CIO September 15, 2014

LEADERSHIP BUSINESS

TECHNOLOGY

VOL/09 | ISSUE/11

Unfazed by the new normal, this year’s crop of CIO100 award winners, show mastery over business and IT. Page 60

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A special recognition of this year’s CIO100 Special Award Winners in 12 categories!

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FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

UBLISHER, PRESIDENT & CEO Louis D’Mello P

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Parul Singh E D I TO R I A L

The Legacy Loop This enthusiasm for legacy does a fair amount of damage to the business.

“Well, you have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn't fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit.”

—George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara Over the past half-decade, since the slowdown set in, I’ve seen managements transform how they view IT. Indian organizations no longer invest in technology, instead they fund business results.

Consequently, the approach towards deployment is rapidly shifting from an ‘as is-transition-to-be’ model which involved selecting a product or service, customizing it and deploying the solution; to a paradigm that begins with identifying a business outcome, selecting the right product for the job, and finally adopting it in a best-practices or template model (with little or no customization) with rapid deployment.

Yet in all of this focus on business end goals, I notice a marked reluctance on the part of enterprise IT to let go of legacy ecosystems.

CIO research reveals that legacy integration is the top reason organizations defer or delay the adoption of technologies such as the cloud or analytics. Throw in the ‘related’ issue of inadequate updated skillsets, and the best of intentions come to naught.

Beyond encouraging a defensive attitude toward all that the IT department has crafted in the past, this enthusiasm for legacy does a fair amount of damage to the business—and the IT department.

As upward of 80 percent of a typical IT budget is devoted to operating and maintaining legacy systems and workloads, implementing any new system or workload or technology not only gets tougher, it’s also tougher to justify in business terms. Over time this clearly means higher cost of operations and lower responsiveness. Tending to legacy hurts business. Period.

My real fear is that the emergence of ‘add-on’ technologies like in-memory analytics or mobility provides enough of a front-end polish, that prevents the much-needed re-architecting of an organization’s core IT. A few courageous CIOs have begun speaking about the need for time-bound refresh of apps, infra and core processes. It’s time, I believe, to insist that all technology must come with an expiry date. What do you think?

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Vijay Ramachandran

EXECUTIVE EDITORS Gunjan Trivedi, Yogesh Gupta

DEPUTY EDITOR Sunil Shah

FEATURES EDITOR Shardha Subramanian

ASSISTANT EDITORS Gopal Kishore, Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT Sneha Jha PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENTS Aritra Sarkhel, Shubhra Rishi, Shweta Rao

SENIOR COPY EDITOR Vinay Kumaar

VIDEO EDITORS Kshitish B.S., Vasu N. Arjun LEAD DESIGNERS Suresh Nair, Vikas Kapoor

SENIOR DESIGNERS Sabrina Naresh, Unnikrishnan A.V. TRAINEE JOURNALISTS Bhavika Bhuwalka, Ishan Bhattacharya, Madhav Mohan, Mayukh Mukherjee, Sejuti Das Vaishnavi J.Desai SALES & MARKETING

PRESIDENT SALES

& MARKETING Sudhir Kamath

VICE PRESIDENT SALES Sudhir Argula

GM MARKETING Siddharth Singh GENERAL MANAGER SALES Jaideep M.

MANAGER KEY ACCOUNTS Sakshee Bagri MANAGER SALES SUPPORT Nadira Hyder SR. MARKETING ASSOCIATES Arjun Punchappady, Benjamin Jeevanraj, Cleanne Serrao, Margaret DCosta

MARKETING ASSOCIATES Varsh Shetty

LEAD DESIGNER Jithesh C.C.

SENIOR DESIGNER Laaljith C.K.

MANAGEMENT TRAINEES Aditya Sawant, Bhavya Mishra, Brijesh Saxena, Chitiz Gupta, Deepali Patel, Deepinder Singh, Eshant Oguri, Mayur Shah, R. Venkat Raman O P E R AT I O N S

VICE PRESIDENT HR & OPERATIONS Rupesh Sreedharan

FINANCIAL CONTROLLER Sivaramakrishnan T.P. CIO Pavan Mehra

SR. MANAGER OPERATIONS Ajay Adhikari, Pooja Chhabra

SR. MANAGER ACCOUNTS Sasi Kumar V.

SR. MANAGER PRODUCTION T.K. Karunakaran

MANAGER OPERATIONS Dinesh P., EA TO THE CEO Tharuna Paul MANAGER CREDIT CONTROL Prachi Gupta ASSISTANT MGR. ACCOUNTS Poornima

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.

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.

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contents SEPTEMBER 15, 2014 | VOL/9 | ISSUE/11

Honorees 2014

44 | Big Data is the

Common Denominator FEATURE | ANALYTICS With big data being one of the main drivers of IT spending, a strong CIO-CMO relationship is a must.

By Stephanie Overby

Case Files 40 | Matriomony.com

6 0

COVER D ESIGN BY UNN IKRISHNAN AV & VIK AS K AP OOR

60 | The CIO 100 SPECIAL REPORT | THE DYNAMIC 100 Unfazed by the new normal, and undaunted by challenging business requirements this year’s crop of CIO100 award winners, show mastery over business and IT.

By Team CIO

ANALYTICS Matriomony.com uses big data analytics to get a better understanding of its customers, figure out the most appropriate way to engage with them, and create a better user experience.

By Sneha Jha

5 0

50 | View From the Top INTERVIEW | ON THE RIGHT SHORE Partha De Sarkar, CEO, Hinduja Global Solutions, says there is an immediate need to re-brand BPM as a ‘career of choice.’

By Shubhra Rishi

2

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DEPARTMENTS 1 | From the Editor-in-Chief The Legacy Loop

By Vijay Ramachandran

7 | Trendlines

3 2

Popular Science | A New Look for the Globe Devices | Analyzed in a Breath Digital | Little Techies!

Legal | Legal Bar Raised Software | Computer’s Tales E-commerce | Crowdfunding Capital of the World Aero Tech | Now You See Through Robotics | Self-made Robots Internet| Monkey Selfie’s a Human Copyright?

Components | Self-power Your Wearables By the Numbers | The Middle Path to Cloud

20 | Alert Privacy | Wearables: The Fine Print

32 | CIOs Serve on Boards COVER STORY | CIO CAREER Relatively few CIOs sit on external corporate boards. But those who do come back to their day jobs with personal and professional insights that boost their careers—and give their home companies a competitive edge.

By Kim S. Nash with inputs from Ishan Bhattacharya and Sneha Jha

54 | The Future of Work is Here

52

FEATURE | CONSUMERIZATION OF IT Travel into the future and take a look at what the future of work will look like. It’s all about four key areas.

By Jonathan Hassell

105 | Essential Technology Data Security | Locking Up Personal Data Convergence | The Convergence Era

108 | Endlines Robotics | A Robot Army

By Joab Jackson

2 4

Column 24 | Choose Your Vendors Wisely IT MANAGEMENT No one should sign a contract with an IT vendor without fully evaluating who they are and what they do.

By Rob Enderle

27 | A Human Experiment?

SOCIAL MEDIA Facebook experiment on users. So what's wrong with that?

By Mike Elgan

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Close-coupled cooling options deliver greater energy efficiency.

Our InRow units come in floormounted and overhead forms (floor-mounted shown here).

Your business needs and IT loads are dynamic. Now, your cooling can be, too.

Introducing expanded Schneider Electric agile cooling options for your on-demand cooling needs.

Today’s data centers are really heating up

Packed racks have led to unprecedented heat levels, row by row. Meanwhile, virtualization creates shifting hot spots. How can you locate enough cooling exactly where it’s required? And how can you streamline cooling efficiency to minimize energy costs? Schneider Electric™ has the efficient and effective solution you need: InRow™ cooling. InRow units come in two forms: floor-mounted and overhead units, both of which deliver cooling targeted at heat sources.

Variable-speed fans target heat and improve efficiency

Rack-mounted sensors monitor the temperature, giving you real-time information on where heat is hiding. As heat loads shift around the room, unique variable-speed fans automatically adjust to meet the demand.

By closely matching cooling with the heat load, you use the cooling that’s required in the right place at the right time, reducing waste by preventing hot and cold air from mixing and eliminating hot spots. You improve efficiency and avoid overcooling. And the overhead units give you the cooling you need within your existing floor print.

Modular design delivers maximum flexibility

Scalable, modular InRow cooling units can be easily and quickly deployed as the foundation of your entire cooling architecture or in addition to current perimeter cooling for a high-density zone within an existing data center.

Our flexible EcoAisle™ air containment system enables energy-efficient pods in data centers with row, room, and/or external cooling systems.

Next Generation InfraStruxure

InRow cooling is part of the Schneider Electric InfraStruxure™ solution, our one-of-a-kind scalable, adaptable, and “on-demand” data center architecture. Our comprehensive life cycle services help InfraStruxure data centers retain business value at all times.

Business-wise, Future-driven™.

The flexibility of the InfraStruxure architecture: Turn any room into a world-class data center. InfraStruxure architecture can be

deployed on its own as a modular, scalable, customized solution that’s easy to design, build, and install for small first-time data center environments.

Extend the life of your data center.

Existing data centers can add on InfraStruxure components to existing architecture and, for increased efficiency, use our flexible EcoAisle air containment system.

Scale up with step-and-repeat modular architecture for large data centers. Medium/large

environments can deploy InfraStruxure architecture as a zoned, “pay-as-you-grow,” scalable architecture solution.

APC™ by Schneider Electric is the pioneer of modular data center infrastructure and innovative cooling technology. Its products and solutions, including InfraStruxure architecture, are an integral part of the Schneider Electric IT portfolio.

Virtualization: Optimized Power and Cooling Maximize Benefits

> Executive summary

Contents

Download our whitepaper #130 and stand to WIN a JBL Pulse Bluetooth speaker Visit www.apc.com/promo Key Code 55208M Call 1800 4254 272/877 Fax 401-788-2797

©2014 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric, APC, InRow, InfraStruxure, and Business-wise, Future-driven are trademarks owned by Schneider Electric Industries SAS or its affiliated companies. email: esupport@apc.com • www.schneider-electric.com • 998-1190475_GMA

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E D I T E D B Y VA I S H N AV I J . D E S A I

NEW

*

*

HOT

UNEXPECTED

A New Look for the Globe will also help DigitalGlobe’s other customers. “Our imagery is used by a lot of state and local governments for urban planning,” said Kumar Navulur, director of next generation products at DigitalGlobe. He said the images are used to survey things like back yard swimming pools, but that’s not all. The satellites capture images in visible and infrared light and these latter ones can be used to monitor the environment.

For example, one of the sensors can see the presence of chlorophyll, the green pigment found in plants and trees. By monitoring over time, an early warning of disease can be picked up. Trees tend to lose their chlorophyll as they are stressed and Navulur said the satellite’s sensor will detect that long before it’s obvious through color changes visible to the eye. WorldView 3 adds new sensors that capture eight additional infrared bands, some of them useful to energy companies in the exploration of oil and gas, and to geological research.

TRENDLINES

POPULAR SCIENCE DigitalGlobe’s WorldView 3 satellite promises to bring unprecedented resolution to commercial satellite imagery.

The satellite will be blasted into space on an Atlas V rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in a launch that has extra significance given a recent US government decision to relax rules regarding the resolution of images that can be sold to companies like Google and Microsoft.

At present, commercial satellite operators are prohibited from selling images with a resolution better than 50 centimeters to customers other than the US government, but with the launch of WorldView 3 that’s changing. From early 2015, the limit will be reduced to 30 centimeters, which is a fraction finer than the 31 centimeters that WorldView 3 can manage.

The change should mean better quality images on services like Google Earth and Bing Maps, and

—By Martyn Williams

Analyzed in a Breath

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vital tool for medical testing, along with blood tests and tissue imaging.

Toshiba used gas analysis technologies from its semiconductor and other manufacturing operations to develop the device. An infrared laser shines on the exhalation while a spectrum analysis component checks for telltale signs of organic compounds.

Using a quantum cascade laser, which is a semiconductor laser used in gas analysis, allowed the analyzer to have a small form factor while retaining the accuracy of larger, floor-mounted devices, Toshiba said. The current version of the device can measure organic compounds such as acetone,

which can indicate obesity and diabetes, and acetaldehyde, which is involved in the chemistry of hangovers.

Toshiba plans to improve the analyzer so it will be able to also detect carbon monoxide, methane, nitric monoxide and other constituents to be able to check on conditions such as smoking, intestinal bacteria, asthma and helicobacter pylori, a stomach bacterium linked to ulcers and cancer.

In conjunction with the manufacturer, Waseda University in Tokyo will begin research into measuring acetone in exhaled breath in an attempt to measure fat metabolism.

