CIO April 2013 Issue

VIEW FROM THE TOP Dr. Devi Shetty says IT can solve India’s healthcare problems.

TECHNOLOGY

LEADERSHIP

LOWE LINTAS’ R. BALKI: BE WARY OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Page 62

BUSINESS

REAPING ACCURACY How Omnikan used a mobile app to weed out losses.

90

Page 44

DAYS OR LESS

They might not tell you, but your business peers think your department is too slow. Here’s how to change that. Page 32

VOL/08 | ISSUE/06

APRIL 15, 2013 | `100.00 W WW.CIO.IN

“CIOs must treat every project like a business project,” says VIVEK KHANNA, VP Finance & IS, Havells, if they want to speed up delivery.

10 10101 10100010 10101001101 10111010010000 10101000101111101 0 00101010101000101 110 0 1 0 1 0 1 10 11 01 01 10 01 001010 00 10 01 00 10 01 01 11 10 01 11 01 10 10 01 00 10 00 10 01 00 01 10 1 01 01 00 01 10 01 01 00 01 10 10 10 10 11 01 10 01 11 01 11 00 11 01 00 01 01 00 10 1 01 01 10 01 01 01 11 00 10 0 01 01 01 0 10 10101 10100010 10101001101 10111010010000 10101000101111101 0 00101010101000101 110 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 10 11 01 1 0 1 001010 00 10 01 00 10 01 01 11 10 01 11 01 10 10 01 00 10 00 10 01 00 01 10 1 01 01 00 01 10 01 01 00 01 10 10 10 10 11 01 10 01 11 01 11 00 11 01 00 01 01 00 10 1 01 01 10 01 01 01 11 00 10 0 01 01 01 0

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FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

PUBLISHER, PRESIDENT & CEO Louis D’Mello ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Rupesh Sreedharan, Sudhir Argula E D I TO R I A L

A Simple Path Keep your strategy simple, your team sharp, and delegate while staying in control—that’s the wise path to success.

“Those who are skilled in combat do not become angered, those who are skilled at winning do not become afraid. Thus the wise win before the fight, while the ignorant fight to win.”

—Zhuge Liang (208 A.D) Wisdom knows no limitations, specially not those of time. I’ve reflected upon this many times recently while re-reading a translation of a Chinese epic. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a 14th century historical novel, which deals with China of the first and second century A.D. Much like the Mahabharata, this epic too is a complex tale with many sub-plots.

One of my favorite sections deals with the Battle of the Red Cliffs and the role played by Zhuge Liang, a key military and political strategist (both historical and fictional).

Through determined effort and the able handling of people, Liang was able to help defeat an army four times bigger at the Red Cliffs. I’ve found valuable lessons in this for everyone—me and you included.

His first precept is to employ capable people, assign them tasks they are best suited to, and then evaluate them without allowing personal prejudice to get in the way. He next focuses on uniting the hearts of his troops before entering a battle.

While Liang is all for gathering intelligence and putting a value on information, he puts equal emphasis on ensuring that his troops are aware of his aims and that his instructions are clear and easy to understand.

Interestingly, one of his recommended strategies is to reach out to as many people as possible and avoid making unnecessary enemies.

Liang’s other diktat, that can make a significant difference to anyone’s efforts, is to take full responsibility for all endeavors.

Over the distance of the centuries, the veracity of Liang’s advice calls out to us: Stay focused on goals, delegate to capable people, keep your directions simple and clear, reach out and build bridges with people and take the lead in everything.

Do you think Zhuge Liang’s strategy will work for you? Write in and let me know.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Vijay Ramachandran EXECUTIVE EDITOR Gunjan Trivedi, T.M. Arun Kumar ASSOCIATE EDITOR Yogesh Gupta DEPUTY EDITOR Sunil Shah ASSISTANT EDITOR ONLINE Varsha Chidambaram SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENTS Gopal Kishore, SENIOR CORRESPONDENT Anup Varier, Sneha Jha CORRESPONDENTS Aritra Sarkhel, Debarati Roy, Eric Ernest, Ershad Kaleebullah, Shweta Rao, Shubhra Rishi CHIEF COPY EDITOR Shardha Subramanian SENIOR COPY EDITOR Shreehari Paliath COPY EDITOR Vinay Kumaar LEAD DESIGNERS Jinan K.V., Suresh Nair, Vikas Kapoor SENIOR DESIGNER Unnikrishnan A.V DESIGNERS Amrita C. Roy, Sabrina Naresh SALES & MARKETING PRESIDENT SALES & MARKETING VP SALES GM MARKETING MANAGER KEY ACCOUNTS

SENIOR MANAGER PROJECTS MANAGER- SALES SUPPORT ASST. MANAGER PRODUCTS SR. MARKETING ASSOCIATE MARKETING ASSOCIATES

PROJECT CO-ORDINATOR LEAD DESIGNERS DESIGNER

Sudhir Kamath Parul Singh Siddharth Singh Jaideep Marlur, Runjhun Kulshrestha Sakshee Bagri Ajay Chakravarthy Nadira Hyder Dinesh P. Dilip Gopinathan Anuradha Iyer, Benjamin Jeevanraj, Lavneetha Kunjappa Rima Biswas, Saurabh Patil Jitesh C.C., Pradeep Gulur Lalita Ramakrishna

EV E N TS & AU D I E N C E D EV E LO P M E N T SR. MANAGERS PROJECTS Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya, Pooja Chhabra, MANAGER Tharuna Paul SENIOR EXECUTIVE Shwetha M. PROJECT COORDINATORS Archana Ganapathy F I N A N C E & O P E R AT I O N S FINANCIAL CONTROLLER CIO SR. MANAGER ACCOUNTS SR. ACCOUNTS EXECUTIVE MANAGER CREDIT CONTROL SR. MANAGER PRODUCTION SR. MANAGER IT

Sivaramakrishnan T. P. Pavan Mehra Sasi Kumar V. Poornima Prachi Gupta T.K.Karunakaran Satish Apagundi

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 3 | REAL CIO WORLD

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

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contents APRIL 15, 2013 | VOL/8 | ISSUE/06

Case Files 44 | Kancor Ingredients MOBILITY When inaccurate data began to eat at Omnikan’s profits—the marigold managed farming arm of Kancor Ingredients—the company turned to a mobile app and weeded out losses.

By Ershad Kaleebullah

82 | Tesco HSC APP STORE How Tesco, the world’s third largest retailer, replicated the success of its online grocery platform in the UK with Eastern European markets quickly and on the cheap.

By Shubhra Rishi

COVER PHOTO BY SRIVATSA SHANDIL IYA \ COVER DESIGN BY VIK AS K AP OOR & UNNIKRISHNAN AV

84 | Micro Inks

3 2

VIRTUALIZATION Vapi-based inkmanufacturer, Micro Inks, dares go where few other companies would: It virtualizes its core apps and gains.

By Ershad Kaleebullah

more »

32 | 90 Days or Less

6 2

COVER STORY | IT STRATEGY They might not tell you but your business peers think your department is too slow.

Here’s how to change that.

By Shubhra Rishi

40 | Captain Change COVER STORY PLUS | IT STRATEGY Nadim Matta, one of the world's top 100 thinkers, and senior partner of Schaffer Consulting, tells you how to become swifter, more agile, and more innovative.

By Anup Varier

56 | Staking a Claim FEATURE | INNOVATION There’s a patent gold rush under way as savvy companies seek to lock in the competitive advantage from their IT innovations.

By Kim S. Nash

4

A P R I L 1 5 , 2 0 1 3 | REAL CIO WORLD

VIEW FROM THE TOP: “India will prove that a nation's wealth has nothing to do with the quality of its healthcare,” says Dr. Devi Shetty, Founder and Chairman, Narayana Hrudayalaya Group of Hospitals.

VO L/8 | ISSUE/06

contents

(cont.)

DEPARTMENTS 2 | From the Editor-in-Chief A Simple Path

By Vijay Ramachandran

8 | Trendlines Technology | How to Beat Government Firewalls Quick Take | The Brave New World of Outsourcing Voices | Is SDN the Next Big Thing?

Mobility | This One’s Glassy!

Social Media | Japan’s Twitter Yellow Pages Security | Security in Your Palm Auto | Hurdles Ahead Policy | No Google Glass Zone Innovation | Toothpaste Plays Muse By the Numbers | Data Mis-management

4 8

14 | Alert Cybercrime | Internet’s New Bogeymen Privacy | Peeping Toms

86 | Essential Technology Services Model | Gaining Acceptance Cloud Security | Eyes in the Sky

48 | Marketing with an IT Twist CXO AGENDA | MARKETING STRATEGY That IT and marketing share a love-hate relationship isn’t new but do they really give each other the cold shoulder? Not anymore. In fact, Karthi Marshan, Head-Marketing, Kotak Mahindra Group, says marketing should be more IT savvy and use IT to create relevant marketing strategies.

By Ershad Kaleebullah

Columns

90 | Endlines Innovation | About Face

By Lauren Brousell

52

19 | Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish FRANKLY SPEAKING It looks like the Akash tablet project has been put in the trash, where it belongs. Now let’s hope they don't plan to aren’t going to recycle.

By T.M. Arun Kumar

23 | Social Relationships, Social Returns LEADING EDGE Calculating the ROI of social media business is tricky for most enterprises. Knowing what to track can be a good start.

By Gunjan Trivedi

27

| Presentation Punch

CIO SKILLS If you’re anything like the average executive, you’re probably a presentation lightweight. Here’s how to create knockout presentations and make your audience want to be you.

By Mike Elgan

6

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2 1

EXECUTIVE COACH Stephen Manallack, an award winning PR consultant, speaker and author says the secret of Indian leaders' success is their soft skills.

VO L/8 | ISSUE/06

CIO Online

.in CIO ADVERTISER INDEX

[ Edi tor's PICKS ] The Chosen Ones To read the most interesting, exciting, and fascinating stories of the day, check out our Editor's Picks. Read the latest features, surveys, and interviews on emerging technologies, challenges and opportunities.

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To keep yourself abreast of the happenings in the IT world around you, watch our online videos. cio.in/videos

[ S l i de S hows ] Outdated tech, unwanted tech skills. View our slideshows for more.

[ Su r veys ]

Cisco Systems(India)

IFC

Ctrl S Datacenters

IBC

Dell India

17+ Innovation btwn Pg 40 & 41

EMC IT Solutions India

25,26+ flap, 66, 67,68 & 69

Emerson Network Power India

53,55,57, 59&61

HP BCS

5

HP IPG

51

HP Services Microsoft Corporation (India) Oracle India

39+Bellyband BC, 30 & 31 11

Panasonic India

1

Riverbed Technology India

3

SAS Institute (India)

65

Trend Micro India

15

By the Numbers Our surveys are a treasure trove of technology, staffing, security trends and beyond.

They mirror economic realities and how they impact you. Visit the By the Numbers section online. cio.in/by-the-numbers

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>> Case Studies >> Whitepapers >> Articles >> Slideshows >> CEO Interviews >> Events

FOLLOW US ON www.facebook.com/CIOIndiaIDG twitter.com/CIOIn

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

VO L/8 | ISSUE/06

EDITED BY SHARDHA SUBRAMANIAN

NEW

*

HOT

*

UNEXPECTED

How to Beat Government Firewalls If you’re not sure about the purpose behind Daiyuu Nobori’s online thesis project, perhaps the large picture of the collapse of the Berlin Wall will help. Nobori created VPN Gate to help individuals in countries that restrict Internet use to beat government firewalls. The service encourages members of the public to set up VPN (virtual private network) servers and offer free connections to individual users, aiming to make the technology more accessible.

“Today’s VPN software is very complex. They are not easy to use. Some VPN services around the world are expensive for people in other parts of the world,” Nobori said. His service maintains a public, real-time list of freely available VPN servers for users to choose from. It also offers downloadable server software to run the VPN, and a client that greatly simplifies the process of finding and connecting to one of the free servers, for the less technically inclined.The service has drawn 77,000 users and served nearly 4 terabytes of data.

He was motivated to create VPN Gate when he learned about the firewalls imposed on people living in Egypt and Libya. The Web page is currently offered in English, Chinese and his native Japanese, but he says that is based more on the number of language speakers worldwide than any political feelings about a particular country. “If people somewhere want to study and can’t use services like Wikipedia or Google, this is a big problem, ” he said.

—By Jay Alabaster

QUICK TAKE:

The Brave New World of Outsourcing

I T S T R A T E G Y Today, the advent of technologies like cloud computing have given CIOs more negotiating muscle making it easier to walk away from unsatisfactory deals. But CIOs who want to enjoy this power need to be willing to define new strategies and processes. Kapil Pal, head-IT, Pepsico India, spoke to Shweta Rao about the changes CIOs must look forward to in order to adapt to current trends in the Indian outsourcing industry.

How has security in outsourcing changed over the years?

Earlier, there were varying quality standards for security, but today there’s a focus on standardization. CIOs are more focused on following a standard and they ensure that the solutions deployed are certified. At Pepsico, we also undergo four security audits per year. Currently, we have deployed a unified security solution with the help of our outsourcing partners to connect about 1,000 distributors over 140 locations.

08

TRENDLINES

TRENDLINES

TECHNOLOGY

A P R I L 1 5 , 2 0 1 3 | REAL CIO WORLD

What’s the ideal duration for an outsourcing contract today?

About two to three years is an ideal amount of time to build a relationship with an outsourcing partner. Initially, our business requirements were mostly met with generic solutions from some outsourcing partners unless we put our foot down on what we exactly wanted. For the first six months, we decided to educate all our partners about our business and its future needs. That’s when we realized that short-term contracts—for one year, for example—don’t work at all. But going beyond a four- year contract is also not practical.

Kapil Pal

How easy is it to move from one outsourcing partner to another?

I think it all depends on the CIO and the outsourcing relationship he builds by giving due importance to SLAs. Sometimes it could be the organization’s fault as well.

Changing a vendor is the easiest way out, understanding and acknowledging our drawbacks isn’t. This is true especially when the fault lies in our own SLAs.

VOL/8 | ISSUE/06

IS SDN THE NEXT BIG THING? VOICES:

N E T W O R K I N G Software Defined Networking (SDN)—an approach to building networks that separate and abstract elements of these systems and allow system admins to quickly provision network connections on the fly—has the potential to open up new opportunities for enterprise IT. But the question is: Do CIOs think it has the potential? To find out, Eric Ernest spoke to some of your peers to understand how they view SDN and if it would stir up a revolution in datacenters. Here’s what they said:

MANDAR MARULKAR Head-IT Infrastructure, Systems & CISO, KPIT Cummins Infosystems

RANGA RAJ CTO , Celstream Technologies “I don’t think CIOs need to put SDN as a big ticket item for them to worry about. It’s going to be predominantly handled by the infrastructure providers, say, in telecom. I don’t think it’s a key influencer in terms of what CIOs will have to do unless these guys get their act together and say that SDN is the standard. Till then, I wouldn’t bother too much about it.”

S. SHIVASHANKAR Group CIO, SPIC “I think software-defined networking is going to be a boon for CIOs. That’s because I believe that SDN will take care of the existing issues—from a network perspective—in datacenters. And for me, this is a good thing.”

M O B I L E Sam Yu won’t name the handset makers involved. But the executive at Taiwanese firm Polytron Technologies is confident that consumers this year will see the arrival of partially transparent glass smartphones.

“It will happen near the end of 2013,” he said, as he showed off a prototype device. “Trust me.”

The prototype phone was, however, not functional. As not all the components used in the phone can be made invisible, the company’s glass technology may at least allow for a portion of the smartphone to remain see-through, with the rest covered behind casing, according to Polytron staff.

Unlike today’s smartphones, which are often encased in plastic or metal and filled with opaque circuitry, Polytron is proposing handset makers build their products with its specially designed glass that can contain near invisible electrical wiring using patented technology. The result can create a transparent effect, making the phone see-through, the company said.

Yu, general manager for Polytron, has been showing off a prototype device, built from a light piece of glass. Certain components such as the battery, camera, and memory card are still visible, but the remainder of the phone, including the screen, is transparent, he said.

“I like things that are novel and look beautiful,” he said, adding that the patent for the technology was developed four years ago. “Current mobile phones are heavier, but with this glass you can make it much lighter.”

Polytron is a subsidiary of US-based Polytronix and focuses on glass technology. One of the company’s main products is its “Polyvision Privacy Glass”, which can flip between transparency and a near-opaque cloudy white with a flick of a switch.

Polytron has mainly focused on providing glass for construction projects, but Yu said he believes its technology can also be applied to electronics. He also displayed a nearly transparent USB memory stick that will start selling later this year, and a speaker system embedded into a thin slate of glass.

TRENDLINES

“In the next 18 months, SDN will completely revolutionize the way people build datacenters. The biggest challenge in setting up an SDN datacenter is creating awareness, understanding the technology, and integrating it with existing infrastructure.”

This One’s Glassy!

—By Michael Kan VOL/8 | ISSUE/06

REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 5 , 2 0 1 3

09

Japan’s Twitter Yellow Pages

Hurdles Ahead A U T O CIOs in the auto sector expect IT funding to be the top

most challenge in 2013. Delayed decisions from business, which held the first spot in 2012, has fallen off the list of top five challenges for 2013.

IT funding Inadequate in-house skill sets Deploying too many technologies/ applications Governance, risk and compliance Supporting business expansion Source:State of the Auto CIO Study 2012

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Security in Your Palm Fujitsu Technology Solutions has named European bank UniCredit as the first major customer for its PalmSecure authentication system, which was on display at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, last month.

UniCredit will roll out the system in Italy as a means of payment authorization. Users enrolled in the system will be able to pay by holding their hand over a scanner on suitably equipped POS terminals, without the need for a card or PIN, the bank said. It is already testing the system, which it calls Papillon. The bank’s CEO Federico Ghizzoni made the first payment on a pilot system at an Italian store belonging to upmarket cosmetics chain Kiko in mid-December.

PalmSecure, already tested with banks in Japan, uses an infrared sensor to scan the pattern of veins in the palm of the hand from a distance of about 5 cms, converting the result into a digital code. The system also detects the flow of blood through the veins, defending against the kind of fake-finger attacks that have bedeviled fingerprint authentication systems and making it pointless for thieves to cut off authorized users’ body parts in order to defeat access control systems, said Fujitsu Technology Solutions CTO Joseph Reger. There is no need to touch or swipe the sensor, making it suitable for environments where hygiene or resistance to dirt is important, such as hospitals or industry.

PalmSecure is an order of magnitude more accurate than fingerprint recognition, according to Reger. Fingerprint scans have a false acceptance rate—when someone else is mistakenly identified as the authorized user—of around one in 100,000, compared to around one in 1.25 million for palm vein scans, according to Fujitsu. The false rejection rate—where the authorized user is refused access—is around one in 1,000 for fingerprint scans and one in 10,000 for palm vein scans, it said.

Fujitsu has enrolled tens of thousands of users of different ages, sexes and ethnic background, allowing it to test the system’s speed and accuracy with a large database of users.

It says its own internal research has shown that palm vein patterns are unique and contain detailed characteristics allowing them to be distinguished from one another.

Fujitsu even envisions that the system could be built into cars as an alternative to existing security systems using keys or RFID tags.

—By Peter Sayer

SECURITY

VOL/8 | ISSUE/06

IL LUSTRAT ION BY MASTERFIL E.COM

TRENDLINES

S O C I A L M E D I A Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo has launched a Twitter-based Yellow Pages service that offers information about regions around the country.

The service, called “Twitter Local Yellow Pages,” collects popular Twitter accounts into groups based on location and theme, then offers users an easy way to subscribe.

DoCoMo launched the service together with Twitter’s Japanese subsidiary and two national radio organizations.

The food section of the Tokyo region of the service, for instance, offers Twitter accounts devoted to ramen, curry, lunches, and the Tsukiji fish market. Twitter also provides a way to browse and search for regional themes that are currently generating high levels of interest on the service.

Twitter has become popular in Japan, especially since the earthquake and tsunami that devastated a large swath of the country’s northeastern coast two years ago, when it became a key tool for sharing information on stricken areas. But the service’s increasingly popularity makes it harder for users to find relevant information.

But this service features accounts divided into groups based on Japan’s 47 main prefectures and large cities, with categories for each including food, shopping, tourism and sports.

To attract users to the service, DoCoMo is running a prize draw with gift certificates for winners in each region.

—By Jay Alabaster

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No Google Glass Zone

TRENDLINES

P O L I C Y Before an official pair has even been released, a Seattle cafe has banned customers from wearing Google’s computerized eye glasses inside the business.

While some restaurants have a “No shirt, no shoes, no service,” policy, Seattle’s 5 Points Cafe and Bar has a no Google Glass policy.

Google co-founder and CEO Sergey Brin wears Google Glass. He would not be allowed to wear the device in Seattle’s 5 Point Cafe.

The cafe said in a blog post, “If you’re one of the few who are planning on going out and spending your savings on Google Glasses—what will for sure be a new fad for the fannypack wearing, never removing your bluetooth headset-wearing crowd, plan on removing them before you enter The 5 Point. The 5 Point is officially a No Google Glass zone.”

It seems the cafe got a bit of pushback from people may be looking forward to wearing Glass while enjoying a cocktail.

One commenter wrote, “Thank God I live in Florida. If I did live in Seattle, I would probably be the first person to violate your ban and let nature take its course. How you can you ban something ahead of its release?”

Another called the cafe “paranoid.”

NO ZONE So the cafe’s management responded, writing, in part, “Sorry for another post on Google Glasses, but I have to address some of the people mad about our Google Glass ban... If nothing else, we’re saving you from looking like a complete

idiot in public. You’ll be thankful in a few years when your kids grow up and don’t have to see photos of you wearing these ridiculous things.” Google is still developing Glass, which is designed to enable users to take photos, shoot video, pull up maps and share images and information on social networks.

A transparent interface over the right eye shows options, while the glasses are manipulated using voice control.

Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, said the cafe may get a lot of publicity out of banning Glass, but the statement doesn’t make a lot of sense.

“It’s quite a surprise to see places ban them before they’ve even been publicly released,” said Olds. “From a practical standpoint, the folks who want to ban Glass, would have to ban other devices too if they want to remain consistent.

Any phone today can take pictures and record sound almost without detection.”

When it comes to recordings and privacy issues, it’s a bit late to worry about computerized glasses.

—By Sharon Gaudin

Toothpaste Plays Muse They say inspiration can come from the most unlikely places. For a scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, the Xerox-owned lab in Silicon Valley best known as PARC, it came from a tube of toothpaste.

The result is a new manufacturing method that can help make solar panels more efficient and increase the energy density of batteries. It began when the lab was looking at ways it could use existing Xerox technology, like printing, in other areas. While watching the way the two or three materials help shape each other when they are squeezed through a toothpaste tube nozzle, an engineer had one of those “a-ha” moments.

By squeezing through a print nozzle a silver paste surrounded by a sacrificial material that would eventually get burned off, researchers found they were able to get a very fine silver line— and in electronics, any type of fine, conducting line is usually good. The sacrificial material shapes the silver as it comes out of the nozzle so the resulting silver line is 50 microns wide and 30 microns high (a micron is a thousandth of a millimeter)—half the width and three times the height achieved when depositing silver

I N N O VAT I O N

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A P R I L 1 5 , 2 0 1 3 | REAL CIO WORLD

on its own, said Scott Elrod, VP and director of PARC’s hardware systems lab where the work is being done. “So this is a solar cell,” said Elrod. The cell is covered with narrow grid lines that carry power but also lie on top of the photovoltaic material that converts light into electricity. Finer silver lines mean less of the solar cell’s surface is covered and that means more power can be generated.

The same technology is being tried out in lithium ion batteries, which sit at the heart of electric cars, power tools, laptop computers and a myriad of other portable electronic gadgets.

Batteries generate electricity through an electron flow between a cathode and anode. The PARC researchers have been using their co-extrusion technology to make small channels in the cathode that allow the lithium ions to penetrate deeper.

“By doing that you can make the electrode thicker and as you make it thicker you basically make the energy density for the whole battery higher,” said Elrod. “So instead of going a 100 miles on an electric vehicle battery you can maybe go a 120 miles.”

— By Martyn Williams

VOL/8 | ISSUE/06

C O M P I L E D B Y D E B A R AT I R OY

Best Practices

Data Mis-Management Data management has been on CIO priority lists year after year. But in reality, it’s a neglected—and mounting—heap of trouble in Indian organizations.

