures—is given to the technical team. “Depending on the need, the technical team is then expected to create a solution. This makes change a continuous process rather than a one-off event,” says Bhramachari. Once change leaders start making a difference, it is necessary for them to remain grounded. “They need to ask themselves: Am I doing this because it looks good on my resume or does it really add value to the organization and does it really solve a business problem. That question dominates a change decision,” says Safexpress’ Raizada. But that don’t-fix-it-if-it-ain’t-broke approach shouldn’t get into the way of another change leader motto: fix it before it breaks. Making that call is hard. “It is easy to get swayed especially in the technology domain where new versions or new solutions are constantly introduced,” says Raizada. That’s why he advocates that change leaders must have a steady head. “Decisions can’t be made in a fit of exuberance,” he says.

“It is not enough to merely see the need for change. A change leader also has to be able to sell the need for change to internal stakeholders.” C.V.G, Prasad, CIO, ING Vysya Bank

The Needle in a Haystack It’s fairly easy for a CIO to spot a fullygroomed change leader, but it’s more useful to spot such talent early and nurture it. At Hero Honda, CIO Sethi has a process called Training Needs Identification (TNI) to identify the strengths of each individual. Depending upon the outcome of a MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) test and a professional assessment using IIM faculty, Sethi decides on how to utilize an employee’s strengths. “They are put into a crossfunctional team to increase their exposure. There they work in different areas that have nothing to do with IT,” says Sethi. This helps them understand the business better and suggest more relevant change initiatives rather than being reactive to business needs. At Safexpress, head-IT Raizada’s approach is more informal. He has weekly or fortnightly brainstorming sessions with his team. These, he says, started as formal review sessions but have turned into informal meetings that everyone looks forward to. “In these discussions you can see what comes from whom in your team. It gives you an insight into their traits and modes of thinking,” he says. Once a CIO gets an idea of the strengths of different members of their team, they can prescribe the necessary training. “You can also assess who is a change leader by looking at the areas people devote most of their attention to. Are they only bothered about tactical, day-to-day stuff or are they being proactive and taking initiative?” says ING Vysya Bank’s CIO Prasad. Change leaders are the ones who have the foresight to tackle problems before they arise; the ones who have a systematic approach to tackling the new and unexpected. They are the ones who can influence people across an organization and set them in the right direction. They are the leaders who hone their domain knowledge, don’t indulge in ‘jugaad’ and have a strategic orientation. Looking for these gems and delegating responsibility to them can help CIOs live happily ever after. CIO Anup Varier is correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to anup_varier@idgindia.com

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photograp hs by SHEKAR GHOSH

“Domain knowledge is of paramount importance. This is what eventually provides insight into potential challenges and allows Paul to take corrective action,” says Prasad. OTW winner and senior manager-IT, Safexpress, Irfan Khan knows the value of knowledge. During the development of the company’s logistics application Khan realized that he needed to understand server maintenance better, so he got himself trained. “He was ready for challenges before they came up,” says Khan’s boss Shalabh Raizada, head-IT, Safexpress. “Khan’s keenness to share knowledge wins him friends in the end user and vendor communities. He doesn’t intimidate team members with his knowledge. He communicates technology in a language they understand rather than showing off his command over the subject. This attitude makes him very approachable,” says Raizada.

Ones To Watch

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NES O TO WATCH 2O11

People and organizational Development

In This Story: Amway India Serco BPO Sistema Shyam Services (MTS)

Cultivators of Talent These CIos-to-be are devising smart ways of training staffers to ready their organizations for tomorrow’s growth.

Definition people and organizational development is about honing the long-term skills of people and the organization as a whole.

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By sneha Jha Maybe it’s just the political environment—with people power sweeping the Middle East and North Africa—or maybe it’s the upturn—and the consequent battle for talent—but nurturing staff and developing their skills is back in fashion. A significant portion of this year’s Ones to Watch winners attach great importance to nurturing and mentoring their people. Immaterial of their industry, they have devised robust talent identification mechanisms to spot high-potential performers at an early stage of their careers and place them in growth acceleration pools. Their initiatives benefit both employees and organizations—in more direct ways than most people suspect. Take Pawan Bakshi, manager-IT infrastructure and eBiz, Amway India, and Ones to Watch winner, for instance. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you, Bakshi is a strong believer in staff development. And for good reason. Bakshi leads a team of just five and he needs to ensure that he does not fall short of skills, operational awareness, or proficiencies. And that’s why he’s constantly pushing his people to acquire multiple skills. “I want my team to imbibe skills in various cross-functional areas of operation. If a critical project has to be executed, my people should have the requisite know-how and domain expertise. A multi-skilled team can provide a ‘just in time’ workforce for special projects. It allows me to enhance a certain deployability’ of resources. I don’t need to infuse new talent every time I initiate a project because my people can multitask,” says Bakshi.

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comprehensive exercises to identify talent and groom it. Why? Because, he says that he knows that if his organization has to be positively positioned in the hypercompetitive ITES market it has to leverage people as the levers of growth. He’s also great at spotting gaps, a critical quality for a people and organizational

people & Organizational Development

Rajeev Batra, CIO, Sistema Shyam Services, applauds OTW winner Vivek Pavecha’s three-pronged strategy to keep developing his staff.

developer. On a periodic basis, Kalia undertakes talent profiling programs to identify the skill set gaps in the system. During one such skill assessment session with his team, he realized that his staff lacked communication skills. Quick to sense the need to enhance the communication and soft skills of his technical staff, he swung into action immediately. He initiated a comprehensive training program to improve their communication skills. By taking timely and corrective action, he was successful in boosting their confidence and accelerating their professional growth—and ensured that his team’s attrition rate hovered at 1 percent.

PhoTograPhS by ShEkar ghoSh

Bakshi also led his team to help create an e-commerce business, which today contributes about 20 percent of Amway’s revenue. And if he moves, he leaves behind a team that can keep the company at that new level. That puts him at the advanced end of people development, a zone in which his contributions impact the larger organization. There are multiple levels in the people and organization development tree that future IT leaders need to climb. And it all starts with the ability to spot the need to training. At Serco BPO, associate vice president and Ones to Watch winner Raman Kalia is known for his keen eye for spotting talent. Within his department, he undertakes

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“Kalia plays a very instrumental role in identifying talent risk areas and proactively developing training plans and programs to plug skill gaps. He also identifies high potential performers and puts them on a fast track to growth,” says Kalia’s boss Navtej Matharu, CIO, Serco BPO, who strongly endorses Kalia’s people-oriented approach. Kalia says he also makes a concerted effort to energize people on a continual basis and lead them to deliver a high performance even in challenging situations. He has also introduced several technical training programs and encourages his 130strong team to train themselves in various certifications available in the market. This, he says, not only augments their professional competence but also translates into value generation for the company. Little wonder then that his team has secured the highest employee satisfaction score for the last five years in a row. There are other methods IT leaders use to drive their teams to excellence. One of them is inter-team rivalry. The jury is still out whether the system works. At Honeywell India Ones to Watch winner Lins Paul, global leader-project management, isn’t a fan of what she calls negative competition. “I inspire principled performance; not performance driven by negative competition. When people fall short of performance objectives I encourage them to do course corrections and sometimes bring to their notice that they need to look for other avenues. But I ensure there is a lot of positivity in my team. I foster healthy ties between them so that they do not behave like crabs in a bucket and I have been successful in preventing friction in the team,” she says. Another key ingredient for a people and organizational developer is the ability to get staffers to look beyond the stifling constraints of the tactical parts of their jobs. That’s something that Kalia does well. “He raises people’s horizons above day-today operational thinking and prods them to improve their overall productivity. He has the ability to communicate, motivate, and mobilize people toward shared goals,” says Matharu.

Later

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“A multi-skilled team allows me to enhance the ‘deployability’ of my resources. I don’t need to infuse new talent every time I initiate a project.” Pawan Bakshi, OTW winner and Manager-IT Infrastructure & eBiz, Amway India Kalia is not alone. Vivek Pavecha, assistant director, Sistema Shyam Services, and Ones to Watch winner, believes that one of the key reasons for performance dips is that people do not enjoy performing the same job role for a prolonged period. “Working in the same function for a long time leads to intellectual inertia. This can result in talent drain and reduced productivity,” he says. Pavecha who leads a group of 25 people (10 in-house team and 15 outsourced) uses a three-pronged approach to address the challenge. One of the ways he has done this is to introduce job rotations. The approach has twin benefits: Employees are spared job monotony that can lead to burnout and the organization has multi-skilled staff. “By rotating talent, I have ensured that people are able to gain expertise in different areas and are constantly engaged in new activities,” he says. He staunchly believes that keeping an engaged workforce today will uncork immense value creation for business tomorrow. Like Pavecha, Kalia, too, is a believer in allowing people to move across job functions. He ensures that any employees who show merit and interest in areas of operation other than those assigned to them should get the opportunity to contribute. “I noticed that there were some bright and enterprising people in my helpdesk team. But they were involved in mundane tasks. I felt their talent had to be harnessed. So I assigned them more ‘value-add’ duties. This helped them realize their career aspirations,” says Kalia. Back at Sistema Shyam, Pavecha has also introduced knowledge-sharing sessions

with his team during which they research on the emerging technologies and their impact on Sistema Shyam’s business. During these sessions, they discuss business realities and possible business scenarios in the immediate future. He summons quarterly talent review meetings to review the strength, development areas and potential career paths of his people. He also champions the talent in his team before the management so that his team feels valued and appreciated. As a result of his initiatives, Pavecha has had zero attrition in the last two years. Part of Pavecha’s success also lies in his selflessness. “He creates a lot of visibility for his people among business peers. He’s the guy who will happily pass credit down to his team for their achievements. He makes their accomplishments known and increases their credibility in the eyes of business. It’s not like only he interfaces with business and takes all the accolades,” says his boss Rajeev Batra, CIO, Sistema Shyam Services. They might use different methods but one thing binds all these leaders: a strong recognition of the reality that they need to develop and sustain systematic people management initiatives. This year’s crop of Ones to Watch winners believes it needs to consistently review its people management strategy. They know that they cannot afford to have disengaged employees, skill set mismatches, or a chronic shortage of operational expertise. And sooner or later that will benefit their organizations.. CIO Sneha Jha is senior correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to Sneha_jha@cio.in

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Winner Profiles

Paras Kothari, 35

Assistant Vice President, Aegon Religare Life Insurance Strength: Result Orientation

Kothari is the kind of person, says his CIO, who works on a tight budget and yet “returns with savings at the end of the year.” He puts his best foot forward and thrives on innovation, adding value to the organization. A good example of this was the implementation of an e-mail solution which combined a proprietary Open-source solution with Microsoft Outlook 2007, saving money for his organization.

Pawan Bakshi, 40 Manager-IT Infrastructure & eBiz, Amway India Enterprises Strength: Customer Impact Bakshi enhanced customer experience and took Amway’s business to the next level. He enabled different payment options for online customers. For users with poor Internet connectivity,

Bakshi developed an offline application. This built customer loyalty and marked Amway’s entry into the online world. The solution was appreciated by customers and today the online business has reached to about 20 percent of overall sales, from less than 1 percent in 2008.

Vijay Bhaskar Reddy, 37 Team Leader-ERP (Technical), Aurobindo Pharma Strength: Team Leadership When the company wanted to retool its Oracle application, Reddy and his team worked tirelessly to develop reports, migrate data, and customize workflow. “Reddy’s timely contribution—supported by a strong team—helped us complete the project,” says his CIO. Reddy’s sensitivity and patience towards

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Our 30 Ones to Watch winners come from a wide range of backgrounds, but all share a passion and a talent for leadership.

his team members makes him approachable and popular.