—By Tim Hornyak REAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

IMAGE: PCWORLD.COM

DEVICES If you’re worried about being out of shape, or suspect you might have a disease like diabetes, just breathe into this Toshiba tube.

It’s part of a prototype medical breath analyzer that’s small enough to be used in small clinics or gyms. By detecting trace gases that are exhaled, it could be used to monitor health indicators such as fat metabolism and help diagnose disease, Toshiba said.

“The main feature of this analyzer is its compact form,” said a spokesman for Toshiba. Another merit is speed, providing analysis results in about 30 seconds, he said. Some doctors believe that breath analysis could one day be a

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EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

LEADING FROM THE FRONT, ON MULTIPLE FRONTS Wendy Koh, Senior Vice President, Juniper Networks Asia Pacific, shares insights on the networking company’s roadmap for the future and how it is building High-IQ, Cloud-enabled networks to steer CIOs to a smarter future.

By Vinay Kumaar

Trends such as mobility and IoT are bringing the need for robust networks to the fore. How can CIOs fulfil this requirement?

As part of my job, I get to meet a lot of customers and partners, and one of the questions that I always like to ask them is “What really keeps you awake at night?” There are two common themes.

First is how they deliver services over the cloud.

How can they control costs while delivering a great user experience? And how can they do all this in a scalable and secure manner? The second pain point is the huge amount of traffic, whether it’s from mobile devices, big data or other sources, that is stressing their current network infrastructure. How do they resolve this core network chaos and achieve intelligent, centralized management of traffic? And how do they reduce the risk associated with complex networks?

These are the two most prominent challenges that come up in customer conversations.

Juniper’s strategy, which focuses heavily on helping customers transform their network, build the very best cloud networks, and at the same time, add network intelligence to what they have today, aligns to these two pain points. The CIO’s needs are shifting from simple connectivity to very sophisticated, large-scale, cloud-based networks and hence why we, as a leader in network innovation, are focused on building best-in-class cloud and High-IQ networks. We work with customers such as Flipkart and The Airports Authority of India to do just this. We also work with service provider customers, such as Telstra and SingTel, to help them build and evolve their networks into ones that are intelligent,

scalable, able to satisfy insatiable bandwidth demands and ultimately help them innovate and deliver new services to customers.

We believe that we are at a major inflection point where a relentless focus on innovation and high-performance, open networking will help our customers address their rapidly evolving networking needs. As CIOs plan for their organizations’ future, riding on the success of what they already have today, to build intelligent, best-in-class cloud networks that will satisfy current and future demands are all very critical factors to consider.

Many CIOs today have started considering cloud-ready solutions for any new implementation. What is Juniper’s strategy to bolster this segment?

CUSTOM INTERVIEW JUNIPER NETWORKS

Every CIO must have a cloud strategy today. One that outlines which applications they can migrate to the cloud and which they should not.

Juniper is committed to helping its customers become Cloud Builders – wherever they may be in the journey – in a seamless and non-disruptive manner. Organizations such as Flipkart, AT&T, UBS, and, recently, Nike have deployed Juniper solutions to support their datacenters and other cloud-based network infrastructures. Our experience and expertise help us deliver strategic guidance to CIOs today who are looking to transform their organizations’ IT infrastructure. This typically starts from the datacenter and is then transformed to the cloud. We’re more than happy to extend our experience to support CIOs, and provide the right level of practical know-how and strategic guidance to help them on their cloud journey.

Juniper Networks’ latest innovation revolves around High-IQ networks.

Could you please shed some light on them?

Sure. It all started with the cloud first. There are a few key trends in cloud computing. A few key customers have already adopted the technology. We have service providers, who are virtualizing their infrastructure so that they can offer services to both B2B and B2C customers. We’re also seeing large enterprises embarking on this, trying to renovate what they have today and working towards building a cloud.

And the third category includes emerging cloud providers. These companies are typically the web to all other companies.

They could be SMEs or gaming companies that use the cloud to launch such services.

They build a whole infrastructure on which they typically host solutions. Juniper already has such solutions today which offer scalability, high performance, and security. The next stage of that, which is the transformation I mentioned, is the High-IQ network. It involves injecting intelligence into the network. We focus on agility, automation, security, efficiency, and transforming what organizations already have invested in today. This is what we call High-IQ networking.

Another major innovation in the networking domain is softwaredefined networking (SDN). What according

to you is the state of SDN adoption in India and how will it grow further?

Almost every customer we speak to talks about SDN and virtualization and how these two apply to their organizations in a few forms. Cost management is one of them; enabling quicker launch of services is another. The third area is more efficient and simplified management of the network. If we look at it in a practical sense, a lot of these customers are now evaluating how they can make use of SDN and virtualization in their infrastructure. They’re keen to know how to really leverage virtualization to achieve these three objectives I mentioned.

However, it will take a few years for these solutions to become a real-life empowerment.

From a Juniper standpoint, we already have a strong portfolio of SDN offerings for customers, which allow them to make long-term investments today to support their SDN journey when they are ready. The three key customer segments that are looking to implement SDN are service providers, large enterprises, and companies that run big datacenters.

Our solutions stand out because we focus a lot on open architecture. We also focus a lot on open ecosystem partnerships, mainly because for any solution to stand out or for it to fit into any organization-specific requirement, it will require some form of innovation. At Juniper Networks, we get our internal teams, our partners, and customers together and co-create solutions.

The deluge of both data and devices in today’s IT ecosystem highlights the need for a stronger and more proactive security posture. How does Juniper Networks maintain the balance between the two?

We believe security is always a fundamental requirement, regardless of the type of network you are running. Today, we’re seeing huge growth in the mobility. There is fast and massive growth in smartphone adoption, especially here in India. What this means for enterprises is that there will be more and more connected devices that will introduce different kinds of security risks into any kind of network that exists today. That’s one part of it.

The second is we’re seeing a change in the motivation of security attackers. Earlier, security intrusions used to be perpetrated by people who wanted to gain fame. Now, it’s become more of a means for them to make money. Then there’s also the nation state reason.

The other trend that we’re seeing is cyber-attacks no longer apply to just traditional networks.

Customers must now secure a mix of traditional, virtualized, cloud and hybrid infrastructures. We talk about hybrid networks, and these face the potential risk of security invasion as well.

The final issue we’re seeing is that not many customers are capable of handling the volume of security threats that face them every day. We’re seeing an increase of about 85 percent in an organizations’ security budget from last year to this year. In APJ, 4.3 percent of the overall IT budget seems to be allocated to security. That itself is a significant amount of investment. Security is one of Juniper Networks’ fundamental strengths, and we continue to evolve steadily. We have virtualized security products which help our customers protect against attacks in a virtualized environment, through the provisioning of security capabilities at the service layer. We’re working with service providers to launch managed security services.

We also have DDoS Secure, which defends organizations from Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attacks. We are able to help customers protect against the ever evolving threat landscape through the adoption of active defense techniques.

Early detection and simplified mitigation of ever increasing cyber threats in a myriad of environments and across a deluge of devices is critical.

What sets Juniper Networks apart from other networking players in the global market? Any key differentiator factors?

As a pure-play, high-performance networking company with organic innovation at its core, we are uniquely positioned to help our customers build cloud and High-IQ networks. Our focus on innovation and a strong belief in open architectures positions our customers well to address their rapidly evolving networking needs.

This openness to co-create with our customers and partners to develop innovative solutions is a key differentiator and will bring us closer to our customers as we innovate together to address the challenges and opportunities ahead.

This interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Juniper Networks

Little Techies!

D I G I T A L Start-up ‘Tech Resort’ has launched, a venture in Eastbourne which aims to develop digital talent among local young people and help teachers in the area prepare for the new computing curriculum due to be introduced in September.

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Legal Bar Raised L E G A L Woe be to the software vendor who aggravates the mental status of recent law school grads.

A number of aspiring attorneys have filed lawsuits seeking class-action status and millions of dollars in damages against software maker ExamSoft after a series of technical problems temporarily prevented them from uploading their completed bar examinations.

Court records show at least three suits were filed against the bar exam software vendor following widespread outcry from test-takers on social media and law-related websites, who railed against ExamSoft for making their lives just that much harder on an already stressful day. ExamSoft’s “wholly insufficient” infrastructure suffered from a “total collapse” on the examination day, according to one of the lawsuits, which was filed on behalf of test-taker Phillip Litchfield in US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

The company “knew well in advance of Exam Day exactly how many applicants had registered and paid to use the SofTest program,” and should have made the necessary preparations to handle the load, it states.

Some applicants weren’t able to upload their tests until the second day of the bar exam, while others weren’t able to make their state’s submission deadline, although most states ended up extending it by a day, the suit adds.

Overall, ExamSoft’s failure caused them “significant emotional distress” amounting to more than US$5 million in damages, it adds. ExamSoft didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story. ExamSoft posted a number of updates on the situation last week as the system issues occurred, as well as an apology to customers.

“First and foremost, we apologize for the upload delays which occurred after your exams on Tuesday night,” ExamSoft said on its website. “The delay in processing did not relate to, or impact, answer content, and we are therefore very confident in the integrity of your exam submissions.”

IMAGE: T HIN KSTOCKP HOTOS

TRENDLINES

The ‘community interest company’ is supporting projects such as ‘Tech Resort Teens’, a fortnightly coding club on Saturday mornings designed to teach young people programming skills.

Roughly 25 kids attend every session and the sessions are vastly over-subscribed, with a waiting list of those hoping to attend.

However co-founder and Eastbourne resident Will Callaghan was keen to emphasise that the skills required go “way beyond coding”.

The venture also hopes to link into formal education, be it primary, secondary or further. To that end, it is working to help support both primary and secondary school teachers as they prepare for the new computing curriculum when it arrives next month. For example, Tech Resort supported a half day course for teachers to help develop their technical skills in programming and give them some insight into the requirements in the new curriculum.

Tech Resort has been granted a small amount of money from the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) but the founders are seeking funding from elsewhere too.

The code club and teachers project was funded by Artswork Ltd. According to Callaghan, the code club has a ratio of roughly 30:70 girls to boys at the moment.

However, he said: “We want to change that and bring it closer to 50:50. As part of that, we’ve been speaking to girls groups such as the Guides.”

Regarding the location of Eastbourne, Callaghan told ComputerworldUK: “Brighton is bigger, but Eastbourne has a few interesting companies and is in a great location, close to Brighton and London.

“The kids can grow the skills base and eventually the digital industry here too. By linking together local businesses and schools, we’re also helping the education system to understand what industry needs.”

He added: “There are lots of people giving up their time to make this happen. Our hats are off to Donna Pratty who secured the Artswork funding and launched the code club. Also Dr Aiden Delaney and the University of Brighton for their great work on the technical side, and many volunteer mentors who’ve given up their weekends to help.”

By Charlotte Jee

—By Chris Kanaracus

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Computer’s Tales

SMAC Stack SMAC technologies are definitely the future and Indian CIOs are keen to place their bets on SMAC technologies to keep up with the trend.

TECHNOLOGY

Key Interest Areas of Indian CIOs

55%

Analytics

45% Mobility

40%

Social Media

32%

Hybrid Cloud

Crowdfunding Capital of the World London has beaten New York and San Francisco to be named the crowdfunding capital of the world, according to new figures out from The Crowdfunding Center.

The UK capital saw 250,000 new campaigns started on platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo between January and July, with a particular focus on sectors such as technology, gaming, and publishing.

The Crowdfunding Center also claims that the UK as a whole is starting to challenge the US’s dominance.

The organization, which provides tools and insights for crowd funders, backers, investors and analysts, also announced the launch of an interactive crowd funding map, which allows researchers and journalists to see where crowd funding investments are being made around the world.

Chancellor George Osborne said: “We stand at the dawn of a new era of innovative finance, and setting the objective of the UK leading the world, London has become the world capital of Crowdfunding. London created more campaigns during July than any other city, while the UK as a whole is ready to challenge US dominance.”

Barry James, founder and CEO of the Crowdfunding Center, said: “The Chancellor is right, this is a new era. We’ve been tracking it and mapping it’s exponential growth for more than two years. What we have seen has revolutionized our thinking and our understanding of what’s happening to the world, it’s economy and fast-evolving global culture.

“Technology is the enabler but people, the crowd, are at the center. It is their decisions, wishes, needs and demands that are driving and directing this new economy. This is why it moves at a faster pace and with a very different heartbeat.

The UK and London are playing a key role and we look forward to sharing in more detail.”

—By Sam Shead

E-COMMERCE

IMAGE: THINKSTOCKPH OTOS

TRENDLINES

S O F T W A R E Researchers at the University of New South Wales have developed a computer program with the artificial intelligence to write stories in the style of Aesop.