IMPROVE your transactional data quality. Data quality begins—and often ends— with OLTP systems. A small investment in ensuring data quality in OLTP systems will go a long way toward reducing future expenses and hassles.

2

STRESS on data maturity.

Companies need to establish standard processes to ensure that data moves to decision makers only when it is mature enough to provide them with complete, accurate, and timely information. Companies can then reduce data de-duplication and increase efficiencies at all stages of the product lifecycle.

TRENDLINES

B

Bad data management is like a tooth cavity: It’s not apparent, but if ignored, can grow into a painful and expensive exercise. It could plague employee productivity and even expose them to compliance risks.

It’s not hard to see why data management is important. According to 78 percent respondents to Symantec’s State of Information Survey 2012, managing information better helps them make better decisions, 76 percent believe that it helps them understand customers better, and 76 percent think that it can increase the speed and agility of employees.

However, years of data piling up in the backyard has resulted in a heap of challenges. Sixty-six percent of Indian businesses say that there is no single version of truth. This is followed by 63 percent who say that it’s too difficult to find the right information at the right time. Sixty-one percent are also worried that critical information is at the risk of falling into wrong hands if not managed properly.

What’s even more worrying is the fact that 35 percent of those surveyed feel that business data is currently out of control. Thirty-eight percent are unsure of who has access to specific information, and while 43 percent are unsure of how old the information is and whether it is relevant anymore. Worse, 78 percent of Indian organizations admit that they have missed compliance requirements in the past year due to poor data management. Is anyone listening?

1

Data Management: Groping in the Dark State of information mismanagement

Impact of information mismanagement

43% Unsure how old information is

40%

Unsure if information is business or personal Unsure who owns information

40% 39%

Unsure how important specific information is

38%

Unsure who has access to specific information

78%

Of Indian organizations admit they have missed compliance requirements due to poor data management.

66%

63%

No single version of truth

Hard to find the right information

61%

Worry it may fall into wrong hands

SOURCE: KPMG INDIA FRAUD SURVEY 2012

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ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENT

Internet’s New Bogeymen I

IMAGES BY PHOTOS.COM

thought I harbored a healthy amount of paranoia before I attended a security conference for IT security professionals last month.

But now I’m just plain scared--and not about hackers and phishers.

No, the people who scare me even more are the security professionals who work for big business. They want my online data, your online data, everyone’s online data. And they want it more than even the bad guys who make headlines.

Big business isn’t evil incarnate, and the companies clamoring for our data aren’t the agents of destruction who would steal our identities for profit or erase our family photos just for kicks. But to the business leaders at e-commerce sites, social networks, and even banks, online privacy is something that must be managed at best, and mitigated at worse.

It’s an annoyance that must be dealt with. They want our data so they can track us, categorize us, and

use what they know about us to sell us something—or sell what they know about us to someone else. Or, as Trevor Hughes, the President and CEO of the International Association for Privacy Professionals (IAPP), told me, “Your data is the currency of the information economy.”

And our online activity is minting more money all the time.

among others. He also touched on more sweeping topics like federal regulations and public policy.

I was intensely interested in all of these issues as an active, web-surfing individual, but I also quickly realized that the other attendees in the room looked at these issues from the other side—from the perspective of their companies, which gather customer data and use it for business opportunity.

Their job is not to worry about protecting our privacy, but to worry about navigating privacy regulations, and protecting themselves from lawsuits and fines.

Our Data is Currency It took just one shocking hour at the conference to destroy every naive hope I might have had about online privacy. Hughes spoke to a large audience of IT professionals tasked with managing customer and user data, and named what he considered to be the hot-button privacy issues of the year: Location data, facial recognition, and Do Not Track,

All Fair Game Hughes also delved into issues surrounding “contextualization”— using your online data to customize

FINDINGS

Beware Rogue Clouds When it comes to rogue IT, cloud computing is a usual suspect. And rightly so.

Organizations worldwide might be running more rogue clouds than they know.

How is the frequency of rogue cloud projects changing over time?

7%

4% Becoming much more frequent

25% Becoming slightly more frequent

Becoming much less frequent

14% 50% Staying the same

Becoming slightly less frequent

83%

Of organizations worldwide say they are victims of rogue cloud deployments.

SOURCE: Symantec

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For more information Call : 1800 425 8970 email : marketing_in@trendmicro.com

Delhi : 91-11-42699000 Mumbai : 91-22-28395776 Bangalore : 91-80-40965068 www.trendmicro.co.in

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“content” (read: advertisements) to your browsing habits and personal demographics. Obviously, contextualization is already a widespread (and profitable) business tool, as anyone who’s experienced targeted ads on Google already knows.

The data set used for contextualization is diving ever deeper, though. “Context will put the debate on targeted ads on steroids,” Hughes told the crowd. “Not only are we going to have the sensitivity of where you’ve been online, but where you are in the world, and what you are doing and thinking.”

Oh, but it gets better. Facial recognition, anyone? You can tell your friends not to tag you in their photos all you want, but that’s small potatoes.

“We will see the anonymity of crowds dissipate,” Hughes said, predicting that photos taken by other people, or by cameras installed in public places, will be used to find you wherever you are.

tracking from browser to browser, and that’s an inconvenient truth for anyone who would need to implement Federal policy. But for Hughes, the real problem for privacy professionals is, “how do you switch it off or maintain it switched-off.”

Yes, you heard right: Do Not Track would be just another hoop that big business needs to jump through—or circumvent entirely.

Unfortunately, for now, businesses that want to track our data don’t even have to worry about the technical vagaries of Do Not Track. “None of this has the force of law yet,” said Hughes.

“Without the ability of regulators to enforce, we may not have any enforcement at all. Do Not Track may not have any consequences.”

You can see where this is heading.

And Hughes confirmed as much: “Some organizations have come out and said they will ignore Do Not Track.”

Don’t Give Data Willingly Do Not Track Me... Please?

Choose not to be tracked, and web sites wouldn’t be able to collect information about you. It’s the ultimate protection, right? No, think again. “Do Not Track is a very, very complicated and challenging issue,” Hughes said. Indeed, there’s no standard implementation for data

Unless you’re some sort of virtual exhibitionist who actually wants to sacrifice online privacy for fun and profit, data tracking should scare you.

But it’s also important to remember that the basic operating principles of our open Internet—an Internet where very expensive content is given away for

free—require a certain amount of data sacrifice.

Indeed, if you want all the complex, nuanced benefits of social sharing, you have to actually share yourself. And you’re probably already doing this, sacrificing your data quite willingly.

Ted Schlein, of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, brought up this paradox while speaking at a cybersecurity session. “People kind of care about privacy, and then they don’t,” he said. “Facebook has a conversation about a new privacy policy, people get excited about it, and then Zuckerberg says something, and they calm down.”

He’s right, of course. Periodic privacy imbroglios haven’t slowed the popularity of social networking sites, photo-sharing sites, even though all of these services gather information about us in order to grow revenue.

Big business is working over-time to collect data about us, and the more time we spend online, the more opportunities we give them to do so. So in the end, I wonder whether it’s scarier that businesses are collecting our data, or that we’re so willingly letting them do it. CIO Melissa Riofrio is senior editor at PCWorld. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

[ON INDIA’S NEW CYBERSECURITY POLICY]]

“The he new cyber security policy should focus on all factors that weaken our cyber space including a lack of citizen awareness. It should clearly define the responsibility of citizens, authority of officials, and accountability of watchdogs.”

— K.K. CHAUDHARY, SVP & GROUP HEAD IT & IS, LANCO ANCO GROUP

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ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENT

Peeping Toms: China and Zambia

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Information and Communication Technology Authority (ZICTA), the country’s telecom sector regulator, tried in vain to close some online publications, including the Zambian Watchdog, which is anti-government. Attempts to close some of the sites failed because they are hosted outside the country.

Official distrust of social media is growing in Africa because it is seen as a platform to provoke youngsters to protest.

“Most of the bloggers who insulted the head of state and dared the government were young people between the ages of 25 and 45,” Sakeni said.

In Malawi, the government has already passed a law allowing government officials to censor what citizens do online. It seeks to regulate

In Come the Freezedroids

C

hina is facing allegations that it is helping the Zambian government with deep packet inspection technology to eavesdrop, censor and intercept communications.

Deep packet inspection technology (DPI) allows monitoring of traffic from a specific IP address and enables the ability to spy on e-mail even as it is being typed out by the user. The Zambian government reportedly intends to introduce the monitoring mechanism to vet Internet services coming in and out of the country.

Zambian and Chinese security officials have reportedly been traveling between the two countries for the project, expected to cost the Zambian government over $5 million (about Rs 27 crore).

Officials from the country’s three mobile operators—MTN, Airtel and Zamtel—and some ISPs have confirmed on condition of anonymity that members of the Office of the President (OP) have been visiting them in an attempt to facilitate monitoring of e-mail and voice communications.

The Zambian government has made it clear in the recent past that it wants to monitor popular social media networks including Facebook and Twitter as well as blogs and e-mails, and block unfriendly news websites.

“The introduction of communication monitoring would clearly undermine civil liberties because the office of the president can snoop on all e-mails and Internet traffic,” said opposition National Restoration Party President Elias Chipimo.

Zambia joins many African countries that consider social media networks to be tools for promoting unrest, after successful uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia that toppled the governments in those nations.

Just last month, the Zambian government said it had finished drafting a law that will see the closure of online newspapers that are critical of the Zambian government.

Over the past year, the Zambian government through the Zambia

and control online communications including social media networks in the country. For example, the law requires that editors of online publications reveal to officials their names, home addresses and telephone numbers in addition to other personal information.

The Malawian law further introduces the concept of governmentappointed cyberinspectors who have the power to, among other things, monitor and inspect websites or activity on any information system in the public domain and report any unlawful activity to the regulator. CIO

Michael Malakata is correspondent at IDG News Service. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

Researchers at Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany have discovered a somewhat unusual method for cracking the security on encrypted Android phones—sticking them in the freezer.

According to the team, the technique works even on devices that are fully encrypted and have locked bootloaders. Their toolkit for the exploit is dubbed FROST, for Forensic Recovery Of Scrambled Telephones.

“Scrambled telephones are a nightmare for IT forensics and law enforcement, because once the power of a scrambled device is cut, any chance other than brute force is lost to recover data,” the FAU team said.

Disk encryption was introduced to Android in Version 4.0. The researchers used a Samsung Galaxy Nexus to demonstrate FROST in a step-by-step tutorial posted to their website. The idea behind the trick is that information stored in RAM remains present for much longer if the temperature is particularly cold—which means that it can be possible to access decryption keys stored in the phone’s memory.

By chilling a well-charged phone to about minus 10 degrees Celsius, then turning it off and on and booting it into recovery mode, data like photos, Web history and phone contact lists can be plucked from the device.

If the phone has an unlocked bootloader, the software can even snare encryption keys from the vulnerable RAM, allowing for full access to everything stored on the device.

— By Jon Gold

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TM Arun Kumar

FRANKLY SPEAKING

Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish It looks like the Akash tablet project has been put in the trash, where it belongs.

Now let’s hope they don't plan to aren’t going to recycle.

L

ILLUST RATION BY MAST ERF IL E.CO M

et us be thankful for the fools; but for them the rest of us could not succeed,” said Mark Twain more than a century ago. And how correct was he. If you are looking for examples to illustrate this statement, you don’t need to look further than the Indian government, which has unleashed many a foolish initiative. And I am not talking about the various yojanas and schemes named after famous deceased politicians (surely there would be many a ponzi scheme floating among those as well).

This is about Aakash, the ultra low-cost tablet, which was supposed to show the world India’s technology prowess and its ability to produce cutting-edge electronics devices on the cheap. That it was just a poor attempt at reinventing the wheel perhaps never crossed the minds of the powers that be.

To say that the Aakash tablet was an ill-conceived attempt would not be far from the truth. It is neither indigenous, nor inventive. It is just cheap—and not just from a cost perspective.

And even if looked at from a cost angle, it just costs a few hundred rupees less than other similar, or dare I say better, tablets available in the open market.

However, why talk about this moronic initiative of the government now? Well, that’s because recent newspaper reports suggest that the Indian government has virtually given up the ghost on Aakash. Sample some of the statements that have been recently uttered.

“Let’s not get obsessed with hardware,” the Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister M.M. Pallam Raju is reported to have said. “The overall (issue) is how we enable students. Let the students decide which device is useful.” It’s up to the users to choose the device from which they want to

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PHOTO BY SRIVATSA SHAN DILYA

TM Arun Kumar

FRANKLY SPEAKING

access content, Raju said, adding that the government’s role is just that of an enabler (not provider).

Hmmm… If one reads between the lines (or understands what the minister is saying correctly), it is clear what the minister is hinting at. What he is saying is that it is NOT the government’s responsibility or job to choose or even provide the hardware device to students—precisely what Aakash was trying to fulfil.

But, what would prompt the minister to make such a statement?

Surely, it can’t be a rash and thoughtless statement. Well, the fact remains that the Aakash tablet project got off to an abysmal start with delayed deliveries, poor performance, and bad reviews from both experts and users plaguing it. To solve this, the technical specs were improved, however, that didn’t alleviate the supply issues.

To make matters worse (for the Aakash project), the newspaper Mint reported that a cabinet note put up by the HRD ministry for procuring five million more tablets in 2013 has been returned to the ministry and the plan to float a fresh tender and have the device manufactured by some public sector companies has effectively been stalled. No wonder the minister is making statements about not choosing the hardware for the users.

And to add to these, from the time Aakash was conceived, technology has become better, faster, and cheaper, as is prone to happen with technology. Currently, there are many devices available in the market that retail between $50-$75 (about Rs 2,750-4,100). So, if one were to procure say, 1 lakh, or 1 million such devices, the prices should presumably be even lower. Of course, these devices would be Chinese made, but that shouldn’t make any difference as most of the electronic devices are made in China these days.

And prices are only going to get cheaper if Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is to be believed—and who doesn’t believe Google these days? On his recent tour to India, Schmidt said that a basic smartphone with a Web browser and apps could soon be available for $50, just a trifle more than what the Aakash tablet currently costs the government to procure.

So, if the news reports about the Aakash project being shelved are true, it is indeed good news. There are better uses of the tax payers’ money.

This brainchild of former HRD Minister, and the current Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Kapil Sibal, deserves nothing better. On the contrary, this step should have been taken quite some time ago. The Aakash tablet was a stillborn idea kept artificially alive only because it helped satiate the ego of the political class, which could then crow about India’s tech prowess without having contributed anything significant towards its success.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. CIO

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Arun has covered the IT industry in India since the time 80386 was cutting edge, MS DOS was the predominant desktop OS, and Internet was still a few years away. Follow him on twitter @aruntm

Stephen Manallack

EXECUTIVE COACH

The Great IndianAdvantage They’re argumentative, they’re aggressive, but what makes Indian leaders stand taller than their western counterparts is a different set of attributes: Soft skills.

I ILLUST RATION BY MAST ERF IL E.CO M

have always been vaguely uncomfortable when western business leaders say their value lies in share prices or their only responsibility is to investors. Surely success is not defined so narrowly and don’t we all share broader responsibilities?

But business leaders in the western world don’t think so.

Research has shown that the primary focus of western CEOs is on the short-term share price of their company. Contrast that with their Indian counterparts who are driven more by social responsibility, energizing the team, managing stakeholders and developing inner strength. According to a report by online HR and recruiting firm, Monsterindia.com, 84 percent of Indian CEOs spend half their time on talent-related activities.

Their list of priorities included: Building teams, raising employee productivity, increasing employee motivation, and retaining talent.

This was supported by another report The DNA of Indian Leadership by Professor Peter Cappelli and others from Pennsylvania University. The report said: “Indian CEOs think in English but act in an Indian context. This means they go beyond the narrow focus of shareholders and put long-term strategic vision, building talent, and molding organizational culture way above share price.”

It is this Indian leader who’s forcing the world to sit up and take notice. Of course, he’s pushed by other forces—like the country's rise as a global economic and technological powerhouse—but the point is that the Indian business leader is now very much in the limelight. Also. the fact that renowned international brands such as Jaguar and Land Rover are now in Indian hands only strengthens their case.

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Stephen Manallack

EXECUTIVE COACH

In my opinion, one of the reasons behind the success of Indian business leaders is their soft skills. This makes them unique because—unlike western leaders—their corporate success is not solely backed by share prices, IT systems, and a huge labor force.

The real secret of Indian success can be found in the following ten attributes of Indian business leaders: Acceptance of change; living in the moment; generosity; patience; ethics and respect; problems are a gift; right words vs style; leaders as gurus; life as a spider web; leading by not conforming.

The Softy Side A potentially new Indian model of soft skills is developing, one that is based on the methods adopted by Indian business leaders who approach people with a belief that we are all much the same and are all connected. These executives are different, not just in placing material gains like share price low on their priorities, but in the way they think. Specifically, they bring several important attributes to the job. Here are some: Generosity: A generous mind looks at the whole community, at the development of the general community, and good Indian entrepreneurs have the generosity to encourage others to come forward with ideas.

I think the Tata group, under Ratan Tata lead by example in terms of extending support to hospitals and schools in local communities. Another example that is worth contemplating is Infosys, when it was spearheaded by Narayana Murthy, which has established a program of providing local communities with libraries.

The point about each of these executives at these organizations is that they could have chosen to keep that money, couldn't they? Or they could have chosen to share that money with shareholders. Instead, they actually chose to be generous to people who really needed it.

Patience: This is another trait that a successful Indian executive possesses. A very good example of an executive who possesses this attribute is Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairman and managing director, Biocon. She started off wanting to join medical school, but as she was unable to, she instead opted to specialize in brewing. When she was not accepted as a brewmaster, she then turned to biotechnology and set up Biocon.

Virtuosity: I was exposed to this aspect of Indian business leaders in 2005 when the earlier Narayana Murthy spoke about corporate governance and morality in business: "We follow one principle—the softest pillow is a clear conscience."

This commitment to values can be seen in how major Indian

companies incorporate transparency and compliance in business dealings. I think it’s important to understand that many major Indian corporations are world leaders in the compliance and transparency and this has been acknowledged by major international publications, like Forbes.

I am not saying that corruption doesn’t exist but what I am saying is that if you look closely at some of the successful business leaders in India, you will find that they have a strong sense of what constitutes good moral behavior and this shows up in the models that they use for disclosure, transparency, and compliance. Leaders of groups such as Tata, Birla, and Infosys are some of the people who embody this attribute.

These are some of the primary attributes that make successful business leaders. Other than these, there are some auxiliary attributes that Indian business leaders possess.

Among them is an important trait that makes Indian business leaders tick: They are warm and friendly people.

One of the reasons behind the success of Indian business leaders is their soft skills. This makes them unique because—unlike western leaders— their corporate success is not solely backed by share prices.

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Globally, Indian business leaders are generally seen as people who enjoy others company and a good part of that is accomplished through humor. It's important to be aware that what's funny in one culture might not be the same in another.

But I think that the successful Indian business leaders have that ability to distinguish between what works in the West and what works in India.

If you compare an Indian business leader with his American counterpart, the Indian is perceived as much more reserved and quieter. But once you get beyond that first glance you actually see the warmth that comes through and this is where a relationship develops.

So, I think a lot of humor is universal and even if it isn’t, I think the wish among human beings to laugh together is quite strong. That humor is vital in all Indian communication is a plus point for Indian executives. In my opinion, one of the winning characteristics of successful Indian business leaders is that they are quick to enjoy a laugh. CIO

As told to Eric Ernest Stephen Manallack is an award winning public relations consultant, professional speaker and author. His most recent book is Soft Skills for a Flat World. Send feedback to editor@cio.in.

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Gunjan Trivedi

LEADING EDGE

Social Relationships, Social Returns Calculating the ROI of social media business is tricky for most enterprises. Knowing what to track can be a good start.

“Man is by nature a social animal. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.”

— Aristotle (Politics, I)

A

IMAGE BY MAST ERF IL E

ristotle knew nothing about social media.

But his description of human nature echoes resoundingly across time, especially today, with our age’s obsession with being social, proven by the fact that the number of channels that allow humans to go social and interact have quadrupled many times over.

However, this holds water only when we consider ‘man’ in an individual capacity. We tend to react differently when it comes to being social at an enterprise-level. This natural inclination to being social seems to lose its favor en route, and skeptics take over.

At the enterprise level, any conversation related to social media tends to face two impediments. On the one hand, social media is seen, largely, as a way of merely extending a company’s brand platform. (This is put together by IT for the marketing department.) And, nothing more. And on the other hand, access to social media by employees is generally considered a distraction.

The Economist Intelligence Unit Survey of 2012 demonstrates that over 40 percent of business respondents feel that it’s the marketing, branding and communications departments that are primarily responsible for social business. Only 17 percent have this responsibility well distributed throughout the organization.

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Gunjan Trivedi

LEADING EDGE

And there lies the problem. These reactions to social media, I sense, are closely related to mindset and perception, and the fact that the use of social media for customer engagement is generally inhibited by the challenge of measuring tangible ROI, which by the way, is still difficult to show.

Author of several books on the subject, such as, Secrets of Social Media Marketing, Paul Gillin suggests some ways out in his presentation, Measuring Social ROI: The CIO’s Role.

He says few companies are measuring results with any level of precision. Gillin states that CIOs need to help enforce disciplined approaches to website analytics, synchronizing metrics to capture and track leads and building 360-degree views of the customer.

According to Gillin, when companies track hits, traffic, unique visitors, likes, and followers, they are actually measuring activity—not engagement. Rather, the terms of engagement should be watched, and these include shares, repeat visits, downloads, subscriptions, reviews, ratings, lead forms, phone calls, and more.

“The transparent world created by social media gives companies opportunities for growth, if they can move beyond mass marketing by building genuine relationships with their customers and reducing the cost of change by becoming more nimble,” says Chris Heuer, specialist leaderSocial Business, Deloitte Digital.

He goes on to say that monitoring flows of attention and information can help companies measure the value of social media investments, and building strong and reciprocal relationships may be the way to capture it.

Heuer’s report suggests that instead of focusing solely on increasing each transaction’s profitability, it is important for companies to strive for relationships with customers that are R.E.A.L.: Reciprocal, Empathetic, Authentic, and Long-lasting. Relationships based on these intrinsic values, and supported by systems of engagement that provide efficient and consistent communication and collaboration can provide better opportunities to increase profitability.

In my opinion, when it comes to going social, organizations shouldn’t invest in social media technologies and platforms just because their competitors are going that way. They should strive to move up the food chain. Instead of talking to customers to drive sales, they should use social media to have a dialogue with customers to create shared value. That’s where the correlation of engagement and measurable ROI begins. CIO Gunjan Trivedi is executive editor at IDG Media. He is an awardwinning writer with over a decade of experience in Indian IT. Before becoming a journalist, he had been a hands-on IT specialist, with expertise in setting up WANs. Reach him at gunjan_trivedi@idgindia.com

Mike Elgan

CIO SKILLS

Presentation Punch If you’re anything like the average executive, you’re probably a presentation lightweight.

Here’s how to create knockout presentations and make your audience want to be you.

M

ost presentations are boring and forgettable. But why? Business presenters have every advantage: A captive audience, big graphics and the benefit of being there in person. Yet most presenters fail to break free from the soul-killing dreck that makes PowerPoint presentations so dull.

Have you ever wondered how good novelists can hold a reader's attention for hours at a time with nothing but words on a page? Have you wondered how good Web writers can keep people glued to the screen when the whole Internet beckons?

I'm going to tell you how to apply skills from the craft of writing to make your presentations enjoyable and unforgettable.

But first, let's understand why most presentations are so bad.

What's Wrong with Presentations

ILLUSTRATION BY PHOTOS.COM

PowerPoint presentations usually involve a lot of pretending.

The speaker pretends to be excited. The audience pretends to be interested. Everybody is faking it.

Most collections of slides are packed with fake images—stock photography, clip art and other inherently false imagery. The human mind is very good at detecting insincerity and fakeness and is repelled by it.

Most business presentations fail because they're based on bad assumptions. Here are some examples of those assumptions: • Audience care about you and what you have to say. (They don't.)

• The audience is thinking about what you're saying. (They're not.)

• The audience can grasp the details of your complex slides on first exposure. (They can't, and they won't.)

• Most presenters act like their audience is made up of informationharvesting robots, not human beings.