Neeraj Gupta, 41 DGM-IT, Ballarpur Industries Strength: Customer Impact Gupta revolutionized the way his internal users worked by empowering them with BI. He changed their mindset from instinctive to analytical by driving various BI reports and dashboards. These reports give an insight into trends and also enable predictive analysis. Gupta’s business customers are so profoundly dependant on the system that they can’t work without it anymore.

Saran Prasad, 40 Director-IT, Cadence India Strength: Commercial Orientation At Cadence—an electronic design automation software and engineering services company— Prasad conceived and worked towards an engineering productivity

enhancement project. During the course of this project, he filed a few patents in developing newer techniques for software validation which has had a huge impact on the company’s R&D. He worked relentlessly to gain expertise on the subject and created a team that delivered customer delight.

Jitendra Patel, 34 Sr. Manager-IT, Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Strength: Customer Impact The company is required to prepare an initial legal scrutiny report for every property before extending a loan. Earlier, it was prepared manually by a panel of external advocates, which was time consuming. Also, the report had to be scanned, uploaded and viewed across the network. Patel re-engineered the process by creating an online

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4.94

crore The average budget of the Ones to watch winners.

application that captured property information, reducing duplication, paperwork and TAT while increasing data accuracy. Advocates can now access the application online.

Harvinder Singh, 33 AVP-Technology Solutions Group, DLF Pramerica Life Insurance Company Strength: Result Orientation Before its business launch, the company—which is a joint venture between DLF and Prudential International Insurance—had to setup its datacenter and migrate all employees from Prudential’s network to the DPLI network. But this migration wasn’t easy as Singh had to complete it before the fast approaching launch date. Singh’s planning and the ability to work tirelessly, across multiple time zones and stakeholders, ensured that all IT systems were up before the launch date.

Rahul Kumar, 40 Jt. General Manager-IT (Automation), Essar Steel Strength: People & Org Development When the company took on an ambitious and expensive coil tracking and transportation initiative, a young team consisting of freshers was formed. Kumar made sure that the trainees had the right

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kind of physical, intelligent and emotional environment. He then developed in-house capabilities to prepare techno-commercial feasibility studies for new technology solutions. He was quick to anticipate the need for various skills—other than core IT skills—in the department and worked towards acquiring those skills.

Kiran Kumar Tupalli, 36

connectivity at half their existing cost. But the real challenge was to migrate the network successfully to the new provider without affecting the business—in 30 days. Thankachen created a meticulous migration plan, putting in place precise timelines for every single branch in the territory while effectively delegating work. This ensured that the migration was completed before time.

Assistant Vice President, Future Generali Life Insurance Strength: People & Org Development

Sujoy Brahmachari, 40

The company had a bespoke third-party solution from an overseas vendor who was taken over by another company. This meant that Future Generali had to build capabilities inhouse to support the solution. Tuppali was assigned the task of building and developing requisite skills within his existing team. With a rigorous team building exercise, he managed to develop an in house team, accruing huge cost savings to the company.

Increasing information risks forced Brahmachari to acquire ISO 27001. He realized that security is more about people than technology, hence he stressed on implementing controls internally instead of employing consultants. He wanted to ensure that the effort put in by the organization towards information security was backed with credibility and consistency. The certification did just that. It increased Hero Honda’s confidence in information security processes and controls, provided it with consistency and increased employee awareness.

Santhosh Thankachen, 28 Chief Manager-IT Projects, Geojit BNP Paribas Financial Services Strength: Result Orientation During the slowdown, Thankachen negotiated with a network vendor who agreed to provide VSAT

Head-IT Infrastructure & CISO, Hero Honda Motors Strength: Change Leadership

Lins Paul, 41 Global Leader-Project Management, Honeywell India Strength: Customer Impact With operations spread across the APAC region, the company realized that it needed a centralized

3.8

years The average time Ones to watch winners have spent in their current position.

IT helpdesk to improve customer satisfaction and standardize its services. But since the APAC region consisted of six time zones, different languages and varied cultures, this was a huge challenge for Paul. But despite these challenges, she managed to integrate the company’s critical processes with the centralized helpdesk. This improved customer satisfaction by 13.2 percent.

Nilesh Mhatre, 42 Senior VP Head Software Delivery, HSBC Strength: Result Orientation India is the HSBC Group’s largest emerging market. This makes it imperative to have leaders who understand business priorities and derive more value from the dollar invested. Mhatre showed that kind of leadership when he spearheaded the pilot for re-tooling their core Banking Re-engineering. The complex project—it required 729 man-month of IT resources and looked at over 9,000 test cases— saved HSBC about Rs 54 crore and will improve customer experience.

Archana Sinha, 40 Senior Manager-IT, HyperCity Strength: Customer Impact Sinha closely tracked customer transaction history to determine

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which products customers buy and which promotions they are most likely to respond to. She conceptualized new in-store promotions in addition to base promotions and put mechanisms in place to analyze the effectiveness of these programs. She also led the loyalty management system, which is unique in the way it rewards customers. Her knowledge of customers from analytics and segmentation has helped HyperCity build more profitable growth.

Aniruddha Paul, 42 VP Change Delivery, ING Vysya Bank Strength: Change Leadership According to Paul’s CIO, change leaders must be convinced that change is necessary and must also be able to sell it to stakeholders. Paul exhibited this ability exceptionally when he implemented a project that was instrumental in laying the foundation for SOA within the organization—a technology project that has a track record of meeting enterprise-wide resistance. “His initial work in documenting the reference architecture brought in structured thinking and helped various change initiatives,” says his CIO.

to extend its business applications on the BlackBerry platform. The project demanded an integration between the mobile platform and the application database, and posed security threats due to modifications of legacy apps and the database. But committed to achieving a secure and efficient solution, Gundale deployed a Web services architecture which made data exchange possible, thereby eradicating any security threats.

Parvinder Singh, 40 Corporate VP, Head-IT Services, Operations & TCU Max New York Life Insurance Strength: Change Leadership Singh initiated a unified communication project for which he picked and evaluated the technology and then presented and delivered to the company’s users. The project was a huge change initiative but he tactfully managed resistance, helping users adapt, embrace, and eventually champion the new UC platform. That project resulted in increased productivity, and reduced cost of training, Web conferences, and content delivery initiatives.

Nikhil Gundale, 32

Pankaj Purohit, 35

Associate Vice President, Lintas India Strength: Result Orientation

Vice President, Motilal Oswal Securities Strength: Customer Impact

Gundale defined the company’s mobility roadmap when it decided

Motilal Oswal Securities uses two trading platforms for its customers:

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Offline and online. Purohit identified the need to create an online facility within the offline platform in order to be able to service that group of customers better. But the move required a deep understanding of offline customers if it was going to be accepted. Purohit successfully delivered the online facility from concept upwards by understanding customer pain points and working closely with a vendor for technical and functional requirements.

Dharmendra Kumar, 41 Sr. Manager, North Delhi Power Strength: Result Orientation

for a secondary site, and would also necessitate replicating ERP data online to the secondary site. The latter was an arduous task requiring systematic approach to change management. Sharma did a thorough analysis of the impact of the move and was therefore able to smoothen out all eventual issues before they could impact the company.

Dixson Almeida, 38 Assistant Vice President, Religare Asset Management Strength: Market Knowledge

When the company took over part of the Delhi Vidyut Board, the latter had two desktops and no network. Kumar was given the mammoth task of taking that set up and building a consolidated datacenter with over 100 servers to support 3,000 users. His focus and determination resulted in a robust infrastructure with 99 percent uptime that has been key in helping North Delhi Power reduce AT&C loss from 52 percent to 13 percent.

With over a decade of experience in the mutual fund industry, Almeida has developed a deep understanding on the market’s dynamics and its customer. Both came handy when Religare Asset Management set up its IT infrastructure and had to negotiate tricky NDAs with a complex set of partners, and cross regulatory hurdles to get approvals from SEBI. His CIO says that the set up wouldn’t have been possible to do in record time and cost without Almeida. “He knows exactly what customers want,” says his CIO.

Naveen Sharma, 38

Irfan Khan, 39

DGM-IT, Radico Khaitan Strength: Change Leadership

Senior Manager-IT, Safexpress Strength: Change Leadership

The primary datacenter of Radico Khaitan, one of India’s largest liquor manufacturers, sat on a high-alert zone for earthquakes. The company’s DR/BCP plan called

“Khan has the uncanny ability to anticipate issues before they actually come up and proactively take corrective action,” says his CIO, adding that spotting problems

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early is key talent for any change leader. When Safexpress was developing its logistics application, he got himself trained in application server maintenance and was ready to counter challenges before they came up. He also enjoys acquiring and sharing knowledge, which wins him friends in the end user and vendor communities.

Raman Kalia, 34 Associate Vice President, Serco BPO Strength: People & Org Development Kalia developed a team from scratch, and has grown it from six to over a 100 and ensured that it is multi-skilled. He was instrumental in cultivating and enhancing the skill sets of direct reports in order to allow them to be leaders in their own right. He is great at delegating work so that team members can strengthen their competence. As a result, he enjoys a low attrition level, and a team whose average tenure is five years.

Vivek Pavecha, 37 Assistant Director, MTS Strength: People & Org Development Although his role is primarily in operations management, Pavecha has undertaken several innovative

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initiatives to enhance the people skills of the organization. As a result, MTS’ Karnataka operations, for which Pavecha manages IT, has seen the fastest growth across MTS circles. This is possible because Pavecha leads a strong team, well-oriented with the business’ goals. And at a time of high attrition, Pavecha has also managed to keep his team intact.

impulse-based transactions on SMS than via a call. Based on his insights, Tata Sky designed a range of services that flash on customer TV screens and can be accessed by SMS.

Nagesh Aswartha, 32

As a third-party logistics service provider, TCI picks up material from a supplier and delivers it straight to the production line of a TCI customer. By understanding customers, Kulshrestha figured out that they would want to know the details of a shipment as soon as it is picked from a supplier. Acting on his instincts, Kulshrestha conceived and developed a module that delivered exactly that. Today, the tool is a lifeline to one segment of TCI’s customers.

AGM-IT, SPML Infra Strength: Customer Impact Aswartha’s insight into the pulse of today’s mobile generation and it’s need to collaborate led him to devise an ERP integrated intranet portal in Open Source and a BlackBerrybased purchase approval system. He also developed a Web and mobilebased CRM system which gives SPML Infra’s marketing department access to customer information from anywhere.

Hara Prasad Kar, 37 SVP-IT Operations & Architecture, Tata Sky Strength: Customer Impact The Indian DTH industry is extremely competitive. Key to staying ahead is the speed with which players can respond to customer requirements with new offerings and how fast these are taken to market. Kar spends hours understanding customer behavior and he realized customers are more likely to make

Pradeep Kulshrestha, 37 DGM, Transport Corporation of India Strength: Customer Impact

Raghubir Singh, 36 DGM-IT, USHA International Strength: Customer Impact Singh displayed a proficiency in understanding the technical aspects of emerging technologies and business processes when he was assigned the responsibility of driving a mobile salesforce automation project. His mandate: Enhance productivity, improve effectiveness, and increase customer satisfaction. He achieved all of that with a mobile app that

ones To Watch

empowered USHA International’s field staff to execute a business application over a GPRS network using any mobile device.

Sameer Pise, 37 Head-Infrastructure & Production IT, Volkswagen India Strength: Result Orientation When Volkswagen was setting up its operations in India, Pise was the force that put together the company’s infrastructure and production IT systems. The scope of the job ranged from planning to implementation. According to his CIO, he put in many additional hours to ensure that processes were stabilized within just two years of operations. “Pise never deters from undertaking new challenges with high risks and always comes back with amazing results,” says his CIO.