The program, developed by UNSW PhD candidate Margaret Sarlej, creates fables around specific combinations of emotions or desires felt by characters in the story. The (human) user of the program can choose from a selection of 22 emotions.

“A human author simply decides an interesting emotional path for the story, and the computer does the rest,” said Sarlej. “The computer decides the events to elicit those emotional responses from the characters, and the characters do whatever the plot needs them to do.”

The program is based on a logical translation of the OCC psychological model, which is named after its creators Ortony, Clore, and Collins.

Australian Research Council fellow Malcolm Ryan has predicted that computers “will be making interesting and meaningful contributions to literature within the next decade”. “They might be more experimental than mainstream,” said Ryan, who is based in the School of Computer Science and Engineering. The researchers have called for authors, computer game designers and other creators to contribute to the project.

—By Adam Bender

Source: CIO Mid-year Review 2014

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Centralized Reporting

Now You See Through | Researchers have developed mobile robots that can use Wi-Fi signals to effectively “see through” walls. It’s raising the possibility of flying drones using the technology to see inside buildings.

Led by Yasamin Mostofi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, the group at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) has shown how the radio signals sent and received by a pair of wheeled robots can provide information about what lies behind concrete walls even when the objects do not move.

Depending on their properties, objects behind a wall will attenuate the radio signals. As the robots make multiple passes around on either side of a walled-off area, one robot measures signals broadcast by the other.

Differences in signal strength can reflect the presence of hidden objects, according to the researchers, who formulated a wave-propagation model for the project.

The approach, which has a targeted resolution of 2 centimeters, can show the location and shape of hidden objects, and has the potential to classify them as wood, metal or

TRENDLINES

AERO TECH

Self-made Robots

R O B O T I C S It would be strange enough to see a robot fold itself into arbitrary shapes and then just walk away.

Then add to the mix that it’s a laser-cut origami robot and you have the new robotic technology created by a team of engineers from Harvard, the Wyss Institute and MIT. Engineers at Harvard and MIT have teamed up to create a robot that can assembles itself and walks away.

“The exciting thing here is that you create this device that has computation embedded in the flat, printed version,” Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, said in a statement.

The technology, which mimics the way amino acids fold themselves into complex proteins, demonstrates scientists’ ability to cheaply and quickly build sophisticated robots that can automate their own design and assembly process, according to Harvard.

“Getting a robot to assemble itself autonomously and actually perform a function has been a milestone we’ve been chasing for many years,” said Robert J. Wood, a

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human. Drones have already been mooted as vehicles for providing Wi-Fi to remote areas as well as potential rogue access points that can steal data from wireless networks. Mostofi’s group is now experimenting with a commercial aerial drone to see how well it can perform the X-ray feat. Multiple drones could be used to scan a concealed area, Mostofi said, or the receiver could be a ground-based robot or fixed node.

“In principle, this should also give us a nice 3D view, because you can change the height, as opposed to 2D imaging,” she said. The UCSB system could be used for applications including search and rescue, detecting potential home intruders before entering a house or as health-monitoring systems for elderly patients.

One limitation of the technology is that as the area to be scanned gets more cluttered or larger, the accuracy of the imaging can go down, Mostofi said. She and collaborators plan to work on improving the approach before it can be commercialized, which would depend on the application and the degree of accuracy needed.

—By Tim Hornyak

professor of engineering at Harvard and the Wyss Institute.

The universities contend that this is the first robot that can assemble itself and then perform a function—all without human intervention.

“Imagine a ream of dozens of robotic satellites sandwiched together so that they could be sent up to space and then assemble themselves remotely once they get there,” said Sam Felton, a Harvard doctoral student, who worked on the project. “They could take images, collect data and more.”

Researchers have been working on different pieces of this technology for some time.

In May, MIT’s Rus announced that scientists there had made progress on the promise of 3D printed robots.

The team created printable robotic components that, when heated, automatically fold into three-dimensional configurations. The researchers also figured out how to build electrical components—like resistors and inductors—from these self-assembling materials.

—By Sharon Gaudin

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CUSTOM INTERVIEW RAMYAM INTELLIGENCE LAB

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS It’s vital for organizations to have holistic insight into customers’ behavior and expectations. Ramyam’s enliven CEM® promises to offer Actionable Intelligence for personalizing customer experience. In this interview, the company’s CEO M.V. Balasubrahmanyam sheds light on its CEM solution.

By Vinay Kumaar How crucial is customer experience management (CEM) for enterprises today?

Customer experience is an evolved process that focuses on customer needs and desires. With all offerings becoming commoditized, price differentiation alone is no longer sustainable for businesses in this competitive world. Customers are demanding more value addition, forcing enterprises to focus on delivering superior products and services with a personalized touch.

CEM solutions should integrate strategy, processes, and technology to optimize customer experience. This increased alignment delivers increased customer activity, advocacy, referrals, revenue, and customer share.

Organizations in which verticals stand to gain the most by focusing on CEM, and why?

Any vertical can benefit by adopting a strong CEM strategy. It could be retail, telecommunication, BFSI, or any other vertical. In fact, we recently realized that oil and gas companies have started looking at CEM. CEM is a strategic decision that will work across all verticals. Businesses with very high transactional volumes and high end-customer visibility must follow a value-driven, focused approach towards understanding their customers better and offer positive expereinces at every touch point of their business to retain as well as gain advocacy from customers.

How does Ramyam aim to deliver superior CEM capabilities to enterprises? Could you give us a brief insight into your products?

Ramyam promotes implementation of CEM as a business strategy for enterprises. Ramyam’s enliven CEM® is an enterprise software that encompasses all the source systems and processes to understand customers’ behaviour in transacting and interacting with the business.

This intelligence is further analyzed to create Next Best Actions (NBA) for each and every customer with time and location context. The actions are delivered and the feedback is monitored to understand the responses. The solution

makes sure that Customer Life Time Value is measured and monitored. The product provides big data visualization in various formats to deliver customer insight and empowers enterprises to apply and deliver the NBAs on the spot.

How have customer organizations benefitted from enliven CEM®?

More and more customers are adopting CEM processing using our enliven CEM® platform for offering superior experiences and adding additional revenues. Like I mentioned, we strive to address the main revenue imperatives of an enterprise business: Customer retention, customer acquisition, and customer lifecycle management.

For example, in the case of an East African communications service provider, we were able to streamline customers, operations, and revenue.

We mediated all the subscriber and revenuegenerating data from different network elements, and streamlined the three revenue-generating channels: Retail usage, retail sales, and roaming & interconnect. Besides, we also provided it with a centralized operations terminal to completely manage network issues that affect customers.

Similarly, we enabled configurable contextual and predictive analytics, along with a 360-degree view of the customer with NBA solution, and proactive churn management for another telecom operator.

This increased their conversion rate by 35 percent and customer satisfaction scores by 22 percent.

On the other hand, a retail e-commerce grocery chain has significantly benefitted from the Customer Insights and relevant offers that are created for each and every customer. We are also providing lifestyle mapping of customers for offering personalized campaigns for our BFSI customers.

Across verticals, enliven CEM® has helped enterprises increase customer satisfaction benchmark analysis by over 25 percent—by means of contextual personalized campaigns and offers, increase customer acquisition by 13 percent— by enabling relevant cross-selling/up-selling opportunities, decrease total customer issue

M.V. BALASUBRAHMANYAM

CEO, Ramyam Intelligence Lab

resolutions metrics by 20 percent, and increase top up revenues by 12 percent—by means of a new customer acquisition and retention strategy.

What differentiates Ramyam Intelligence Lab from competition? What is its USP? We are the only single-footprint solution, so far in the market, which follows a value-driven approach towards CEM. The kind of value-driven multiple CEM solutions on our platform, which we call “Experience Accelerators’, answer each and every vertical, making it a unified enterprise solution than a siloed approach.

For instance, a lot of products in the market are just quick-fix solutions. They might be standalone analytical tools, loyalty management tools, campaign management tools and the likes which are generally siloed. To put these together to create a unified ecosystem with unified process flow is difficult and time-consuming. This lack of unification of different customer-facing solutions is what our customers have seen in the market, and our providing a robust, unified solution is what has made us get noticed.

All along, we’ve realized that the time taken to set such a unified framework up through our enliven CEM® platform is very less. Any proprietary system will take a huge amount of time for just implementation. Our implementation window is quite small compared to that of big analytics vendors.

For more details on enliven CEM®, please contact Balasubrahmanyam at balu@ramyamlab.com This interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Ramyam

Monkey Selfie’s a Human Copyright?

TRENDLINES

I N T E R N E T A selfie taken by a black macaque monkey and an entire aboriginal language were asked to be removed from Wikipedia by people who claimed to have the copyrights to them, the Wikimedia Foundation said in its first transparency report.

Wikimedia, which operates Wikipedia, published a report detailing two years of alteration and takedown requests as well as requests for user data it received.

Of the 304 general content removal requests, none were granted, Wikimedia said in a blog post. And while the amount of copyright takedown requests was notably low, the requests that were made might raise some eyebrows.

One of them was made in January by a photographer who left his camera unattended in a national park in North Sulawesi, Indonesia.

A female crested black macaque monkey managed to get a hold of the camera and took a series of pictures, including some self-portraits. The pictures were then featured in an online newspaper article and eventually posted to Wikimedia

Commons, a database containing freely usable media files, Wikimedia said. “We received a take-down request from the photographer, claiming that he owned the copyright to the photographs. We didn’t agree, so we denied the request,” the organization said. The photos are still part of the Commons database where the author is listed as “the monkey on the photo” and the permission field says “nonhumans cannot own copyrights.”

Another copyright takedown request involved a Tasmanian aboriginal language center that demanded the removal of the English Wikipedia article on ‘palawa kani’, a project to create a generic language resembling the extinct languages once spoken by the Aboriginal Tasmanians.

The language center claimed copyright over the entirety of the language, Wikimedia said.

The organization refused to take the article down “because copyright law simply cannot be used to stop people from using an entire language or to prevent general discussion about the language,” it said.

— By Loek Essers

Self-power Your Wearables

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conference. The technologies are still emerging, but the chip performance and energy efficiency of some wearables are reaching a point where it has started becoming “convenient for us to replace the battery and replace it with ambient energy,” Ramadass said.

Energy harvested from the body and environment is in the microwatt range, so it can’t be used for smart watches or fitness trackers, which draw milliwatts of energy, Ramadass said.

“You shouldn’t be thinking about a regular wearable devices like FitBit, smartwatch or others,” Ramadass said in an interview on the sidelines of the show.

Smartwatches have displays and software that can drain batteries, while energy harvesters are better for wearables that collect and transmit bits

of data at specific intervals.Self-powered devices could make an impact in the context of the Internet of Things, said Massimo Alioto, associate professor at the National University of Singapore.

There will be billions of Internetconnected devices supplying realtime information in the coming year.

Data-gathering instruments today are designed around the size of batteries, and self-powered devices could resolve some power and size issues, Alioto said.

The researchers said that energy harvesting technologies could be relevant in smoke detectors, alarm sensors, smart meters and even remote controls.

There will be 26 billion Internetconnected devices by 2020, according to Gartner.

— By Agam Shah

IMAGE: THINKSTOCKP HOTOS

COMPONENTS Low-power wearables may soon bid adieu to batteries and start drawing energy generated by body heat and movement, and ambient energy from the environment.

Consumer electronics devices are getting smaller but conventional batteries are not, and it’s important to start implementing new energy harvesting techniques to keep devices powered for long periods of time, researchers said at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California.

Energy harvested from body heat, motion and ambient light could be used in medical implants, monitoring sensors and disposable medical patches, said Yogesh Ramadass, lead design engineer at Texas Instruments, during a presentation at the Hot Chips

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CUSTOM INTERVIEW BMC SOFTWARE INDIA

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

Doing IT

Automatically The primary responsibilities of IT leaders are shifting towards delivering business results today. However, IT operations shouldn’t take a hit due to this shift. Sachin Chawla, Country Manager, BMC Software India, details how automation can help CIOs maintain a balance between both these objectives.

SACHIN CHAWLA

By Vinay Kumaar What are some of the major challenges that organizations face with respect to operating datacenters today?

Datacenter managers today are caught between a rock and a hard place. The expectation from them is always to do more, which includes protecting rapidly increasing data and a growing number of missioncritical applications. Add to this managing highly complex and heterogeneous environments and yet meeting the SLA they promised the business, and being absolutely compliant to industry standards. Then there is also the pressure from business to deliver services faster than ever before so that they can stay competitive.

At the same time, they are expected to do all of the above with less budget which translates to fewer qualified staff and lessthan-robust budgets. The key word to note here is “qualified staff” which is not at all easy to find. In summary, they are laboring to do more with less.

What role, according to you, does automation play in helping organizations overcome these challenges in datacenters?