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Mike Elgan

CIO SKILLS

If your presentation contains 10, 15, 20 or more slides, and each slide offers several points, you're assuming that people are somehow going to grasp, memorize or learn dozens or hundreds of facts. This isn't going to happen. You'll be lucky if they remember three.

Business speakers approach presentations like it's a transfer of information: "I have all this information I want you to know, and when I'm done presenting you will now have the information."

This is the worst kind of delusion. People usually retain little more than a general impression.

So if you want to make your presentations entertaining and unforgettable, you should learn from people who are good at enjoyable and memorable communication: Writers.

Present Like a Writer A typical business presentation breaks down communication into subjects like these: Our company, our product, our product's architecture, our value proposition. These might be the right categories to discuss if your audience were passionately curious about you and your company. But they're not.

The reason you're presenting is not to satisfy curiosity, but to inspire curiosity. A forced march through your company's details will inspire nothing but despair.

A good writer is more likely to break down the parts of communication into the categories that reflect how the human brain works, like these: Mental images. Stories.

Emotions. Information.

Let's look at each of these categories and how you can organize your presentation around them.

Mental images. Professional communicators, and especially writers, pay close attention to mental images. When non-fiction writers want readers to imagine something memorable, they use a good visual metaphor. And when politicians want voters to forget something horrible, they avoid mental images and instead use euphemism and jargon—language that has been stripped of visual imagery. That's how any skillful communicator manipulates an audience: Use visual imagery to create memories; use euphemism and jargon to erase them.

One of the reasons most presentations are so bad is that speakers use euphemism and jargon because they think it sounds "professional." It doesn't. It's amateur-hour communication.

A good metaphor is effective because it imparts a strong mental image that faithfully communicates an idea and makes it memorable. You can tell people that a particular cow is yours, but nobody will forget the fact that you own the cow if you sink a smoking, orange-hot branding iron into the animal's flesh.

Writers use metaphors. But as a presenter, you never have to

use them. When you want to create a mental picture in the minds of your audience, show them the picture! The best business presentation I ever saw used slides that didn't have a single word on them. Every slide was a photograph. When the speaker talked about the growth of his company in the '90s, he showed a striking picture of a race car as he talked. When he moved to the postrecession decline, he showed a picture of a car on fire.

Ten years later, I still remember his presentation.

Very important: Use real pictures, not fake ones. Never use stock photography, which stinks of artificiality. If you want to represent happy customers, for example, show a picture of actual customers. Show real products, real employees, real users.

One of the most striking scenes from the TV series Mad Men was about a memorable presentation. In the show, advertising creative director Don Draper convinces Kodak to call its slide projector the "Carousel." It's a powerful presentation because the whole time Don is talking, he's showing amateurish snapshots of his family. The presentation is so powerful and evocative that one of his colleagues runs out in tears.

Stories. The human mind is hard-wired for stories. We crave them. We need them. We can't resist their appeal. So tell stories in your presentation.

Business speakers approach presentations like it's a transfer of information: "I have all this information. When I'm done presenting you will now have the information." This is the worst kind of delusion.

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A good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end and involves at least one protagonist—a person that other people can relate to who experiences the events in the story.

In the beginning, there's a balance. In the middle, that balance is disrupted in some way. And at the end, a new balance is established. That's what a story is.

The key to bringing stories into your presentations is to personalize the information you're sharing. Instead of talking of some big change your company went through, tell a story about the person or people who made the decision that led to the change, and explain what they went through to reach that decision.

Emotions. The other thing people remember is emotions. In fact, when your audience leaves the meeting room, your entire presentation will be judged on only one thing: How you made them feel. I've seen presentations where the presenter gave almost no information, or said nothing useful. But he was funny, and people walked out saying, "That was great!"

Good emotions for presentations to instill in audiences include shock, fear, nostalgia, joy and excitement. But most of all, people remember humor.

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Mike Elgan

CIO SKILLS

One of the reasons most presentations are so bad is because speakers use euphemism and jargon because they think it sounds "professional."

It doesn't. It's amateur-hour communication.

Don't do "schtick" or prepared material. Don't tell jokes. Instead, expose the humor in the material you're presenting. Instead of trying to go for the big laughs, convey the mildly amusing shared reality you have with your audience. Keep it real.

Information. Most presentations are nothing but information. The presenter puts all the information on a series of slides, then drags his victims through those slides, point by point. Here's a much better idea: Put all the information on paper or an electronic document and distribute it after the presentation.

(Don't do it before—you want everyone looking at your vivid pictures, not shuffling through your boring information.)

You'll want to add a bit of information to your slides, but only to make an impression, not to convey specific facts and figures.

To understand how this works, deconstruct Apple announcements, for example. They show numbers not so you'll learn the information, but to leave you with impressions. (Fast growth! Big sales! More apps than other phones!)

Your ‘presentation’—the slides you show and the words you say—should be focused 100 percent on making people interested in you and your message and on creating a positive impression.

Communicate the nitty-gritty details in the handout.

So put each of these parts of your presentation in its place.

Add pictures to your slides. Tell stories with your voice. Print

information on paper for later. And sprinkle emotion throughout.

And finally: Any writer will tell you that words matter. Follow these basic tips on language to make your talk powerful: • Use short, basic words.

• Use the active voice when you can.

• Be specific and avoid vagueness.

• Avoid cliches and jargon. (If you've heard or read a phrase several times before, don't use it.)

• Cut everything you can. (If any picture, point, story or other element of your presentation isn't absolutely necessary for what you're trying to communicate, get rid of it.)

Presentations are boring. But yours don't have to be. You can grab an audience's attention and build lasting memories by thinking like a writer. CIO Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

CLOUD REDEFINING ERA

Towards a Fast and Flexible Enterprise Mandar Marulkar, Head-IT Infrastructure, Systems & CISO, KPIT Cummins Infosystems, talks about the most effective features of Windows Server 2012 and how it helped make his organization more agile.

Mandar Marulkar is Head-IT Infrastructure, Systems & CISO of KPIT Cummins Infosystems. Marulkar has over 19 years of experience in IT, and has held senior positions in IT infrastructure, systems and security. His extensive knowledge in IT strategies, technology, and processes have helped transform business processes and provided his organization with a competitive edge.

Why did you consider migrating to Windows Server 2012?

Windows Server 2012 has a lot of functionalities that were missing in the earlier versions. For example, we found that the Windows Server 2012 active directory is designed for a highly virtualized environment—like ours—and has features for rapid deployment. So, while setting up a new site, as we did at Noida recently, we could just take the image of the active directory and clone it within an hour. This is a very powerful feature.

Another advantage is the fact that this server is BYOD-ready. With the Windows Server 2012, there are a lot of features related to access control which helps us deploy BYOD. How does Windows Server 2012 help you enable a flexible workplace?

Traditionally, when people work from home or a location other than an office, you deploy a third-party VPN solution and install a client on the user machine which would enable them to create a VPN tunnel while they are on the Internet.

With Windows Server 2012 DirectAccess, you expose the server over the Internet. In both Windows 7 and Windows 8 OS, there is a default feature that automatically creates a secure VPN tunnel with the organization without any end-user intervention when the user connects to the Internet based on the availability of DA server.

While this existed earlier, there were limitations in terms of

manageability, load balancing, and multi-site support, which is much better now.

With the Windows Server 2012, there are a lot of features related to access control which helps us deploy BYOD.

But some users would need to perform more resource-intensive tasks. How do you address their need?

For such users, we are experimenting with Windows To Go. Today, most machines have USB 3.0. So, an image of an end-user machine—with its operating system and applications all in place—is taken on a USB stick and then that is used to boot whichever machine he chooses to work from.

This would give him access to his entire profile on the machine and the only thing we need to do is keep the data on a network drive to ensure seamless access. For this, we have invested in Office 365 and plan to migrate our entire workload of Exchange, Sharepoint, Yammer, SkyDrive, and Lync onto the Microsoft Cloud in a couple of months.

What are your future plans with Windows Server 2012?

We plan to implement dynamic access control which is similar to file-level data leak prevention technologies. This would allow for a central access policy and file data classification, which can be done manually or automatically based on the confidentiality of information.

It has an extremely powerful feature that provides complete file access auditing and rights management, based on which it can automatically encrypt documents.

There are a lot of features related to file server data-security—using dynamic access control—in Windows Server 2012 that we hope to take advantage of.

Windows Server 2012: IT Rolled Into One Windows Server 2012 provides a complete virtualization platform across compute, storage, and networking, , says Srikanth Karnakota, Country Head, Server and Cloud Platform, India, Microsoft.

Srikanth Karnakota is Microsoft’s India country head for its Server and Cloud Platform business. In this role, he is responsible for P&L, strategy and marketing of Microsoft’s Cloud and Server platform business. In his earlier role at Microsoft, Karnakota incubated start-ups and the venture capital engagement arm of Microsoft India.

How can enterprises tackle the significant cost of entry associated with private clouds and justify an ROI? A good way for customers to start is to build on the infrastructure that they already own. They can start by consolidating and moving to a virtualized datacenter and then continue to transition to private and hybrid clouds by adding more automation and orchestration capabilities. One of the big advantages that Microsoft provides is that it helps customers build on what they have, and architect the cloud in a way that makes sense to their requirements.

Take our System Center 2012, for example.

This helps organizations deliver flexible and cost-effective infrastructure with what they already own by helping them integrate heterogeneous datacenter investments, including multi-hypervisor environments.

What’s the role of System Center 2012 in managing private clouds?

System Center has historically been known for physical and virtual management in the datacenter. Now, System Center can manage the cloud infrastructure too. It provides the capabilities to manage physical machines, VMs, applications, and the hybrid cloud. In addition, managing heterogeneity is core to System Center. It can manage multi-hypervisor environments—like VMware and Citrix—and also convert existing VMware VMs to Hyper-V VMs. System Center can also manage Linux guests.

From an application management standpoint, System Center 2012 helps customers deliver predictable application service levels with deep application insight. This is where the core business value resides.

Windows Server 2012 is a fantastic platform to build virtualized infrastructures.

In fact, it can virtualize 99 percent of the world’s SQL databases.

Without well-defined interoperability standards how can companies ensure seamless operations in the cloud?

Interoperability is absolutely critical and that is something Microsoft has invested a lot in. At the platform level, Hyper-V can virtualize specific distributions of Linux. We talked about the interoperability capabilities of System Center such as cross-platform monitoring of Sun or Solaris guests with Operations Manager; cross-platform configuration management for Linux and Unix with Configuration Manager; and inteinte grated automation across management tool sets from other vendors with OrchesOrches trator. These sets of tools help customers achieve interoperability.

How does Hyper-V stack up against its competition?

Windows Server 2012 is the third release of Hyper-V, and is a fantastic platform for infracustomers to build their virtualized infra structure. We now support 64 virtual propro cessors, 1TB of memory, and 8,000 VMs in a cluster—the largest in the industry. In fact, 99 percent of the world’s SQL databases can be virtualized on Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012. we’ve built a complete virtualization platform across compute, storage, and networking. With Hyper-V network virtualvirtual ization in Windows Server 2012, customers can get built-in multi-tenancy and isolation.

In addition, with the new Shared-NothingLive-Migration in Windows Server 2012, cuscus tomers can now have complete VM mobility and can also live migrate virtual machines with a simple network connection.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP MICROSOFT

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IT Strategy

Days Or Less

They might not tell you, but your business peers think your department is too slow.

Here’s how to change that.

By Shubhra Rishi

The IT department has always suffered the any new opportunity that could prop up their reputation of being too slow. For years, users drooping top lines. That means they’re having more complained that IT just wasn’t fast enough. It’s meetings, outside of their regular planning cycles, why, they said with shrilly self-righteousness, that are churning out more ideas on how to make they were forced to go around it, giving birth to the money—most of which need IT support. phenomenon we know as shadow IT. The numbers back up that observation. According But none of this is new. to CIO research, the number of Indian CIOs who Here’s what is: An even greater need for speed say that “deploying too many technologies or and agility from the business. If CIOs thought their applications is a major challenge to their departments were already being department” rose from 71 percent Reader ROI: pushed too hard to roll out IT projects in 2011 to 79 percent in 2012. Our The factors driving a quickly, they’re not going to like what research also points out that since greater need for speed the future has in store. the slowdown, the number of IT Three things you must An economy stuck in the fetal projects that medium to large do to go faster position is making businesses more companies are undertaking in a How to enable a cultural change desperate than ever to action almost year has tripled.

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IT Strategy

This trend, coupled with a lingering reluctance among consumers to spend, is effectively shrinking the pie companies are fighting over. Although consumer confidence is on the rise, Nielsen’s Consumer Confidence survey (November 2012) points out that 54 percent of Indian consumers still say they’d rather put spare cash into savings than spend it. As a result businesses are decreeing that new products, services, and solutions need to be pushed out faster to ensure they get the largest piece of a smaller pie. Add then to this mix swiftly changing customer demands.

Put together, these trends have increased the number of new, quick ramp-up projects within enterprises, heightening the need to hustle and be more agile. “It’s speed that gets a company to realize the benefits from a technology initiative,” says Ashish Agarwal, SVP-IT at Apollo Munich Health Insurance.

“Tech projects can be accelerated and it would certainly expedite business benefits.”

Vivek Khanna, VP-Finance and Information Systems, Havells, says his belief that “CIOs must treat every project like a business project,” enabled his team to pull off two ERP projects back-to-back in a six-month period.

CIOs who aren’t taking this need for speed seriously should remember that there’s plenty, including their reputations, at stake.

A recent Forrester study asked business leaders how long they thought it would take IT to build and deploy an innovative new idea that required software development as a key component. Only 8 percent believed IT could deliver within three months. It gets worse: More than four in 10 business leaders thought it would take a year or more.

You get the idea: IT was considered slow before the financial crisis and it risks being considered even slower today.

The question is: How fast is fast? A year? Six months? How long does IT now have before it’s considered a ‘dawdler’ by the business?

Key to answering that question perhaps lies in looking at the horizon Indian businesses operate within. In the last 18 months that’s shrunk. According to CIO research, a growing number of Indian companies say their

business’ horizons have contracted to less than six months. That means more business leaders are now making plans for the next six months—as opposed to the traditional year-long cycle. It also means that an idea only has six months to go from concept to completion—and start paying for itself. Based on that, CIOs we spoke to now say that one quarter or less is about how much time IT has to deliver business projects.

The experts agree. “Companies shouldn’t take one year to deliver a project only to find out that that’s not what their customers wanted. Instead, they should break a large IT project into smaller prototypes and deliver it at shorter intervals, preferably, in a calendar quarter or less,” says Andy Kaufman, a project management professional and the president of the Institute for Leadership Excellence and Development based in Chicago. Kaufman helps companies improve their ability to deliver projects and lead teams.

That’s easier said than done. How do you take a large project that affects multiple stakeholders and legacy systems and turn it around in 90 days or less? And then do it on a regular basis? CIOs who want to achieve that type of continuous delivery need to attack the challenges that have traditionally got in their way. You know them well: A lack of businessIT collaboration, slow software development practices, and an inability to prove ROI, which impacts IT’s credibility.

Ready to get on the fast track? Here’s how to get started.

IMPERATIVE

1

For CIOs who want to introduce a culture of speed to their organizations, there are a couple of things they must do. These include breaking down large projects into smaller, but more in-demand, products and services that can be churned out more frequently.

They also need to find ways to cut the number of concurrent projects IT handles—thereby sharpening its focus. And finally, they should ensure that the products they create satisfy both customers and the business. All of this will allow business and IT to push 36

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Hold Business Close

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Ashish Agarwal, SVP-IT, Apollo Munich Health Insurance, automated the company’s technical underwriting process in 75 days because he ensured his team was not spread too thin over multiple projects.

investments a company is making in IT are going to deliver higher returns.”

Vivek Khanna, VP of finance and information systems at Havells, tries to ensure that every project is driven by a business-led IT team. “CIOs must treat every project like a business project,” he says.

That belief is what, he says, enabled his team to pull off two ERP projects back-toback in a six month period—in Thailand and China. The ERPs, says Khanna, were meant for a company that the Rs 7,500-crore Havells acquired. While the ERPs used some templates, the implementation required a number of customizations, which as any CIO knows bogs down projects.

There were other hurdles as well. “Communication was a challenge. During training workshops, when the Indian team visited China, training sessions needed an interpreter and sometimes written communication. The entire change management process started from understanding their existing business processes, performing knowledge transfers via physical training sessions, conference calls and video conferencing,” he remembers.

Despite these obstacles, each ERP was functional within 90 days, a far cry from when large projects like these took over a year. “Our thought process is: If a project’s duration exceeds a certain period, you start losing focus,” says Khanna.

Key to his success is a team of 18 he put in place. “My internal team has core business skills. They helped me roll out projects very quickly. They understand business well and have over 10 years of experience,” he says.

That understanding of business is critical to project success, says i-Lead’s Kaufman, who also believes in business-IT teams. “Project management comes down to managing business expectations.” But to manage them well CIOs need to regularly interact with the business. “All the involved stakeholders must feel a sense of ownership in the project. It helps accelerate delivery,” he says.

At Anand Rathi Financial Services, IT and business work hand-in-hand, says Mukesh Mehta, VP and head-IT. It has been five years since the in-house IT team built Web-based CRMs for each of the firm’s eight business units, including insurance, retail, HNI broking, mutual funds, and commodities.

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out prototypes faster and more frequently, thereby creating more opportunities to meet customer demands, and transforming themselves into a more agile unit.

None of that can be accomplished effectively without the co-operation, nay, the full involvement of the business.

Without this collaboration, it’s almost impossible for CIOs to convince their management to make the necessary changes for a new way of working to take off. Nor will CIOs be able to successfully defang middle management, where most of the resistance against a new approach will come from.

Building deeper business and IT collaboration means understanding what each other’s priorities are, standing by the other during testing times, driving one another, and jointly asking management to change some of its practices. This is probably what CIOs will spend most of their time doing because no one else can do it for them.

Step one in that direction is realizing that traditional methods of business-IT collaboration don’t make sense any more.

“The model in which business says ‘here’s what we need’ and the IT team develops and implements it, is not effective. The right model is having a combined team led by the business that includes IT folks. We should stop calling anything an IT project. Business projects with a heavy dose of IT in it will drive the agenda,” says Nadim Matta, senior partner, Schaffer Consulting; and president of the Rapid Results Institute.

The way Matta sees it, business and IT leaders should collaborate to bring together a team of business and IT execs, set them a challenge, and then get out of the way. The team then has 100 days to find a solution. It’s an approach he has used successfully with Fortune 500 companies, whose very size builds silos. (See interview on page 40) This can be tough for CXOs because it runs against the grain of most leaders who are taught to be ‘in charge’ or lead from the front.

And that’s why, Matta says, it’s important for CIOs who want to try a new, faster approach to get “air cover from at least one business leader,” who sees the benefits of letting teams take over.

“If you have that,” he says, “you reduce your risk. It also increases the odds that the

Customer Focus

IT Strategy

In early 2012, Anand Rathi’s business team decided to take the next step: Give the managers of different units the ability to better monitor potential leads.

To do that, Mehta’s team would need to complete three smaller projects. First, they needed to create a mechanism that enabled potential clients visiting Anand Rathi’s website to leave behind key information. That data was then re-directed to an appropriate business’ CRM. Each CRM then had to automatically produce daily reports with the number of potential clients and those that had been followed up on. Finally, each CRM was linked to each unit’s HR portal. With three projects running across eight business units, Mehta was juggling 24 projects.

“It took us only two-and-a-half months to complete the customizations on all the CRMs, but we couldn’t have done it without regular meetings with respective business teams,” says Mehta.

IMPERATIVE

2

Minimize Scope When Ola Cabs launched in 2010, it wanted to ensure, like most other businesses, that it could offer all the facilities a modern customer expected of a cab service. To CEO and CIO Bhavish Aggarwal that included a website, a contact center, and a mobile app, all of which should have been ready on day one.

Aggarwal is not alone. In a world that rewards one-stop shops, companies that offer end-to-end services, and greater customer choice, not having multiple offerings is seen a sign of weakness, or worse, of amateurishness.

It’s why customers, for instance, prefer the supermarket to the local kirana.

It’s also why businesses tend to create software that can do everything at once.

Jez Humble, author of Continuous Delivery and principal consultant at Thoughtworks, a software company that focuses on software design and delivery, believes there is an inherent flaw in this type of thinking. He says businesses are trying to predict what customers or users want—instead of asking them. “When IT thinks of all their wonderful IT projects, they think of all the ways in 36

“Users are okay with an innovative product that delivers one thing very well in the beginning then gradually becomes much more featurecomplete,” says Bhavish Aggarwal, CEO and CIO, Ola Cabs.

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which they can make each of them as perfect as possible. The reality is no one cares. It’s sad but true. People want to solve their own problems. It’s not about the fabulous products you can build, it’s about how you can solve a customer’s problems,” he says.

He has a point: Customer predictions are extremely hard and can often be counterintuitive. Neither are detailed requirement documents the answer, because if they were, IT projects wouldn’t suffer from scope creep.

Desisting from guessing what gets people is a lesson President Obama’s campaigners learnt. When the team was tasked to send out e-mails asking for donations, the big question was: What do we put in the subject line?

They experimented with hundreds of subject lines but, to their surprise, the one that really worked was: ‘Hey’. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Amelia Showalter, director of digital analytics, said: “We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to keep testing.”

“That’s totally counter-intuitive,” says Humble talking about the campaign. “While sending out these e-mails, the team would never have been able to guess what people

would respond to. The truth is, guesswork in IT is lethal. Imagining what the business needs or the customer wants is a collective waste of time and effort—especially in waterfall models where you deliver the product to the customer or business only at the end of project completion.”

The smarter thing to do is to put a prototype out there quickly for customers and let them tell you where to go—what Showalter called testing. To do that, companies need to break down large projects into bite-sized pieces and prioritize them. It’s what Humble did when he built a commercial release management system for a Fortune 500 company.

“We built it in such a way that the very first feature was a simple status page showing that the application was live,” he says. “The whole idea of continuous delivery, which is a subset of the agile methodology, is to say that software is production ready from day one.”

But how do you define what the smallest unit is? For instance, could Mehta from Anand Rathi have attempted just one of the three projects, instead of all three?

The answer, says Humble, is to focus on

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the customer. “If you know the smallest amount of work that you need to do to solve a customer’s problem, then, you can solve a customer’s problems in less than 90 days.”

That’s exactly what Agarwal did at Apollo Munich Health Insurance. In October 2011, Apollo Munich’s operations team conducted a study to figure out how it could cut the amount of time it took to issue an insurance policy. The team, says Agarwal, looked at the six legs of the policy issuance process and asked the IT team to find a way to speed up multiple areas.

Agarwal knew that the business wanted the changes to be ready for the January-March cycle, when the insurance industry sees a surge in business, and Apollo Munich gets 45 percent of its business. He also knew that they were better off focusing their energies on compressing one key leg of the issuance process: Technical underwriting. Throwing all their energies into that one area, in his estimate, would allow the company to better scale up and meet the needs of the market.

The business heard him and Agarwal delivered. In just 75 days, Agarwal says, “we scaled up our capacity to handle much higher volumes. I recommend agile practices because you can quickly and dynamically align to changes in market conditions. With large projects, which run over years, you risk a lot of factors changing like business processes and customer expectations. Agile processes help you align to market forces.”

In Ola Cabs’ case, it could have waited until it had gotten its Web presence, call center and mobile app going before it launched. But it didn’t. The company, which operates in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Pune, started operations without its mobile app. Five months after its website and contact center were up, Ola Cabs put out its mobile app. In the meanwhile it had figured out what customers really wanted and then created a unique app, one that none of its competitors can still match.

Aggarwal, however, ensured that the app didn’t try to do everything and hence it could be put out in just under a month. “Users are okay with an innovative product which delivers one thing very well in the beginning and then gradually becomes much more feature-complete,” he says.

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IT Strategy

Rising to the Occasion The launch of the Mahindra XUV500 is a great example of IT and business combining forces to produce fast results.

Mahindra & Mahindra isn’t exactly known to be slow, but what it did for the launch of the Mahindra XUV500, set a high bar even for itself.

Sometime in July 2011, Mahindra & Mahindra realized that it had a peculiar problem with its still unreleased SUV: The car was too good. It packed so many features that, like a multi-faceted insurance plan, it would be hard to find people to sell it. “It’s very difficult to explain all its features, even the best salesmen struggle,” says Bishwanath Ghosh, CIOCorporate, Mahindra & Mahindra.