Japjit Singh Sandhu, 36 Executive VP & Country Head, YES Bank Strength: Result Orientation Ever since YES Bank launched their Version 2.0 roadmap to grow from 170 to 750 branches by 2015, Sandhu’s been on the go. “We‘re practically opening a new branch every day,” he says. Clearly focused on making as many branches live as fast as possible, Sandhu has been working tirelessly to de-risk the entire operation, automating process, removing human intervention and reducing external dependencies. The bank’s already opened 210 branches and is targeting 250 by June.

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neS neS O to watch 2O11 the second annual cIo staffIng survey

runtothe

ground IT staff numbers haven’t scaled up to meet the needs of the upturn, and as a result a sizeable chunk of CIOs say they are understaffed. Overworked and underpaid, it’s only a matter of time before IT staffers move out. In the meanwhile, CIOs are working to check attrition. But can their strategies fix the problem?

Survey Methodology

69% of CIOs are using annual pay hikes to retain staffers— but 65 percent expect only moderate increases. Is that enough to stem attrition?

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The CIO Staffing Survey 2011 was administered online over three weeks in March 2011. One hundred and twenty-eight Indian IT leaders participated in the survey. The survey ensured that all participants were heads of IT. Sixteen percent of respondents were from organizations with annual revenues over Rs 20,000 crore; 29 percent represented enterprises with annual revenues between Rs 2,000 crore and Rs 20,000 crore; 31 percent were from companies with revenues in the range of Rs 500 crore to Rs 2,000 crore and 21 percent were from companies whose annual revenues were below Rs 100 crore. Three percent represented non-profits, NGOs and government departments. All responses were gathered using a secure server with all individual data kept confidential. Percentages described within may not add up to 100 due to rounding. The degree of error is 7.8 percent at a 90 percent confidence level.

Vol/6 | ISSUE/06

Staffing Survey

The ProbleM IT Staff Numbers Have Not Increased in Pace with the Upturn IT departments across India Inc. are being squeezed by the needs of the upturn. The increased need for IT deployments to leverage the upturn is not being met by new recruits, leaving a significant chunk of CIO feeling that they are understaffed.

65% Headcount has stayed the same

Attrition is Under Control— But for How Long? A majority of CIOs (65 percent) say attrition up to 9 percent is acceptable.

GOOD NewS

90%

of CIOs currently have an attrition level between 5-9 percent—under the acceptable level.

It has decreased

TODay 43 perCeNT Of INDIaN CIOs Say THey are INaDeqUaT a ely STaffe aT ST D.

IN DeCemBeR 2009, oNLy 19 PeRCeNT SAID THey weRe UNDeRSTAffeD.

Average Size of IT Teams Under 10

12%

10 to 29

40%

30 to 49

18%

50 to 99

13%

100 and above

17%

43% Vol/6 | ISSUE/06

52%

of CIOs expect attrition to go beyond 9 percent—above the acceptable level.

20% It has increased

15%

BaD NewS

Reasons for Attrition Salary / compensation

80%

limited career options

47%

Monotony of work / projects

20%

attrition isn’t an issue

19%

The IT dept has a low profile

15%

Dissatisfaction with the management

14%

Unclear goals and responsibilities

13%

Office politics

The Top 3 HR Challenges

IT staff possibly feel underpaid because they are doing more than one person’s work, which fits in with this: Preventing burnout is a CIO’s number 2 challenge. 1. Retaining needed skill sets

of IT teams were 50 people and larger in Dec 2009—today that’s only 30 percent.

2. Demanding workload/ preventing burnout 3. Finding / hiring needed skill sets reaL cIo worLd | a p r I l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

neS neS O to watch 2O11

2011

The solutIon—and Its Problems CIOs are taking the reasons for attrition—feelings of being underpaid and being burntout—head on. They are also training staffers to empower them. But these tactics don’t always seem to be thought through.

Is Training Being Taken Seriously?

Tactics to Retain Staffers

organizations that mandate the Number of Days Staff Undergo Training

Creating a healthy workplace

71%

annual pay hikes

69%

IT training

55%

Mentoring

52%

flexible working hours

41%

Job rotation

39%

Business training

34%

fast-tracking career growth f

29%

Non-cash based awards

19%

Stock options

17%

Telecommuting Monthly cash incentives

Training, one of the top three ways CIOs are using to stem attrition, seems to have some problems with follow through.

44% yeS

56% NO

7.5%

9% 6%

But are Salary Hikes High enough? 69 percent of CIOs are using annual pay hikes to retain staffers—but 65 percent expect only moderate increases. Is that enough to stem attrition? expect significant increase 26% Moderate increase 65%

The average amount of IT budgets kept aside for training staff.

66%

The number of CIO who keep aside 5% or less of their IT budgets for training staff.

Does y your Company Have formal f mentoring Programs? fifty-five percent of CIOs say they are turning to training to stem attrition but most don’t do it formally.

largely unchanged 8%

46%

54%

yeS

Top 3 Strategies to fight Attrition CIOs say their most preferred weapon against attrition is creating a challenging job environment, but only 20 percent of CIOs say monotony is a reason for attrition.

CIos e expecting ‘Significant’ Hikes IT/ITes

40%

1. Creating a challenging job environment

Manufacturing (including auto)

33%

2. Training

Services (including utilities)

27%

3. Outsourcing specialized requirements

BfSI

15%

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Staffing Survey

The sIlver lInIng CIOs are not backing down in the face of their Hr challenges. They are taking renewed interest in their staffersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; issues and have put in place mechanisms to start the process of retaining staffers.

72%

Of Indian CIOs rate the importance of staff management very high: an 8 and above (compared to all their other responsibilities.)

Resources of Recruitment when they canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t win the retention game, they are working around attrition by hiring new recruits. placement agencies

29%

employee referrals

23%

Internal Hr

18%

Newspaper advertising

11%

Job sites

Campus recruitments

Competition

1. Initiative/a Initiative/ ttitude 2. Interpersonal skills 3. Communication skills/ skills/analytical skills

How CIos will Train Staffers In-house classroom training

54%

Individual informal mentoring

50%

Third-party classroom training

48%

Job rotation

43%

e-learning

38%

executive education classes

34%

rewards for acquiring skills on their own

29%

formal mentoring programs

27%

Tech Skills CIos want w

CIos are Hiring at the...

1. Technology planning and process management 2. Infrastructure and network support

13%

Senior level

46%

entry level

3. app/DB development and management

How CIos will Train Staffers

75%

Mid level

The Importance of Industry expertise in Hiring New Recruits e 7 to 10

4 to 7

1 to 3

60%

32%

respondents scored on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest.

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Non-tech Attributes CIos want w

Third party classroom training

62%

In-house classroom training

55%

Individual informal mentoring

42%

e-learning

43%

Job rotation

38%

rewards for acquiring skills on their own

32%

executive education classes

28%

formal mentoring programs

24%

reaL cIo worLd | a p r I l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

Big Promise

Data’s Big

By Eric Knorr Reader ROI: What is Big Data and why it’s relevant to enterprises Why even small companies can benefit from Big Data How it is changing business intelligence

A P R I L 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

Feature_Big_datas_Big_Promise.indd 50

Hadoop and other tools can unlock critical insights from unfathomable volumes of corporate and external data—changing the way organization’s look at business intelligence.

usiness intelligence is almost always among the top technology priorities of big companies. Yet by most accounts, satisfaction with business intelligence often falls short of expectations. Reasons abound: poor data quality, cost overruns, inaccessible data sources, and our old friend, miscommunication of requirements. But businesses don’t like to fly without instruments. So year after year, companies pony up for business intelligence initiatives despite lackluster results. Vol/6 | ISSUE/6

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Business Intelligence

A recent technology surge promises to break this unfortunate cycle. The hottest new technology trend goes by the nickname Big Data. Conventional business intelligence software operates on SQL data; Big Data processing crunches on semi-structured information, from social networking clickstreams to security event logs. Hadoop, an Open Source software framework for

What’s

Big Data?

The catchphrase that encompasses the data, tools, platforms, and analytics needed to turn large repositories of corporate and external data into trends, statistics, and other actionable information.

distributed processing, is the best-known technology for processing unstructured data, but there are others, including GemFire, MarkLogic, and neo4j. But what exactly is Big Data? In the never-ending quest for a competitive advantage, organizations are turning to large repositories of corporate and external data to uncover trends, statistics, and other actionable information to help decide on their next move. Those data sets, along with their associated tools, platforms, and analytics, are often referred to as ‘Big Data’, a term that is gaining popularity among technologists and executives alike. Although decision-makers have realized there’s value in Big Data, getting to that value has remained elusive in

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most businesses. That’s where IT can help, creating services that empower researchers to delve through large data stores to perform analytics and discover important trends. In other words, IT will prove to be the catalyst that delivers on the promise of Big Data. Big Data has already proved its importance and value in several areas. Organizations such as the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), several pharmaceutical companies, and numerous energy companies have amassed huge amounts of data and now leverage Big Data technologies on a daily basis to extract value from them. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses Big Data approaches to aid in climate, ecosystem, weather, and commercial research, while NASA uses Big Data for aeronautical and other research. Pharmaceutical companies and energy companies have leveraged Big Data for more tangible results, such as drug testing and geophysical analysis. The New York Times has used Big Data tools for text analysis and Web mining, while Disney uses them to correlate and understand customer behavior across its stores, theme parks, and Web properties. Big Data plays another role in today’s businesses: Large organizations increasingly face the need to maintain massive amounts of structured and unstructured data—from transaction information in data warehouses to employee tweets, from supplier records to regulatory filings—to comply with government regulations. That need has been driven even more by recent court cases that have encouraged companies to keep large quantities of documents, e-mail messages, and other electronic communications such as instant messaging

and IP telephony that may be required for e-discovery if they face litigation. Perhaps the biggest challenge facing those pursuing Big Data is getting a platform that can store and access all the current and future information and make it available online for analysis costeffectively. That means a highly scalable platform. Such platforms consist of storage technologies, query languages, analytics tools, content analysis tools, and transport infrastructures—there are many moving parts for IT to deploy and look after. There are many proprietary and Open Source resources for these tools, often from startups but also from established cloud technology companies such as Amazon. com and Google—in fact, use of the cloud helps solve the Big Data scalability issue, both for data storage and computational capability. However, Big Data does not necessarily have to be a roll-your-own type of deployment. Large vendors such as IBM and EMC offer tools for Big Data projects, though their costs can be high and hard to justify.

Hadoop: The Core of Most Big Data Efforts In the Open Source realm, the big name is Hadoop, a project administered by the Apache Software Foundation that consists of Google-derived technologies for building a platform to consolidate, combine, and understand data. Technically, Hadoop consists of two key services: Reliable data storage using the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and high-performance parallel data processing using a technique called MapReduce. The goal of those services is to provide a foundation where the fast, reliable analysis of both structured and complex data becomes a reality. In many cases, enterprises deploy Hadoop alongside their legacy IT systems, which REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

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Business Intelligence

Big Data

Business intelligence systems typically operate on SQL data. So-called Big Data consists of unstructured stuff, such as Web clickstreams or system logs. Often, domain experts—rather than BI experts—use data visualization tools to interact with Big Data and determine whether patterns exist that might justify further analysis via conventional BI means.