Automation is a must for organizations in any industry today because of the obvious benefits it brings in every field. In case of datacenters, it helps you automate numerous vital tasks which are currently done manually.

Be it provisioning the IT environment’s full stack (applications, database, middleware, networks, OS, virtualization) or configuration management of disparate IT components, automation helps you do more with less, without compromising on efficiency. In

Country Manager, BMC Software India addition, it also delights businesses because they can now deliver services faster. Services that traditionally take 15 days to provision can now be set up in few hours and that too with less resources; that is the real benefit.

In addition, automation also helps you maintain compliance in your IT environment, be it due to your internal policy or any of the industry standards that your organization must adhere to. Since compliance is an imperative, organizations end up spending a huge amount of man-hours to generate those compliance reports. With automation, this can be done online on a real-time basis.

Frankly, automation is so all-encompassing that there’s hardly any component of datacenter operations that doesn’t benefit from it.

How does BMC Software ensure effective datacenter automation for customers? Why should customers choose BMC Software over competition?

We have an integrated solution which helps customers automate their datacenter in a holistic manner. We help them automate each and every IT component, from apps, middleware, and database to servers, networks, and cloud.

The best part of our solution is that we are platform-agnostic. Therefore, it doesn’t matter for us which technology you use for which IT component; we provide the same benefits mentioned earlier, regardless of the technology. Given that most organizations have a heterogeneous environment, we can deliver RoI faster than any other vendor.

Some of the other benefits that customers can expect to see by adopting BMC solution are: Reduced operational costs; reduced service downtime; streamlined service provisioning; managing physical, virtual, and cloud resources from a single platform; improved operational productivity; consistent enforcement of compliance; improved security by reducing time to remediate; and automated audit cycles.

What are some of the other solutions that BMC Software offers to ensure the smooth running of IT operations?

As we say at BMC, organizations today run on IT and IT runs on BMC. If there’s anything to do with managing your IT and getting real business benefits out of it, we have a solution. We cover the IT management space with several solutions such as IT Service Management, which covers the whole service management space with effective asset, change, and SLA management; Proactive Operations, which ensures high performance and availability; Datacenter Automation solutions; and Workload Automation solutions.

This interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with BMC Software India

C O M P I L E D B Y I S H A N B H AT TA C H A RYA

Best Practices

The Middle Path to Cloud

T

Better performance, more control, higher reliability, and reduced cost are few of the reasons why CIOs are adopting

TRENDLINES

The popularity of hybrid cloud among Indian CIOs is gradually gaining ground. This popularity however, comes at the cost of private cloud losing some of its worth.

According to the CIO Mid-year Review 2014, 48 percent of Indian CIOs are using or at least planning to use hybrid cloud, as compared to 35 percent in 2013. This jump is almost directly proportional to the decrease in the percentage of CIOs who were planning to use and were using private cloud.

Hybrid cloud can give customers the freedom of choice when it comes to deploying workloads. It also ensures proper security and scalability.

The four main reasons for CIOs to adopt hybrid cloud are better performance, more control, higher reliability, and reduced cost. 48 percent of Indian CIOs say they are deriving or hoping to derive better performance from hybrid cloud. The CIO survey also revealed that 41 percent of Indian CIOs are adopting hybrid cloud because of higher reliability and reduced cost.

Security still takes the center stage in the discussions surrounding the cloud. The survey showed that 31 percent of Indian CIOs are hoping to get better security from hybrid cloud and 40 percent of the CIOs pin their hopes on hybrid to derive lesser downtime.

1

KEEP critical data of the enterprise secure.

2

CHOOSE workloads that can move to the public cloud and which can be kept in the internal storage.

3

ELIMINATE needless manageability of certain IT systems keeping in mind the aspects of cost, risk, security, and governance.

4

CHECK the level of security before moving workloads to the public cloud.

Private Cloud Makes Way for Hybrid Top reasons for CIOs to adopt hybrid cloud

60% Of Indian CIOs feel that moving to public cloud increases agility

48%

Better performance

42% More control

41% Higher reliability and reduced cost Lesser downtime

40% 31%

Better security 18

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38%

Of Indian CIOs say the biggest hurdle while shifting to private cloud was ‘integrating existing IT products.’ SOURCE:CIO MID-YEAR REVIEW 2014

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alert

ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENT

Wearables: The Fine Print D

IMAGES BY TH INKSTOCKPHOTOS.IN

o you remember the last time you read a privacy policy? Any kind of privacy policy? Be honest.

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Nobody reads privacy policies.

They’re not really meant for the users, anyway—they’re meant to protect companies from potential lawsuits. As such, they’re long, complicated and often packed with enough legalese to make even an eager litigator’s eyes glaze over.

Some CEOs of companies that make products to collect endless mountains of data don’t even read privacy policies.

“It’s almost impossible for users to read and understand privacy policies. All of the [services] I use, it doesn’t matter if it’s Netflix or whatever, I don’t read privacy policies. I wouldn’t understand it without a lawyer,” says Florian Gschwandtner, CEO of Runtastic,

which makes a number of fitness tracking devices, including the Orbit fitness band, as well as a collection of fitness apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

The reality is that privacy policies have never been more important. Many of the latest gadgets are designed to collect all kinds of user data, and much of their value is in the analysis of that information. But how do you know what happens to your information after you hand it over to that fitness tracker or smartwatch? Do you want a company secretly selling your data to your insurance company, for example, so it can track your exercise habits, weight gain (or loss), alcohol intake or whatever other stats you decide to track, and then

adjust your premium accordingly?

Today, lots of device and app makers sneak all kinds of protections into privacy policies that let them do just about whatever they want with your data, assuming you’re willing to accept the terms of service (ToS).

I spoke with a few notable privacy experts for advice on how to dissect a privacy policy, what specifically to look for and some potential red flags that should make you wary if you spot them in a privacy policy.

Jeremy Gillula, Staff Technologist, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says wearable device users should look for two main things when reading a privacy policy: What specific kinds of data are being collected and what the

Organizations Have Lost It! FINDINGS

Security breaches in organizations are leading to huge losses. Here are the top things a firm has lost due to a breach.

Areas Impacted by Security Incidents

Customer records compromised or unavailable

25%

Brand/reputation compromised Loss of customers Theft of soft IP

20

43%

Employee records compromised

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34%

36%

Of security incidents were caused by current employees of an organization.

SOURCE: GISS 2014

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alert

ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENT

company is doing with that data.

“Somewhere in there they should be explicitly listing what they collect from you, or what you’re providing,” Gillula says. “It could be anything from a user name or an e-mail address to ‘We log your IP address and the unique identifier of your smartphone when you sync your device’.”

If you’re not clear on why a device, app or service needs a certain kind of information, be wary. The company isn’t necessarily doing anything suspect with the information, but it should make it clear why they’re collecting certain types of data.

“The bigger concern is who they will share [your data] with,” Gillula says. “Usually they will either say, ‘We share it with third parties but only when they agree to protect your data in the same way that we do,’ or they’ll say they share it with third parties in the course of ‘normal business operations.’”

Gillula says you should beware of companies that state they may share your data with third parties or “partners” so that they can deliver ads or to help develop new products and services. “That is usually a red flag.

They’re giving the information to other parties. From there, who knows where it goes?”

If a company sells or exchanges data that’s not directly connected to anything you have specifically requested, or that’s not specific to the service you’re getting, you may want to be wary, according to Gillula.

Like Gillula, Ruby Zefo, VP, Legal and Corporate Affairs and associate general counsel, chief privacy and

security counsel, Intel, suggests scanning a privacy policy in search of the specific kinds of data being collected and then looking for whether the devices or services share your data with third parties.

“If you’re just relying on the band itself and you never really take a close look at the app or the reports, you may miss what some of the sensors are catching,” Zefo says. “You want to be clear on the information being collected. You also want to see if the information is being transferred somewhere else.”

Zefo suggests looking for statements on how the company protects your data after it is collected.

“I have chosen to allow the device to collect information that I know it’s collecting.

That was a decision I made. I know how it’s being analyzed,” Zefo says. “That’s OK with me, but I don’t want someone else getting that data that shouldn’t have it.”

If you see a company trying to reserve its rights to share data very broadly, be wary.

“It doesn’t mean they’re doing anything nefarious with it,” Zefo says.

“But it makes it harder to determine what exactly they’re doing with it. It may be worth an e-mail to customer service to ask for the details, if it seems like it’s overly broad.”

Kevin Haley, Director, Symantec Security Response, recognizes that today’s privacy policies aren’t user

friendly—but, at this point, it’s the user’s responsibility to protect his own privacy by reading the policies.

“Companies have a responsibility to make clear what they’re doing,” he says. “It shouldn’t be on the user to have to go through those polices. We’re not all lawyers.”

Haley says the No. 1 thing to look for in a privacy policy is whether your data is going to be sold to third parties.

“Is [my data] going to be given to other people? Is it protected [when stored]?

Is this company going to use my data by selling it?”

Haley also says that free apps often pose a more significant risk than paid software: “There’s often a hidden price.”

If you can’t easily find a company’s privacy policy, or if you have to request it, you should be cautious sharing your data, Haley says.

If a company doesn’t make a privacy policy readily available, he adds, “You have to ask ‘What else didn’t they think of?’ I’d be very concerned.” CIO

Al Sacco covers mobile/wireless for CIO.com. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

[ONE LINER:]

The Bitterbug malware points to many traits of a Pakistan-based cyber exploitation effort that is directed against Indian targets.

—FIREEYE LABS & CYBERSQUARED INC’S THREAT CONNECT INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH TEAM TO INDIA TODAY

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CASE STUDY

Efficiency through Process Optimization:

Aviva Life Insurance Shows the Way Harnath Babu, CIO, Aviva Life Insurance, speaks about how his company achieved efficient printing, substantial cost savings, and improved business processes, thanks to Ricoh’s MPS solution.

By Shweta Rao

D

espite the belief held by many business executives that document-driven processes relate only to “back office” functions, research indicates that this conventional wisdom is off the mark and that optimizing document-driven processes presents a significant revenue growth opportunity.

Harnath Babu, CIO at Aviva Life Insurance, however, wanted to break the convention. That’s the reason he decided to optimize document-driven processes at his company and gain better controls.

Since Aviva Life Insurance operates in a highly regulated vertical, it faces a constant requirement for prints of customer communication and contractual documents.

The company had a vast printer network spanning 120 locations with more than 2,800 staff and 24,000 agents. “We had already deployed a different vendor’s MFP solution, but it caused frequent printing-related issues,” Babu says. These, in turn, affected Aviva’s print productivity. Naturally, the company decided to move to a stronger and hassle-free print infrastructure.

Babu then started evaluating vendors who could fulfil Aviva’s print requirements and provide other value additions too.

“We have a corporate excellence process that involves rigorous evaluation right from vendor registration to selection, and Ricoh satisfied all the criteria before being selected as our new MDS partner,” he says.

Ricoh’s team evaluated Aviva Life Insurance’s requirements and recommended a select set of devices along with software solutions, depending upon the printing and document application and usage at each work station. “This setup has helped us maintain uniformity depending on usage as well as volume of work done.

Some of the unique features offered in the solution have also helped us achieve better usability,” he adds.

Getting on Board

Ricoh’s MDS strategy focused on reducing Aviva Life Insurance’s cost per print numbers as well as satisfying end-user needs. “As a large organization, we were skeptical whether an MDS solution will help achieve

Harnath Babu CIO, Aviva Life Insurance our strategic goal of digitizing business processes and automating workflows that stubbornly remain paper-based,” Babu says.

Today, his company’s engagement with Ricoh has driven worker productivity by creating the most efficient and effective document workflow environment.

Since the beginning of the engagement that began three years ago, Ricoh has taken its commitment beyond just consumablebased cost savings by adding complementary

capabilities such as print management, document scanning, and an electronic document workflow software. And the ROI has been more than impressive. Until today, Ricoh has reduced printing costs by 25 percent compared to the earlier solution.

A Bundle of Benefits

Ricoh’s MDS has benefited Aviva Life Insurance in multiple ways. For instance, Ricoh’s Remote software has provided Aviva Life Insurance with activity tracking and analysis capabilities for all printing, photocopying, and scanning. It has also improved the company’s placement of devices to avoid print and scan backlogs.

Similarly, it has also helped Aviva Life Insurance protect network and data security vulnerabilities. “With confidential information moving through workflows everyday, we need to establish a chain of custody for every document,” says Babu.

Also, Aviva cannot risk any business disruption that will result in permanently losing valuable information assets. To this end, Ricoh’s MDS solution today ensures that document capture processes conform to corporate data protection policies. These policies cover scanned documents both at the server and desktop levels to mitigate business risk. The solution also creates searchable digital files, eliminating the labour required to hunt for information manually.