As great as the Mahindra XUV500 is, if it couldn’t be pushed effectively by dealers and M&M’s salespeople, it would affect the SUV’s sales. To maneuver around that problem, folks from IT, sales, and customer care decided to combine forces and create a solution that could help salespeople. It’s a process Ghosh likes to call co-creation.

The clock was ticking. The Mahindra XUV500 was to be launched at the end of September 2011, just two months away, and there was no pushing that date back.

The team decided to use an interactive kiosk solution that could be put up at dealerships. The kiosk would get around the problem of depending on the unequal abilities of dealerships to sell the SUV. To get around the deadline, however, the team would question the age-old approach to project management. “We had to think beyond conventional IT deployments. All the normal phases of project management— from requirement, design and delivery—were mixed. Gone are the days when projects followed a sequential pattern of requirements, design, development and testing,” says Ghosh, adding, “CIOs should be able to deploy IT projects fast Bishwanath Ghosh, CIO-Corporate, Mahindra & and effectively.”

Mahindra, combined forces with sales to create a Key to the fast rollout was the solution in two months flat. collaboration with sales. And they were heavily involved. “We conducted virtual meetings, called vendors, carried out discussions and viewed prototypes on a daily basis,” says Arun Malhotra, chief-sales and customer careautomotive at Mahindra & Mahindra. All in all, he says, they had about 60 meetings over the course of the project.

“If we went by convention, the project would have taken six months to a year,” says Malhotra. He adds that they simultaneously deployed 150 tablets to M&M’s salesforce. This allowed M&M’s salespeople to reach out to customers and give them a virtual tour of the car.

The collaboration between business and IT produced a sturdy kiosk, complete with powerful content and video, which gives prospective customers a virtual tour of the XUV500. It was delivered a day before the launch. Thanks in part to the project, the Mahindra XUV 500 sold 35,000-plus units within just a year of its launch.

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IT Strategy

That’s an approach, Agarwal from Apollo Munich agrees to. “Target workable solutions instead of perfect solutions or risk losing your window of opportunity. Think agile and think what can be built in a 90-day timeframe,” he says.

Another benefit of breaking up projects into smaller pieces and working on them one at a time, is that CIOs can build more agility. How? By putting out prototypes and asking for feedback, both business and IT get a better sense of what customers or users really want. This could result in deleting some requirements from blueprints—saving business-IT teams time. It could also lead to new realizations of what customers really want—which can then be fast-tracked.

That’s what happened at Ola Cabs. By the time the company had put out its mobile app, it had already started work on a second feature for the app. Initially, the app was only meant to schedule immediate pick-ups.

In the second version, Aggarwal planned for a feature that allowed users to book pick-ups in advance.

In the meanwhile, Ola Cabs had sought feedback and learnt that what customers really wanted was a way to pay via mobile.

Although that wasn’t a feature that was on Aggarwal’s immediate plans, he ensured that he included it in the app’s second release— which took 75 days.

For CIOs who want some of that agility and speed, Humble says there are some factors to watch out for. Organizational mindsets, he says can come in the way of speed.

Companies, for example, still plan budgets once a year, which isn’t conducive to the fast changes they want to introduce at frequent intervals. “Organizations are setup in the wrong way,” says Humble. “We have budgets once a year and create big projects at the time.

When you plan for a year-long project, from that point on, you have framed the problem in a one year timeframe.”

IMPERATIVE

3

Ensure ROI Like with anything new, asking people to adopt this quick and agile approach will meet 38

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Mukesh Mehta, VP and Head-IT, Anand Rathi Financial Services, says teaming up with the business is key to fast project delivery.

with resistance. One way to win them over is showing them proof that it works, in terms they understand: ROI Too often though, says Humble, ROI isn’t a key criteria when starting off on a project.

“Most companies have a small number of projects that they are expected to build, but they don’t necessarily produce good ROI,” he says, adding that if a project’s ROI is lower than 4 percent, CIOs are better off putting their money into a trust.

Whether or not that was part of this plan, the technical underwriting project Agarwal ran at Apollo Munich, got plenty of business bang. The decision to focus on one key aspect of the policy issuance process ensured that Apollo Munich was able to make the most of its busiest season. The project, says Agarwal, ensured that 97 percent of policies can now be issued in three days—compared to 83 percent in three days before the project.

Not every project will give you easy-todemonstrate metrics. But CIOs can look for other measures that their businesses track.

Since its launch, customers have booked over 4,000 Ola cabs a day, on average—across

three channels (its contact center, website, and mobile app). “But the mobile app is the fastest growing channel, increasing at the rate of 30-40 percent a month,” says Aggarwal. “Customers simply love the application and its repeat use is higher than any other channel.”

In the meanwhile at Anand Rathi, Mehta says that automating certain CRM processes ensured that each business unit no longer needs to manually create daily sales reports.

The system now is programmed to generate automatic sales reports at the end of each day.

“This has slashed the turnaround time for report generation from 24 hours to approximately two hours,” says Mehta. “This translates into a direct business benefit because every vertical can now ensure whether daily sales targets are being met or not.”

Who ever said slow and steady beat fast and furious? CIO

Shubhra Rishi is correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to shubhra_rishi@idgindia.com

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CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP HP SERVICES

Passport to Efficiency Why VFS Global, an outsourcing and technology services specialist for diplomatic missions and governments worldwide, renewed—and broadened— its engagement with HP. Dhiren Savla is Group CIO at VFS Global, which runs over 800 offices in 87 countries. Savla has decades of experience running IT organizations that bring huge value to the business. During his career Savla has worked at Merrill Lynch, Crisil, and IL&FS Investsmart, among others.

Why was VFS Global looking to change its sourcing model?

VFS Global’s sourcing strategy has always been set around ‘right sourcing’, which means the right mix of in- and out-sourcing. We started outsourcing around nine years ago with premier IT partners. During those years, VFS Global has grown significantly and its service portfolio has also reached new heights. It was important to build a sourcing model that's predictable, flexible, and future-ready. Also, like all multiparty engagements, we faced challenges around accountability.

At the same time, it was important for an organization like VFS Global to have its IT partners become a part of our growth journey wherein they have equal skin in the game.

Considering all of these parameters, we decided to approach our sourcing model with some key themes including transformation, predictability, flexibility, consolidation, and partnership.

Were you looking for higher efficiencies, or was improving effectiveness a key criterion too? How critical was better manageability?

VFS Global’s management believes in a valuedriven approach rather than a price-driven one.

The key focus was ensuring we were futureready, and future-proofed. As we talk, VFS Global runs over 800 offices in 87 countries worldwide.

This complex and diverse setup requires extra effort and a creative approach to ensure better manageability. A conventional approach to this situation may not really offer effective or optimal solutions, so we had to work on a customized

approach which met all our needs. Our smarter sourcing strategy with a value-driven approach and a future-ready focus brings about efficiency gains as a natural by-product.

Can you describe the due diligence you undertook for partner selection?

We followed a stringent and elaborate process of RFI/ RFP for the selection process. This was managed and monitored entirely by KPMG. We formed two key teams for this process: One of IT leaders who evaluated partners, solutions, approaches etcetera. And the other was a executive leadership team, which looked at overall engagement, relationship, and governance. The selection process was detailed, independent, and scientific.

During the process, we also evaluated enhancing an existing relationship with stringent SLAs, greater scope and a different commercial model. After a detailed process, VFS Global saw a huge value in renewing our engagement—with a broader scope—with our existing partner HP, under a business-KPI driven contract.

How did you ensure consistency in quality of service across your global locations?

We have a highly-complex infrastructure. We have 800 offices in 87 countries; datacenters in Asia, Europe and the Americas, and our operations run 24/7 with no window for planned downtime. Also, we run several small offices with low staff count but service requirements are the same. We need to build optimal, hybrid solutions to ensure the delivery of committed services.

We are in the process of building a monitoring framework, which will facilitate the measurement and, hence, the adherence to SLAs and KPIs. All SLAs and KPIs are defined across VFS Global’s worldwide footprint to ensure a unified experience and service quality.

How has smarter IT sourcing improved decision-making at VFS Global?

Smarter sourcing brings several benefits to VFS Global. It gives agility, readiness, and predictability which are extremely critical factors for high-growth businesses. This also helps us respond faster to both the business and new opportunities. In a way, it helps us increase revenue and lower costs.

Since we know ‘what it takes to deliver’, internal decision-making has become quicker and sharper.

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

C

aptain Change

He’s the president of the Rapid Results Institute, a senior partner of Schaffer Consulting—and one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s, Top 100 Global Thinkers. In this interview, Nadim Matta shares the simple but powerful approach that’s helped some of the world’s largest organizations get swifter, more agile, and more innovative.

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By Anup Varier

When organizations like GE, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the World Bank want to accelerate implementation and change, they call on Nadim Matta, president of the Rapid Results Institute. Matta is a leading expert in accelerating results and building capability in complex environments. He has broad, global, crossindustry experience in helping leaders align around common VOL/8 | ISSUE/06

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priorities, set outrageously high expectations, and inspire teams to achieve unreasonable goals.

He talks about the importance of looking at projects through a 100-day lens, how CIOs can tackle the challenge of too many concurrent business requests, and the political waters they will have to wade through to get their organizations to move faster.

How can enterprises create the capacity for swift organizational change?

In most organizations, the capacity for rapid change often already exists and doesn’t need to be created. It just needs to be unleashed.

Successful change requires giving people the experience of working together in new ways and overcoming some of the organizational barriers that stop them from reaching their potential. We usually help leaders do this through 100-day projects—what we call Rapid Results Initiatives.

IT Strategy

time that business people were spending chasing and collecting data, so they can spend that time doing analytic work.

The team focused on one of the key reports that the Federal Open Markets Committee used to guide their interest rate policy. And they decided to measure their success based on the rating of the quality of this report by members of the Open Markets Committee.

IT members of the team ended up creating a very simple version of their data warehouse that was completed in a few weeks, and the team implemented other changes to the way they worked that enabled them to achieve their 100-day goal. Shifting the focus from an IT project to a ‘business value’ project breathed life into the IT’s data warehousing project. And after the 100 days ended, there was renewed interest in the organization in continuing to invest in the data warehousing effort.

The earlier CIOs test the readiness of business, the sooner they can decide which projects in their portfolio to dial up their investments in.”

Could you give us an example of these Rapid Results initiatives?

Many years ago, I worked with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on a data-warehousing project that was being championed by the IT department. The idea for this project came from the business managers who wanted to organize analytic data on the economy in an easily accessible database. Its purpose was to avoid spending lots of time chasing down data that they needed every month to generate policy recommendations. The IT team consulted with the business people and gathered their requirements, and they set about building a data warehouse. This, of course, was before the era of big data.

But it was taking the IT team too long to get this done and soon, business representatives on the team started finding excuses to avoid project meetings. During one management team meeting I attended, the same people who had asked for this capability began to consider pulling the plug on the project because they couldn’t see any tangible outcomes from IT’s efforts. They had, in effect, lost interest in the project.

You have to remember that in any change effort, energy is a scarce resource. So it was no surprise that the business team members were losing interest.

We turned the project around by using the Rapid Results Approach. The business head asked one of his managers to lead a team that would include some IT members, but that would be mostly made up of people from the business. The challenge for this team was to deliver—in a 100 days—real value to the business, using the original concept of making it easier for business people to access all the data they needed to do their analysis and produce their policy reports. This new team decided on a 100-day goal to free up half the VOL/8 | ISSUE/06

That sounds like a bottom-up approach. Is that how the Rapid Results method works?

At its heart, the Rapid Results method is a bottom-up approach. But it needs to be enabled and sponsored by the top of the organization.

What we typically look for is a champion at the leadership level who gets what we are talking about. Why? Because cultural issues can’t be overcome with a magic wand. The Rapid Results approach offers the possibility of experiencing a very different reality, and that’s why it needs initial protection from somebody at the senior level.

Once a Rapid Results team, like the one we helped set up at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, gets together, senior leaders typically need to give them the space to decide on their own what their 100-day goal will be. This is sometimes hard for senior leaders to do. They worry that the team might pick the ‘wrong’ goal. This is part of the reason for the 100-day timeframe. The fact that it’s only a 100 days makes it easier for senior leaders to let go of the reigns a little. These teams can be disruptive in terms of the changes they experiment with. Leaders tolerate their disruptiveness in part because it’s just 100 days. At the same time, the 100-day time frame is viewed by Rapid Results teams as a window of opportunity for their voices to be heard and for proving what they can deliver. So they push themselves really hard. The time frame is what allows this process to begin to take hold.

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IT Strategy

The model in which business says “here’s what we need” and the IT team develops and implements it is deeply flawed.”

Won’t this approach clash with an organization’s bureaucracy?

It often does. The first step is to check if there is a readiness among senior leadership to tackle the bureaucracy. In our experience, senior leadership teams are often keen to loosen up the bureaucracy and to see change happen. The resistance to change usually comes from the multiple levels between senior leadership and frontline workers. This is understandable.

Middle managers need stable environments to be able to manage efficiently. And they may have worked hard to create the status quo and therefore become highly invested in it.

One of the ways to tackle this is a process that a Schaffer colleague helped General Electric develop in the late eighties called Work-Out. At the core of this process is a two-day event where several front line teams are challenged by senior leaders to tackle a tough challenge. This could be to reduce costs, grow revenues, accelerate product development, and so on. At the end of two days of intense brainstorming and problem-solving, frontline teams present their recommendations on how to tackle this challenge.

Mid-level managers then have to respond to the ideas that are presented in an open forum, often with more than a hundred people in the room, including the senior leadership team. This sends a clear signal to the organization that there is a new way of doing things, one in which managers need to respond to ideas from the front lines quickly, in a public and transparent manner.

In a paradoxical way, you need to create a structure to give the ‘organic emergence’ of ideas a chance to thrive. Unfortunately, organizational bureaucracy does not allow innovation to emerge in an organic manner. So the structure is necessary, at least temporarily.

Why a 100 days? Why not 50?

You can get it down to 10 days if you want. IT people do scrums all the time. The only thing I would say about scrums is that they tend to be very IT focused. They tend not to extend to the business.

There is nothing magical about the 100 days. The magic really is in creating a sense of urgency, and in learning early and often.

If you are dealing with app development, for example, then you absolutely want the cycle to be much faster than 100 days. You might aim for a two-week learning cycle. You can put an app out in the market and get feedback early in the process.

So yes, the cycle could be less than 100 days depending on the business and the IT application that goes along with it.

Over the last few years, CIOs have been running more parallel projects than ever before hoping that one will bring business benefits. What do you think of this approach?

It is a smart approach, as long as you combine it with the Rapid Results method. The CIO may want to find out where there is readiness among business leaders to engage. And they may want to find this out earlier rather than later. The earlier CIOs 42

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uncover and test this readiness, the sooner they can decide on which projects in their portfolio to dial up their investments in. A CIO might start with many projects, but he or she needs a way to evaluate which of these is getting the most traction and showing early signs of value delivery. They can then prioritize these projects based on how much engagement they are getting from their business partners. The Rapid Results Approach can help CIOs to do this.

How can IT teams work around the problem of businesses wanting to see a finished product before providing more inputs and feedback?

The model in which business says “here’s what we need” and the IT team develops and implements it is deeply flawed. This needs to be a process of co-creation between business and IT. In fact, we should stop using the term ‘IT project’. Instead, we should call these ‘IT-enabled business projects’.

Recently, I was working on a project in Los Angeles, which has one of the biggest concentrations of homeless individuals.

The challenge was to utilize available resources to solve the housing problem. There are dozens of organizations dealing with homelessness, and it was difficult to optimize the use of their resources and assets so they can provide appropriate housing to the homeless population. The solution that they were working on was to create a coordinated information system that captures everything one needs to know about each homeless individual and also about the assets that are available. This would allow them to match the two data sets and optimize the use of their collective resources.

Under a traditional set-up, this project would have been a multi-year undertaking. It would have entailed the concerned organizations getting together and defining the specs for an IT consulting firm. The firm would then go off to develop a multimillion information system over the course of a year and then pilot it. And it is only then that they would find out what the real issues are. In this case, in addition to the IT system, many organizations will need to change their behavior and to learn to collaborate in new ways and to trust one another. In theory everyone says they will do this, but you never know if they will until these things are put to the test in real situations with real consequences.

We suggested a different approach. We helped the LA organizations launch two Rapid Results teams: One focused on VOL/8 | ISSUE/06

Cover Story homeless individuals, and the other on assets that can be used to house them. Each team started by building a simple spreadsheet in 30 days that has key information on each data set. And then they created simple algorithms and macros to match the data sets. This allowed the two teams to test whether the system would work and would help achieve the desired objectives. Importantly, by doing this, the teams were also tackling the more profound issue of the readiness of the various organizations to open up their books and share information with each other, and to agree on a common framework for matching assets with the needs of homeless individuals. Once there is confidence that these issues can be tackled, then the organizations can invest in the ful-fledged IT system. The key here is conducting small 100-day experiments that substantially reduce the risk of making a huge IT investment.

The Rapid Results approach is new to most CXOs. And like anything new, CIOs will say, there’s the fear that it could fail more easily. How do you calm jittery CIOs? I’m assuming we’re talking about CIOs who want to have their teams make a greater impact on the business. If you are a CIO who feels completely satisfied with your contribution to the business, then you will not be inclined to try anything new. For CIOs who believe that there is more they can do, what they really need is ‘air cover’ from at least one business leader to try the Rapid Results approach.

If a CIO has that air cover and support, then they can actually reduce their risks.

And they will also increase the odds that the investment their company is making in IT will deliver higher returns.

If you are interested in return on investment, you could achieve this by increasing the numerator, the business impact, or by decreasing the denominator, the IT investment. By knowing earlier on, within 100 days, that an IT investment will not generate business impact, the CIO can drastically increase the returns by reducing the denominator.

IT Strategy

It’s a perception that leads employees to feel that somebody else is responsible for solving their problems. Unless there is a concerted effort to give people the space to challenge that idea—without undermining authority—people will keep quiet when they are at a forum where people more senior to them are present.

Fourth, some ideas, by their very nature, require lots of time and persistence before they deliver a business benefit. Ideas that involve new business models aren’t going to go from idea to cash in a short time. Incentives in most organizations are not aligned to enable radical ideas to take root and deliver value. There is a need for a way to give people the reassurance that working on such ideas will be recognized and rewarded.

This is where the Rapid Results approach becomes vital. It is a way to turn radical ideas that have a long time-horizon into ideas that can deliver some value in 100 days. It begins to realign incentives because the impact can be seen, at least in a microcosm, in the short term, and people can get recognition, and from there, they will get the boost of energy they need to keep going.

Finally, what are your thoughts on bringing in outside consultants to solve an organization’s problems?

The challenge many companies face—beyond idea generation and creating a solution—is implementing these ideas and

We should stop using the term ‘IT project’. Instead, we should call these ‘IT-enabled business projects’.”

What then suppresses a company’s capacity for change?

There are many reasons for this. Here are a few. First, people on the frontlines are not enthusiastic about putting forward their ideas of how to improve business performance—unless the leadership team works hard to encourage this. Front line people are reluctant for two reasons. First, they often come up with ideas but there is no follow through, leading to frustration. Second, if an idea does get implemented, the people who came up with idea rarely get the credit.

Second, organizational silos make it very difficult for people to get together organically and think about solutions that require collaboration across different departments. There is often no natural mechanism to enable such interactions. These forums have to be created and sponsored by leadership teams.

Third, there is a perception that the higher up someone is in an organization, the more capable they are of solving problems.

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solutions. Our experience tells us that people are more interested in implementing ideas that they have a sense of ownership for.

So, unless external consultants are playing a catalytic role—like enabling insiders to develop their own ideas—their impact can be limited. Naturally, there is a role for expert external consultants.

For example, sometimes management teams prefer that ideas and recommendations come from outside experts so there is someone else to blame if things go wrong.

The bottom line: I don’t know how an organization could be passionate about something somebody else came up with. If you are not passionate about an innovative idea, then during the course of implementation, when roadblocks come up, you are going to give up. Only passionate people who feel ownership for their ideas and solutions will persist. So I believe when it comes to innovation and change management, external consultants are most impactful when they play a catalytic rather than an expert role. CIO

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

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Feature

APPS you

SOW

ACCURACY

you

REAP

BY ERSHAD KALEEBULLAH

When inaccurate data began to eat at Omnikan’s profits—the marigold managed farming arm of Kancor Ingredients—the company turned to a mobile app and weeded out losses.

If someone told you that the fortunes of one of India’s largest nutraceutical companies rest on the tiny petals of marigold flowers, you’d probably rubbish their claim.

Not if it were true. Ask Jawed Ahmed, GM and group IT head, Omniactive Health Technologies and Kancor Ingredients. “Yes, it can make our company either a profitable or a loss-making venture,” he says.

That’s because the tiny petals of the marigold flower hold a chemical called xanthophyll—which, when converted to lutein, protects the vision of the human eye—that wields tremendous power. Power so intense that this chemical can spin the fortunes of companies that manufacture it.

That’s why, for nutraceutical companies, like Omniactive the timely availability of superior quality xanthophyll is critical. Otherwise 44

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pharma companies that use lutein would shift their loyalties to But instead of subtracting the problem, the agents only multiplied it. other producers, taking Omniactive’s business away.

Despite having its destiny tied to the availability of xanthophyll, the company had outsourced its production. As a result, procuring the Croppy Situation required amount of quality xanthophyll wasn’t satisfactory. So, the Producing lutein is a tricky business. This is compounded by the company decided to take control of the process of producing lutein. fact that marigolds are sensitive and need to be handled with care.

To do that, the company decided to float a new organization For instance, if the flower is exposed to very cold temperatures called Omnikan, with the objective of producing lutein or not watered at regular intervals, its lutein levels will fall. Also, through managed farming of marigold. It identified 3,000 after the flower is harvested, it has to be processed within four to acres of land in three towns of Karnataka: Hassan, Halebidu five hours. Any delay would pull down the ideal yield percentage of and Gundlupet. the flower—which is between 2 to 2.5 percent—and anything below The farmers in these districts were then asked to cultivate 2 percent is detrimental to the business. “This is why we have to marigolds at four-day intervals. Similarly, when the cultivation handhold farmers and create a robust solution to track the entire cycle was over, they had to harvest at four day intervals so that the lifecycle of marigolds.” This was hard because the company had a company could control and time the produce. “The plan was to large acreage under cultivation and needed to control its supply chain. regulate the flow of supply. We wanted to keep it To make matters worse, the company used ruddy Reader ROI: going at a steady rate,” says Ahmed.

Excel sheets to track the cycle of marigolds. The As this was the first time farmers were agents would go to the field, note down the stage How accurate data can save costs and contain cultivating marigolds on their farms, they lacked that a particular farmer’s marigold was in, and the losses expertise. So, Omnikan appointed agents—and amount of time it would take for him to harvest it.

What it takes to create a assigned farms to them—who would meet The agent would then go to the office and update geo-tagging solution farmers, and ensure that the schedule was it on Excel sheets which would then be viewed by The benefits of mobility adhered to, and report it back to the company. agricultural scientists who would provide inputs on

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IMAGE BY MASTERFIL E.COM

Case File | Kancor Ingredients

Case File | Kancor Ingredients the maturity of a farmer’s marigolds. For instance, at the end of six weeks, marigolds should have turned a certain shade of yellow.

If they haven’t, scientists would input their suggestions on the Excel so that the agents can then inform farmers to take corrective action to get the cycle back on track.

Because this process wasn’t real-time, it led to erratic harvesting schedules. For example, the company would witness weeks without any produce and the very next week it would have to deal with 25-30 tonnes of marigolds. “The erratic schedules were a cause for concern. We could not possibly process the entire produce in one go and

as a result, we ended up losing business, ” says Ahmed.

Omnikan knew it had to make the process real-time and get rid of erratic schedules. There was only one way to do that: Set up a farm management system (FMS) on a private cloud.

Mobile Harvest Sitting on the cloud, the FMS provided agents and scientists with an interface that could be logged into from different locations in real-time. The FMS was a one-stop shop for agents, scientists, and accounting teams as it covered the entire cycle from registering a farmer to paying the farmer for

Appy Farming Omnikan’s mobile app not only provided the company timely and accurate information, it also helped it save input costs to the tune of Rs 44 lakh in a single season.

Before Mobile App

After Mobile App

Agents visit farms, check the growth of marigolds and update cumbersome Excel-sheets, which are then viewed by scientists.