Data mining

Web clickstream data

BI appliance or cloud service running Hadoop or other non-relational solution

System log data

Other unstructured data

allows them to combine old and new data sets in powerful new ways. Hadoop allows enterprises to easily explore complex data using custom analyses tailored to their information and questions. Hadoop runs on a collection of commodity, shared-nothing servers. You can add or remove servers in a Hadoop cluster at will; the system detects and compensates for hardware or system problems on any server. Hadoop, in other words, is self-healing. It can deliver data— and run large-scale, high-performance processing jobs—in spite of system changes or failures. Although Hadoop provides a platform for data storage and parallel processing, the real value comes from add-ons, crossintegration, and custom implementations of the technology. To that end, Hadoop offers 58

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Data visualization When patterns emerge, domain experts can frame the task for conventional BI.

sub-projects, which add functionality and new capabilities to the platform: Hadoop Common: The common utilities that support the other Hadoop subprojects. Chukwa: A data collection system for managing large distributed systems. HBase: A scalable, distributed database that supports structured data storage for large tables. HDFS: A distributed file system that provides high throughput access to application data. Hive: A data warehouse infrastructure that provides data summarization and ad hoc querying. MapReduce: A software framework for distributed processing of large data sets on compute clusters. Pig: A high-level data-flow language

Domain expert

Conventional BI

and execution framework for parallel computation. ZooKeeper: A high-performance coordination service for distributed apps. Most implementations of a Hadoop platform will include at least some of these sub-projects, as they are often necessary for exploiting Big Data. For example, most organizations will choose to use HDFS as the primary distributed file system and HBase as a database, which can store billions of rows of data. And the use of MapReduce is almost a given since its engine brings speed and agility to the Hadoop platform. With MapReduce, developers can create programs that process massive amounts of unstructured data in parallel across a distributed cluster of processors or standalone computers. The MapReduce Vol/6 | ISSUE/6

Business Intelligence

framework is broken down into two functional areas: Map, a function that parcels out work to different nodes in the distributed cluster, and Reduce, a function that collates the work and resolves the results into a single value. One of MapReduce’s primary advantages is that it is fault-tolerant, which it accomplishes by monitoring each node in the cluster; each node is expected to report back periodically with completed work and status updates. If a node remains silent for longer than the expected interval, a master node makes note and reassigns the work to other nodes.

Building on Hadoop In addition to many Open Source support tools such as Clojure and Thrift, dozens of commercial options exist as well, though many are built using Hadoop as the foundation. One example is Datameer, which provides a platform to collect and read different kinds of large data stores, put them into a Hadoop framework, and then provide tools for analysis of this data. Basically, Datameer seeks to hide the complexity of Hadoop and provide analysis tools on top of it. Datameer’s sweet spot is data sources that exceed 10TB, the size at which Datameer says companies begin to struggle with using traditional technologies for data analysis. Other commercial vendors offering similar approaches to Big Data analytics include Appistry, Cloudera, Drawn to Scale HQ, Goto Metrics, Karmasphere, and Talend. And the three main database vendors—IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle— all support Hadoop interaction, though in different ways. The Open Source BI vendor Pentaho also supports Hadoop.

Big Data Fits All Businesses Big Data is not just all about size; it is also about performance, whatever the dimensions of the data set. That matters for immediate

Overhead Doctor Read how to Shrink Your IT Infrastructure Costs. visit cio.in/ mustread

Vol/6 | ISSUE/06

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c o.in

The World Bank makes its statistical data about the entire world available online, and the Library of Congress is archiving all Twitter data since March 2006. What’s more, there are plenty of news and investment data services that offer low-cost access to their information. analytics, such as assessing a customer’s behavior on a website to better understand what support they need or product they seek, or figuring out implications of current weather and other conditions on delivery routing and scheduling. That is where server clusters, highperformance file systems, and parallel processing come into play. In the past, those technologies were too expensive for all but the largest businesses. Today, virtualization and commodity hardware have reduced the costs significantly, making Big Data available to small and medium-size businesses. Those smaller businesses also have another path to Big Data analytics: The cloud. Cloud services for Big Data are popping up, offering platforms and tools to perform analytics quickly and efficiently. But do smaller businesses really need access to Big Data? Simply put, yes. All companies have Big Data whether they realize it or not. For example, most online businesses collect large volumes of data from their log

files and clickstream data. For companies that don’t have such data streams, storing gigabytes not terabytes of information, Big Data tools let them tap into the vast trove of publicly available data sources. Public data like what? Take for example how the World Bank makes its statistical data about the entire world available online, and the Library of Congress is archiving all Twitter data since March 2006. What’s more, there are plenty of news and investment data services that offer low-cost access to their information. Big Data techniques can be used to analyze these data sources, in addition to your own data—or both together. Take, for instance, FlightCaster, a company that offers improved accuracy in predicting flight delays and, in the process, outperforms estimates by the major airlines. FlightCaster mines large amounts of historical data on domestic flights and factors in real-time conditions, as well as other proprietary elements using much of the same (public) data available to the airlines. FlightCaster’s secret sauce is its practical understanding of Big Data analytics and the application of the proper tools to calculate the outcome in real time. As costs fall and companies think of new ways to correlate data, Big Data analytics will become more commonplace, perhaps providing the growth mechanism for a small company to become a large one. Consider that Google, Yahoo, and Facebook were all once small companies that leveraged their data and understanding of the relationships in that data to grow significantly. It’s no accident that many of the underpinnings of Big Data came from the methods these very businesses developed. But today, these methods are widely available through Hadoop and other tools for enterprises such as yours. CIO

With inputs from Frank J. Ohlhorst Eric Knorr is editor in chief at InfoWorld, a sister publication of CIO. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

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casefiles real people

* real problems * real solutions

Redefining

Cash Crops

The IT project that simultaneously increased the profits for both small farmers and Godrej Agrovet—and will probably reduce India’s dependence on imported palm oil.

By Sneha Jha Narayanppa Gowda, 44, owns three acres of land in the Kollegal taluk of the Chamarajnagar district of Karnataka. At the foothills of the Western Ghats, Kollegal receives plenty of rain, but that isn't helping Gowda. The output of his oil palm farm has been abysmally low for years, and it's impacting his income. In the last year, however, things have begun to turnaround. Access to better farming practices have ensured that Gowda doubled the productivity of his farm. And that's thanks to an innovative, IT-driven farm management system from Godrej Agrovet. Gowda isn’t alone. Other farmers, like his neighbor, Baseshwaria Murthy, and the broader agriculturist community have also benefited from the IT project. But before the far-reaching project reached a point when it could offer these benefits, it would test the determination of Godrej Agrovet as a company and it’s IT leader.

Fast-Growing But Unruly, Like Weeds Godrej Agrovet has a variety of products but one thing ties them together: They are all agriculture- or poultry-based. Take for instance its palm oil business, which is used for both everyday cooking and the commercial food industry. Godrej Agrovet is the largest producer of palm oil in the country. It got there by combining the strength of hundreds of small palm growers like Gowda in Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat, Karnataka, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, and Mizoram, adding up to 40,000 hectares of plantations. The company, which also produces animal feed and agri-inputs among other products, pulled out all the stops in its need for growth. As a result, Godrej Agrovet, which has

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45 manufacturing units, 18,000 farmers and over 1,900 employees, ended up with decentralized IT systems, with each location meeting its own IT needs. While that might have created small hassles in the short-term, it made it impossible to grow efficiently in the long-term. Especially if the Rs 1,600-crore company wanted to grow fast like, say, increase the area under palm oil cultivation by five times—which it plans to do in the hope of significantly reducing India’s dependence on imported palm oil from South East Asian countries. In line with this objective, the company wanted to augment the productivity of its contract farmers by leveraging technology to provide services that could boost crops—and improve the income of farmers. “A palm tree has a gestation period of three to four years. After this, farmers can earn between Rs 70,000 and Rs 1 lakh a hectare for the next 35 years. With a little help, farmers can easily cover one million hectares in the next five to six years, producing about 3.5 million ton of crude palm oil,” says S. Varadaraj, executive VP (Finance & Systems), Godrej Agrovet. That’s why a year ago, the company undertook a major exercise to integrate its ERP with its farm management system (FMS) and bring farmers like Gowda closer into the business.

S. Varadaraj, EVP (Finance & Systems), has given Godrej Agrovet's palm oil business a fighting chance to meet its 2015 target of tripling its turnover.

p hoto by srivatsa s handilya

Ploughing at Information Today, every oil palm farmer like Gowda has an RFID card which contains data including soil condition, fertilizers in use, produce, yields, etcetera, and links to a centralized repository of information that Godrej Agrovet uses to analyze farming best practices and make recommendations to other farmers. “Today, we can advise farmers on remedial measures to be taken if there is a sharp variation in quality or yield. This helps them improve their revenue stream,” says Varadaraj.

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But Godrej Agrovet would not have been able to help farmers like Gowda and Murthy if the company had not undertaken a business transformation exercise. That project came about because the company’s decentralized IT systems did not give its executives the information visibility they needed to analyze key operations across business lines.

“Consolidating all operational information that resided on scattered databases was a major challenge. We wanted a solution that would enable us to access and consolidate information and make meaningful analysis,” says Varadaraj. However, that was merely a starting point. The organization wanted to derive an allied benefit from the project. And it wanted

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Case File | Godrej Agrovet

those benefits to trickle down to the broader ecosystem of farmers. “We identified the need to centralize and integrate our operations on a single business platform but we did not want to restrict

pulled them out whether they were available or otherwise,” he says. That didn’t always go down well with department heads, he says. To stave off such resistance, B.S. Yadav, MD, Godrej

“Now we can advise farmers on remedial measures if there is a sharp variation in yield. This helps them improve their revenue stream.” — S. Varadaraj, EVP (Finance & Systems), Godrej Agrovet Agrovet used his veto power and instructed department heads to free up the people who merited a place in the project team. With that done, Vardaraj shifted his focus to finding an implementation partner that he could rely on to see the company through to the other end. Vardaraj realized that this was one of the more important decisions he would take in the life of the project and decided to approach the subject cautiously, even if it took time. His search started with reference checks on the implementation partners who could handle a project on such a scale. “We had a cross-company taskforce which evaluated the right partner. We short-listed implementation partners with experience in Best of the Crop the specific field we wanted them to operate With so much riding on the project, top in,” he says. management decided they needed to put Then he dug deeper. Accompanied by his their weight behind it. They made it clear taskforce, Vardaraj visited the sites these to everyone, says Vardaraj, that they did partners claimed to have done work in. He not see this as a transitional project or an says his visits to Bajaj Auto and Britannia upgrade. “They wanted it to be a business had a favorable impact on him. After talking transformation exercise. At the outset, to the CIOs of these organizations, he zeroed they clearly defined the objective to all in on HP as the implementation partner. stakeholders,” says Vardaraj. With all the major building blocks in But that wasn’t enough to help Vardaraj. place, and with the project’s definition clearly To build an in-house project team, delineated Vardaraj was sure its execution Vardaraj knew that he would require the would go smoothly. best resources of the But he laid a great organization. So he didn’t Case Studies deal of emphasis on take the path other IT Read more game changing cases project administration. leaders with less pull take: like The 48-hour Fund Value He regularly reviewed Look for surplus people Release Assurance Backed By all aspects of the in each team. Instead, he IT on www.cio.in/mustread cherry-picked the best c o.in implementation. talent in the company. “I ourselves to that. We realized that we could pass on transformational and sustainable business benefits to the agriculturist community. We realized that we could leverage technology to effectively connect with over 18,000 farmers engaged in palm plantations and help them increase their cultivation,” says Vardaraj. The way the company decided to centralize its operations was to deploy a business transformational ERP on a centralized database structure. But transformation on the scale the company imagined would require every last project management trick in Vardaraj’s book.