Overall, Ricoh’s MDS has streamlined Aviva Life Insurance’s printing and documentation processes in a cost-effective and efficient manner, proving that some conventional beliefs have to be broken at times.

This case study is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Ricoh India

Rob Enderle

IT MANAGEMENT

Choose Your Vendors Wisely No one should sign a contract with an IT vendor without fully evaluating who they are and what they do.

W

e tend to approach new vendors based on the products they sell and choose vendors largely based on what we believe their products do.

Unfortunately, this leads us to buy solutions that we often never fully deploy or that often fail to meet our expectations. What's more, we rarely conduct a causal analysis of the problems.

I've covered enough failed projects over the years to be able to group most problems into several areas that you can (and should) explore before taking in a new vendor or even continuing with an old one. I've identified six things you likely aren't asking vendors before you make your selection.

Do They Eat Their Own Dog Food?

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Does the vendor use the product itself? This is more than a "Yes" or "No" question. You want to find out how successfully the vendor uses it and if you can independently measure the impact on the vendor's own financial performance.

Most large-scale solutions are sold on the promise that they will decrease costs and increase productivity. This should show up in the financial reports of the firms that have deployed the product—and if the vendor decided to eat its own dog food, it will have deployed first and (should have) done it best, the positive results should be measurable in its financial results. Vendor CIOs are good people to interview about this, as because they typically don't lie well. You can get a sense of whether the vendor's sales team is just making things up. If it is, avoid the product.

I worked for one CEO who argued that he was being customer-focused by driving his greatest products into the 24

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IT MANAGEMENT

market but refusing to deploy them himself. I was in the audit department at the time and knew the real reason was because our own CIOs, at cost, couldn't justify the expense.

If the vendor can't justify using the product, you most certainly can't.

How is Employee Performance Measured?

Most vendors are purging themselves of forced ranking, but it isn't going out easily. An unfortunate present from Jack Welch at GE, it's been suggested that forced ranking is at the core of Microsoft's slide, as it pits employees against each other and makes common goals nearly impossible to accomplish.

Forced ranking also shifts focus from creating the best products and best services to internal political fights over turf, creating silos in organizations that work against their peers and lower the firm's effectiveness.

A few years ago, you didn't have a choice; virtually all of tech used this unfortunate method to measure employee performance. Now, fortunately, you do have a choice.

There are two reasons to avoid firms that use forced ranking.

First, it's the right thing to do for the people working at that firm.

Second, firms that use this practice focus on internal politics, not their customers.

strategy forces a vendor to make its customers happy to reduce churn costs. You choose to have a homogenous shop to get the benefits of simplicity. It's your choice, not the vendor's.

An interesting side comment: Until early last decade, Microsoft used a lock-in strategy and latterly hit a wall with their enterprise efforts. The European Union forced the firm to shift to an interoperability strategy—and, as a result, its enterprise efforts have become far more successful.

Great Place to Work?

The reason for this question is employee and executive churn. The more stable a vendor's workforce, the better it can communicate accurate strategies and road maps. Just as important is the fact that the technicians and salespeople learn about your firm, which makes them more valuable to you. A vendor constantly doing layoffs or otherwise experiencing for churn can't tell the truth about its future because that future is in too much flux.

Within every vendor you'll find people fighting the good fight, trying to make their firm more responsive. It's in your best interest that those people win.

Do They Use A Lock-in Strategy?

One of my most memorable moments while working for a large technology company was asking my vice president of marketing why we were implementing an unethical practice. We were telling government accounts we were going to build something we had defunded. I thought the repercussions would be dire.

"What you don't understand, Rob, is that we sell air," he said. "They have to buy what we sell and they have to pay what we charge for it."

I thought then, as I do now, that this was a going-out-ofbusiness strategy. Sure enough, the firm went into sharp decline around the time of that conversation.

Vendors can use one of two strategies when building their products: Interoperability, where the vendor works to assure that its stuff works in heterogeneous environments, and lock-in, where the vendor assures its stuff just works great with its own things in a homogenous environment.

While there can be advantages to a homogenous shop, there's also an obvious problem: The vendor knows you'll pay whatever it charges and focuses all its efforts on customer acquisition, not retention, since you're locked in.

Eventually, you're screwed—and so is the vendor, because those customers eventually escape. An interoperability

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It may take years to realize the full value for large solutions, but if the vendor constantly changes direction and provides inconsistent support, you'll probably never see that value. More important, you won't be able to trust what the vendor says is coming, because there's no way anyone will actually know.

To answer this question, look at sites such as Glassdoor (and you’ll find out things about the vendor you probably never knew.) Or simply ask the folks who come to present to you how long they've been at the firm.

This is how I found out years ago that Digital Equipment was failing; I started chatting with folks after an impressive presentation, and they started pushing resumes at me.

Suddenly, I knew the firm was toast.

Do They Use Analytics to Make Decisions?

This is especially important for firms that sell analytics products, but I covered that in the first point.

Analytics are the new secret sauce for making more measured, fact-based decisions. More-informed executives tend to make better decisions—but, in any company, executives can be so far behind the technology curve they're effectively obsolete. These executives tend to avoid new tools like the plague—it's simply too big a jump for them to make decisions using a new tool. The end result: The company enters a death spiral but simply doesn't know it yet.

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How a vendor measures employee performance is an indicator of whether you should work with them: Avoid those using forced ranking.

The most important place you want to see this is for customer care, as this analytics lets the vendor understand your problems. Years ago, when Steve Ballmer was still talking to people like me, he pointed out that Microsoft had so many customers that he couldn't understand any of them individually. Analytics can fix problems such as this. You want a firm that has the capability of understanding and responding to your unique needs; without analytics, big firms just can't do this. Since companies tend to grow after they increase their customer base, using analytics even in the midrange is still important.

Do They Measure Executives Using NPS? The Net Promoter Score is a method of measuring true customer satisfaction. This measurement focuses executives to create advocates out of customers, which means they do care what you think and what your experience will be. Having executives measured as much on how ecstatic you are as they are on how much money they get from you should be a requirement of any vendor you select. Money is their benefit, but satisfaction is yours.

fight, trying to make their firm more responsive. It's in your best interest that those people win over those who just want to wring as much money out of you as they can.

If you adopt the criteria outline here, you'll do your part to not only make IT vendors stronger. You'll also make your own company a better, more successful place to work as your own executives see that these practices are the best path for their own careers. Let's call this our effort to make the world a better place, one vendor at a time. CIO

Making the World a Better Place, One Vendor at a Time

Endline: Rob Enderle writes on emerging technology, security, and Linux.

Within every vendor you'll find people fighting the good

Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Mike Elgan

SOCIAL MEDIA

AHuman Experiment?

Facebook and OKCupid experiment on users. So what's wrong with that?

I

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n a post on his company's blog this week, OKCupid co-founder Christian Rudder openly boasted, "We experiment on human beings!"

Rudder's post described a few of the experiments that the dating website had carried out. In one, OKCupid told people that they would be good matches with certain other people even though the site's algorithms had determined that they would be bad matches. That's right: The company deliberately lied to its users. OKCupid wanted to see if people liked each other because they have the capacity to make up their own minds about who they like, or if they like each other because OKCupid tells them they should like each other.

The OKCupid post was in part a response to controversy over a recently discovered Facebook experiment, the results of which were published in an academic journal. Facebook wanted to see if people would post more negative posts if their own News Feeds had more negative posts from their friends.

In the experiment, Facebook removed some posts by family and friends because they were positive. The experiment involved deliberately making people sadder by censoring friends' more uplifting and positive posts.

Don't like this kind of manipulation? Here's Rudder's response: "Guess what, everybody: If you use the Internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That's how websites work."

What's Wrong Here?

Rudder's "everyone is doing it" rationalization for experimenting on users makes it clear that he doesn't understand the difference between what OKCupid and

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Facebook are doing, and what other sites that conduct A/B tests of different options are doing.

The difference is that OKCupid and Facebook are potentially changing, damaging or affecting the real relationships of real people. They are manipulating the happiness of people on purpose.

These companies might argue that this damage to the mood and relationships of people is small to the point of being inconsequential. But what makes them think it's OK to deliberately do any damage at all?

The other glaring problem with these social science experiments is that the subjects, you and me, don't know they are participating.

Yes, I'm sure company lawyers can argue in court that the Terms of Service that everyone agreed to (but almost nobody reads) gives OKCupid and Facebook the right to do everything they do. And I'm sure the sites believe that they're working so hard and investing so much to provide free services that users owe them big time, and that makes it all OK. Imagine a splash screen that pops up each month on these sites that says: "Hi. Just wanted to make sure you're aware that we do experiments on people, and we might do experiments on you. We might lie to you, meddle in your relationships and make you feel bad, just to see what you'll do."

No, you can't imagine it. The reason is that the business models of sites like OKCupid and Facebook are based on the assumption of user ignorance.

which is no longer called Edgerank, is the product of thousands of social experiments—testing and tweaking and checking and refining until everyone is happy.

The result of those experiments is that Facebook changes your relationships. For example, let's say you follow 20 friends from high school. You feel confident that by following them—and by them following you—that you have a reliable social connection to these people that replaces phone calls, e-mails and other forms of communication.

Let's say you have a good friend named Brian who doesn't post a lot of personal stuff. And you have another friend, Sophia, who is someone you don't care about but who is very active and posts funny stuff every day. After a period of several months during which you barely interact with Brian but occasionally like and comment on Sophia's posts, Facebook decides to cut Brian's posts out of your News Feed while maintaining the steady stream of Sophia posts. Facebook boldly ends your relationship with Brian,

I'd love to see the founders of social sites write blog posts that brag: "We DON'T experiment on human beings."

Why OKCupid and Facebook Think it's OK The OKCupid admission and the revelations about the Facebook research were shocking to the public because we weren't aware of the evolving mindset behind social websites. No doubt the OKCupid people and the Facebook people arrived at their coldly cynical view of users as lab rats via a long, evolutionary slippery slope.

Let's imagine the process with Facebook. Zuckerberg drops out of Harvard, moves to Silicon Valley, gets funded and starts building Facebook into a social network. Zuck and the guys want to make Facebook super appealing, but they notice a disconnect in human reason, a bias that is leading heavy Facebook users to be unhappy.

You see, people want to follow and share and post a lot, and Facebook wants users to be active. But when everybody posts a lot, the incoming streams are overwhelming, and that makes Facebook users unhappy. What to do?

The solution is to use software algorithms to selectively choose which posts to let through and which to hold back.

But what criteria do you use? Facebook's current algorithm,

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someone you care about. When Brian posts an emotional item about the birth of his child, you don't see it because Facebook has eliminated your connection to Brian.

And don't get me started on OKCupid's algorithms and how they could affect the outcome of people's lives.

Not only do both companies experiment all the time; their experiments make huge changes to users' relationships.

The Real Danger You might think that the real problem is that social networks that lie to people, manipulate their relationships and regularly perform experiments on their users are succeeding.

For example, when Facebook issued its financial report last month, it said revenue rose 61 percent to $2.91 billion (about Rs 175,000 crore), up from $1.81 billion in the same quarter a year ago. The company's stock soared after the report came out.

Twitter, which is currently a straightforward, honest, non-manipulative social network, has apparently seen the error of its ways and is seriously considering the Facebook path to financial success.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said in an interview this week that he "wouldn't rule out any kind of experiment we might be running there around algorithmically curated experiences or otherwise."

No, the real problem is that OKCupid and Facebook may

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While Twitter may follow Facebook down the rabbit hole of user manipulation, there are still social networks where what you see is what you get—messaging apps.

take action based on the results of their research. In both cases, the companies say they're experimenting in order to improve their service.

In the case of OKCupid, the company found that connecting people who are incompatible ends up working out better than it thought. So based on that result, in the future it may match up more people it has identified as incompatible.

In the case of Facebook, it did find that mood is contagious. So maybe it will "improve" Facebook in the future to build in a bias for positive, happy posts in order to make users happier with Facebook than they are with networks that don't filter based on positivity.

What's the Solution?

While Twitter may follow Facebook down the rabbit hole of user manipulation, there is a category of "social network" where what you see is what you get—namely, messaging apps.

When you send a message via, say, WhatsApp or Snapchat or any of the dozens of new apps that have emerged recently, the other person gets it. WhatsApp and Snapchat don't have algorithms that choose to not deliver most of your messages.

They don't try to make you happy or sad or connect you with

incompatible people to see what happens. They just deliver your communication, plain and simple.

I suspect that's one of the reasons younger users are increasingly embracing these alternatives to the big social networks. They're straightforward and honest and do what they appear to do, rather than manipulating everything behind the scenes.