Agents create comprehensive reports on android-based farm management system (FMS) app.

Because this wasn’t in real-time, scientists couldn’t give inputs to farmers on time to rectify problems like stunted growth of marigolds, or degrading quality of soil.

Agents upload photographs of their farms—clicked on smartphones—ensuring that scientists undertake immediate course-correction in case of any issues.

Agents are required to visit the farms they are assigned to at least once a week. But they used to update the excels from any farm.

Thanks to geo-tagging, agents can update information and create reports only from the perimeter of their assigned farms.

IN FOGRAPH BY VIKAS KAPO OR



Omnikan incurs high input costs—as it provides seeds to farmers—owing to inaccurate land area details.

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Geo-tagging ensures accurate land measurement and reduces input costs by three percent or Rs 44 lakh in a single season.

the produce.

Agents had to update the data weekly for scientists to provide their inputs. Missing the weekly deadline would trigger a reminder SMS that would be sent to agents’ phones.

But the agents sprung a surprise on Ahmed. It was imperative for agents to physically go to the field to check the development of marigolds but they were sitting at home and updating the FMS from their smartphones. “We didn’t realize that the Web-based solution would work on phones and expected agents to enter the data from our office. We got thinking and realized that even though implementing a solution on the smartphone could be a security risk, it would work if we put in some checks and balances and use it to our advantage,” he says.

Omnikan decided to take the plunge and build an app in-house based on the Android platform for the agents and farmers. For starters, the company decided to provide agents and farmers—who had more than 5 acres of land to their name—with Huawei smartphones. Providing phones to the farmers simplified the overall process as now they could update the FMS themselves.

For smaller farmers, agents would continue visiting fields and sending updates about the development of marigolds.

However, the agents were only allowed to perform data entry on the application for security reasons. Initially, agents used to enter data onto the app, which was then stored in a repository. This data would then be uploaded by officials at Omnikan onto the FMS, from where the scientists can view it.

To enable real time reporting of data, Ahmed—who had outsourced the development of this to third-party developers—had all the functionalities of the FMS built into the mobile app as well.

Today, every stage of the harvest cycle is monitored through the smartphone app and Omnikan can now accurately predict when to expect the final produce. “Accordingly, we schedule our factory operations. When the final produce leaves the farm for our factory, agents weigh the flowers and enter the data into the smartphone. For payments to the farmer, this data is integrated with our ERP,” says Ahmed.

Omnikan didn’t stop at that.

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Picture Perfect

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We saved upto three percent of the total input costs because we figured that 90 acres of the 3,000 acres of land didn’t belong to farmers, thanks to geo-tagging.

— Jawed Ahmed, GM & Group IT Head, Omniactive Health Technologies and Kancor Ingredients

that agents visited the farm at least once a week.

But getting here wasn’t easy. Ahmed faced resistance from agents as their work would be now more scrutinized. However, he managed to convince them otherwise.

As the mobile app was developed and tested in English, without any Unicode characters, the farmers needed to know the language to use the app. As a workaround, the company decided to use seven big, bold icons that could be used easily to identify what the application wanted to convey.

With the system in place, it was time for Omnikan to relish the benefits.

Reaping the Rewards The Android app rained benefits for Omnikan.

Accurate farm measurement using geotagging saved input costs. “We saved upto three percent of the total input costs because we figured that 90 acres of the 3,000 acres of land didn’t belong to farmers.” This amounted

to a savings of about Rs 44 lakh in a season.

Better planning accuracy in harvest dates resulted in plant utilization of more than 95 percent during the harvest period. Also, there is an increase in transparency and a faster information flow from the farm to the center of excellence and back to the farm.

Enthused by the results of the mobile implementation, Ahmed is now planning to introduce BYOD at Omnikan.

“In the future, we are looking at a BYOD solution because the application has matured and we have more control over it. Currently, our agents and farmers cannot use the issued phones for voice and hence have to carry two phones. We would provide them with approximately Rs 200 per month for data charges and take this forward,” says Ahmed. CIO

Send feedback to ershad_kaleebullah@idgindia.com

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INFOGRAPHICS: VIK AS KAP OOR

To take the implementation a notch or two higher, Ahmed insisted on agents sending photos of the farms to the scientists.

At the end of every two weeks, agents need to click a photograph of their assigned farms from their smartphones and upload it to the FMS. The scientists working at the agricultural center of excellence can use the photographs to analyze rainfall patterns, temperature patterns, and based on that correlate the growth of marigolds. So if something is amiss, corrective steps can be taken immediately. “Thanks to this, the gap between the experts and the ground level farmers has come down,” says Jawed.

The company got a taste of the advantages of this system when last year one of the agents uploaded a photo of a small farm in Hassan. The scientists discovered pests in the farm.

It was a continuous farm with 300 farmers and 1,000 acres under cultivation.

“While we noticed the pest problem in one of the sections of the farms, we also noticed that this problem was present in three other sections as well. Immediately, we decided to get rid of the pest problem or else we would have lost almost a quarter of our produce,” adds Jawed.

While it was important for the company to keep an eye on the evolution of marigolds through photographs, it was also important to ensure that agents visited farms they have been assigned to at least once a week.

But how was Omnikan going to make sure that agents visited their assigned farms and entered the relevant data onto the FMS? There was one way: Geo-tagging. To do that, the latitude and longitude details for each farm were added to the master data.

Doing this enabled the company to restrict agents from entering data from their farms only.

Now, agents can feed data into the system from their smartphones only if they stand within a 10 meter periphery of their farms. “In case an agent enters data into the application from any location apart from the farm they are in charge of, the system would flag up the information,” says Ahmed. By doing this, Omnikan ensured transparency and made sure

Karthi’s Agenda To make marketing more IT savvy and leverage IT to understand customers better.

MARKETING WITH AN

IT TWIST

CXO Agenda | Marketing Strategy

That IT and marketing share a love-hate relationship isn’t new but do they really give each other the cold shoulder? Not anymore. In fact, Karthi Marshan, Head-Marketing, Kotak Mahindra Group, says marketing should be more IT savvy and use IT to create relevant marketing strategies.

BY ERSHAD KALEEBULLAH

CIO: What are the two big challenges marketing faces today?

KARTHI MARSHAN: There are two chief challenges that marketing faces, particularly in financial services: Collating the views of the customer, and connecting with customers on a one-on-one basis.

How can IT help in tackling these challenges?

I think both these challenges can be solved primarily by IT. There have been some amazing developments in the big data space, which can help us understand our customers holistically by integrating their demographics, transaction details, preferences, location, and social profile to give marketing realtime alerts on what kind of messaging would be most relevant and appropriate.

How can marketing and IT ensure they overcome the disconnect that exists between the two departments and work more in harmony?

What disconnect? I would like to stress on the fact that there is more disconnect between sales and marketing than between IT and marketing. Folks in IT and marketing both want many of the same things. To build cool stuff that makes us famous. I believe empathy is the key here. The point is, across organizations, unless everyone walks a mile in the other girl’s shoes—they may be new, shiny, and pretty— you will never know where it pinches.

In your opinion, what would the IT-marketing relationship look like, 10 years from now?

Ten years from now, everybody will be in

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marketing. No, really. Look at it this way, there was a time when cars would break down so much that we had mechanic shacks every 100 metres. Today, cars are so well-built, they almost never break down. Let’s take another example, once upon a time, every senior employee had his or her own stenographer or typist.

Today, Anand Mahindra and his ilk crank out dozens of tweets, hundreds of e-mails and so on, and in that sense everybody is a typist, right?

That’s why, 10 years from now, I think the best IT minds will be performing marketing roles, where they bring their deep understanding and apply it to create attractive solutions to customers’ problems.

You spoke about how senior management is now using Twitter. A lot of companies are also turning to social media marketing. It’s a medium IT disapproves, but is this justified?

I think IT is right on its part to be wary of things like social media to some extent. This is because the risks for both organizations and customers are significant.

However, the truth is, it’s not the technological risks that are a threat, but the nature of the social medium.

That’s because, as with any new technology, it takes time for users to adapt to social media, and in the interim, naïve users end up exposing themselves to grave human risks, which we inadvertently blame technology for.

For example, take new debit card owners, who hand over both their cards and their passwords to strangers at an ATM, asking for help to withdraw cash. Social media could be like that—for new users—and those are the real risks to watch out for. In light of that, even from a marketing lens, I would not endorse gimmicks REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 5 , 2 0 1 3

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CXO Agenda | Marketing Strategy

Do you believe that because IT is busy implementing solutions for operations, marketing is low on its priority list?

It is true that marketing stands way back in the IT queue. But rather than blame IT for it, I feel it is the CXO suite’s job to throw light on the IT needs of marketing.

Until there’s executive buy-in for IT investments to support marketing goals, it will continue to be a low priority.

Having said that, marketing has historically not been a big consumer of IT services—but, according to Gartner and Forrester, that’s changing. Also, technology is evolving so fast, that today we need minimal IT support to implement our solutions—only 20 percent of what was required five years ago.

What disconnect? Folks in IT and marketing both want many of the same things: To build cool stuff that makes us famous.

Hence I feel, in marketing, we have to put in a lot of effort to stay abreast of cutting-edge technologies and ensure that IT effort is minimal. For example, with cloud services available for so many applications, the demands on IT teams have drastically reduced. Even the risks are reduced, since we can now host marketing applications at a safe distance from mission-critical ones, like core banking.

that we get such cool applications to play with, right?

Similarly, it is incumbent for marketing folks to bring a technology bent of mind to their tasks. And by that I mean a responsible technology bent of mind, if I may add.

An IT solution may be bolted together over a long weekend in response to a marketing director’s whim and yet marketing folks will chafe at the bit about IT’s speed of delivery. But the truth is that IT is actually being a caretaker, ensuring no one can break in, and once implemented the system doesn’t break down.

Do you have any examples of great solutions that are possible when marketing and IT work in harmony?

Like I said, it’s not just IT and marketing but other disciplines—like product, process, operations and service—that are required to work in tandem to roll out really impressive offerings. One example I could quote where all teams worked together to swiftly roll out a service which has become an integral part of our offering is our online account opening system for savings accounts and NRIs. We are the first—and arguably—the only bank which gives consumers the option to start banking from their mobile devices within 10 minutes. This means they can open an account and instantly get an account number and a customer relationship number within 10 minutes.

In the same session, they can even fund the account.

Do you think IT needs to be more customer-centric?

As Gandhi said, we need to be the change we want to see. I would rather that my colleagues and I were more IT savvy. CIO

Is it then okay for marketing teams to bypass IT departments?

I think this adversarial characterisation is neither accurate nor useful. I actually think the lines between discipline silos is fast blurring. After all, it is only when engineers with a marketing bent of mind populate Apple, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etcetera

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Ershad Kaleebullah is correspondent. Send feedback on this interview to ershad_kaleebullah@idgindia.com

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PHOTOS BY K AP IL SH ROF F

like exposing customers’ bank account details on their social networking accounts. I think it’s too early for that.

Innovation

Gaining Stature CIOs in the US—and in India—are earning more business credibility, sharpening customer focus and raising IT’s strategic profile.

By Kim S. Nash

Reader ROI: How to strengthen IT’s standing with the business Technologies that will help Why you should be prepared not to be welcome 52

The measure of a CIO is in how everyone else in the company views the IT organization. Many CIOs strive to create an IT group that is the department people call first when a new business idea strikes. Even better: They strive to be there at the idea’s birth. Building such a

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strategic IT group takes time and tactical smarts— but it’s a journey more CIOs are making.

Results from the past three years of the US version of the State of the CIO survey suggest that CIOs are increasingly taking steps to solidify or elevate their team’s relationship with business

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CIO Role stakeholders by delegating more, developing leadership and cross-functional skills among their IT staff, and turning their attention to customers. One-third of CIOs now visit customers, up from 18 percent two years ago.

That’s a pattern that is also prevalent among Indian CIOs. According to the CIO India research, developing cross-functional focus among IT managers, delegating more IT operations to trusted lieutenants, and training IT staff to partner better with business, are the top three ways Indian CIOs are solidifying and elevating IT’s relationship with business.

“With credibility,” says Warren Kudman, CIO at the $8.1 billion Sealed Air, “you can then have conversations with business partners about opportunities to differentiate [your company] through technology or even new lines of revenue that are IT-enabled.”

But not everyone is there yet. It’s heartening that 20 percent of CIOs in the US say their IT groups are seen as business peers who develop—not just enable— business strategy. However, the majority remain in the muddled middle: 32 percent are seen as influential collaborators, 26 percent as service providers and 15 percent as cost centers. Still, we’re seeing a shift to the advanced end of the spectrum.

Once again, that’s a trend that is visible among Indian CIOs, except that here, it’s more noticeable. The number of Indian CIOs who say that their businesses view them as competitive differentiators (definition: truly part of the business, and engaged in developing—not just enabling—business strategy) has gone from 14 percent in 2010 to 27 percent last year.

Many of the mobile and analytics projects CIOs plan for 2013 may enhance perceptions, conceived as they were in cooperation with business partners and aimed at high-visibility targets such as customerexperience improvements. Tom Farrah, CIO at Dr Pepper Snapple Group, has begun

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Building Stronger Relationships Top five ways Indian CIOs strengthen IT’s relationship with the business.

1. Developing a cross-functional focus among IT managers 2. Delegating more IT operations to trusted lieutenants 3. Training IT staff to partner better with business 4. Meeting more frequently with influential stakeholders 5. Creating quick wins for business partners Source:CIO Research

mobility and visual analytics work after sending IT people to the field to understand how sales agents and truck drivers work.

“Our job is to help our sellers sell and drivers deliver,” he says.

Clean, clear thinking from the CIO about basic corporate goals helps keep IT from drifting into non-essential areas. But CIOs are learning they must also employ a variety of management tools to support the mission—and enhance their own value.

Delegation and Mixed Meetings To generate goodwill quickly, it’s always effective to use time-tested methods, such as completing quick-win IT projects for business. But any self-respecting C-suite expects more than just quick wins, which means CIOs have to use more sophisticated and nuanced tactics to elevate IT. For example, it makes sense that by delegating more IT operations to highperforming direct reports, a CIO can gain time to focus on strategic issues. But there’s no single formula for deciding what to delegate and to whom.

Kudman at Sealed Air created the position of VP of IT business management to monitor technology spending and manage IT vendors.

He also created a “value-management team” of 20 to 25 people responsible for making

sure the company gets the most value from already-installed software and hardware.

The team also educates business units and even IT staff about the capabilities and capacities of existing systems, Kudman says.

“If I didn’t have people I could rely on, how I spend my time would be very different.”

By delegating, he frees up time to brainstorm with non-IT peers about ways to push Sealed Air ahead of rivals in the food and medical materials packaging business.

The company recently started to deploy machines that monitor whether healthcare workers wash their hands between patient visits. The devices gather data, collect compliance reports and send alerts to supervisors. The IT group discussed the business case for this new technology-based revenue stream and suggested methods of data storage and security to the business unit. That’s the kind of strategy-shaping CIOs should strive for, he says. “The most important thing is to be the trusted adviser.”

At Potlatch, a $500 million (about Rs 2,750 crore) timber and wood products company, delegation looks different.

Having assigned infrastructure operations, including phone systems and networking, to a couple of IT staffers, IT Director Brent Gregory is now redistributing applications work. He encourages several of his trusted

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CIO Role staff to learn more about specific business areas, such as running mills and cutting and replenishing timber. The goal is to have them take ownership of the applications that most matter to those groups, Gregory says.

“I’m trying to focus more on getting with the moneymakers of the company,” he says.

Meeting frequently with key influencers is the number-one way CIOs improve stakeholder relations. Again, the idea of having in-person meetings with those you want to build relationships with sounds simple. Doing it, though, may not be.

When the IT staff at WD-40 Company started to attend other departments’ meetings, all parties “were uncomfortable at first,” says Bob Hoagland, VP of IT. Business

counterparts may have wondered whether IT was there to check up on their technology decisions, he says. But the aim was for IT people to listen for hidden problems that might be easily solved by technology.

For example, an applications manager heard that a woman in marketing was juggling data from 175 Excel spreadsheets.

The IT staffer wrote a Web-based application that dissolved the marketer’s stress. “This wasn’t even her primary job,” Hoagland recalls, “but we [saw] in that conversation a potential solution we [could] provide.”

Sending ERP administrators to mingle with colleagues in other areas of the business will help smooth the workflow changes expected from a new quality-management

Rather than push for an IT spending spree right now, Bill Haser, CIO of Tenneco, wants to combine technology with new processes to make employees more productive.

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system due to be installed in 2013, he says.

Any initial discomfort about mixed meetings was worth it. “The more people are involved with each other, the more ownership they will take for building relationships,” he says.

Mobile and Big Data Reality A CIO creates an effective IT group when he makes sure his technologists understand how employees and external customers behave, says Robert Wollan, global managing director of Accenture’s sales and customer service practice.

In particular, the IT group can help marketing, sales and other departments isolate what customers notice and seem to value, he says. That is, IT can provide tools to tease out what promotions, incentives and ways of interaction elicit the most reactions or most lucrative responses. Then IT can help formulate technology plans to do more of what works, he says.

Among IT staff, CIOs should encourage careful watching of employees and customers alike, says Farrah at Dr Pepper, a $5.9 billion (about Rs 32,450 crore) manufacturer of 50 brands of beverages.

Farrah didn’t plunge into mobile apps early on. Instead, he assigned small teams to study innovation in IT areas, such as mobile technology and analytics, as well as in business functions, such as field sales in the beverage industry. After they researched, they reconnected to pool their new knowledge.

Their findings: A Dr Pepper salesman typically has three minutes to greet, sell and possibly sign a deal with a store manager.

Knowing that, IT set out to design a mobile analytics app that delivers accurate, current data about a specific store or product in a way that will grab the store manager’s attention.

The pre-work of studying and planning will serve the company well, Farrah contends.

He is piloting a custom application for Apple iPads that allows a salesman to conduct business all on one screen—no jumping to multiple screens or endless scrolling.

Reports once rendered in many columns and rows are now graphical and tailored to particular customers or sales goals. “They can use more of the three minutes to sell rather than manipulate the tools,” he says.

Similarly, the Evangelical Lutheran

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CIO Role Church in America, a nonprofit religious group with 4.3 million members, is taking a measured approach to analytics, says Jon Beyer, head of IT. After hiring consultants to inventory the church’s digital, analog and paper archives in early 2012, Beyer is now developing a data management and analytics strategy.

Now that he knows he has 250 terabytes of unstructured data, he wants to turn it into useful information.

For example, IT may catalog the thousands of hours of video shot at various church events, applying metadata tags that identify people in the scenes. From there, constituent outreach managers could find people who attend events frequently, cross-reference them with an existing CRM database and solicit them for donations, Beyer says. First, though, data cleansing has to be completed, eliminating duplicate entries and reconciling questionable entries.

“We’re Lutherans. People spell ‘Andersen’ all different ways,” he says.

After a false start with CRM and analytics a few years ago, under a different IT leader, Beyer plans to catch up in the next 18 months.

Generally, the reality of big data may be catching up with the hype. Survey results suggest IT leaders are more aware of such initiatives now after they failed to make big inroads last year.

Money Mindsets and Cross-Training Smart CIOs understand the financial levers used in different parts of the company to ease or increase pressure. At WD-40, for example, a money mind-set pervades IT. CIO Hoagland says that’s partly because it’s a small company, but a big brand. He knows, for example, how much revenue the company makes per employee. He likes the attitude of one of the newer members of his staff who, when looking at the cost of new systems, asks, “How many cans

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On the Rise The number of Indian CIOs who say their businesses view them as competitive differentiators, (truly part of the business, and engaged in developing—not just enabling— business strategy) is increasing.

Number of CIOs considered competitive differentiators 27%

17% 14%

2010

2011

2012

20%

Of Indian CIOs say marketing IT (so that the business better understands IT’s capabilities and processes) is one of their most important IT management initiatives in 2013.

Source:CIO Research

of WD-40 are we going to have to sell to buy that?”

That kind of thinking is especially valuable in tough times, says Bill Haser, CIO

of Tenneco. As the global recession erases some investment projects from a CIO’s wish list, Haser says, another way to elevate IT is to improve processes. Tenneco isn’t suffering; sales have jumped 55 percent since 2009, from $4.6 billion (about Rs 25,300 crore) to $7.2 billion (about Rs 39,600 crore) for 2012.

The company, which makes emissionscontrol and ride-control systems for cars and other vehicles, benefits from the stricter and more complex environmental regulations emerging worldwide, Haser says.

But rather than push for an IT spending spree, Haser’s big goal right now is to make sure employee productivity rates match company growth. To do that, he will combine new technology with new processes. He wants to use the cloud and other newer technologies to help employees be more effective. For example, in an effort to improve the productivity of existing employees, Haser set up cloud versions of project-management software and a human resources tool. “We don’t want to add headcount at the same level we’re adding revenue,” he says.

Like other CIOs, Haser is training his staff to be better partners with peers outside IT, and he’s developing their cross-functional know-how. He started “technology councils” in 2010, where IT managers periodically meet with tech-savvy managers in a given business unit to discuss the future.

Sometimes a council focuses on one issue, such as new ways to measure emissions. As a result of a council held last year, IT is helping Tenneco engineers on different continents use collaboration software to share product designs more easily.

“We say, ‘Here’s the strategic intersection between what you want to do with the business and what IT can do,’” says Haser. CIO Research Director Carolyn Johnson contributed to this report.

Kim Nash is senior editor. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Innovation

Staking aClaim B y K i m S. N a s h

As companies strive to regain the ground lost to the recession,

CEOs are talking a lot about innovation.

Some have decreed that a certain percentage of revenue must come from brand-new products and services each year. If CEOs want innovation, then CIOs ought to want patents. Not for internal IT operations inventions, but for unique business methods and other inventions made possible by new technology. The innovation mandate, and the convergence of social media, mobile technology and analytics, has companies running to the patent office, trying to lock in ownership of new ways to do business and interact with customers.

“It’s a new gold rush,” says John Lanza, a partner at the law firm of Foley and Lardner.

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There’s a patent gold rush under way as savvy companies seek to lock in the competitive advantage from their IT innovations.

And it’s big.

Remember the dotcom boom, when just about anything anyone did on the young World Wide Web—from clicking to chatting to buying a book—was ripe for patenting? Today’s race involves more companies in more industries. In the

Reader ROI: What patents using IT look like The financial importance of filing patents Components of a patent strategy

1990s, it was mainly financial services companies and startups eager to nurture e-commerce. Today’s patent push includes rich, established companies in a variety of industries where IT is becoming the business model: healthcare, automotive, retail, insurance, consulting, airlines.

Allstate Insurance, which has more than 100 patents pending, sees patenting as a powerful weapon. For example, the $28 billion (about Rs 154,000 crore) company has patents for customizable insurance policies and for picking the best location

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Brian LeClaire, CIO and Chief Service Officer, Humana, says that obtaining patents for IT-enabled innovations can be a valuable differentiator for the business.

for its offices, all enabled by IT. Allstate’s patent portfolio has doubled in the past three years, a spokesman says. “Patents are invaluable in keeping the company ahead of the competition,” he says.

Patents can indeed bestow a sizeable competitive advantage. A company may, of course, incorporate its unique invention into products or services customers have never seen. But even if the invention doesn’t make it to market, the patent owner can block others from doing the same thing. “The monopoly granted to you by a patent will help you establish and shape a marketplace,” Lanza says.

Who doesn’t want in on that? In the past two years, Bank of America has applied for patents for a system to change a person’s emotional state and for wearable financial indicators—rings or watches that bring consumers financial data. General Motors found a way to let you text while driving. Humana patented a system for predicting a person’s future health based on his medical and pharmacy claims data.

Equifax patented technology to monitor a child’s budding financial data for identity theft. Wal-Mart invented a system to let you apply for credit cards at the gas pump.

Some of the mobile, social networking and analytics patents granted during this flurry won’t withstand challenges by competitors, either in court or at the patent and trademark office. During the previous Web patent rush, courts crackled with lawsuits challenging “business method” patents that covered ways of performing a common task that critics

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said were too broad to be patented. Thennewcomers Priceline and Expedia, for example, sued each other several times, and Amazon’s controversial patent on “1-Click” ordering was challenged and re-examined for years before the patent office confirmed it once and for all in 2010. While some of today’s patents may fall, others will hold. That leaves CIOs under pressure to devise defensive and offensive patent strategies to keep and create competitive advantage, says Teresa Lunt, VP and director of the computing science laboratory at Palo

Alto Research Center (PARC), a for-profit R&D company owned by Xerox.