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Reaping Benefits The project went live in November 2009. The first phase of the implementation covered the animal feed business. The second phase of the project was implemented in June 2010 and covered the agri-input and oil palm plantation business. The business transformational project yielded rich dividends for the organization. On an organizational front, it gave Godrej Agrovet a single view of various critical business processes and a tighter integration with farmers, suppliers and customers. Prior to the deployment of business transformation project, reports reached the management on a weekly basis, says Vardaraj. But the new system supports centralized decision-making and ensures that management gets reports on a daily basis. He adds that the response time to customers and suppliers has also shrunk from 15 days to real time. All of these benefits have made the organization more fleet-footed in responding to fast-changing business scenarios. “Team members including nutritionists, sales managers, and procurement personnel collaborate with real-time visibility on a single ERP platform. The implementation has increased visibility of sales, costs, and margins across locations and products. Those advantages are going to help Godrej Agrovet meet its 15 percent growth target for 2011 and a Rs 300-crore turnover target from its palm oil plantation business by 2015. “By integrating technology with our farm management services we can definitely achieve this triple growth,” says Vardaraj. That’s good news for farmers like Gowda and Godrej Agrovet. And in the long term, probably India. Now that’s win-win. CIO

Sneha jha is senior correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

Vol/6 | ISSUE/06

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casefiles

Fleetwood Enterprises

Not until filing bankruptcy papers and trying to sell off parts of the company did Fleetwood Enterprises realize the value of its IT group. Here’s how its CIO ensured that it did.

The Organization: The maker of recreational vehicles (RV) and modular homes Fleetwood Enterprises was a powerhouse in the 1990s, but by 2000, its revenues had peaked at $3.7 billion (about Rs 16,600 crore). As domestic manufacturing costs rose and two downturns curtailed consumer spending, profits steadily dropped. And Fleetwood lost money every year from 2001 on. The Business Case: In March 2009, management finally filed for Chapter 11 with plans to sell off as much of the company as it

Larry Smith, former VP-IT, Fleetwood, says that convincing management to sell the IT group wasn’t a walk in the park.

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* By Kim S. Nash

could. Then Larry Smith, Fleetwood’s VP of IT, and his 32-member IT staff took center stage with a plan to sell the IT group—software, hardware and staff—to a third party. The business decision made it possible for Fleetwood to sell its manufacturing lines and begin to pay its creditors while preserving jobs. But the buyers needed access to historical data and business processes, along with IT services to run manufacturing operations during the transition. Fleetwood had integrated systems, such as billing and HR, common to both of its manufacturing units, making it impossible to split RV-related IT from housingrelated IT without spending money it didn’t have. But if Fleetwood sold its IT group to a vendor, the vendor could sell technology services to the new owners. The Project: En Pointe, a services firm, bought Fleetwood’s IT group for an undisclosed sum. The deal provides IT to all parties and keeps Fleetwood’s technology staff together in full-time jobs with equivalent salaries and benefits. According to bankruptcy documents, salaries for the 33 IT professionals En Pointe hired from Fleetwood total an estimated $3.9 million (about Rs 18 crore). Fees paid to En Pointe for IT by the new owners of the RV and housing groups, plus the Fleetwood

estate, amount to $6 million (about Rs 27 crore) in the first year. That makes the IT group worth roughly $9.9 million (about Rs 45 crore). The RV and housing groups sold for a combined $62 million (about Rs 2,790 crore). The Benefits: The arrangement also allows for up to $400,000 (about Rs 180 lakh) to flow back to Fleetwood this year—a cut of the money En Pointe makes providing IT services to the new housing and RV group owners. That will help Fleetwood retire more debt. Plus, software that Smith and his team built for Fleetwood to communicate with its dealers is being turned into a product that En Pointe plans to sell to other manufacturers. Especially satisfying to Smith, who is now vice president of En Pointe’s app services management practice, is that more potential buyers lined up for the IT group than for either of Fleetwood’s main businesses. And the people best suited to provide IT to any new owners of either product line were Fleetwood’s existing technologists. But Smith also felt a personal obligation to get the best outcome for the people he managed, he says. In retrospect, Smith says, he had a hard sell. “It took a lot to convince Fleetwood executives there was value in us in several ways. Today, it’s what I can hold my head up high about,” he says. CIO Send feedback to editor@cio.in

REAL CIO WORLD | a pril 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

4/8/2011 7:57:10 PM

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Fullerton shrank the time it took to approve a loan from 18 days to six days and simultaneously saved rs 10 crore. This is how. The organization: Talk about business going elsewhere. According to 2011 BCG-CII study, 65 percent of low-income, Indian households will go anywhere else—even moneylenders—to get a loan rather than turn to financial service institutions. Their biggest grudges against financial institutions? Long transaction times. That’s a problem Mumbaibased Fullerton India Credit Company, a non-banking finance company (NBFC), wanted to fix, especially because Fullerton lends mainly to customers in Tier-III and rural areas, tackling about 50,000 loan applications a month and disbursing Rs 225 crore. The Business Case: But the company also had other problems. After it's launch in 2007, Fullerton saw a period of rapid growth. It opened 850 branches and its employee-strength crossed 15,000. Then the global recession hit and Fullerton was forced to consolidate. “By the beginning of 2009, we needed a solution that could cut opex costs but

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Fullerton india Credit Company

we also needed to ensure whatever cost-efficient processes we put in place did not affect our turnaround time or customer service,” says CIO Anoop Handa. The fact was Fullerton’s loan turnaround time was not best-in-class even then. Loan officers at Fullerton’s 800 branches collected paperbased loan applications and supporting documentation, scanned them, and sent the images to a central operations team for booking and documents verification. If they passed it, the file was sent to a central credit team for loan approval. The process got messier when incomplete applications or a lack of supporting documents, forced the central operations team to send back an application. This happened pretty often because about 45 percent of Fullerton’s business comes from customers in TierIII cities and rural areas where obtaining documents for collateral, like a land agreement, is hard. The constant to-andfro of scanned images also increased Fullerton’s network bandwidth use and necessitated the buying and servicing of scanners and printers at 800 branches— eating heavily into opex and the time of IT staffers. The solution: “Our technology team led by SVP Rahul Bhardwal, devised a part offline/part online loan booking process and integrated it with Omniflow

* By DeBarati roy CIO Anoop Handa, made Fullerton India Credit Company more attractive to a huge market of untapped low-income households.

(a document management and workflow system),” says Handa. The new system introduced a 'booking sheet' that allows branch-level officers to fill in the details of a loan for the central credit and operations team to evaluate. This is seamlessly uploaded into Omniflow. The solution eliminates the need to use scanned images. More importantly, the system alerts branch level officers if they key in an invalid entry ensuring that incomplete applications are filtered out early. The solution, says Handa, also checks against a database of existing or probable

fraudsters and raises an alert at the branch level. The Benefits: The solution has helped Fullerton shrink opex costs by Rs 10 crore, mainly in bandwidth reduction cost and the maintenance of scanners and printers. That’s plenty, especially for an organization that shrank its footprint from 800 in 2007 to 350 today to stay competitive. The system also cut the time it takes for a loan to be approved from about 18 days to six days. That should drive some of that money-lender business back to Fullerton. CIO Send feedback on this feature to debarati_roy@idgindia.com

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VIEW

from the TOP

V.S.S. Mani, Founder & CEO, JustDial, on IT's pivotal role in battling one of the local search giant's largest challenges.

Speed

Dial By Varsha Chidambaram

Timing. V.S.S. Mani, founder and CEO, JustDial, seems to be in constant battle with it. Take for instance his failed attempt to start JustDial in the early 90’s. It was a great idea whose time hadn’t come. It didn’t get much easier the second time around, says Mani. “After failing in the first attempt, JustDial continued to remain a dream and an obsession till 1996. The idea would not crystallize due to lack of financial resources and the right ecosystem.”

What do CEOs and other C-level executives expect from you? Read all about it in View from the top. Visit www.cio.in/ceointerviews

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Few others, he says, believed in the idea, but Mani hung on. His doggedness paid off and soon what started as a 300 sq.ft., garageoffice operation grew into a 4,500-strong organization—with Rs 200 crore turnover this March—that covers almost every city and town in India. It's spread to the US too, with plans to expand into Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong. But if Mani’s timing was too early in the 1990s, today, he’s constantly racing

against time. If JustDial was a story of pure doggedness, today it’s all about reaction time. Shrinking time-to-market, he says, is one of the largest problems of the industry. “Being a consumer-centric business, the challenges we face are multi-fold; it’s like playing chess with over a million people at the same time. It’s a mind game and you always need to try to come up with something better.” Fortunately, this time around, Mani isn’t on his own. IT, he says, has his back.

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V.S.S. Mani expects I.T. to: Reduce time-to-market

Streamline business processes

Improve search engine accuracy

CIO: JustDial's unique business model has been very successful in India. How has IT contributed?

V.S.S. Mani: IT has helped us turnaround

Photo by k apil Sh ro ff

dynamic business needs in considerably short spans of time or time-to-market. Being a consumer-centric business, the requirements and the challenges we face are multi-fold; it’s like playing chess with over a million people at the same time. It’s a mind game and you always need to try to come up with something better. Even with dynamic needs, we have

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been able to stay ahead because we are on an in-house built Open-source platform. For us, being able to adapt to changes, improving search accuracy based on user feedback, and incorporating new search logic have been some of the biggest gains from IT. IT has also been able to streamline all corporate processes, end-to-end, from marketing to finance. This, in itself, is an important step because for an organization like ours, there is a lot of subjectivity involved. That’s because our offerings or what we sell don’t relate to a

physical, tangible product. So, without a proper process in the backend, it would be almost impossible to achieve regulated process flow.

Can you take us through the story behind JustDial? After failing in the first attempt that lasted barely two-and-a-half years, JustDial continued to remain a dream and obsession from 1992-96. The idea would not crystallize due to a lack of financial resources and the right ecosystem. But

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View from the Top

finally, JustDial was started in a small 300 sq.ft. garage office in 1996. It's been a wonderful journey from a three-member start up to a 4,500-member corporation. Revenues grew from Rs 85 lakh in March 1997 to Rs 200 crore in March 2011; from one city to covering almost every city and town in India. We have grown from a few thousand users to 57 million unique users. Our daily average user strength is above 6 lakh today and our Web usage is neck-to-neck with the voice service. When we started, only a handful of people believed in us, but we had the last laugh.

What are the biggest challenges in your industry? In terms of challenges, reducing the time-to-market is an extremely crucial issue for the players within the industry. Besides, in our industry, it is not possible to rely on tried-and-tested formulas. We just have to give several factors due weightage and make sure that as a trend evolves we understand it and react to it. That's why I feel that time-to-respond is a decisive element.

Has IT helped you stay ahead of competition? Certainly. We have been able to scale up seamlessly because of IT. It has been one of the key factors of our growth. We grew from a small team to 4,500. That wouldn’t have been possible without everyone in the setup being tied to the umbilical cord of IT. The sheer task of standardizing processes across such a volatile workforce would have been a daunting task without IT. IT has also helped in price modeling and discovering ways to make profits. Because of our open architecture, we were able to introduce best practices from various fields and add value to our search process. This approach allowed us to extract more information and give refined search results to our end users. 68

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"IT has helped us turnaround dynamic business needs in considerably short spans of time." —V.S.S. Mani

Can you highlight some of your key IT initiatives? IT is the backbone of our entire setup. Nothing in the organization—barring some ancillary activities like HR and regulatory finance—can function without IT. We do a lot of regression-oriented data analysis which helps us clean data which in turn makes the entire search process learning-oriented. We don’t try to formulate rules; rules formulate themselves based on usage. Also, Open Source helped us extract better performance from search systems and applications. It has also freed us from vendor lock-in, and enabled the organization to choose hardware platforms that deliver flexibility and high performance.

What, in your opinion, is the role of a CIO? The position of CIOs in organizations like ours is challenging and daunting

due to the myriad business and technical responsibilities assigned to them. They are responsible for ensuring that their firm’s IT investments are continually aligned with their strategic business objectives, while also planning and maintaining an IT infrastructure that will meet their firm’s current and future needs. I’d say that for a services-based organization, the value of an enterprise lies in the knowledge of the individuals delivering those services. They are also the ones standing on the profit generation pedestal.