Still, I'd love to see at least one major social site embrace honesty and respect for users as a core principle. That would mean no lying to users, no doing experiments on them without their clear knowledge, and delivering by default all of the posts of the people they follow.

In other words, I'd love to see the founders of social sites write blog posts that brag: "We DON'T experiment on human beings." Wouldn't that be nice? CIO

Mike Elgan writes about technology and tech culture. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Enterprise Mobility Survey 2014 The CIO Enterprise Mobility Survey 2014 surveyed IT leaders from Indian enterprises across industry sectors to understand how mobility is causing a significant shift in strategy.

Enhancing employee productivity and collaboration and improving customer service are among the top business goals that CIOs hope to achieve with mobility initiatives. However, sales is the largest line of business that has deployed mobile applications, followed by customer service.

Top 5 Business Goals for Enterprise Mobility Initiatives

57% Enhance employee productivity

and collaboration 46% Improve customer service 30% Increase sales and revenues 25% Create competitive

differentiation 10% Increase collaboration with

external partners

Android BlackBerry

29%

13%

43% 45%

iOS Windows Hybrid or multiple OS 5% 6% Others 2% 5I%

24% 12.5% 20%

62.5%

51%

37%

Symbian

Current

Planned

62.5% of organizations’ mobile strategies currently support the Android platform.

63%

End-Point Security

59%

Device Management

40%

Integration Across Platforms

40%

Legacy Integration

19%

Access to Talent for Managing

End-point security is the biggest issue while dealing with enterprise mobility, whereas 59% see device management as the challenge.

Marketing

30%

Human Resources

26%

Field Service

Sales

52%

36%

Customer Service

41%

Sales is the largest LoB that has deployed mobile apps.

POWERED BY

33%

of CIOs have already deployed mobile security practices.

74%

71%

are either planning or piloting enterprise mobile infrastructure strategy and plan.

are either planning or piloting mobile application strategy and plan.

Nothing at the moment

30%

Planning

40%

Evaluating/Piloting Deployed

9%

18% 12%

Delivering unified communications for mobile

13% 14% 44%

Utilizing cloud services for delivery of applications to any mobile device

29%

Only 9% of CIOs said that they will not allow mobile devices into the corporate network.

Nothing at the moment

Planning

Evaluating/Piloting

Deployed

This survey is brought to you by IDG Services in association with IBM and Samsung

CIOs Who Serve on Boards Sharpen Their Business Skills Relatively few CIOs sit on external corporate boards. But those who do come back to their day jobs with personal and professional insights that boost their careers—and give their home companies a competitive edge.

By Kim S. Nash

Relatively few CIOs sit on external corporate boards.

But those who do come back to their day jobs with personal and professional insights that boost their careers—and give their home companies a competitive edge.

Elite CIOs who serve on boards witness situations they might not otherwise see, never mind shape, which makes those execs more valuable. They assess acquisition targets, evaluate successors to the CEO or help take a company private. Discussions at board meetings can spark ideas for new products and services or provide market intelligence about competitors. Because directors sit above the management team, CIOs who serve on boards may participate in private conversations with external auditors that even the Reader ROI: CEO is barred from. Every meeting, they’re privy to Why it’s important to put a candid accounts of successes and failures from fellow price to your data directors, learning what works and what doesn’t in Different methods to evaluate the value of data business situations as diverse as massive cost-cutting projects and crisis management. ServiceMaster, Nissan How to determine which data to safeguard and Lennox International.

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Time on a board naturally makes a CIO more well-rounded.

But it also builds skills in influencing and guiding, because directors should be wise advisers.

They have to tamp down a habit of hands-on management and instead ask sharp questions and relay experiences. Tyco, Avnet and other companies use board involvement as a professional development tool. “I want to develop and give back,” says Tyco CIO John Repko. “And gain.”

Some companies, however, ban top execs from joining boards, concerned they will be distracted from their main job.

After all, a board may meet 12 or 15 times per year, and each meeting requires preparation.

It’s a serious commitment.

But this type of prohibition is shortsighted, Goodspeed says. Companies with such rules limit your growth, as well as their own, she says. “I would ask myself: Do I really want to be there?” Goodspeed typically made it a condition in her CIO employment terms that she could do board work.

Still, a CIO interested in serving must make a straightup business case to her CEO and her own board, which must approve the move, says Mahvash Yazdi, president of Feasible Management Consulting. They want to know what the company will get out of your extracurricular activity, Yazdi says.

She went through the exercise when, during her long tenure as CIO of Edison International (which ended in 2012), she served as a director at Apria Healthcare Group from 2006 to 2008. “CEOs usually don’t want their CIOs to serve on outside boards,” she 34

Rajat Sharma, president–IT, Atul says a CIO should have the ability to create and manage change.

Be Business Savvy, Get On the Board Ability to manage people, bring in change, and take substantial interest in business processes are few things a CIO needs to make it to the board.

There was a time when the world of a CIO revolved around the four walls of the IT department. Engrossed by the complexities of the ever-changing technology, CIOs found it extremely difficult to jump to opportunities that would help them understand business functions better and there by reserve a place on the board.

Earlier CIOs dealt with 0s and 1s. But things have changed over the years. A lot of CIOs today are bold enough to harbor the ambition of visualizing themselves on the board of their enterprise.

In the contemporary world, the advantages that technology can provide to an enterprise cannot be sidelined. As big data and analytics come on to the forefront, and customer experience and satisfaction is of prime importance, the role of CIO extends beyond the limitations of an IT department. This has made it possible for CIOs to become customercentric and adapt to business roles.

But every leader, be it a CIO or any other executive, must possess specific skills to make it to a company’s board.

“In order to find a place on the board, a CIO should have the ability to create and manage change. A CIO should also be business savvy and at the same time have a visionary outlook coupled with constant and consistent customer focus,” says Rajat Sharma, president–IT, Atul.

The term ‘managing’ gathers a lot of importance when we talk about a business role which deals with taking a holistic view of an enterprise and leading it from the front.

“The major leadership skills that are needed to thrive on a board—managing people, harboring the ability to market ideas, and having skills that can quickly help align and supplement IT with business,” Sharma says.

The board looks out for business efficiencies. But, there is one edge which a CIO has, which no other leadership role is exposed to and that is the ability to meticulously understand how a business is performing.

“There is no portfolio apart from that of a CIO which has an all-round and in-depth knowledge of business and its performance statistics,” says Sharma.

—By Ishan Bhattacharya

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says. “You have to build a lot of credibility for a CEO to agree.”

Do Push Your Company Ahead Nothing impresses a CEO more than seeing one of his leaders improve the company’s competitive position. With board experience, a CIO can find many savvy ways to do that, says Chris Hjelm, CIO of the $98.4 billion (about Rs 590,400 crore) Kroger grocery chain. Hjelm was a director at RehabCare, a rehabilitation services company, from 2007 until 2011, when Kindred Healthcare bought it. He then joined Kindred’s board.

Hjelm learned “an enormous amount” about how the healthcare industry works through his two board stints, he says, which helps Kroger in various ways.

For example, he shares information about healthcare and regulatory trends when Kroger’s senior executives discuss what insurance and wellness programs to offer the supermarket’s 375,000 employees.

Also, Kroger, which runs more than 2,000 pharmacies inside its 2,640 supermarkets, as well as some walk-in clinics, may come up with ways to piggyback on the trend toward treating chronicbut-controllable conditions at the patient’s home, Hjelm says.

The conversations get him thinking about new lines of revenue, he says. He won’t say exactly what, and nothing is imminent. But as a board member, “I sit in a different world and experience that world and it turns a lightbulb on,” he says. “There may be a connection to a strategy in

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a business that could grow, a service we don’t provide today.”

Sitting on boards in industries serving your customer base provides insight into your customers’ needs, says Virginia Gambale, managing partner at Azimuth Partners, which advises companies on techenabled innovation and growth strategies. She’s also a board leadership fellow at the National Association for Corporate Directors (NACD), teaching master classes to directors.

Getting close to customers through a board can also reveal how they handle market pressures, which might, in turn, give you ideas for products or services that your competitors don’t provide, Gambale says. “You can learn how to disintermediate.”

During Repko’s 2011-2013 stint on the board of BioClinica, a clinical trials services company, he gained market intelligence about the drug business that helped him as then-CIO of Covance, which is also in the clinical trials business.

Although they didn’t compete head-on all the time, both Covance and BioClinica kept tabs on the activities of pharmaceutical companies.

He was able to bring some information discussed at BioClinica board meetings back to Covance, such as general talk about what a drugmaker like AstraZeneca was looking for in upcoming clinical trials, he says. “To the extent it was not material and it was public information, I could use that as CIO of Covance. It was very helpful.”

Directors can carefully take ideas from a board to their employers or to another

board, Gambale says, so long as the concepts are public information. The key is to uphold confidentiality agreements signed as a director.

Once a project, product, service or plan is public, of course, anyone can discuss it. “You can’t give away the secret sauce about how it gets

is a director, was considering how to provide connectivity to employees and customers.

Because she had previously served on a board in the telecom industry, she had heard of a new technology: Broadband connectivity via satellite.

Without naming names, she brought that idea (which was

Getting close to customers through a board can also reveal how they handle market pressures, which might, in turn, give you ideas for products or services that your competitors don’t provide done, but you can talk about it,” she says. But even when information is private, she says, you can make use of it by asking astute questions of your own team “in a way that opens up their thought processes.”

For example, she might ask, “If we were to leapfrog so-andso, what would leapfrogging look like?” That style of brainstorming is especially effective for IT groups, says Gambale, former CIO at Bankers Trust and Merrill Lynch.

Gambale recalls that a few years ago JetBlue, where she

public information) back to JetBlue. “You can handle it professionally, in keeping with corporate governance guidelines, and it’s bilaterally beneficial,” she says.

JetBlue last year launched its own satellite for in-flight WiFi, claiming its system is eight times faster than those of other commercial airlines.

“Had I not had that experience in the telecom space, I would not have been able to help guide my [JetBlue] team,” she says.

“This changed everything.”

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Vijay Sethi, CIO and VP-IS and HR, Hero MotoCorp, says board participation can alter a CIO’s business perspective.

Steal Good Ideas Directors—as purveyors of wisdom who have promised to act in the best interests of shareholders—are expected to talk honestly about what they’ve seen and done in their business lives.

Say management is contemplating investing heavily in services from one IT vendor or another. Or maybe the company is figuring out how to respond to a crisis, such as a major data breach.

The 10 or 12 executives in the boardroom may have their own war stories and will discuss strategy and tactics, says Peter Gleason, CFO and managing director of NACD. And that’s warts and all, he says. “You won’t see sharing like that at a conference or in social circles.

But in a boardroom, you will.”

Part of what Steve Phillips, CIO of $25.5 billion (about Rs 153,000 crore) technology distributor Avnet, finds useful about board discussions is the 50,000-foot view of topics such as mobility and risk management.

Phillips is chairman of the board of Wick Communications, a $50 million (about Rs 300 crore) community news company that is managing the shift from print to online products. Seeing how vital mobile systems are to Wick spurred Phillips to step up Avnet’s efforts to provide mobile systems and mobileenabled content to its business customers. “It’d been on my mind for some time, but what I learned at Wick helped sharpen it,” he says.

Likewise, the board’s holistic view of risk management drove home important points.

“When you have an explicit 36

CIOs On Board Broaden Business

CIOs who get involved at the board level expand their business outlook and undergo a rich learning experience.

Hordes of CIOs are moving out of the backroom and making steady strides towards the front office. Fired by a keen desire to elevate their position in the organizational pyramid, CIOs are striving to work across the entire mosaic of business. They are sniffing out opportunities to get closely involved with the execution of business.

Joining the board is one such career defining opportunity. Not only does it broaden the horizons of a CIO but it also acquaints one with various aspects of business. It provides a CIO an opportunity to chisel his skillsets and be business savvy by looking at business execution from close quarters.

“Board level participation can alter the business perspective of a CIO,” says Vijay Sethi, CIO and VP-IS and HR, Hero MotoCorp. When Sethi gained access to the corporate board at HMCMM, he went through an enriching experience.

Avinash Arora, director-Supply Chain Management, India, New Holland Tractors spent time in the corporate core management team of the company (MNCs don’t have a board) and reflects

discussion as a board about things that could go wrong and [their] potential impact on the business, you think strategically indeed,” he says. Managing risk has always been important to Avnet, he says, “but my board experience reinforces that sense of priority.” Avnet has recently invested more in disaster recovery and cybersecurity partly as a result of his board experience, he says.

You’re more likely to reap business benefits if the company whose board you’re

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on mirrors your own company in certain ways, Yazdi says. For example, key issues for a utility company like Edison are supply chain and logistics. The same is true at Apria Healthcare, which provides home respiratory services. Also, both are in highly regulated industries.