“You have to make those land grabs before you’re even sure what you’re going to do,” Lunt says. “If you wait until you’re certain of all the business analysis, someone else has grabbed the space.”

Why Seek a Patent?

Furthering corporate goals is the numberone reason to patent anything, whether the objectives are financial, strategic or competitive, says Brian LeClaire, CIO and chief service officer at Humana, a $36.8 billion

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Innovation

(about Rs 202,400 crore) health insurance company. “To remain competitive, intellectual property becomes an important differentiator,” LeClaire says.

Among the eight patents Humana won in 2012 are ones for a team fitness game, which is now a product, and one for an online health game, which isn’t yet available to customers. Humana’s patents for methods of predicting health, which were granted in 2010, took six years to get. The technologies are now used internally as part of services offered to customers.

Exclusive patent rights are good for 20 years from the date of application (the same applies for Indian patents).

That much time may sound like an impressive lead time, but markets can change quickly. Even within the threeyear lag while patent examiners decide, a competitive edge may die. Case in point: In 2006, Aetna launched a credit card

patent today might yet become valuable.

Laws could change or a company in a different industry might use a variation of the idea, and the patent owner could license its patent for royalties, says Lunt from PARC. Plus, you may later develop related technologies or business methods that use the original patented material, LeClaire says. That initial patent might be the seed idea that sprouts a tree with many patented branches, he says. “The original seed might not have ultimate value, but it is the genealogy of a concept that does.”

For companies that want to be known as groundbreakers, building a big patent footprint can help. For example, United Parcel Service, regarded as a perpetual innovator, has attained 313 patents in the United States, 69 of them since 2010. The $53.1 billion (about Rs 292,000 crore) company recently patented technology to

index that calls for products launched in the past three years to bring in 10 percent of the revenue at each of the company’s five business units every year. Equifax has received nine patents in the past two years, with two more pending.

Its patented technology for detecting theft of children’s identities is part of a family plan credit-monitoring product Equifax launched in March 2012.

Patents carry benefits in addition to forming new products to sell. They have financial value as an asset on the balance sheet. They also enhance the corporate brand, maybe even the stock price, Lanza says. “They confer the sense there’s value at the company beyond just what’s on the table.”

Creating Patent Strategy Assessing the potential of intellectual property (IP) isn’t a task for the CIO alone, even if the IP is based on IT. At Humana, ongoing discussions between the technology, law, product development, innovation and other groups clarify whether and how the company pursues legal protections, LeClaire says.

Knowing the value of what you have takes many experienced eyes.

Humana employees undergo training to understand intellectual property and the legal protections it can receive, in part so they don’t inadvertently reveal sensitive information. Allstate does that, too.

The public nature of the process at the patent office may influence decisions on whether to pursue protection, says Rich Adduci, CIO of Boston Scientific. Once an application is filed, the information in it usually goes public. “People can leverage that to create adjunct innovations,” he says. Adduci is a named inventor on two patents from 2008 for work he did as a consultant at Accenture. “There are cases where you wouldn’t want a patent because you will have to disclose things you don’t want to. You have to be selective,” he says. Sometimes, the time and expense

While some of today’s patents may fall, others will hold. That puts CIOs under pressure to devise defensive and offensive strategies to stay ahead. with Bank of America that financially rewarded Aetna insurance customers when they charged health-related items, including medical treatments. The insurance company and the bank shared some customer data and called the Healthy Living card “innovative.” In 2007, Aetna applied for a patent. In 2009, the companies discontinued the card because it violated then-new privacy laws, a spokesman says.

In 2010, Aetna finally won the patent.

“You have to make your best guess when filing as to how long you’re going to be able to offer the product or service in question,” Lanza says. “When circumstances change, companies have to step back and say, ‘We guessed we were going to have a fantastic product for many years. We were wrong.’”

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let customers track packages on wireless devices without having to enter the full 18-digit tracking code, and technology to reroute sensitive packages to avoid unacceptable environmental conditions, such as extreme cold or heat.

Patents are integral to UPS’s business strategy. As CIO of UPS, Dave Barnes oversees the $1 billion (about Rs 5,500 crore) that the company invests in these and other technologies every year. He declines to discuss his patent strategy other than to say, “We are very active in this space and extensively utilize technology innovation to drive our business growth.”

Equifax, a $2 billion (about Rs 11,000 crore) credit reporting company, hopes to improve its innovation reputation. It has instituted a New Product Innovation

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of chasing a patent would be wasted. A company may invent a unique system or method but it’s so buried within a process that you’d be unable to tell whether anyone infringes. “If you can’t figure that out by readily available data points,” Lanza says, “why file?”

American Airlines won a patent this year for technology that sends data to passengers’ mobile devices while they’re aboard a plane. Lanza wonders whether the patent may be an example of buried innovation. “If the steps in the claim take place on a server in a datacenter somewhere,” he asks, “how is American ever going to know [if] its patent is infringed?”

American declines to comment on that invention, but CIO Maya Leibman says patents generally are part of the airline’s competitive advantage. “We are leveraging internal intellectual capital to come up with business solutions that provide the best possible experience for our customers,” she says.

An effective patent strategy must also include monitoring what rivals and other companies file. American, for example, patted itself on the back in a recent employee memo for winning more patents than any other major airline. Watching the intellectual capital moves of competitors is critical for staying ahead, says LeClaire from Humana. This knowledge influences new product ideas and launches and potential acquisitions, he says. Patent strategy “permeates the broad sweeps of what we do as companies.”

Lanza compares patent decisions to the game of chess. “You’re trying to figure out what you’re doing, what your competitor is doing, how to get around that, and whether, in the end, your invention still has value to the company.”

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CIOs should devise defensive and offensive patent strategies to keep and create competitive advantage says Teresa Lunt, a VP and lab director at the Palo Alto Research Center.

Some inventions appear to be obvious, but in the nuanced realm of patent law, they’re different enough to merit protection.

Allstate was recently granted a family of three patents for customizable insurance, each of which covers related but different aspects of the invention.

Patenting a family of inventions protects you better than getting a single patent, says Lunt, who helps PARC formulate patent strategy. PARC works with clients such as Procter & Gamble and BASF to develop inventions that may be patented and

also licenses patents to other companies.

Owning a patent family, she says, “makes it harder for someone to peel out a piece of the technology and lock you out of some application of your idea.”

Holding a patent means defending a patent, which can be expensive and distracting. The median cost to fight a typical patent infringement case in court in the US is $2.5 million (about Rs 14 crore), according to the American Intellectual Property Law Association. The average time to trial is two to two-and-a-half years,

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the association says. Allstate, for one, is undeterred. In May, the company filed a lawsuit against Nationwide Mutual Insurance, accusing its rival of infringing on its first customizable insurance patent, granted a year ago. Nationwide’s Vanishing Deductible offering, which decreases a customer’s deductible for each year of accident-free driving, steps on optimization systems and methods Allstate owns, the suit says. When Allstate was granted two more patents in that family in July, the company added more infringement claims to the suit. Nationwide hasn’t yet filed a response and continues to sell the Vanishing Deductible product. “We plan to vigorously defend our position,” a Nationwide spokesman says.

One of the big factors in formulating patent strategy, says Adduci, is determining whether the competitive boost outweighs the burden. Adduci has

popular goal of recently patented IT inventions, made possible by the union of mobile, social and analytics technologies.

Often the manipulation is couched as a consumer benefit, but corporate profit is always kept in mind.

For example, in 2010 Bank of America submitted a patent application aptly named “Consumer Behavior Modification Tool.” In one version of the technology, a consumer who wants to curb spending or increase savings would be assessed a fee when he buys something frivolous, such as fancy coffee or clothes. What constitutes unnecessary spending would be determined by the consumer in advance. As the bank says in its application: “Consumers can rationalize that they can afford to treat themselves...

Unfortunately, these costs can have a grave effect on [their] financial health.”

Humana, meanwhile, thinks games can get customers to change unhealthy habits.

lead users through customized link paths based on analysis of how other users have interacted with similar links in the past, “much as pheromones deposited by ants attract other ants.”

It’s hard to say whether any or all of these patented ideas will be made into products or services, says PARC’s Lunt, but patenting ahead of the market is sound strategy. Patents like this put rivals on notice not to tread too close, she says.

PARC, for example, patented optical laser technology for printing that became quite lucrative when optical media like CDs and DVDs took off, she says. More recently, PARC patented mobile technology for commuters that detects when ride-sharing partners deviate suspiciously off-course.

“That will become valuable only if ridesharing becomes a much bigger activity,” she says. “We would love to license it.”

Some patents might appear unrealistic as commercial products now, but could prove valuable in the future, Lunt says. “Sometimes they turn out to be used in ways you don’t anticipate and turn out to be quite valuable.”

We don’t know yet how strenuously rivals may challenge the new crop of patents. Allstate’s suit against Nationwide may establish how truly different insurance policies created by data analysis have to be. Perhaps Humana’s online health game won’t turn out to be appreciably different from any other healthcare company’s. But as IT continues to permeate business models in so many industries, companies will feel pressured to protect any advantage they can gain, says Lanza, the intellectual property attorney. Companies with a vibrant and vigorous patent strategy— including both offensive and defensive moves—gain a reputation for innovation, he says. And innovation “is a fantastic barrier to competition.” CIO

One of the big factors in formulating a patent strategy, say CIOs, is determining whether the competitive boost outweighs the burden. considered seeking patents for recent software development work for an iPad project at Boston Scientific, a $7.6 billion (about Rs 41,800 crore) medical device maker. The work, which he declines to detail, is innovative enough to patent, he speculates. But a patent would bring no payoff for Boston Scientific. “We’re not a commercial software house, so I’m not going to bring it to market,” he says. “We’ve thought about it, but honestly, the paingain ratio isn’t there.”

Homesteading the Future Today, many of the most interesting patents are not so much about business methods but about using technology to get ever-closer to the customer.

Manipulating customer behavior is one 60

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Making an online game of eating better, exercising more and choosing other healthy actions will keep them coming back, LeClaire says. “Gamification can be a valuable differentiator.”

Travelers, the $25.4 billion (about Rs 139,700 crore) insurer, wants to improve people’s risk management skills. It applied for patents for systems to measure how busy a road or building or transportation system is. The data would show a customer how she puts herself at risk in daily life— and Travelers would price her insurance policy accordingly.

Strategies for conditioning consumers to change their routines are also at the heart of a recent Amazon.com patent. The $48.1 billion (about Rs 264,500 crore) e-commerce company created a system to

Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in.

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from the TOP

Dr. Devi Shetty, Founder and Chairman, Narayana Hrudayalaya Group of Hospitals, recommends IT to fight one of India’s biggest challenges: Affordable healthcare.

Doctor’s

Orders

BY ERSHAD KALEEBULLAH

He’s received both a Padma Bhushan and a Padma Shri, the third and fourth highest civilian awards given by the government of India.

He’s also been called the Henry Ford of heart surgeries, and the poster boy of affordable healthcare. Yet, none of that is truly astonishing about Dr. Devi Shetty.

Here’s what is: That he remains a straight-speaking gent, a trait that’s harder to find, the higher people rise in prominence. And Dr. Shetty’s pretty high on the prominence totem pole.

That’s also what makes it a pleasure to talk to him. That and his ideas on how to make healthcare affordable, something India needs in a bad way.

India falls short of almost every healthcare benchmark there is, whether it’s healthcare infrastructure per 1,000 patients, spend on healthcare as a percentage of GDP, rural access to hospitals, etcetera.

In this interview, Dr. Shetty shares why he believes that many of India’s healthcare challenges are impossible to tackle without IT.

CIO: What is India’s biggest healthcare challenge?

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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Dr. Devi Shetty: The greatest challenge is that we need two million beds. The kind of a capital you need to fund that isn’t available in our country. Then there is a clear disparity in the expectations of the government: On one hand the Indian government wants the cost

of healthcare to go down, and, on the other, it looks at the healthcare industry as a way to generate additional revenue.

Do you believe IT has a role in finding a solution?

IT helps lower the costs of various operations in every service industry. Look at

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DR. DEVI SHETTY EXPECTS I.T. TO Better patient care Increase the reach of medicine

PHOTOS BY SRIVATSA SHAN DILYA

Help control costs and ensure more affordable healthcare

the number of financial transactions on the NASDAQ. Within a few minutes, billions of dollars exchange hands. And the cost of the transaction is virtually nothing. This is possible only because entire services are run on efficient IT platforms. The problem is that, all over the world, the penetration of IT in healthcare is extremely poor.

What can IT do to lower costs in healthcare?

One can’t reduce the cost of healthcare without IT. Actually, no service industry

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can reduce costs without IT. IT is the matrix which holds the entire delivery system.

Take what we are doing for example. We are, perhaps, one of the few hospitals in the world which creates a balance sheet on a daily basis. A sophisticated ERP system on the cloud houses all the financial data of all our hospitals. But looking at a P&L sheet at the end of the month is like reading a postmortem report. You can’t really do anything about whatever losses you have.

So we've ensured that our IT initiatives give us a P&L account on a daily basis.

Every day at noon, senior doctors and administrators receive an SMS with the previous day’s revenue, expenses, and profit and loss margin. Looking at your P&L on a daily basis is a diagnostic tool; you can take remedial measures.

With doctors you can’t change their behavior by preaching, you need to produce the data. You tell them exactly how many days a patient stayed before an operation, how many days in the ICU, how many days in post-op, and what is the cost of material used for the operation. All this cannot be

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generated without the help of IT. Narayana Hrudayalaya has invested heavily in IT and we are reaping benefits.

How has IT helped Narayana Hrudayalaya expand?

We have 17 hospitals spread across the country; there are some I haven’t even visited after they were inaugurated. But, I’m clued in on their day-to-day operations. We have a complaint management system that tracks all the problems our hospitals face. It helps me call the bluff of the COO of a hospital who says things are fine, when in reality, I know there were 184 complaints registered that day.

When we started this system, we registered 200-300 complaints a day. Now it’s down to between 60 to 80. That’s the power of information. I can't think of the healthcare industry without IT.

Can IT better patient care?

While IT cannot cure, it can make healthcare safer for patients. For example, in the US, close to 10,000 people die due to prescription errors every year. No doctor in this world has the presence of mind, roundthe-clock, to calculate drug interaction accurately every single time. Hospitals must have a policy that prescriptions should be made only using specialized software that can make prescriptions. This is already available.

Yet, most hospitals don't use IT as much as you do. Why? The doctors at the helm of affairs in the healthcare industry, and those who influence policy, belong to my generation. We grew up in an era when there were no computers. And, when we don’t understand something we are scared of it. Also, there is a hidden fear that it may reduce our importance.

This can be mitigated by introducing solutions that have a ‘wow’ effect, and which can be used by us without typing. Today, the technology is available to make this happen.

Where does telemedicine fit?

Right now it's not having a big impact.

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texts back the right dosage and intake timings.

It is all happening in a very informal manner.

What's needed to make it more formal?

“India will prove to the world that the wealth of a nation has nothing to do with the quality of healthcare its citizens get.”

—Dr. Devi Shetty

One area where it works is radiology but we don't have many senior radiologists. A single radiologist interprets the CT and MRI scans for all the group's hospitals.

That said, we've treated over 53,000 heart patients in remote locations and we believe that eventually very few patients will go to hospitals, except for surgeries. For medical problems they will stay at home, use handheld devices to diagnose (ECG, blood tests, etcetera) and video conference with doctors.

Right now, that’s happening informally.

For example, if a patient-doctor relationship extends beyond a clinic or hospital, the patient might be comfortable interacting with a doctor over video-conferencing. We have a warfarin clinic based in Hubli that’s managed by an ex-patient. (Warfarin is an anticoagulant drug.

It’s dose needs to be monitored based on blood tests to check for international normalized ratio or INR). All patients treated at this clinic get their INR tests done and SMS their report to the ex-patient. He inspects the report and

I think these are all very chaotic developments. Eventually, with low-cost connectivity, I expect things to change.

Also, with telemedicine, there is no legal protection for doctors. If a doctor does not physically prescribe an antibiotic, it is not legal. The government needs to make laws for telemedicine for it to operate smoothly.

What do you believe is the future of Indian healthcare?

India will become the first country in the world to dissociate healthcare from affluence.

Within 10 years, every Indian will have access to high-tech healthcare with dignity. India will prove that the wealth of a nation has nothing to do with the quality of healthcare its citizens can avail. This is possible because we produce the largest number of doctors, nurses and medical technicians in the world.

Outside the US, we have the largest number of USFDA approved drug manufacturing units in the world. We have everything needed for a phenomenal healthcare delivery model. The only thing that's missing is that patients do not have enough money. That will be addressed soon. For example, around 10 years ago, we convinced the state of Karnataka to launch a health insurance plan called ‘Yashaswini Micro Health Insurance’ that has a premium of Rs 5 per month. Today, four million farmers get the benefits of this insurance. Over 10 years, over 4.5 lakh patients have had various types of operations—including major heart operations—for just Rs 5 a month.

We’re now trying to convince policy makers to float a scheme where every mobile phone subscriber in India pays Rs 20 over and above their regular bill, which will enable us to create the most robust and scalable health insurance program on earth.

Poor people in isolation are very weak but together they are very strong. CIO Send feedback to ershad_k@idgindia.com

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EMC KEEPS HERO MOTOCORP’S IT RUNNING The world’s largest two wheeler manufacturer, Hero MotoCorp, is gearing up to realize its global ambitions. But its backup system and related downtime threatened to slowdown the company. That’s when EMC stepped in.

Company

Hero MotoCorp

Industry Automotive

Headquarters New Delhi

It’s hard not to envy Hero MotoCorp. Its journey spanning nearly 30 years—when it was first launched as Hero Honda Motors in 1984—has been phenomenal. Be it producing 100,000 motorbikes within three years of its launch or creating a brand like Splendor that has made Hero the number one company in the world—for the last 12 years.

Today, in its new avatar—separating from its erstwhile Japanese partner Honda—it has set out to make a mark on its own. The company has laid out an ambitious plan of garnering $10 billion (about Rs 55,000 crore) in sales in the next five years. It also plans to sell 10 million units annually with 10 percent of the sales originating from international markets.

And it looks like it’s already getting there. In 2012, Hero MotoCorp sold 6.23 million two-wheeler units—an increase of 15 percent from the 5.4 million units sold in 2010-11—garnering a net income of around Rs 24,000 crore, and netting a neat profit of nearly Rs 2,400 crore. In the same year, it also launched its first motorcycle, Impulse, under the Hero

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP EMC

Since the data restoration time has come down considerably— from 60 minutes to just seven minutes—the confidence that data will be available when required reassures users. This has made users very happy.”

VIJAY SETHI,

VP-IS & CIO, Hero MotoCorp

brand name. And it didn’t stop at that. With a vision to set up shop across the border, it has already forayed into Latin America and a few Asian markets.

Hero MotoCorp seems like it’s unstoppable. But there was one bump that could reduce the speed of the company.

SPEED BREAKERS AHEAD The company is at a stage where it can’t afford downtime. But its backup system threatened to make that a possibility.

The backup and recovery system the company had in place worked on taped storage. This resulted in time consuming backups and the system could not retain data for long. Also, the restore operations were rather drawn out affairs—all of which affected end-user

productivity. That’s because it also impacted over 2,000 laptops and desktops of employees. “When a backup would take place, it would slow our systems. So, during a 20-25 minute back up window for a PC or laptop, for example, users’ productivity would drop considerably,” says Vijay Sethi, VP-IS and CIO, Hero MotoCorp.

Another problem was the volume of data, which was also increasing rapidly. Sethi had his work cut out. He knew he had to fix three issues: Reduce the overall backup time per user—which stood at around 17 minutes; bring down data restoration time per user—which took about 60 minutes—thereby reducing downtime; and finally, reducing the amount of data that was to be backed up.

Apart from these, there was one more important factor that Sethi needed to take into account:Data

security. “We were reviewing our backup systems to see what was the best way to go ahead from a business continuity perspective as well as from the point of view of assuring individual users that their data would be fully protected,” says Sethi.

For a company that has the ambitions that Hero MotoCorp has, it was imperative for Sethi to fix these issues quickly and set the wheels in motion.

PEDAL TO THE METAL Given its needs, Hero MotoCorp decided to opt for EMC Avamar—backup and recovery—solution after evaluating a slew of solution providers. An important factor that cemented the decision to go with EMC was ROI. Sethi realized that the additional investments involved in implementing EMC’s Avamar solution vis-avis upgrade of current system would be paid off within 18 months considering the benefits that the company would get.

Sethi set up an Avamar Standalone datastore at Hero MotoCorp’s corporate office and plants.

At one of the sites, Sethi deployed Avamar RAIN (redundant array of independent nodes) as a backup to standalone sites.

The backup site, by virtue of its RAIN architecture, has multiple server nodes. This helps in terms of maintaining added reliability as when one node fails, it doesn’t affect the functioning of the other nodes and, as a result, relevant data won’t be lost.

With EMC’s Avamar solution, Hero MotoCorp’s back up window— at the server level—reduced from almost 8 hours to 2 hours. restoration time from almost 10 hours to around 4.5 hours. The size of data being backed up has reduced by 20 percent.

Benefits Reduced costs Improved productivity Faster data restoration Reduced downtime Increased data retention time Faster backups

All the relevant business information from users’ desktops, laptops, and servers at each of the offices and plants is backed up onto the respective local EMC Avamar DataStores from Monday to Saturday.

Moreover, a weekly backup happens on Sunday which then gets replicated onto the backup site. Data at the backup is now retained for 30 days and at the standalone site for seven days.

EMC’s Avamar solution also supports the deduplication feature of the variable block variety, which makes sure that the data which is being backed up both at the standalone and backup sites is new, that is unique, so that the older data which has already been backed up doesn’t have to be backed up again.

This reduces the overall size of the backup that needs to be stored.

CROSSING NEW MILESTONES As less data is now being backed up the pressure on the networks or the individual systems—in terms of CPU utilization—has reduced tremendously. Another advantage that de-duplication bestows is scalability: A single EMC Avamar solution has the capability to backup upto 2,000 laptops and desktops.

Sethi says that with EMC’s Avamar solution he has seen his backup window at the user level reduce from 17 minutes to around eight minutes—an almost 40-45 percent reduction. Restoration time has come down from 60 minutes to just seven minutes. Also, the size of data being backed up has reduced by around 20 percent. At the server level, back up window has reduced from almost 8 hours to 2 hours and restoration time from almost 10 hours to around 4.5 hours.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP EMC

Moreover, EMC Avamar solution includes a client feature wherein individual users can restore their system’s data themselves, without having to call on the company’s IT team. So in addition to having the backup moved from a tape-based storage to a hard drive-based system, the IT team’s workload has also consequently come down.

“The effort on part of the IT team has reduced,” says Sethi. While Sethi didn’t reduce the manpower of his IT team, people have been redeployed to other activities.

“The users are happy, and since the restoration time has come down considerably, the confidence that data will be available when required and that it will be available fast reassures them,” says Sethi.

Also, none of the existing infrastructure at Hero MotoCorp had to be modified during the implementation.

The only problem Sethi had to face when implementing this solution was from a project management angle.

This was because when the backup with the new Avamar system was to be taken for the first time, Hero MotoCorp’s employees had their mobility curtailed to a certain extent. That was because they had to have their laptops provided at their main offices for a certain period of time. But that was just a one-time issue. Once that was fixed, Hero MotoCorp was ready to relish the benefits of its brand new backup system, which EMC implemented in just five weeks across sites.

Today, with the new system in place, Hero MotoCorp expects to achieve its ROI within 18 months from the implementation of the EMC Avamar solution. Now, Hero MotoCorp’s competition has many more reasons to worry because the company is—in the real sense of the word—unstoppable.

Storage: Keeping Pace with Change Sanjeev Wad, Head South Business, EMC India, talks about how EMC has been staying on top of everchanging customer expectations on the rapidly-evolving storage front.

What’s EMC’s strategy with its Xtrem Family of flash-optimized storage?

EMC’s latest XtremSF Family of serverbased PCIe Flash cards is an enterpriseclass SSD sitting in a storage array that knows how to use it intelligently. It delivers 150 IOPS per GB. That’s 300x better than disk drives. When we take basically the same media technology, and mount it on a server-resident PCIe card: It can deliver 2000 IOPS/GB. That’s more than 13x faster than the array-based enterprise flash

drives. In India, EMC has a huge customer base using its flash-based storage. We aim to transform the storage space with our flash-based storage solutions and we’re investing heavily in flash hardware, and more importantly, software.