What do you think of technologies like cloud computing, social media and BI? We are interested and excited about all these emerging technologies but we always believe in being judicious when it comes to their application. We use cloud computing only for internal development because ours is a very transaction-oriented system and cloud is not the best way to take it forth. Social media and business intelligence are definitely important. We are focusing a lot on user reviews and ratings. In fact, today, JustDial has more user reviews and ratings than all other websites put together in India. And to make it better we are also incorporating features like ‘Tag Your Friend’ whereby before visiting a place, for example, users can actually see how their friends rate that place and accordingly take a decision. So we are bringing the user community’s contribution or social contribution to this aspect. At JustDial, we do not believe in blindly following trends. We ensure that we understand how it fits into our scheme of things and how it best serves our requirements. We don’t do something simply because it’s trendy, we take up only those initiatives that best help us serve the needs of our target. CIO Varsha Chidambaram is correspondent. Send feedback to varsha_chidambaram@cio.in

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AN IDG CUSTOM SOLUTIONS INITIATIVE IN ASSOCIATION WITH

TRANSFORMING BUSINESS THROUGH JUDICIOUS APPLICATION OF IT

NURTURING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS Companies of the Kotak Mahindra Group did not have a single view of their customer. A Siebel CRM implementation changed the picture.

PLUS INTERVIEW Johny Paramian, CIO, GMR has positioned IT as an internal consultant to its own organization making his department more responsive to business needs

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

NURTURING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS Companies of the Kotak Mahindra Group did not have a single view of their customer. A Siebel CRM implementation changed the picture.

Company Kotak Mahindra Group Industry Banking & Finance Offering Banking, Brokerage & Insurance

irds of the same feather flock together, so the saying goes. But the different companies of Kotak Mahindra group, despite having a common goal of servicing the customer, weren’t speaking the same language. When a customer called in to two different companies of the group or even two different departments within the same company, the experience he or she got was dissimilar,” said Aruna Rao, Group CTO, Kotak Mahindra Bank and Group Companies. That was three years ago. Senior management knew that the variance in customer experience wasn’t helping any of the group companies – viz. Kotak Mahindra Bank (KMB), Kotak Mahindra Prime (KMP), Kotak Securities, Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance Company (KLI) and Kotak Mahindra Capital Company (KMCC). And what if one of the group company employees knew about the interest of a customer in a specific product that the employee himself wasn’t servicing –

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

say a sales executive selling a housing loan learning about a customer’s interest in life insurance? There was no guarantee the information would be communicated to the appropriate sales executive. Though no one was putting a figure to it, lost sales opportunities were costing the companies. Rao and the business heads of individual companies got together to rally behind a company-wide CRM implementation. “It didn’t make sense to have individual CRM implementations when we wanted a single view of the customer,” Rao said. That was easier said than done. The line of business varied across the group companies, as did the priorities of the business heads. Taking the time to properly map the group companies’ varied requirements was important – a situation senior management was mentally prepared for.

It was as if earlier our sales people used a machine gun to fire blindly, now they use the sniper approach to target potential customers.” KVS MANIAN, Head, Retail Banking, Kotak Mahindra.

ENTER THE CHAMPIONS The first thing to do, Rao notes, was to standardize the customer-facing processes across the group companies. Representatives of the various business units met to have a common agreement on how to proceed. “With the support of the business heads up-front, the deployment plans got a boost,” Rao said. Broad directions were chalked out, but the task of sketching out the details of the changes required was going to require multiple iterations of drafting and testing plans. Only an executive who understood the current systems fully would do. That was the prime considerations that went into selecting a ‘business champion’– an officer responsible for drawing out the detailed process change needs – from each of the business unit. “The business champions had hands-on knowledge about the business and so they were able to provide a description of how the business really worked,” Rao said. A standardized process was to enable the organization to provide consistent service irrespective of which business the customer was dealing with. It was to create an infrastructure that would let the company standardize its sales and service divisions. TCS was roped in as the implementation partner. The consultancy company provided a proposal to deploy Siebel across the group companies and advised a phased implementation approach for executing the same. TCS believed that a phased approach would suit the organization since the approach was less risky as it offered a built in mechanism (phase-based milestones) for measuring the overall project progress.

The phase-based milestones approach went well with Rao. “The IT department must demonstrate the value of projects at regular intervals to business users if the department is to earn a healthy respect,” she said. Rao evaluated the possible risk scenarios and put in measures to mitigate the risks. “When systems serve multiple processes, even a slow-down in the system can cripple a company’s ability to respond to customer needs – a situation that we would not like ourselves to be in, as it was for the very reason of speeding up the response that we had started off with the implementation,” she said. Hence, rigorous performance tests to check if the system could handle the load were carried out.

Rao evaluated possible implementation risks and put in measures to mitigate them.

THE JOURNEY TO CRM

The broad vision for the working group on the CRM implementation was to align with the Kotak Group’s message of positioning its constituent companies as a one-stop-shop for all the financial services and investment related needs of customers. The solution needed to meet the high level objectives of having the ability to uniquely identify common customers of the various group companies and successfully using this information to communicate the value proposition of the various financial services offerings of the individual group companies to them. At the same time, it was imperative to provide a consistent user experience to customers across all business entities and communication channels. Given the magnitude of the objectives, i.e. integrated operational CRM including sales, services and marketing across all the business units, the end

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

IT must demonstrate the value of projects regularly to business users if the department is to earn a healthy respect.” ARUNA RAO, Group CTO, Kotak Mahindra Group .

state vision was divided into shorter phases, each of which independently delivered business value. Before embarking on the change, the “as is” CRM processes were documented and the capabilities on 16 CRM capability parameters of each business group were determined. This was followed by defining the desired capability levels in each area and hence the “to be” CRM processes need. The “to be” processes in different business groups were compared and standardized in the area of service, sales and marketing. These standardized processes were then defined as a CRM Business Requirements Document (BRD) across the group. This Business Requirement then was given a technical platform to be implemented on.

THE CARROT AND THE REASON When the group first started with the deployment, resistance to change, at least from some quarters, was only to be expected. The new system required the sales force to make targeted marketing calls and campaigns and enter the outcome of every interaction in the system. The different business units had CRM-like processes of varied sophistication levels: some had rudimentary processes, others had advanced ones, which, however, had interfaces that were in much variation with the ones at Siebel. Still others didn’t have any system. “We needed to encourage the sales force who had never used a system to record their sales calls to now start doing so,” Rao said. In such cases, Rao recaps, it was not just the question of a system change, but about a change in the attitude. “In the case of a section of the sales

people, we had to prepare them to use it,” Rao said. “Some sales staff are not naturally inclined to fill in reports, they just don’t have the temperament to do so.” Again, the business champions came to the rescue, helping create an effective training program which would not only get the sales force up to speed with the new system, but get them enthused about it too. This included demonstrating to the sales people how they could track their activities, while managers could get an insight into what products were selling better. The notion that often a successful deployment largely hinges on effective people management was vindicated through other examples. Some of the sales staff who were used to following a certain system had to give it up and now acclimatize themselves to the new one. Rao notes that initially they resented this as it seemed to take them more time to use the new system, but when they were apprised that the new system would help them track customer queries and respond to the queries in a much more productive manner, their attitude changed.

THE SNIPER APPROACH The CRM implementation has seen all-round gains. KVS Manian, who is the Head of Retail Banking at Kotak Mahindra, says that they are now better able to track fulfillment of customer requests.

KOTAK GROUP’S CUSTOMER-FACING GOALS FOR THE CRM APPLICATION: Ability to identify the customer uniquely and validate information required as per “Know Your Customer” regulations Get a unique tracking no. for all service requests raised with Kotak Tracking of customer interaction history Customer interaction through multiple channels, including email and SMS, ensuring channel independence for enquiry

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

REAPING THE GAINS For customers:

For staffers:

Reduced TAT for service delivery All cross sell product availability from any Kotak group entity Consistent service across all Kotak group companies

Single view of all customers’ interactions within each group company Single system for tracking service related interactions like queries, complaints, fulfillment requests, and information requests etc. Ability to track lead against a customer / prospect within each group company, including automatic transition of sales stage and auto closure of opportunities Ability to create customer / prospect list for targeted campaigns and end to end execution of the campaign list till its logical closure Ability to schedule activity for self and team

The system helps them to accurately track various customer complaints and their current status. That is one of the reasons the turnaround time for resolving a customer complaint is much better now. In reality, though, customer complaint resolution is hardly the system’s raison d’ etre; customer engagement for effective marketing probably is. Here, again, the application seems to have found its mark. While aggressive marketing has been the rule ever since the group companies came into existence, Manian has found that the efficiency of the campaigns has increased dramatically after the CRM implementation. Having a complete customer view and the right analytic to support their marketing pitch have helped the engagements with the customer become much more profitable. “The application has significant enhanced our ability to cross-sell,” says Manian. “It was as if earlier our sales people used a machine gun to fire blindly, now they use the sniper approach to target potential customers.” While it’s difficult to quantify the benefits of a CRM implementation for a spurt in sale can never exactly be ascertained, Manian makes use of an interesting model to justify the deployment. He notes that the cost of implementation including licensing costs and consultancy charges was going to be around Rs 22,000 – 23,000 per employee, which was less than 5% of the annual expenditure of hiring an employee of the relevant grade. “Even if there was going to be a 10% increase in productivity, it was quite a boost,” he said.

Further proof of the CRM application can be gleaned from Kotak Mahindra Bank’s annual report for the previous year (year ended 31st March 2010). The report says that, “(the) bank launched credit card business and reached the milestone of 1 lakh cards in the first year of operations. The card design and product benefits have received overwhelming response from customers.” Manian says that the CRM greatly enhanced the bank’s ability to cross-sell and the credit card success story is a validation of the same. Rao concurs with Manian on the credit card story. With the CRM in place, Kotak stole a march over some of its competitors on two fronts – on the one hand, resolution of customer calls was very rapid and on the other, with the business drivers having clear visibility on the campaigning efforts and the success rate on a regular basis, they could channel their efforts more productively. “I remember the business head walking into his office in the morning. On his table would be a report showing the turnaround time for every single customer query and request that came to the bank,” Rao said. With the basic CRM modules in place, the Kotak group is now looking at innovating on top of the basic layer to add value to business. Integrating the system with the employees’ mobile phones is on her mind. So is the social CRM concept. “Three years ago, when we started off, there was no concept like social CRM, but now it is taking a lead in marketing innovation,” she said. “The CRM journey is never complete, one has to be constantly abreast of the developments.”

TRANSFORMERS INTERVIEW

A Sound IT Roadmap helps

GMR PROVISION NEW SERVICES By positioning IT as an internal consultant to its own organisation,

Johny Paramian,

Group CIO, GMR has made his team more responsive to business needs.