Yazdi had notable experience in operations and regulatory matters as Edison’s CIO, but she gained insights into how a company in a very different industry handled such issues.

Hjelm says Kindred

Healthcare is similar to Kroger in key ways: Both have a very large workforce and a keen interest in improving connections with consumers. He has observed how Kindred has managed an internal cost-savings project while Kroger, too, is running a similar initiative. He took away some tips on how to structure the team and communicate progress to the rest of the company.

Linda Goodspeed has honed a system for sharing ideas among the companies she’s involved with. She

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the same opinion. “Being a part of the core management team helped me identify the levers of business growth.

I learnt what is important to business and how business performance can be enhanced by applying technology solutions,” he says.

The learning Arora imbibed during this stint helped him nurture critical business ideas. “I have employed cloud applications to provide cost effective solutions to business and expanded our reach to customers,” he says.

Moving to the board position helps a CIO shed the ROI oriented myopic view of business decisions. “One needs to analyze each proposal not just on traditional ROI / NPV/ Business value parameters but way beyond including sustainability,” says Sethi.

Sethi’s participation at the board level made him realise the fact that as a board member there are so many responsibilities that go beyond being a business function head. “As a board member it is about the value enhancement of all stakeholders, corporate governance, compliance and risk management, and performance evaluation of the organization as a whole rather than individual departments,” he says.

Joining the board gives the CIO a chance to hobnob with the industry stalwarts. It exposes them to the working styles of one of the best and the sharpest minds in the business world. CIOs can be right in the middle of the execution of business and acquire a rich learning from the cross pollination of ideas.

“Independent directors on the board bring a lot of varied experience and I find interacting with them as a great learning experience. Overall it has made me a more holistic professional,” Sethi says.

—Sneha Jha

is a director at AutoZone, Columbus McKinnon and American Electric Power, boards she also served during her long career as a CIO. For example, American Electric is a prime target for hacking and terrorism and, as a result, has some sophisticated enterprise risk management practices that it’s willing to share.

When Goodspeed thought AutoZone or Columbus McKinnon might find the practices useful, she broached the topic with the utility. Then

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she sat in on a conference call while managers at the companies talked. She brokered the exchange but didn’t lead it.

Other times, she made sure to get written permission to share information. “Confidentiality is extremely important. I’m very careful,” she says.

CIO as MVP Board experience teaches new skills and offers opportunities to enhance talents a CIO might already have but doesn’t often get to use as technology leader.

Goodspeed, for example, kept her finance knowledge fresh because, on a board, you are immersed in the topic every meeting, she says.

“You talk about sales and growth and what worked and what happened.”

That’s frontline experience translatable to your own company. You can contribute more intelligently and share more unique information than you might have otherwise.

“You can participate in those discussions from a perspective other than IT,” she says. “This assisted with my confidence.”

It’s the same for Hjelm.

Board experience makes him more comfortable as a business executive, he says.

For Phillips, being on the board of a much smaller company exposes him to the inner workings of business that he doesn’t see in-depth at Avnet.

That includes cash management and sales-incentive programs.

As a result, he’s a stronger part of Avnet’s eight-member executive board, he says. He got a big vote of confidence last year from Avnet CEO Rick Hamada, who put Phillips in charge of the company’s global operational excellence team. The group runs special projects to improve efficiency at the company. For example, the team recently increased shipping capacity by 15 percent at one warehouse and reduced worker footsteps at another site by 3 million steps per year. “He can see I can take on broader management,” Phillips says.

Directors get a broad view of a company, more expansive than that of even the smartest leader of a functional area, Gleason says, even if that

functional area that touches every facet of a company, as IT does. As a CIO, you may have helped a business unit use technology to be more efficient, but you probably don’t fully understand the competitive problems the unit faces, he says.

As much as Kroger recognizes the benefits of its senior executives holding board seats, the company limits each person to one directorship at a public company, although Kroger execs can serve on private and nonprofit boards, too.

The three boards Goodspeed belongs to are “an insane amount of work,” she acknowledges. When she was CIO at ServiceMaster, the company asked her to step down from one, “which was fair,” she says. As it happens, other changes were happening at ServiceMaster at the time, so she decided to retire and remain on all three boards.

One of the most difficult aspects of being a firsttime director is pulling out of management mode and learning how to ask questions and use influence. Yazdi, the management consultant, remembers the transition as a gradual one for her, recognizing the boundary between management, as a CIO, and governance, as a director. Ultimately, it helped her avoid micromanaging her IT staff, she says.

It isn’t easy to make that change, which is why NACD offers a class in it. As a director you must provide perspective, Gleason says, “but you’re not making the decisions.”

You’re also in for some new experiences. Repko learned

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CIO Career

the nitty-gritty of taking a company private when BioClinica was sold to a private equity firm last year in a $123 million deal. He had gotten his board seat because Covance owned 15 percent of BioClinica and had the right to appoint up to three directors.

Repko was recused from early discussions of the sale because of Covance’s ownership stake—it would have been a conflict of interest. After the deal was approved by a smaller group of BioClinica directors, however, he joined weekly discussions to map out how the transaction would unfold.

“There was a shareholder lawsuit and everything,” he

CFO or CEO on some of the best practices out there,” she says.

Your First Board Seat There’s no one right way to find your first board seat.

Linda Goodspeed, former CIO of ServiceMaster, Nissan and Lennox International, got her first directorship through a recruiter. So did Kroger CIO Chris Hjelm. Steve Phillips, CIO of Avnet, and Mahvash Yazdi, former CIO of Edison International, got theirs through networking. Some CIO board appointments are strategic placements by the CIO’s own company. Wal-Mart CIO Karenann Terrell, for example, was appointed to the

to look at candidates who know how to profit from data and keep IT safe. But boards sometimes hesitate to fill a seat with a CIO. There’s a view that many CIOs aren’t board material, says John Repko, CIO of Tyco. He’s looking for a board seat now, interested in a $2 billion to $3 billion (about Rs 12,000 crore to 18,000 crore) services company. That would be bigger than his first board, but not too big.

One technique he uses to avoid being branded as “an IT guy” is to get his name out through public speaking--but carefully. “I never speak at conferences on IT,” he says.

Security, quality, and talent

Although boards know they need more technology expertise, seats for CIOs are scarce. Digital disruption and embarrassing security problems are forcing boards to look at candidates who know how keep IT safe says. (The suit was dismissed.)

“Now I can say I have that experience behind me.”

Phillips, meanwhile, oversaw the hiring of a CEO when Wick Communications’ top executive left. While on the Apria board, Yazdi went through the due diligence process of an acquisition. Apria’s board also explored different ways to finance a major transaction.

“You bring back ideas for the 38

board of Yihaodian, an online grocery store in China of which Wal-Mart is majority owner.

Although boards know they need more technology expertise, seats for CIOs are scarce, says Peter Gleason, CFO and managing director of the National Association for Corporate Directors. Dual forces of digital disruption and embarrassing security problems are forcing boards

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management carry more cachet, he says.

While plenty of retired CEOs and CFOs fill board seats, retired CIOs don’t have as long a shelf-life, Gleason says.

They lose relevance because technology moves too quickly.

Plus, some boards reason that if they need technology questions answered, they can hire a consultant to come in and advise them during a meeting

or two, he says, rather than devote a precious full-time seat to a CIO. Nonetheless, some CIOs do get director offers. If you find yourself debating whether to take a board position, CIOs who have been there have some advice. First, review all of the company’s major financial documents, such as annual and quarterly reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Should you join the board, these documents will bear your signature vouching for them.

Then read the company’s proxy statement, which details board activities, how directors participate and what they are paid. You may also want to talk to the company’s external auditor to get a feel for how the board conducts itself and manages finances, Goodspeed says. Also read through any pending lawsuits. “You want to know you’re joining a credible board,” she says.

Yazdi suggests interviewing existing directors to ass`ess fit-culture, style and ethics. Ask directors to respond to different scenarios, she advises. “Find out: Is it a cutthroat board? A very disciplined board? One that values diversity? Are they good listeners?”

Finally, be prepared for continuous learning, Goodspeed says. “Learn all you can all the time regarding the company and the environment they live in,” she says. “You owe it to the company and shareholders.” CIO

With inputs from Ishan Bhattacharya and Sneha Jha Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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9/18/2014 5:09:29 PM

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TECH

SPOTLIGHTS ANALYTICS BIG DATA CLOUD DATACENTERS ENTERPRISE APPS INTERNET OF THINGS MOBILE SOCIAL SECURITY

CHENNAI, DECEMBER 2014

Match Made with

Analytics

Matriomony.com uses big data analytics to get a better understanding of its customers, figure out the most appropriate way to engage with them, and create a better user experience.

BY S N E H A J H A

Case File | Matriomony.com

G

one are the days when all-knowing aunts were pressed into service to seal suitable alliances for eligible bachelors and spinsters.

When it comes to matchmaking, online is the way to go. With hordes of people taking the plunge into Internetarranged marriages, India’s e-matrimony business is poised to grow to Rs 1,500 crore by 2017, according to ASSOCHAM. Matrimony.com owns a huge chunk of the cyber matchmaking pie market. With brands BharatMatrimony. com, CommunityMatrimony.com EliteMatrimony.com, MatrimonyGifts.com, Tambulya.com, and new business models like AssistedMatrimony.com, the Chennai-based Internet company is nearly twice the size of all of its Indian competition put together.

“We cater to a large number of online matrimonial search subscribers. We have about 8,000 members registering every day, and that number’s been swelling with every passing day. We have about 1,500 marriages reported in a day,” says J.K. Iyer, chief strategy and analytics officer, Matrimony. com. It has in subscribers in nearly 5,000 Indian cities, and NRIs from almost 150 nations. The Brand Trust Report 2014 ranked it as India’s most trusted matrimony brand.

All those members meant that Matrimony.com was sitting on a ton of data, and Iyer wanted to mine it with analytics.

The Hitch

Big data analytics unearthed that women preferred non-smokers, frequent smokers, and then social smokers—in that order. It was a counterintuitive revelation. Until then executives at Matrimony.com believed that women preferred non-smokers, social smokers, and then frequent smokers.

The bedrock of successful cyber matchmaking is communication; communication between Matrimony.com and its members, and between members themselves. One of its communication goals is to motivate members to complete their profiles. Another is telling members how to improve responses to a prospect.

To do this, Matrimony.com interacts with its subscribers through multiple channels. These include a 2,000-plus telesales team, a customer support team that handles 3 lakh calls a day, its feet on the street, via SMS, and e-mailers, and using its website, its mobile site and 180-plus brick and mortar offices.

But as Matrimony.com grew, communications started to take

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place in silos. It was a knotty affair, for example, to pull out the communication history of a single customer across e-mails, telesales, SMS, customer support, feet on street, and retail stores, among others.

“Our communications are multi-channel and multiwave. Not all our members will respond at the same time or respond to one channel. So, communications need to be multi-stage. If we now add other communication agenda, the communication agenda becomes very complex,” says Iyer.

The second big ask was analytics. “We wanted to know who responded to our campaigns, and which members sent out alliance requests. We also wanted to garner deeper insights from who married who. Such intelligence will be extremely useful in delivering our brand’s core promise: ‘Find someone who cares for what you love’, and, of course, the ultimate goal of happy marriages,” says Iyer.

Analytics could also help tweak the profile form Matrimony.com asks its users to fill. Filling the profile form is critical point in the marriage hunt process. Subscribers sift through a host of profiles

before selecting a suitable candidate. That makes profile information crucial. The profile form is quite comprehensive, comprising several mandatory and non-mandatory fields.

“We keep a some fields non-mandatory at the time of registration since several questions require time to fill. The ‘about me’ field, for example. The key is to understand which of the mandatory and nonREAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

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mandatory fields are critical for alliance generation,” says Iyer.

Matrimony.com figured it could use big data analytics to advise customers what fields have strong correlation with alliance interest generation and how they should fill them.

Iyer decided to use big data and analytics to help Matrimony.com analyze its vast troves of data to create meaningful campaigns and make using the site a more rewarding experience. And he should know how: For about 15 years, Iyer has been teaching marketing analytics to consulting firms across the globe.

Right Click Matrimony.com’s big data analytics journey commenced about 18 months ago. Iyer started by creating an internal vision documents around analytics and campaign management.

In the first quarter of 2013, he conceptualized big data analytics project.

His first job was to zero in on a solution that met three criteria. He wanted a solution that offered the best integrated marketing communication suite in terms of its ability to integrate multiple campaign sources such as Web, telesales, e-mail, SMS, etcetera, and was capable of handling diverse data sources, and handle scale. The solution also needed to include a robust analytics that could handle very large and diverse data types. His final criteria was a great implementation partner.