How are CIOs reacting to Software Defined Storage (SDS) and Virtualized Storage?

Server virtualization has completely changed how we think about compute.

Customers are opting for a ‘virtualization-

Server virtualization has completely changed how we think about compute. Now those concepts are being applied to the storage world.”

SANJEEV WAD,

Head South Business, EMC India

first’ policy and SDS is a linear extension of this thinking. Moreover, storage virtualization can address the difficulties in meeting customer SLAs effectively by reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

What do CIOs expect of storage solutions and how is EMC addressing that?

For starters tape has been replaced by disks, which in turn, are being replaced by flash storage. In-line deduplication has lowered the cost of using disks for backup and archive to the point where disk-based data protection solutions are often faster and cheaper than tapes.

Second, in a world of big data, scaleout storage architectures are in demand. We are addressing this with our products like VMAX, Isilon, and Atmos.

Also, customers are moving away from ‘speeds and feeds’ to efficiency, service levels, continuous operations, and this is precisely where EMC is able to demonstrate value to the customer.

PRESENTS

6-8 MARCH, PUNE

OPPORTUNITY IN UNCERTAINTY

A sluggish economy, tight budgets, fierce competition, and demanding business: It couldn’t get any better for CIOs. For, this is an opportunity for IT leaders to show the business that in times of crisis they can transform themselves to business CIOs and make a difference.

BY TEAM CIO

W

e’re a privileged lot and we live in privileged times. That’s because, there aren’t many illustrious instances in history when uncertainty—be it economic or otherwise—has turned out to be the biggest opportunity for business and IT. Today’s businesses are standing on shaky ground, battling a down economy, staggered growth, and fierce competition.

And they are passing all that uncertainty onto IT. But instead of retreating, IT is rising to the occasion. It’s looking for ways to boost customer experience, innovate with emerging

technologies, and infuse predictability in uncertain times. IT is now playing the key role of a business driver, as it is stepping up to deliver business value. To help CIOs do that better, IDG and IDC jointly hosted the second edition of the internationally acclaimed CIO Summit 2013 in Pune from 6th to 8th March, 2013.

The summit, which gathered top Indian IT leaders under one roof, featured some of the most influential minds from across the globe. And, this year’s overarching motif, IT Means Business, facilitated ample exchange of ideas and threw light on challenges and their probable solutions.

Here are some of the highlights of the three-day symposium:

The Chief Impact Officer As organizations gear up to chart a higher growth trajectory, they are embarking on a new era of IT-enabled innovation and transformation. And in order to instill a culture of IT innovation within their organizational fabric, they need to run IT like a business. During his keynote session, David McNally, IT executive advisor, IDC USA, said CIOs could do that by focusing on new technologies.

“The new IT paradigm is being driven by the adoption of what is being termed as the Third Platform that comprises big data, mobile, social business, and cloud services.

Industry transformation will be driven by the adoption of these technologies,” said McNally.

These technologies are forcing organizations to move from a portfolio of systems to a portfolio of services.

This is translating into IT and business agility, and spurring transformation.

McNally shared research findings from the US-edition of the CIO Summit, which indicated that over the next three years, business’ participation in IT would grow considerably to 80 percent. “The changing equation of IT within the enterprise would bring CIOs to the center stage of business operations”, he said.

Naveen Chopra, director of Vodafone Business Services, Vodafone India, elaborated on McNally’s observations and spoke about how CIOs should be able to see themselves as change agents.

“The role of a CIO today is no longer just confined to managing the IT infrastructure. Today, CIOs can have a positive impact on the business in improving customer experience, and most importantly, increasing revenue,” said Chopra.

In line with their revised role as Chief Impact Officers, CIOs’ business priorities should include increasing revenue, delivering efficiency, and attracting

and retaining customers. “Changing priorities are translating into actions on the ground,” he said. Chopra emphasized the need for CIOs to reprioritize and extend their business-technology focus from conventional IT to include newer platforms such as social media.

The Third Platform Shifting focus to newer technologies was also highlighted by Meetul Patel, GM, Microsoft India. “The new era is driven by three major trends: Social media, mobile devices, and cloud computing.

The last two have the potential to reshape the experiences of your multi-generation

workforce and your customers, thus directly impacting the way your organization consumes technology,” he said.

His session was followed by an exhaustive demonstration of the latest innovations, riding these mega trends, in a slew of Microsoft solutions.

“CIOs constantly look for rich information that empowers them with real-time analysis to take quick decisions. A sociallyconnected CIO can do just that by viewing snapshots of his projects and their performance trends, and by having seamless access to his office right from his pocket,” said Arun Subramaniam, product marketing lead, Microsoft India.

Further, in conversation with Vijay Ramachandran, editor-inchief, IDG, Ramkumar Pichai, GM, Microsoft Office Division, and Srikanth Karnakota, director-Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft India,

discussed how responsibilities of CIOs continue to revolve around three themes: Reducing costs, attracting new customers, and increasing employee productivity. They also said that the entry of generation-Y into the workforce is encouraging the use of social media.

Another technology that’s becoming a favorite is cloud computing. CIOs have begun to look at the cloud to take a key step towards better business agility and user-experience. One of the best examples of agility is SKS Microfinance which has grown phenomenally with respect to its customer base, post a cloud deployment.

Srinivas Peddada, executive VP a nd head-IT, SKS Microfinance, shared his cloud story during the Microsoft CIO Perspectives session. “Reaching out to 44 million customers with structured as well as

Today, CIOs can create a positive impact on the business by improving customer experience and increasing revenue.”

NAVEEN CHOPRA NAVEE Director, Vodafone Business Services, Vodafone India

To learn how your role can break new ground, watch our videos on: cio.in/videos/cio-summit-2013

FEATURE

apt information is our biggest achievement today,” he stated.

The Innovation Link In his keynote address on day two at the CIO Summit , Dr. Ankush Chopra, Assistant Professor of Strategy at Babson College (USA), commented on the problems prevailing in Indian enterprises today. The biggest issue, he said, is the gap between business needs and IT solutions.

CIOs have always been prone to finding islands of innovation that create rigidity issues in business transformation. “The key to leading innovation is to find the systems-strategy link,” he said.

Chopra proposed a three-part strategy that can help CIOs plan ahead. It involves imagining possibilities, visualizing endstates, and creating pathways.

Strategic anticipation capabilities will help CIOs enable and drive strategy, and bring along relevant innovation for the highest impact, he concluded.

Nishant Rao, country manager, LinkedIn India, explained how organizations can boost performance. To scale new heights of growth, enterprises need to achieve a high level of technical, process, and people performance.

He advised CIOs to develop a cohesive big data and social strategy, unlock productivity by enabling other functions with metric and dashboards, and leverage social tools to make employees productive.

The Proactive CIO Jaideep Mehta, VP and country GM, IDC India, spoke about how IT KPI metrics have moved from being technology-oriented to businessoriented. This means that CIOs will have to adapt to this scenario by getting appropriately re-skilled.

Mehta talked about this changing landscape of enterprise IT in India, where a younger and more tech-savvy set of

Executives want to access business information wherever they are and whenever they want from any device—securely.”

SDN can optimize each network element, simplify network design, lower opex, and facilitate new business solutions.”

Wipro is spearheading social transformation through several social initiatives in its bid to reform Indian government enterprises.”

NILESH GORADIA

SAJAN PAUL

PRASENJIT LAHIRI

Head-Pre Sales, Citrix India

corporate leaders is bringing a new perspective to technology deployments. This is enabling faster business growth.

Mehta suggested that one of the ways CIOs can become business leaders in their own right is by prioritizing their end-customers.

He also suggested that CIOs—to further their case as business leaders—should be proactive.

“CIOs should see themselves as business leaders and lead the way to fulfill the profitability agenda of their enterprises,” he said.

That was seconded by Venu Reddy, research director at IDC India. He said that if critical business activity is to be driven by high-powered IT, there should be a change happening in the organizational mindset with regard to the role of IT. Once business states a requirement, CIOs should move forward and suggest a solution. “Only by suggesting solutions to business problems, will CIOs be able to drive the discussion,” he added.

However, Indian organizations

Director-Systems Engineering, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks

GM & Business Head-Integrated Service Delivery, Wipro

How are organizations dealing with BYOD and SDN? Watch our videos to find out. Visit: cio.in/ videos/cio-summit-2013 have inherent inefficiencies that hamstring collaboration. The gargantuan volumes of customer transactions, fragmented systems, low process visibility, and a lack of standardization lead to such inefficiencies. Also, the hidden costs to effectively address these issues are prohibitive.

However, with the right strategies, said Asit Sinha, India head, Strategic Outsourcing, HP Enterprise Services, collaboration can deliver an abiding competitive edge in the way organizations interact with customers.

In his opinion, social media platforms and digital technologies have thrown open new customer engagement models. “Data explosion in digital technologies provide new opportunities to build customer understanding, create real-time, multi-directional interaction that can be used to attract new customers, improve

relationships, and increase revenue,” Sinha said.

In fact, new-age collaboration pl at for m s p owe re d by social media and video have revolut ion i zed t he way organizations engage with customers and employees. In order to understand the nuances of collaboration in today’s enterprises, CIO, in association with Polycom, organized a panel discussion at the summit.

One of the panelists, Anantha Sayana, VP and headCorporate IT, L&T, said that the demographic changes in the workplace have ensured that young and tech-savvy employees are joining enterprises that encourage use of IT to work more efficiently and conveniently.

Vikram Dhanda, SVP and head IT-Shared Services, Aegis, recommended that collaboration should be championed by

FEATURE

Polycom Panel: India’s top CIOs shared insights on collaboration technologies.

making it easy to use for internal customers. “However, It must not be mandated,” he said.

Commenting on the current state of consumer-driven IT innovation, Sanchit Vir Gogia, principal analyst, Emerging Technologies at IDC said, “We are at an inflection point where IT budgets will be needed to fund consumer-driven use of IT. About 58 percent of

Indian organizations are already there as they are bullish on using IT to enable business.”

Building Blocks But adopting these new technologies puts pressure on an organization’s network.

Sajan Paul, director-Systems Engineering, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks, emphasized

Business is driven by three major trends: Social media, mobile, and the cloud. They can reshape customer experience.”

Data explosion in digital technologies provides opportunities to build real-time customer engagements that can increase revenue.”

MEETUL PATEL

ASIT SINHA

General Manager, Microsoft India

India Head-Strategic Outsourcing, HP Enterprise Services

To check out the latest trends in emerging technologies, watch our videos on: cio.in/videos/cio-summit-2013

FEATURE

the benefits of software-defined networks (SDN) to solve this problem. With the advent of cloud and mobile devices, the definition of networking has undergone a sea change. “SDN can optimize each network element, simplify network design, lower opex, reduce time to service, correlate cost based on value, and facilitate new business solutions,” Paul said.

In his conversation with IDG’s Ramachandran, Ashish Dhawan, MD-enterprise business, Juniper Networks Asia, highlighted the fact that in the era of private cloud deployments, SDN is certainly poised for growth. “It plays an instrumental role in the maturity of private clouds,” he revealed.

Chuck Jones, VP-W W Systems Engineering, Brocade Communication Services, agreed to the fact that networking is undergoing a dramatic change today, which is being driven by four major trends: Mobility, virtualization, cloud and video.

Jones highlighted that in the current scenario, CIOs are expected to increase enterprise growth, attract and retain new customers, reduce enterprise cost, and create new products and services through innovation. In order to help CIOs achieve that, he said, Brocade is leveraging SDN to deliver automated, efficient, scalable, and agile networks.

Once the infrastructure is in place, CIOs can focus on deploying new technologies costeffectively. “The IT executive’s budget priorities are shifting to drive investments in analytics, collaboration, and communication initiatives,” said Vinod Ganeshan, senior director-Sales, Hitachi Data Systems India (HDS).

But sometimes these projects can fail due to: A lack of fact-based analytics, governance, inputs from stakeholders, and poor interlock between IT and business. He said these challenges can be addressed by focusing on four success factors:

Networking is undergoing a dramatic change today, driven by four major trends: Mobility, virtualization, cloud and video.”

CHUCK JONES

VP-WW Systems Engineering, Brocade Communication Services

Econometrics, virtualization, convergence, and the cloud.

Further, Amod Ranade, GMDatacenter Business development, Schneider Electric, shed light on how energy management is vital to achieving proper energy conservation and drive efficiency.

Mobile World Speaking at the CIO Summit, Nilesh Goradia, head-Pre Sales, Citrix India, said that corporate executives are IT’s most demanding customers. “For executives, work is not a place. They want to access business information wherever and whenever from any device—securely,” he said.

“Of course,” he added, “this trend of executive mobility will spread to the entire enterprise, with employees adopting mobility as well.” Allowing employees to work on their own devices encourages ‘workshifting—working from a place of one’s convenience and preference. Goradia further went on to talk about how continued consumerization of IT will force IT

In today’s environment, energy management is vital to achieving proper energy conservation and drive efficiency.”

The CIO’s budget priorities are shifting to drive investments in analytics, collaboration, and communication initiatives.”

AMOD RANADE

VINOD GANESHAN

GM-Datacenter Business Development, Schneider Electric

Senior Director-Sales, Hitachi Data Systems India

Learn how to curtail costs of your IT infrastructure. Watch our videos on: cio.in/videos/cio-summit-2013 departments to change. The need to adapt to changing conditions is a situation that a number of IT teams face on a regular basis.

Mandar Marulkar, head-IT Infrastructure, Systems and CISO, KPIT Cummins Infosystems, shared his experience at the Microsoft Perspectives session.

He stated that consumerization of IT had made his organization’s employees very demanding in terms of being able to use devices of their choice at the workplace.

Survival of the Fittest Taking a leaf out of the Darwinian theory of adaptation, Shalil Gupta, consulting and insights director at IDC, spoke on how CIOs need to respond to changing business dynamics.

“CIOs can form a digital leadership framework to secure themselves from business shocks like restructuring and other

value-chain responsibilities,” said Gupta.

Moving over from value-chain responsibilities to social responsibilities, Wipro is spearheading social transformation through several social initiatives in its bid to reform Indian government enterprises. Prasenjit Lahiri, general manager and business head-Integrated Service Delivery for Wipro, presented a technology showcase of different implementations in industries such as healthcare, banking, and security, carried out in various government organizations.

With the influx of new technologies—like social media and mobility—and trends like consumerization of IT, there’s no doubt that IT and the CIO’s role are changing course. And if they resist change in uncertain times, they’ll be left behind, leaving a trail of lost opportunities.

FEATURE

Powered by

Econometric Transformation By using the theory of Econometrics, CIOs can save costs to make a strong business case to gain management support for investments in innovation.

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ough economic times require new perspectives and strategies for reducing the cost of infrastructure. The past several years of IT procurement have left many IT organizations with overprovisioned and under-utilized IT capacity. Now, with a squeeze on capital and credit, many organizations are faced with diktats to do more with less. Hitachi Data Systems, in association with CIO, gathered senior IT leaders on the sidelines of the CIO Summit 2013 to understand how CIOs can save costs to make a strong business case to gain management support for both strategic and tactical investments.

Today, organizations should evaluate new technologies on the basis of how they can contribute to business performance.

However, this is becoming increasingly difficult to do. A quick survey among the CIOs present at the round table, showed that the average IT expenditure to just keep the lights on was about 80 percent, with many of them spending over 90 percent, leaving no room for innovation. Many CIOs were of the opinion that the biggest factors contributing to this is

difficulty in convincing top management that a transformation project is required, and that it is difficult for the IT team to

“One of the first steps is to define and measure current costs. We cannot improve what we cannot measure. This is the core of econometrics.”

VIVEKANAND VENUGOPAL VP & GM, Hitachi Data Systems India

demonstrate the value that can be generated in terms of ROI. However, Shivashankar S., group CIO, SPIC, was of the opinion that in many cases ROI can be easily identified. “When it comes to virtualization, it is easy to calculate the ROI, because we can reduce the number of servers. Also, cost benefits in terms of cooling, AMC, real estate, and other datacenter costs are reduced,” he said. However, Sanjay Marathe, EVP, CTO and head-Strategic Services Unit, Zensar Technologies, said it is also important to drive home the intangible benefits while creating a business case for IT. “When we talk about aligning business with IT, we should use the language that the business understands and talk about the functionality and the improvements that IT can enable,” he said.

One way out is applying the principles of Econometrics: The application of mathematics, statistics, and computer science to economic data.

According to Vivekanand Venugopal, VP and GM, Hitachi Data Systems India, cloud computing, VM sprawl, and capacity-on-demand architectures sometimes call for a review of existing IT ecosystems, especially storage. “One of the first steps is to define and measure current costs.

We cannot improve what we cannot measure. This is the core of econometrics and key to providing continuous improvement of the storage estate,” he said.

When seeking to control storage costs, an organization needs to determine which types of costs are most relevant to control and measure them. Reducing costs is often not simply a matter of selecting products, but of designing a storage architecture that is more supportive of the organization’s cost-reduction goals. “Organizations should use econometrics to follow the money spent on IT assets over their lifetimes, and map IT investments to business benefits and cost improvements,” Venugopal said.

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Imprinting Creativity Security, consumerization of IT, and mobility are pushing CIOs to move to managed printing services. But there’s one more driver for moving to MPS: Innovation.

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nterprises are increasingly gunning for operational efficiency. They are realizing that this can be done by driving better-designed business processes that have minimal points of disruption or failure. This means that these core business processes should be supported by effective tools and technologies that ensure a smoother flow of information. A solution like Managed Print Services (MPS) can help organizations further this cause by facilitating smoother inflow and outflow of information, and reduced costs. These costs include those derived from fewer consumables, device consolidation, more efficient use of real-estate, and better help desk management systems. At the sidelines of CIO Summit 2013 in Pune, CIO and Ricoh caught up with IT leaders to understand their MPS journey and what one needs to keep in mind before implementing MPS. Today, networked MFPs are an integral part of the IT infrastructure with the same vulnerabilities as any other networked device. In fact, the security risks of traditional printers was a key discussion point as a

majority of CIOs opined that MPS provides an ideal opportunity to assess the potential risks of an unmanaged print environ-

“Today, organizations want to pursue business process transformation to attain greater value from their MPS engagements.”

RAJIV BHATIA COO-Core Business Group, Ricoh India

ment and deploy the appropriate controls to mitigate such risks. According to Pankaj Agrawal, CISO, Aircel, these risks include potential data leaks through unauthorized access to printed documents in output trays, recovery of information stored on hard disks within print devices, and the interception of queued print jobs. “Except for top management who have their own printers, we have ensured that users are on an MPS setup, and security was the biggest driver toward making this move. We are not looking at implementing a password to collect the printed document, though,” he said.

Apart from security, CIOs cited other factors for moving to MPS. This included achieving cost savings, reducing wastage, improving productivity using proper assessment and workflow integration by linking it with key business priorities and existing ERP, leading to green IT. Despite its many benefits, solution partners tend to just focus on the cost benefits of MPS. “In order to get the maximum benefits from an MPS solution, the partner should create an environment where we do not have to constantly double check every report and activity. They should focus more on providing a better solution, than on the billing aspects of the solution,” said Kapil Pal, head-IT, PepsiCo. While MPS may be a winning combination, there are certain best practices that need to be kept in mind. Many large enterprises are now in the later stages of their MPS engagements and are looking for additional benefits. According to Rajiv Bhatia, COO-Core Business Group, Ricoh India, organizations want to pursue business process transformation in order to be able to attain greater value from their MPS engagements. “It is ultimately the capability of the MPS provider to be innovative by aligning the solution with business requirements, by understanding the customer’s need on other areas of IT systems and processes also,” he said.

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Igniting Business Innovation A number of IT trends are driving transformation and innovation in the enterprise. But if they aren’t backed by a solid network infrastructure they would fail to make a difference to the business.

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echnology is always in a state of flux. And that’s good news for business. Because today trends like mobility, consumerization of IT, cloud computing, analytics, and big data are opening up new opportunities for business.

But before adopting these technologies CIOs need to fully understand their impact on the underlying infrastructure.

On the sidelines of the CIO Summit 2013, CIO magazine, in association with Juniper Networks, gathered top IT leaders to understand what it takes to go beyond managing servers, network, and storage as a single resource pool, and apply technology to efficiently manage and operate the converged ecosystem.

According to Ashok Kannan, head-IT, Ashok Leyland John Deere Construction Equipment, the cloud by definition is a scalable and flexible infrastructure. However, in the case of a private cloud, the ability to scale is limited. “We are looking at the public cloud, and also creating a roadmap to implement SaaS, PaaS and MaaS. Since we are currently using the parent company’s infrastructure and are on a

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private cloud, we believe the public cloud would deliver more in terms of scalability and reduced costs. We are still trying to al-

“Many existing networks struggle to keep up with the rapid provisioning, self-service, and mobility associated with the cloud.

Here’s where SDN can help.”

SAJAN PAUL Director-Systems Engineering, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks

lay the security concerns of our management,” he said.

While security concerns have always been a bane, especially when it comes to the public or hybrid cloud, a majority of CIOs said that organizations and service providers should share the responsibility of a company’s data on the cloud. Kaushal Chaudhary, senior VP-IT and group CISO, Lanco Infratech, feels security shouldn’t deter enterprises from moving to the cloud, because today there are a host of success stories and best practices to follow. “The discipline and due diligence of the cloud should be our responsibility. Also, the biggest challenge is not security but utilizing the existing infrastructure. The move to the cloud can be made in a phased manner to achieve ROI,” he said.

While organizations are looking forward to taking advantage of the cloud, the associated complexities can be challenging.

From a networking perspective, organizations need new architectures that can provide the apt levels of scale, resiliency, and security to overcome complexity.

According to Sajan Paul, director-Systems Engineering, India and SAARC, Juniper Networks, organizations continue to add new applications as well as increase their use of server virtualization in their cloud environment, creating much more dynamic IT infrastructures. “While virtualization technologies are well established in the server and storage domains, there is a lot of progress to be made when it comes to making the networks scalable and flexible,” he said.

As a result, many existing networks struggle to keep up with the rapid provisioning, self-service, and mobility associated with dynamic cloud computing platforms. “Software-defined networking (SDN) architectures and technologies can help organizations by providing centralized command-and-control, distributed enforcement, and integrated services and programmability,” he said.

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Delivering Change On-Demand New technologies put pressure on the IT infrastructure to keep up with dynamic business needs.

But CIOs can take on the challenge by leveraging IT to infuse efficiency and agility.

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IOs and other IT executives are facing a steep set of business priorities: Expanding their enterprises, attracting new customers, reducing enterprise costs, and driving innovation through new products and services. To achieve that, CIOs need a robust IT infrastructure.

One view is that new on-demand datacenters can only be empowered by interconnecting all resources within and between datacenters. This can be achieved by infusing automation, efficiency, and agility into enterprise IT. In order to understand the roadmap for CIOs to move from the physical to the cloud world without straining the network, CIO in association with Brocade, organized a roundtable discussion with some of the country’s biggest IT leaders.

One of the key discussion points was that technology adoption follows an adoptadapt-plateau cycle due to bottlenecks that choke the pace of innovation. But is there a way to ensure that businesses can advance more seamlessly and translate efficiency into effectiveness? According to Chuck Jones, VP-WW System Engineering, Brocade Communications Systems,

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in order to position the IT infrastructure as a business enabler, CIOs should be able to increase the value of the infra-

“SDN can provide new levels of automation, dramatic improvements in efficiency, and higher performance and scalability for massive network capacity growth.”

CHUCK JONES VP-WW System Engineering, Brocade Communications Systems

structure. “Sometimes, increasing the value is about reducing costs, and it’s also improving the level of services you have with the existing infrastructure,” he said.

According to Raghu Kumar Paruchuri, head-ERP and IT, Tata Power Strategic Engineering Division, the challenge now is to move the datacenter itself into a cloud-based environment. “It will be difficult for the companies that recently underwent a refresh cycle to be able to undergo this transformation and they may have to wait until the next refresh cycle,” he said. However, for some companies the concept of on-demand datacenter is close to being a reality. According to Harnath Babu, VP, AVIVA Life Insurance, his complete infrastructure is moving towards a centralized location. “Even the desktop has become a service now, and we should be able to achieve an efficiency of 70 to 80 percent, soon,” he added.