JOHNY PARAMIAN Group CIO, GMR

Custom Solutions Group TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

What are the chief IT challenges of a rapidly growing group such as GMR and how do you tackle them? Rapid growth is something we envisaged three years ago. Based on the road map that was drawn at a board meeting at that time, we planned for adequate infrastructure keeping in mind the potential growth. So now, as and when we add projects, our infrastructure is well geared to cater to them since the basic building blocks are in place. Capacity planning has thus been an important part of our strategy. We kept this aggressive growth in mind and invested up-front – in SAP, Microsoft stacks, an off-site DR site, a datacenter, and a hybrid service model for support. Our hybrid service model involves inhouse support staff as well as a service contract. So if there are any issues with one service channel – for instance, a shortage of manpower in our IT support staff or a delay in service from the service provider end – we take support from the other. This way we insulate ourselves against service related downtimes. GMR caters to diverse verticals such as energy, airports, highways, SEZs and urban infrastructure. What does this diversity mean to the IT department? We look at IT in two parts – enterprise IT and domain IT. Enterprise IT is the base IT infrastructure that is common across companies while domain IT is anything that is specific to that business. For instance, airports will have their own IT stack while highways will have a toll management system. With this segregation, we are able to better address IT demands. We also have a knowledge management portal. With a strong enterprise IT foundation, we are now going to add applications. How do you make IT responsive to business challenges? We have an annual IT plan presented to the board where IT’s role in the company’s strategic planning is discussed threadbare. As such, IT becomes part of business. Specific workshops once every quarter with the business heads help us to evaluate our progress. The closely knit interaction between IT and business ensures that project changes are communicated to IT as soon as they surface. By this manner, we are always in sync with the business. Also, IT’s contribution is determined from the perspective of business outcome, not just project execution. How do you address the problems that come with legacy infrastructure? At a board meeting three years ago, keeping the growth plans for the company in mind, it was

decided to do away with all legacy systems. That was the time we migrated to SAP. All existing legacy applications were discarded. You have been a principal consultant with PWC earlier. How has that role helped you in your current role as a technology decision maker? My work as a consultant has shaped at least two aspects of my working style. One, I focus more on business outcome and the other, we position ourselves as an IT internal consultant. It’s true that every IT solution is very often seen as a cost to the company. However, if you look at it from a “business outcome” perspective, then it has a different connotation. Secondly, by positioning our own IT services as an internal consultant, we look at the whole job from a true client perspective. We had to put SLAs in place and also pay attention to successfully market our expertise so as to drive the consumption of IT. What’s a nagging worry on the IT deployment scenario that you find many CIOs discussing? Today mobile devices have proliferated but their impact in terms of security has not been properly assessed. We need to ask ourselves whether we are ready in terms of having an effective company policy to counter the proliferation of mobile devices. We will not be able to keep employees from using all kinds of mobiles within the enterprise space, so the question is how do we safeguard enterprise data. What have been some of your recent projects? How have these benefited your organization? And looking forward, what are some of the projects that you are planning? IT assets management takes almost 60-70% of IT costs. To reduce this, we have implemented asset optimization and consolidation. We have also done virtualization of some of our key infrastructure. Going forward, we are working on our ‘journey to cloud’ strategy.

Transformers is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

Established in 1904, City Union Bank is one of the traditional banks in South India, with a customer base of 1 million. The bank embarked on a technology modernization program to position itself for the future-be it to facilitate business expansion, or tap into emerging market opportunities and the needs of the younger generation in the country. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) deployed TCS B NCS Universal Banking at City Union, enabling the bank to deliver a host of convenienceenriched services to its customers. As one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fastest growing technology and business solutions providers, TCS used its extensive knowledge of the banking domain and adapted its internationals best practices to centralize key back-office operations and processing. Increasing the bankâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s customer base by 100% and profits by 300%. And, of course, enabling City Union Bank to experience certainty.

Essential

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A CLOSER LOOK AT Collaboration technologies

Telepresence and video conferencing might not be impressive costwise or have many takers yet but the benefits that these collaboration technologies provide are hard to ignore.

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The Real Illusion By Georgina Swan

| It could be any meeting room, anywhere, with one major difference: The room, within Sheraton on the Park hotel in Sydney, is a gateway to the world. At the push of a button, the executives at Sheraton were chatting to colleagues in Toronto, Canada, speaking to each other as if they were seated across the table. They saw the nuances of facial expressions, hand gestures and presentations, full-size, clear and uninterrupted. Impressive, immersive and bleeding edge, telepresence has numerous benefits but with a hefty pricetag, the concept of virtual meetings feature well and truly on the 'nice to have' side of CIOsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; priority lists, if it features at all. Not that it isn't a compelling technology. Far from it. But organizations have been hard pressed to assemble a suitable business case for implementation. Starwood had no such issue. The group is in the midst of stage one of a global rollout that aims to install 70 telepresence suites in cities around the world by the end of this year. Tokyo has just come online, joining the likes of Chicago, London, Los Angeles and several locations across Asia. At the current rate of implantation, about six rooms are going live each month. "Before it became a global initiative we tried to get it running between Sydney, Singapore, Macau and another location in Asia," explains the director of IT for Sheraton on the Park and IT regional director for Starwood Pacific Hotels, Lindsay Leigh. "We decided it wasn't

video conferencing

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team's involvement.

Source: Gartner

essential technology

going to be as effective if we only had four locations talking to each other. So we went to the US. A few other Starwood hotels were looking into the technology so we sent our heads of IT globally to talk to vendors and see what we could come up with." The Sydney telepresence suite was the first cab off the rankâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and the first publicly available suite in the southern hemisphere. It uses Cisco technology and the hotel partnered with its communications provider, Telstra, and Tata Communications. Telstra was keen to get behind the project, managing the backhaul. The Tata Global Network includes a submarine cable network and a Tier-1 IP network, with connectivity to about 200 countries across 400 points of presence. As the first implementation, Leigh wanted the room to be the showpiece of the region and the hotel. Cisco installations must conform to set guidelines but as the saying goes, the devil is in the detail. "The room is 100 percent soundproof. We went through about 10 different configurations of lighting until we worked out what was best for where all

"The first part was: 'Will people want to buy this and what is the price point at which people would look at this scenario?' "So we analyzed the cost of flying; if you fly a CEO or senior executive from here to Singapore it's $3000 (about Rs135, 000) to $4000 (about Rs 180,000)." Sheraton on the Park charges about $500 (about Rs 22,500) per end point, per hour. Anybody can use the service and the hotel setting, where staff are on call 24 hours a day, makes the round-the-world proposition realistic. But virtual conferencing also makes tons of sense from a sustainability perspectiveâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; and we're talking tons of carbon.

Sustainable Collaboration Telepresence is perhaps the pinnacle of virtual meeting technology but it requires significant investment. It has, however, helped bring video conferencing technology into the parlance of enterprise. "Larger organizations will be going for high quality, such as Cisco telepresence, Polycom or Tanberg," says senior analyst for enterprise Asia-Pacific at Ovum,

It is somewhat of an inconvenient truth that the recession has been a boon to the video conferencing industry,as organizations tried to cut travel costs. the individual people sit," he says. "The little things we learned have become the standard across the whole of Starwood. So we were in a trial period on the fly to make it fit and it has come together perfectly. This is what they base everything else on." It is somewhat of an inconvenient truth that the global financial crisis has been a bit of a boon to the telepresence and video conferencing industry. Faced with the indelible need to cut costs and increase productivity, enterprises began to explore alternate methods of collaboration that don't involve getting in a car or on a plane. It was a key part of the business case for Starwood's own telepresence network. 78

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Claudio Castelli. "Normally, you have to have a carrier behind you so the companies tend to be multinationals with sites in multiple locations." Castelli says video traffic in the enterprise is growing as video conferencing technology makes it possible for companies to go for high level solutions without the high level investment. Some companies like international planning, infrastructure and environmental consulting firm, Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB), combine both. PB is considering the deployment of a telepresence solution between its offices in London, New York and Dallas. Its CIO, Christopher Johnson,

60%

Of organizations plan to spend more on telepresence to expand it's coverage. Source: Theinfopro

successfully implemented a Tanberg-based video conferencing solution that has not only garnered considerable buy-in from employees, but material ROI. PB Asia Pacific was already using Cisco's WebEx Web-based conferencing at the desktop level, but the solution had reached its limit within the organization. Johnson was keen to explore the collaborative opportunities of video-based solutions. He and his team worked with managers to identify the sites employees most traveled to by rental car and by plane. Based on the findings, he was able to make a case to trial video conferencing. One of the key drivers for the implementation, Johnson says, was the organizationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s social and corporate responsibility focus. The company recently established a 'fly free' week, when air travel was banned for all employees, as part of its sustainability program. "From a corporate responsibility perspective, we commenced an advertising campaign within the business in the four locations that employees most traveled to around the theme of: Why jump on a plane when you can achieve the same thing through video conferencing?" Johnson cites directorate-level sponsorship, communication and a multifaceted approach that took in all business units as some of the reasons for the project's success. He is also impressed with the reporting functions of the system which allow the company to track the number of conferences, network performance, and ROI.

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"There are some assumptions in reporting," he admits. "It asks for the number of participants and the typical cost of travel per participant. But it became pretty clear to us during the 60-day trial that there was a material ROI—a very tangible reduction in rental cars and flights, and the rather intangible in productivity gains." PB is not the only company to have realized the productivity benefits of video conferencing. Ricoh CIO, Rob Livingstone, was able to use the impetus of a major business project to implement a Polycom high definition video conferencing solution. When Ricoh's state-of-the-art Oceania printing innovation center in Sydney was given the green light, the company also realized the need to provide a showcase experience to customers in other parts of the country. "Part of our strategy was to put in high definition video conferencing," Livingstone says. "So a customer could come into the Melbourne showroom and enjoy the benefits of a high definition video conference directly into the printing innovation center in Sydney. They can see and experience the software and hardware without having to fly up." The drive and justification for the solution may have been all about the customer and the need for best of breed infrastructure, but Ricoh soon began to realize that the technology also provided company benefits. "Because all the video conferencing is done across our internal data network, the marginal cost of calls is zero," Livingstone says. "It's high bandwidth, point-to-point or multipoint conferencing and we encourage staff to use it for internal meetings. Obviously, customers come first but we have spare time on the network and we found that the internal use has been phenomenal." Ricoh is averaging about 2,500 video conferencing sessions per year. Based on a five percent improvement in productivity tied to a percentage of those who might not travel, Livingstone calculates the company is looking at a minimum of 250 hours of productivity gained based on the technology.

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"And that's probably conservative," he says. "Our total travel bill has reduced year-onyear by about $220,000 (about Rs 99 lakh). That's a compound saving, which is also due to reduction in airfares, better buying and shorter trips where necessary, but certainly a contributing factor to the reduction is the high use of VC." He estimates about 40 percent of the savings is directly attributable to the use of the video conferencing infrastructure. The success of video conferencing has spurred a further desktop video conferencing rollout through the same infrastructure. "We are now extending the capabilities of the meeting or boardroom video conferencing units to the desktop for key stakeholders within our business," Livingstone says, "And extending the scope of VC even more." But how do you know when a video conferencing rollout has gained buy-in from the business? You start receiving grief from employees when it's not available. PB quickly found its video conferencing rooms oversubscribed and that mobility was becoming an increasing requirement. Johnson solved the issue by deploying Tanberg's desktop-based video units. Likewise, CSC, which has installed seven LifeSize high definition video conferencing units in its offices around Australia, discovered a keen level of interest from staff only 12 months after implementation. "People beat me up because they can't get in to use it," jokes CSC CIO, Ben Patey. He considers desktop video conferencing the next evolution for enterprise "as long as CIOs can get answers to questions such as 'how does it impact the network?'" You also need to have sound architectural design, strong policy settings and a close relationship with your telco. Another major consideration is an ageold IT issue—interoperability—as vendors jockey to establish their technologies as 'industry standard'. "It's not easy to make Cisco talk to LifeSize or Tanberg," says Ovum's Castelli. "It is possible but you need an exchange service in the middle form a service provider, that means extra charges."

Tommy Hilfiger’s Virtual Fitting Rooms Leading lifestyle brand Tommy Hilfiger signed a five-year managed services contract with BT last year for a video conferencing solution which also includes—it claims—the industry's first 'virtual fitting room'. These virtual rooms enable immediate global "in-person" communication and collaboration among Tommy Hilfiger's designers and manufacturing facilities, connecting offices in Amsterdam, New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo, with potentially more units to follow. "The virtual fittings rooms include addons such as mobile cameras and recording facilities to enable the design team— based in Amsterdam and New York—to collaborate faster and more effectively with the manufacturing team in Hong Kong," a BT spokesperson says. "Teams are able to discuss the development of every single piece of the collection face-to-face without having to take long-distance flights." "The solution has brought us an immersive virtual meeting experience and saved both time and money," says Fred Gehring, CEO, Tommy Hilfiger Group. "Teams are able to interact and collaborate as if they were in the same room, making us much more agile and competitive. We look forward to better and more regular communication between our entities across the globe." Bas Burger, CEO, BT Benelux, adds: "This solution will also significantly lower carbon emissions. It is a good example of where sustainability and cost-savings go hand-in-hand. We understand that sustainability is not an altruistic activity. To sustain the business, investments need to show return." — Zafar Anjum

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The telepresence industry is beginning to see partnerships, such as the recent deal between BT and Tata Communications for an intercarrier exchange."You have to subscribe and buy it as a managed service," Castelli says. "That's the direction it seems to be going but, so far, it is not fully transparent." For CIOs, it can be more like picking a team than choosing a technology partner. "It was a big decision on our part," says Starwood's Leigh of the choice to go with Cisco. For those like Starwood, which sells its telepresence suites as a service, the ROI calculation is solely around use. Leigh estimates an ROI of about nine months. PB's Johnson used a relatively simple but effective evaluation procedure. "We had a register in the room at each of the locations to rate the experience having just finished a video conference," he says. Johnson says the initial $292,000 (about Rs 131 lakh) investment would have an ROI of eight months. "We didn't have to do a thing to our network except tweak quality of service and prioritization for the traffic and so on. Within 60 days of implementation, we received the reduced year-on-year, monthon-month invoices for all our travel—and the $292,000 investment had turned off $750,000 (about Rs 337. 5 lakh) in travel. Ricoh's Livingstone says there were two parts to the ROI discussion. "One is based on a strategic intent and the ROI rides on the back of that initiative, whether it's the refurbishment of a major building or infrastructure. From our point of view, the ROI was very strategic—it was about maximizing exposure to existing and potential customers and driving our business towards significant growth targets. "It turns out that we've traveled some way down the line with [video conferencing] use internally, with quite considerable utilization and savings as a result—and that has been the icing on the cake." CIO

Immersed in Telepresence Research |Though it’s still in the early stages of adoption, but businesses that try telepresence, like it and want more, a new study says. Nearly seven out of 10 businesses polled don't use telepresence and have no plans to use it, but of those that have it deployed, 60 percent say they plan to spend more to expand it's coverage in the coming year, according to survey results by TheInfoPro. "That speaks well of a technology in the early adopter phase," says William Trussell, managing director of network research for the research firm. About 13 percent of the 230 interviewed for the study say they plan to try telepresence by the end of the first quarter of next year, he says. The main reason businesses give for expanding telepresence use once they have it is that the technology meets business goals, which primarily means it saves on travel costs, Trussell says. When a similar survey was conducted last year, many of the comments from respondents indicated they were reluctant to invest in telepresence because it called for a significant initial investment they found daunting. In the most recent survey, those who have adopted say the technology fits into strategic plans and it delivers on the savings. Also, vendors have made an effort to introduce lower-end options that require a smaller initial outlay, Trussell says. In its survey, TheInfoPro found that businesses are cooling some on WAN optimization. Spending on WAN optimization continues to grow, he says, but at a slower rate, indicating that because if its clear potential to cut WAN bandwidth costs or at least to defer increases, the technology has passed into the mainstream with 47 percent of those surveyed saying they use it. In another area, TheInfoPro found that 41 percent of businesses have some form of unified communications deployed, with roughly equal percentages (about 29 percent each) saying they have plans to implement UC by the end of the first quarter of this year.

image by p hotos.com

essential technology

early adopters

—Tim Greene

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Collaboration SharePoint Style Global hotel chain Hilton is upgrading to SharePoint 2010 for its employees and business partners at 3,600 hotels across the globe. By Shane O'Neill With additional inputs from Tim Greene At the time of writing, Hilton was at the end of its pilot program for Exchange and Office 2010 and should have rolled them out in increments in January 2011, starting with employees not on Exchange and Outlook. SharePoint is still in the planning phase as Hilton determines who exactly needs SharePoint and how IT will govern content, says Webb. He says he hopes Office, Exchange and SharePoint 2010 will make Hilton a "workplace of the future."

Everyone on the Same Page

enterprise apps | If you're staying at a Hilton Hotel for business or pleasure, you probably won't see evidence in the lobby that the worldwide hotel chain is upgrading to Office and SharePoint 2010 for its employees and business partners at 3,600 hotels across the globe. But behind the scenes, Hilton Worldwide CIO Robert Webb is counting on an upgrade

The Office 2010 upgrade is part of Hilton's Innovation Collaborative, where the company tested a group of technology vendors to deliver technologies across all Hilton hotels around the world. Those that passed muster include IBM, Accenture, AT&T and Microsoft. While IBM is Hilton's main datacenter and desktop support service vendor, Hilton is looking to Microsoft for its productivity

image by photos.com

One major goal of Hilton's Office and SharePoint 2010 upgrade plan: Get all its employees onto one platform. Hilton has 130,000 employees in 82 countries. to Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Office Communications Server (rebranded as Lync), as well as a migration to Windows 7, to improve productivity and communication among Hilton employees, from C-level executives to front desk workers.

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and collaboration tools piece of the puzzle, and has expanded its enterprise agreement to provide 2010 versions of Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server and Windows 7 to all Hilton employees and business partners.

One major goal of Hilton's Office and SharePoint 2010 upgrade: Get all employees onto one platform. Hilton has 130,000 employees in 82 countries. Hilton is not alone in its journey with SharePoint. Enterprise adoption of SharePoint is rapidly on the rise: A survey from document management company Global 360 reveals that 90 percent of the survey's 886 respondents currently use SharePoint, with 8 percent using SharePoint 2010. Moreover, 67 percent of those that use SharePoint spread it out enterprise-wide, indicating that SharePoint is not just for the IT department. The survey also highlights how SharePoint is used at organizations. It commonly starts out as a content repository but transitions to something more dynamic. A good 67 percent of respondents have extended SharePoint's use to manage document workflows; 66 percent use it for portal and Web content management; and 56 percent use it to support business processes. And 27 percent say that over half of the documents stored in SharePoint are used to support mission-critical parts of the business. The advantage for Hilton, as with most companies, is that its workforce is familiar and comfortable with Exchange and Office REAL CIO WORLD | a p r i l 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

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documents, says Webb. Most of Hilton's workers come from an Office 2007/Exchange 2007 environment, or from some Novell Groupwise e-mail systems outside the US. "This is not a simple e-mail upgrade," he says, who points out that there will be more of an emphasis on the "document sharing and collaboration features of SharePoint merged with Exchange 2010 for a unified e-mail and collaboration platform."

Many of the social networking features of SharePoint and unified communications— including IM, video and voice—of Office Communicator are integrated into the application everybody uses most: Outlook. "We've been tying SharePoint features and the chat and presence features of Office Communicator into Outlook, and will push that integrated package out," says Webb.

An Eye on the Cloud

As Webb rolls out the presence features of OCS into Outlook, he understands the potential that having voice, video and chat features at their fingertips could be a distraction for workers who are not used to it. In fact, according to a recent Forrester survey title Information Workers Are Not Quite Ready for Desktop Videoconferencing, a large percentage of staffers in North America and Europe have little interest in using collaborative technology tools like desktop video. Of the 5,400-plus businesspeople surveyed, 72 percent don't want desktop video, and even if they did, they don't have much access to it, says the Forrester report.

Hilton is evaluating a cloud computing model for certain parts of its workforce. Like many big enterprises, Hilton does not plan a wholesale move to a cloud model, but rather a hybrid environment. "We like the flexibility of mixing both on-premise and a hosted cloud model," says Webb. "We plan to have a mixed environment where some services are delivered from an IBM cloud and some are from a Microsoft cloud." But a hybrid approach calls for a deeper examination of Hilton's workforce to see who can get by on cloud-based applications like

Presence Without Distraction

Hilton realizes that the potential of having voice,video and chat features at staffers’fingertips could be a distraction for those not used to it. those in Microsoft's Office 365 online service, and who cannot, says Webb.

SharePoint and Outlook for Social Networking While Webb sees SharePoint as an important part of its collaboration tool set, it is not the only tool in his armory, and his goal is to keep the focus on SharePoint's social networking and document sharing features a natural part of Hilton employees' workflow. "We want employees to use SharePoint MySites and TeamSites [which create a Facebook-like environment] to share information or jointly edit documents with people in their departments," says Webb. 82

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"I think having the 'free' and 'busy' indicators is helpful to keep it from being too much of a distraction," says Webb. "But at the same time our IT and training groups have an obligation to educate people on how to most effectively use these tools, and not just throw more technology at employees and expect them to know how to use it all." Webb adds that the good news is that workers have an established familiarity with Microsoft products, but there will be a learning curve for new features in Office 2010. "It's up to IT to help manage information overload," he says. CIO

SharePoint, Share Pain Despite widespread adoption, the SharePoint platform comes with challenges, according to a survey by management company Global 360. These include: Out-of-the-Box User Experience Not Great. Only 17.6 percent of survey respondents feel SharePoint delivers a great out-of-the-box user experience. Conversely, 78 percent describe SharePoint as somewhat adequate to inadequate, and that it requires additional in-house design and development. Their biggest challenge, according to 21 percent of respondents was, a “lack of an intuitive, easy-to-use interface for business users." Building Business Apps Takes Time and Effort. SharePoint, particularly SharePoint 2010, has made advances in areas such as social media, offline access, and better CRM and ERP integration. But according to the Global 360 report, "the gap between what has been delivered and what can be achieved is still dramatic." Of the 60 percent of respondents who described the SharePoint user experience as inadequate, 47 percent are building custom apps within their SharePoint environments. And this takes time. Thirty percent cited "development time and effort required to build business applications" as the top challenge when implementing SharePoint. Getting IT and Business Users on the Same Page. Employees have come to expect more from their enterprise apps. For this reason, IT needs to involve users in the planning of SharePoint deployments. This not always easy, since there can be a disconnect between IT and the business users. But early user feedback will ultimately speed adoption and reduce the costs of a SharePoint deployment, says the Global 360 report.

—Shane O'Neill Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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At first look, I would have skipped Buy In, but its subtitle “saving your good idea from getting shot down”, caught my attention. I was taken aback by the authors’ recommendations of taking people on with rationale rather than burying them in data. Most of us, when presented with some of the attacks (as illustrated in the book) would lose our composure, roll up our sleeves—and begin a losing battle. The problem is that we think that logic and strong reasoning will win the day. Whereas, the commonest ways that an idea is attacked are related to the fears and emotions of the audience. The book focuses on the fact that if one is not prepared to respond to the challenge, ideas will most likely be rejected. The book gives an insight into the 24 common attacks which you are likely to face with some thoughts on how you can handle them. It’s a short book, illustrated with a long story, but it reads quickly and is well worth reading if you find your ideas being shot down way more often than they should. RAJESH BATRA, CTO, GlOBAl l HEAlTH l

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It’s a tactfully written book, especially helpful in figuring out how to re-direct attacks to your advantage. It’s a must-read for go-getters. It helps identify potential road blocks, maneuvering past them, getting your ideas accepted, and silencing and winning over both reasonable and unreasonable objections. In the book’s first half, the authors build a theoretical foundation for tackling those who oppose your ideas. In the latter half, a practical method for dealing with such attacks is described. I found this approach engaging and educational. I highly recommend to not only CIOs but also to those who’ve faced opposition to their ideas at any point. VIRENDER PAL, CTO, SpiCEJET

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