But today, quite a few organizations are facing the challenge of delivering more with less. According to Vishad Rahangdale, CIO, Electrotherm India, there is a lot of pressure from the business to get the data synthesized faster, and the user is looking at IT for a solution. “We are looking at SDN to understand how it can help us to dynamically prioritize data over the networks,” he added.

That’s where Brocade comes in. According to Jones, Brocade is empowering the on-demand datacenter through its leadership in Ethernet and Fibre Channel fabrics and core routing—as well as innovations in SDN—to deliver the world’s most automated, efficient, agile, and scalable networks. “This can result in new levels of automation that streamline network capacity deployment, dramatic improvements in efficiency and resource utilization compared to legacy network topologies and protocols. It will also result in higher performance and scalability for massive network capacity growth,” he added.

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The Hyper Connected World Today, organizations need to provide their workforce with reliable end-to-end connectivity while controlling costs and embracing new ways of working. This is no longer a difficult task.

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ew technologies are now emerging to push the concept of the workplace into new realms. Internet enabled phones, video conferencing, and telepresence are helping businesses to hold face-to-face online meetings with employees, partners, and customers across geographies. The implementation of smart workplaces along with access to more sophisticated applications and services such as HDTV, interactive gaming, video-on-demand, and Web 2.0, call for even more bandwidth.

However, most organizations have faced several challenges when it comes to managing their bandwidth and last mile connectivity. To find new ways to deal with this problem, CIO magazine along with Vodafone, brought together several IT leaders to understand the mashed up world of mobility and collaboration.

One of the key concerns of the group was in providing reliable last mile connectivity in the hinterland. The absence of a national backbone and limited access to the international gateway has resulted in high communication costs and poor service.

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According to Atul Jayawant, president corporate IT and group CIO, Aditya Birla Group of Companies, the biggest

“We are constantly trying to bring in new technology models, helping enterprises to find more efficient ways of doing business through connectivity.”

NITIN BHANDARI, AVP-New Products & Partnerships, Vodafone India

challenge is to provide connectivity in the rural areas. “The potential for extending access beyond affluent urban users to the wider population is huge and this is a challenge as well as an opportunity,” he said. To fix this issue, Rajesh Saboo, head-systems, Future Group, said that it would help if telecom providers tie up with a solution provider and offer more than just connectivity solutions.

But it is also important for connectivity to be decommoditized. According to Rahul Mahajan, AVP-IT, K. Raheja Corporate Services, there is a huge influx of applications which require constant connectivity. “One way to differentiate the service provided is by providing secure connectivity to these applications. Other technologies such as M2M and RFID can be a very important value addition,” he said. Having said that, Gopal Rangaraj, VP-IT, Reliance Life Sciences, felt that today technological advancement in this space has opened new doors for business.

“But this freedom is only possible because the latest generation of communications technology is finally reliable and costeffective. Cost and reliability are key differentiators,” he added.

Service providers seem to be listening to CIOs as they are coming up with solutions to fix the very same issues.

According to Nitin Bhandari, associate vice president-New Products and Partnerships at Vodafone India, the company is looking to play an important role in enabling connectivity with its flexible mobile solutions, Integrated Wireline Communication and Machine 2 Machine solutions among others.

“We are constantly trying to bring in new technology models which have proven successful outside India, helping enterprises to find more efficient ways of doing business through connectivity, thereby enhancing their productivity and generating value for the organization,” he said.

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Dealing with Data Deluge A tsunami of structured and unstructured data is overwhelming organizations. CIOs should turn to analytics and big data to stay afloat.

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ith the increase in heterogeneity of consumer and enterprise IT environment, and convergence of multiple platforms, a huge amount of structured and unstructured data is being generated. At the same time, many organizations face challenges of unclear business requirements, inconsistent data, poor time to market, and inability to har vest business benefits from analytical tools. Clearly, new approaches are needed to manage unstructured data and unlock its value. This is driving the big data revolution.On the sidelines of CIO Summit 2013 , CIO magazine along with Mahindra Satyam spoke to senior IT leaders to understand what this means for business, how CIOs can successfully marr y structured and unstructured data while shifting from a sense-andrespond perspective to an anticipateand-shape perspective.

According to S. Srinivasan, CIO, Sundaram Fasteners, “We work on a high-volume, low-profit strategy, manufacturing

over 2,000 different products every month, with a portfolio of over 20,000 products. A big customer may require only 350 prod-

“Organizations should harness next-generation analytical tools to grow and transform businesses amid a global economic slowdown.”

SANJAY JOSHI Global Head-Big Data, Mahindra Satyam

ucts a month, and this varies every month.

In such a scenario, it becomes critical for us to identify patterns in this, and to be able to predict what will be the next requirement,” he said.

While there is a tsunami of data that is being created from a multitude of sources, and CIOs are looking to analyze transactional, structured, and unstructured data on a single platform, a majority of CIOs are still facing challenges in dealing with structured data. According to Bhupendra Pant, head-IT, L&T-EWAC Alloys, the organization has moved on from paperbased customer feedback to using rich multimedia and video testimonials. “In this scenario, the biggest challenge is to be able to track the value that this data provides, and to be able to use it at the right time, in the right manner,” he said.

On the other hand, G. S. Ravi Kumar, CIO, GATI, said that the company uses vehicle monitoring and tracking systems and these result in a pool of structured data. “While we are tr ying to analyze driver behavior and patterns, I believe the real challenge is when our customers start using RFID codes. This would change the way our shipments are monitored,” he said.

According to Sanjay Joshi, global head-Big Data, Mahindra Satyam, in order to achieve real business growth, in the connected world, organizations need to focus on attracting and retaining customers as well as employees, improving business processes, and reducing enterprise costs. “In order to do this, organizations can begin by harnessing next-generation analytical tools to grow and transform businesses amid a global economic slowdown, increased competition, and the rapid emergence of social media. It is important to look for an outcome-based model,” he added.

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casefiles REAL PEOPLE

* REAL PROBLEMS * REAL SOLUTIONS

FAST

FORWARD How Tesco, the world’s third largest retailer, modeled the success of its online grocery platform in the UK on Eastern European markets quickly and on the cheap.

BY SHUBHRA RISHI The Organization: It might come as a surprise to many that the Brits are the world’s biggest online shoppers, not the Americans, not the Japanese. But that didn’t surprise executives at Tesco. When an independent regulator in the UK, Ofcom, came out with this finding, the folks at Tesco smiled knowingly. With revenues of $3.2 billion (about Rs 16,500 crore), Tesco is one of the most profitable online grocery retailers in the UK and it knew just how much the English love to shop online.

Tesco wasn’t happy just being a leader in the UK, though, and had set its sights on new markets. However, if Tesco wanted to replicate its success in the UK in other international markets, it had to come up with a plan that would allow it to roll out its online stores in new geographies quickly and cost-effectively.

The Business Case: In early 2011, Tesco revealed its targets to double returns from 5 percent to 10 percent in its developing markets that comprised Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Thailand, and Malaysia. In order to achieve this, it wanted to expand its smaller format stores, and also launch an online grocery operation across the whole of Eastern Europe, Thailand, and Malaysia.

And it had to do it fast. "It was extremely important for Tesco to get the first mover advantage in some of the countries in Eastern Europe because we saw a growing business potential in these countries," says Vinod Bidarkoppa, director IT and CIO, Tesco HSC India. He wasn’t shooting in the dark. The company had conducted surveys in Czech Republic, where nearly 80 percent of the sample population voted for an online grocery home shopping service that could deliver a fresh and reliable range of products.

Tesco decided to lap up this opportunity.

The Project: The mandate was clear. Tesco needed to create online shops in two different continents, on the cheap and fast.

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Creating a new e-commerce platform for each country would counter the company’s objective. The best way, Bidarkoppa's team realized, was to create a standard template on a virtualized server infrastructure and hosting model. “We created this template using a combination of an off-the-shelf product and some custom services and components in order to create a multitenant platform which can be built once and deployed multiple times,” says Bidarkoppa.

This off-the-shelf product has features akin to an app store. It holds single-serve codes—in a multi-tenant environment—like language, regulatory compliance codes, etcetera for each country. For example, Tesco Poland can pick up the component from the software—like downloading apps from an app store—that are relevant to its site. And Tesco Thailand can do the same.

Also, the sites in these countries would run on instances of the virtualized platform.

In order to ensure that customers across the world enjoy the same experience, Bidarkoppa and his team created a service layer using the SOA design principles and integrated several of their existing systems like product pricing and promotion systems, POS and fulfillment systems etcetera into the platform. “So a customer shopping on the online grocery store wouldn't know that a single app store model in the backend is leveraging all the operations that he performs on it—from viewing the website in the local language, to browsing for different products, to buying and paying for them.”

At the end of 18 months, the team at Tesco HSC launched an online grocery site for Czech Republic.

The Benefits: The platform has reduced the cost of deployment and the time to market significantly. It offers Czech customers over 20,000 lines of fresh and frozen food and groceries, and other items such as toys, stationery, and accessories.

Tesco has already rolled out this offering in Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Thailand. “From

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Vinod Bidarkoppa, Director IT and CIO, Tesco HSC India, created a platform that helped the company set up online shops in Eastern Europe within just three months.

the time the platform was launched in the Czech Republic, we took just three months to on-board Poland and Slovakia.”

The online service allows Tesco customers to shop in their local language and choose from multiple modes of payment. Since the deployment, in the weeks following the launch, Tesco already had more than 100,000 customers registering on the new online service and

more than five million items sold across countries in Eastern Europe.

"It was important for us to provide this additional channel to our customers so that we could on-board different countries in a region and also roll-out different services to different stores as we expanded our online presence," says Bidarkoppa. CIO Send feedback to shubhra_rishi@idgindia.com

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casefiles

MICRO INKS

Vapi-based inkmanufacturer, Micro Inks, dares go where few other companies do: It virtualizes its core apps and gains.

*

BY ERSHAD KALEEBULLAH

The Organization: When it started, Micro Inks was just another small-scale, Vapibased company in a city that’s home to over 1,400 other small scale industries.

Within 25 years, it's grown to over Rs 1,000 crore and has become a force to reckon with in the ink industry.

The Challenge: From 2006 to 2010, the company ran core apps like ERP on physical infrastructure. This included 28 Intel-based servers with direct-attached storage.

That set up had a great run until a fateful day in 2009, when a deadly virus

Mayank Desai, Head-IT, Micro Inks, virtualized core apps and got rid of downtime.

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corrupted the company’s ERP and took business down for three days.

That's when Head-IT Mayank Desai decided to revamp the company's entire IT infrastructure and move all its core apps to a virtualized environment to check downtime.

The Project: Desai had a plan, but he foresaw an imminent problem: Allocating resources to apps on virtualized infrastructure was going to be hard as most hypervisors only support the Intel platform. Also, they don’t have core performance levels of a Unix server.

Despite these issues, Desai knew that ensuring zero downtime was paramount.

So he decided to take the plunge. He virtualized and shrunk the number of servers from 28 to seven.

“We set a recovery time objective of one to four hours, and aimed at achieving zero data loss, in case systems went down,” says Desai.

Disaster recovery and a lack of support from Oracle—since it would be running on another vendor’s virtual platform—were pressing concerns for Micro Inks while moving its core apps to a virtualized environment.

But Desai had no reason to worry since the new system would automate DR, which meant should a disaster occur, Micro Inks can switch over the core apps and legacy systems

from its production datacenter to a near-DR site.

Virtualization also enabled the company to perform testing without disrupting production systems or users.

By replicating Oracle instances—running on native operating system, Windows— Desai is confident that Micro Inks can avail support in case of any problem. “We also created a back-up for Oracle which was running on legacy systems.”

The Benefits: Today, Micro Inks’ datacenter runs on more resilient infrastructure, and in the event of a disaster, the organization can recover with zero data loss from its ERP and mail systems.

“If we experience physical server failure, the solution automatically restarts the VMs running ERP or mail components in safe environments,” says Desai.

Chances of failure are very low considering that Micro Inks tested for over 500 failover scenarios.

“After we had finished configuring our apps on the virtual infrastructure, we found that we had 40 percent spare resources,” said Desai. “This gives us room to expand and mitigate recurring IT expenses.”

Encouraged by the project’s success, Micro Inks is now looking at VDI for 600 users. CIO Ershad Kaleebullah is correspondent. Send feedback to ershad_kaleebullah@idgindia.com

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technology IMAGE BY MASTERFILE

A CLOSER LOOK AT SECURITY-AS-A-SERVICE

A growing number of enterprises are turning to securityas-a-service offerings drawn by its ability to lower costs and create more flexibility.And the challenges, according to them, aren’t insurmountable.

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Gaining Acceptance

BY BOB VIOLINO

| Organizations that are looking for security features including identity management, encryption and access control—and at the same time want to take advantage of the cost and flexibility benefits of the cloud—might check into security-as-aservice offerings available now from several vendors.

In this scenario, security is delivered as a service from the cloud, without requiring on-premises hardware. "The largest benefit to using security as a service is the ability to avoid sometimes substantial capital outlays," says Lawrence Pingree, a research director at Gartner who covers the security market.

In addition, Pingree says, some cloud-based security services provide the flexibility needed to address certain use cases. For example, e-mail filtering services are popular since some mobile device platforms limit the ability for endpoint protection products to run on them.

Other use cases include virus protection, vulnerability management, identity management and single sign-on. Gartner forecasts that cloud security services will grow from $1.9 billion (about Rs 10,450 crore) in 2012 to $4.2 billion (about Rs 23,100 crore) in 2016, with a compound annual growth rate of 23 percent.

Here's how three companies have integrated cloud-based security services into their IT infrastructure—and how they've protected themselves from service outages, data

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breaches and other risks that come with placing corporate security in the hands of an outside organization.

Email Continuity and Virus Protection When it comes to protecting a business from malware, cloud services are often "ideal for providing both the centralized distribution and flexibility" that security providers need to distribute information to their customers, Pingree says. It's also a good fit for some customers, because they can rely on vendors to keep malware definitions updated without having to do that themselves.

Sirva Inc., a provider of corporate relocation services, has been using cloud services since 2009. That's when Sirva deployed Symantecs’ Email Continuity cloud service, a standby e-mail failover system that provides virtually uninterrupted access to e-mail in the event of a mail server outage.

Over the next few years Sirva adopted other cloud-based services, including a

were charging Sirva for disaster recovery (DR) services even when the company was not using these services.

"They wanted to charge us for a service that did nothing," at least most of the time, Diab says, so Sirva began looking for DR options where it would pay only for services it was actually actively using.

Cloud applications, including security, cost about 25 percent less than they would via traditional licensed software, Diab says. In addition to cost savings, Sirva is benefiting from the reduced internal support needed for things like applying hardware and software patches and bringing systems back up after an outage— vendors perform those tasks now.

At the same time, the company has been gradually retiring some of its aging servers and moving applications to the cloud.

The level of maturity of cloud services is no longer an issue, Diab says, and in fact many cloud-based offerings have proven to be reliable in terms of providing highperformance services globally, which is increasingly important as the company

The biggest driver to moving security to a services model is cost reduction.

Cloud applications,including security, cost about 25 percent less than they would via traditional licensed software.

URL-blocking application from Websense and a penetration-testing service from WhiteHat Security.

Soon, Sirva expects to begin using Microsoft's Office 365 cloud service, which includes security functions such as antispam, anti-virus, identity management and e-mail encryption, says Adam Diab, manager of contract and solution delivery at Sirva.

The biggest driver to moving security and other IT functions to a services model is cost reduction, Diab says. Costs of on-premises hardware and software have been mounting, he says. Many of the company's IT vendors

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expands its overseas operations and looks to standardize on hosted services.

Identity Management and Single Sign-on In early 2012, Tickr.com, a company that sells technology to allow customers to track mentions of their company and products on social media sites, began using securityas-a-service offerings from Symplified for identity management and single sign-on.

As part of its product development process, Tickr.com needed to provide secure access to some of its own proprietary

$4.2 billion

Estimated size of the cloud security services market in 2016 from $1.9 billion in 2012.

SOURCE: GARTNER

applications as well as to Google Apps and Salesforce.com, says Bobby Mukherjee, vice president of business development at Tickr.

Providing easier and quicker access to the apps for developers was especially critical for the company, which needs to rapidly turn out new releases of its products, Mukherjee explains.

With the service from Symplified, "I'm able to simplify access to cloud- or on-premises apps for my users in a more secure way than other options on the market," Mukherjee says. "The solution also integrated easily with other Web and SaaS apps we were already using. It also has an intuitive admin interface, which has made configuration changes easy."

As he recalls, "We had some rather expensive engineers who were consuming considerable blocks of time logging in and out of multiple critical applications and keeping track of user passwords as part of their daily workload."

Engineers were spending up to 10 percent of their time dealing with application log-in, password and security issues. "This was disruptive and expensive for us, so we looked for a single sign-on security solution" that would greatly simplify the process of granting access while at the same time maintaining a high level of security, Mukherjee says.

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services for applications such as e-mail and customer relationship management, and had seen a number of benefits such as cost savings and greater flexibility.

The cloud "has worked out very well for us because of the economics of it; you buy what you need," Mukherjee says.

Tickr has been able to quickly and easily add e-mail accounts and CRM application user accounts as the company has grown over the past few years. Having the ability to purchase exactly what the company needs when it needs it has led to lower overall costs for technology, including reduced maintenance expenses. Mukherjee says Tickr has seen significant savings from using cloud services, but he would not provide specifics.

The company, which began using security-as-a-service in March 2012, expects to see the same type of time and cost savings with the security applications, compared with procuring traditional on-premises software licenses for similar technologies.

Another benefit is ease of use, Mukherjee says. The single sign-on and identity management capabilities required no training for end users. "If there had to be training, people [in the development operation] would have rejected this," he says. "The whole point was to have time savings, so it had to be quite efficient."

Vulnerability Management Cox Communications, a broadband communications and entertainment company, relies heavily on two securityas-a-service offerings. One is for vulnerability management and one for application security static and dynamic analysis, says Jay Munsterman, director of security engineering.

Static analysis is automated review of source code or binaries, and dynamic analysis pertains to live Web applications, Munsterman explains.

"Both services [provide] us with access to mature resources that [are] faster and less expensive than doing it in house," Munsterman says. "Using cloud services keeps us current against 88

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The centralization of critical services into clouds increases the risk that a single potential outage can have more dramatic cascading effects across customers and cause damage. new and emerging threats at a pace that would have been extremely challenging to maintain otherwise."

The applications are full featured and for the most part fully configured on day one, Munsterman says. "We didn't have to go through a long deployment/configuration process," he says. As for expense, while the services "aren't cheap options, [I] don't need to maintain staff whose only valueadd to the company is maintaining the platforms," he says.

But there were quite a few reservations about going to the cloud for security, Munsterman says, especially when it came to housing the company's intellectual property and vulnerability information with a third party, outside of the walls of the Cox datacenter.

"We were fine with the concept of outsourcing various business processes; that has been the standard for years," Munsterman explains. "But security functions were thought to be among the un-outsourceable. Security was regarded as a function that must be held close."

When Cox went into its first RFP for security-as-a-service, there was a vendor in the running that Cox executives assumed wouldn't make the cut, Munsterman says.

"When they came out on top we were all surprised," he says. "Having a solid, neutral evaluation standard ensured that we saw the offer for what it was and not what we were predisposed to see."

Having the clear results of a neutral RFP grading process "helped convey the value and strengths of the outsource vendor," in this case Veracode, Munsterman says. "We included them in the consideration only to be thorough, with no expectation that an outsource option would win us over. It did."

Gaining acceptance of the cloud-based offering began with "solid contract language" and ended with forming a strong partnership, Munsterman says. "Knowing the people providing the service made everyone more comfortable," he says. "There was a lot of work done by our internal champions to convince folks to give the chosen route a chance. Those most fervently opposed were won over after the first year's performance.

Results are hard to deny."

Those results included the speed and thoroughness with which the company was able to roll out its application security program. "Our champions were internal folks who worked with all the parties the program touched, to provide hands-on training and to handle feedback quickly and fairly," Munsterman says. "Within the development teams a few security-minded leaders stepped forward to help us present the program and position the partnership between development and security, rather than allow it to appear as a security mandate."

Other Risks Getting people to buy in on the concept of security-as-a-service is not the only challenge.

"The potential for data breach can be the most ominous potential downfall of using an external service, since it centralizes security data," Gartner's Pingree says.

Cloud customers remain concerned about security-related data being hosted in cloud service environments, he says.

"Encryption is essential for storage of data externally from an organization, and in order to protect your data," Pingree says. "Ideally, the keys used to encrypt must be owned and controlled by the organization and not accessible by the cloud provider's employees."

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GOVERNMENT SNOOPS

Bob Violino is a freelance writer. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Eyes in the Sky CLOUD SECURITY | Almost half of IT experts are deterred from keeping sensitive data in the cloud because of fear of government intervention and possible legal action.

This was revealed by a survey from Lieberman Software.

The survey, which looked at IT and cloud experts' attitudes to storing data in the cloud, revealed that government and legal interference puts 48 percent of them off from entering the cloud environment.

"There are a number of reasons why IT experts might be apprehensive about storing corporate data in the cloud," said Philip Lieberman, president and CEO of Lieberman Software. "However, in my opinion, the key issues are around government surveillance, cloud legislation and data security. CIOs fear that they will put their data at risk by moving to a cloud provider as they are unsure they will keep the data properly protected, which could ultimately affect their job and their business."

According to Lieberman, the other issue is around legislation in the cloud and the fact that CIOs do not want governments snooping around their corporate data.

"If a government or official body wanted to see what data a company was holding in the cloud, the cloud host involved would be legally obliged to provide them with access," he said. "This means there is very limited privacy in cloud environments. CIOs know it is much easier to hide data within their own private networks."

Other findings of the survey revealed that 88 percent think there is a chance that some of its organization’s data hosted in the cloud could be lost, corrupted or accessed by unauthorized individuals; similarly, 86 percent don't trust the cloud for their organization’s more sensitive data and 51 percent of those surveyed don't trust the cloud for any of their personal data.

The survey was conducted at the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Congress among 300 IT professionals. Seventy percent of survey participants were from companies with more than 1,000 employees, and 50 percent had more than 5,000 employees.

— Zafar Anjum

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In addition, Pingree says, the centralization of critical services into clouds increases the risk that a single potential outage can have more dramatic cascading affects across customers and cause damage.

If your cloud vendor goes down, "you too end up down," Pingree says. "Some providers may have planned properly to avoid outages and data breaches, others may not. Customers need to be cautious [that] they are selecting a security service provider that protects itself properly."

Organizations concerned with cloud outages "should ask how a provider is able to provide system continuity as part of their contracted services and consider a backup cloud provider that they can use as a hot-standby in the event of outage," Pingree says.

While the likelihood of a service outage is relatively low because service providers have provisions in place to prevent that, Sirva's Diab says, there is a small risk that a critical business application such as e-mail could be lost for an extended period time. "It has become a matter of managing risk vs. reward," he says.

Another potential downside of using these services is that many of the providers offer simple, fixed/non-negotiable service level agreements (SLAs) and limited liability recovery, Diab says.

Companies looking into security-as-a-service in general or seeking information on best practices can turn to variety of resources. For example, the Cloud Security Alliance's Security as a Service Working Group in October 2012 completed a peer review process and published implementation guidance documents.

The Working Group's Implementation Guidance includes peer-reviewed documentation for each service category, including identity and access management, data loss prevention, Web security, intrusion management, email security, encryption, business continuity and disaster recovery, network security and security assessments.

Given that many of these services are fairly new, it's probably a good idea to look into resources such as these before taking the security-as-a-service plunge. CIO

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* BY LAUREN BROUSELL

Despite its popularity, online shopping has its drawbacks, sometimes leaving customers disappointed or surprised when their purchases arrive. This is especially true when buying make up. How do shoppers figure out the right products for their complexion, color, and skin type without touching it or trying a sample? Online make up store P.S. Beauty, which launched in September in the US, offers customers a free video chat with make up consultants to match consumers with the right products. When customers visit www.thepsbeauty.com, they complete a questionnaire about their skin type, eye color and preferred products. Then they are paired with a video consultant who conducts make up demonstrations and recommends products. P.S. Beauty sells about six items per transaction, says company co-founder Caroline Dahlof, and less than 10 percent of them get returned.

The video chat connection, she believes, makes all the difference. “By using this technology, we are making the shopping experience more personal and simpler.�

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