Work quickly got underway and in the first phase, Matrimony.com deployed the analytics solutions in April of 2014.

Campaign management tools are now being implemented in phases across all channels.

Clearly, the benefits are worth all the effort Iyer and his team put in. The project, says Iyer, achieved what it set out to do: Give the company insights into subscriber preferences.

“In a male subscriber’s profile, we have a field that captures information about his smoking habits with three options: Non-smoker, social smoker, and frequent smoker. The big data analytics tool has helped us re-evaluate our understanding of how women reacted to this information,” he says.

What big data analytics unearthed was that women preferred non-smokers, frequent smokers, and then social smokers, in that 42

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“Thanks to anaytics, alliance interests have shown early rises of about 5 percent.”

J.K. Iyer, Chief Strategy and Analytics Officer, Matrimony.com

order. It was a counterintuitive revelation.

Until then, executives at Matrimony.com believed that women preferred non-smokers, social smokers, and then frequent smokers.

Iyer shares another example. “We analyzed volumes of text data and figured that women are most interested when men write about their hobbies—and least when they write about their expectations. That’s extremely crucial intelligence about what should be included in profile descriptions,” he says.

The organization’s national presence and the diversity of its customer’s socio-economic profile calls for segmentation. This can ensure that its sales goals are better met through targeted campaigns and offers. “Campaigns are not just about communication—but also about determining, through analytics, what product would suit them and when,” says Iyer.

The online match maker is now equipped with a much better understanding of its members. Now it’s bettered armed to use the right products, platforms, and campaigns to engage with them.

“We have reduced three fields from the profile information form. Our alliance interests have shown early rises by at least 5 percent. Similarly, there are signs that sales have grown at least by 8 percent in the last two weeks of modifications and changes. These results are from very recent improvements.

Over time, we expect most key metrics to move up significantly. That also means smoother member-to-member interactions and very good traction in alliance interests —all in all more happy marriages,” says Iyer. CIO Sneha Jha is special correspondent. Send feedback to sneha_jha@idgindia.com

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With big data being one of the main drivers of IT spending, a strong CIOCMO relationship is a must.

BIG DATA IS THE COMMON DENOMINATOR The lines between IT and marketing are blurring in the age of digital marketing. For that reason, it’s more important than ever that CIOs and CMO communicate consistently and effectively. To examine this evolving relationship as it pertains to big data in particular, CIO. com partnered with CMO.com to produce this report.

It’s a sign of the times that CMOs now spend more on technology than any corporate officer outside the CIO’s office. And the biggest driver of that tech spending is big data, which accounts for 37 percent of the marketing technology budget, according to member-based advisory group CEB. Yet, as with many technology projects, CIOs and CMOs may not always see eye to eye on big data strategy and tactics. According to a recent survey of more than 1,100 senior marketing and IT executives by Accenture, 40 percent of CMOs believe their company’s IT team doesn’t

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By Stephanie Overby

Reader ROI: Why CIO-CMOs partnership is crucial for big data projects What roles should CIOs and CMOs play in big data projects How can CIOs guide CMOs on big data requirements

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understand the urgency of integrating new data sources into campaigns to address market conditions, while 43 percent of CIOs say that marketing requirements and priorities change too often for them to keep up.

Yet a strong partnership between IT and marketing is crucial if big data and analytics are to succeed. CMOs may increasingly take the lead on big data projects, but CIOs are the key to implementing, maintaining and scaling these solutions. “Marketing is the driver of the big data car,” says Todd Merry, CMO of global hospitality and food service company Delaware North, “but it doesn’t go anywhere without IT.” Even more so than with other tech projects, CIOs and CMOs need each other to deliver actionable insight with big data and emerging data collection and analytics tools. “The CIO brings the expertise in determining the quality of the data, as well as the process of acquiring and analyzing it. The CMO brings the expertise of how the data can be used to drive business

data is actionable and what they need from each other to get big data right.

Defining the Big Data Roles When it comes to analytics, it’s important that the CIO and the CMO explicitly agree on “who owns the initiatives, the role each leader will take on, and when and how they are expected to work together,” says Chris Curran, chief technologist for PwC’s advisory practice.

At biotech company Biogen Idec, IT and marketing are exploring ways in which they can bring together wearable devices, patient relationship management and big data to understand not just the broad patient population, but the individual patient.

“This can help us understand not only how patients treat their diseases differently, but also how they respond to treatment differently both physiologically and as a function of genetics,” says Greg Meyers, Biogen Idec’s VP-IT. This is meaningful not only how we market our products by

A strong partnership between IT and marketing is crucial if big data is to succeed. CMOs may increasingly take the lead on big data projects, but CIOs are the key to implementing these solutions. decisions. The CIO brings the knowledge of what’s possible—or could soon be possible—through technology, while the CMO pushes IT further by asking the right questions, giving them the right ideas, and pushing them to find a way,” says Anne Park Hopkins, senior client partner in Korn Ferry’s CIO Practice. “This responsibility to leverage data to drive the business strategy and business decisions, however, is shared.”

We talked to a diverse group of CMOs and CIOs about how they work together to transform marketing with big data and analytics tools, how they ensure that big 44

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how we research both current and future therapies.”

To do that, both marketing and IT must be clear about what each brings to the table.

“In my view big data/advanced analytics is a three-legged stool,” says Meyers, who also spent a good portion of his career in marketing. The first is math—linear algebra, calculus, discrete math, and statistics.

IT and marketing must build such skills jointly. The second leg is computer science.

“Many of the technologies now available to us like Hadoop/Map-Reduce and NoSQL databases are inaccessible without some

hard-core coding,” says Meyers. “These skills are often already in IT.” The third is the contextual understanding of the business, “While IT is getting better at being embedded into the business, for a marketing project its crucial marketing, not IT, is clear on formulating the questions or hypotheses it is trying to uncover with analytics and what decisions will be made with the answers,” Meyers says.

At Delaware North, IT makes sure all analytical capabilities work as advertised and provides the infrastructure, tools and technical acumen necessary for marketers to accomplish their big data an analytics goals and objectives, says CIO Kevin Quinlivan. But because it’s such a large and diverse company, marketing and IT divide and conquer when it comes to look for new big data opportunities. “It’s often the marketers out in the field looking for new and innovative ways to employ big data and analytics while IT continues to innovate the tools at the center of the organization,” says Quinlivan.

Starting at the Finish Today’s enterprise is swimming in data that could enable marketing transformation, but transforming that data into knowledge has proven difficult. “Businesses need actionable insights across all channels,” says Eddie Short, head of KPMG’s Insights Labs. “These so called ‘moments of truth’ are critical in building the customer experience, and that means having the right data and predictive analytics to be prepared for key customer interactions that could lead to cross-sell, upsell or just have a truly engaged conversation with your customer.”

The problem is that many organizations put the technology before the business problem they’re actually trying to solve. “It’s often easy to get mesmerized by the vastness of big data or the capabilities of the tools in the market today. Who hasn’t been captivated by a beautiful bit of data visualization or the distillation of mountains of data,” says Merry of Delaware North.

CIOs can be a good check on the business value of the latest shiny big data tool and force CMOs to put the business outcome

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Big Data

first. “Marketing is often used to take quick action and get quick results,” says Meyers of Biogen Idec. “Since much of this is still so new, and the technology is still so immature its important we focus on the handful of things that really matter and spending the time together to work through an experiment and scale it up to something that can be sustainable for the long-haul.”

“CMOs and marketing organizations need to hone their focus on both the business questions they need answered, and the decisions they want to inform, with analytics,” says Suzanne Kounkel, principal and leader of Deloitte Consulting’s customer transformation practice. Without that emphasis on the end result, marketers often ask IT to aggregate, store, and host all available customer data, which is both costly and risky. “As a result, data aggregation often becomes a bottleneck due again to the volume and velocity of digital data today, and the CMO can inadvertently task the CIO to create an extreme data environment,” Kounkel says.

“Big data engineers can pull swarms of data about a company’s current and future customers, yet not all of this information is valuable for a CMO,” says Samer Forzley, VP-Marketing at Pythian, a data engineering company. “Instead of going overboard with the quantity of data, CMOs need to focus on quality, and only seek information that they can directly transform into sales.”

A Critical Look at Big Data Vendors Marketing’s big data requirements can put a lot of stress on already overloaded IT organizations. At Delaware North, marketing and IT have been working together for the 30 years, but big data has put a particular strain on the relationship.

“It’s also introducing a new set of vendors and partners often disrupting existing IT relationships,” says Quinlivan.

Marketing can ease some of the CIO’s stress by approaching the big data ecosystem of suppliers in a more focused way. “It’s not uncommon for marketing to want to use many different agencies and

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Big Data: No Room for Talent Fifty-seven percent of companies say they do not plan to hire new employees for their data efforts in 2014.

A report by data-driven marketing specialist Infogroup Targeting Solutions found that companies are continuing to ramp up their spending on big data marketing initiatives in 2014 (62 percent of companies expect their big data marketing budgets to increase). However, most of those companies are focusing on technology, not people—57 percent of companies say they do not plan to hire new employees for their data efforts in 2014.

That may be a costly error in the long run, says David McRae, president of Infogroup Targeting Solutions.

“The survey findings also indicate that marketers are moving from the information-gathering stage to the analytics phase of big data adoption,” McRae says. “But a downturn in hiring could stall big data implementation, as the need for human capital is greatest during the analysis and action stages.”

“Big data is meaningless without manpower,” he adds. “While it’s exciting that most companies are making bigger investments in big data, marketers should not forget that it takes people to make sense of the information. Hiring before reaching the analytics stage enables companies to become data-led and act on the data.”

Of those marketers that are planning to hire for data-related positions this year, 59 percent plan to hire a data analyst or strategist.

Infogroup surveyed nearly 400 marketers at the Direct Marketing Association’s DMA 2013 conference in October for its Big Data’s Big Step report. It found that 54 percent of marketers have already invested in big data, and 61 percent of those early adopters already report positive ROI. Also, many marketers expect to start seeing a positive ROI in the next year (23 percent) or two years (23 percent).

Additionally, more than half of the early adopters say they are well into or past the initial data access phase of their initiatives, having conquered the challenges associated with data collection and cleansing. Those early adopters are now focusing on what Infogroup calls the second and third phases of adoption: insights and deployment.

Marketers have also shifted their perceptions in terms of the barriers they see to big data adoption. In 2012, Infogroup says half of respondents said analyzing or applying data would be their biggest data-related challenge in 2013. Fast-forward a year, and respondents say that budget limitations (35 percent), lack of quality data (27 percent) and limited tools and technology (25 percent) are the biggest challenges they face in using big data to deliver multichannel marketing programs.

— Thor Olavsrud

buy many different off the shelf tools for different jobs” says Meyers of Biogen Idec.

“We try to show them the value of having inputs in as few places as possible. The more diverse your data sources the harder it is to extract something useful.”

Marketing leaders should take advantage of investments already made by IT. “Small ‘boutique’ solutions are often incompatible with enterprise-wide tools, making it often very difficult to access insights from elsewhere in the organization,” says REAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

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KPMG’s Short. “CMOs should not try to recreate the wheel by building their own systems since these tools and capabilities likely exist already and can be provisioned

by IT.” IT leaders can guide marketers through this emerging landscape. “The CIO can educate the marketing team on the possible and how to achieve the possible with data and analytics,” says Korn Ferry’s Hopkins. At Western Union, executive VP-Global Operations and Technology and CIO John “David” Thompson see his role as one of technology sherpa for CMO Diane Scott and her marketing team. “We see them bump up against a challenge and we try to dig in and help them solve it,” Thompson says. “We’re their technology consultants.”

Opening Up In order to provide that guidance, Thompson and his team must anticipate marketing’s needs before they have them. Developing tools and systems that support Western Union’s 700 million transactions a year and delivers a unique customer experience to its hundreds of millions of customers is a challenge. “My team and I are highly engaged with marketing to understand the things they’re trying to do to drive revenue, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce costs,” Thompson says. “We have to stay one step ahead of them in order to stay abreast of the technology.” Thompson’s team takes marketing’s strategic plan and extends it out two or three years so that IT can build the infrastructure to support big data efforts and bring new capabilities to bear.

Four Tips for Staying the Course with Data-Driven Marketing To help marketers become more data-driven, Infogroup offers four recommendations: View big data adoption as a process. Big data adoption isn’t a goal. It’s a means to the end of improving customer engagement, increasing retention and loyalty and optimizing marketing performance over time. Keep in mind that big data adoption is a multi-year investment that requires planning, resources and patience.

Start now and be deliberate. Since you can’t tackle big data in a day, you should start small and be intentional about implementation. Start now or risk falling behind competitors who are already moving on to more advanced phases of implementation.

Temper expectations about ROI. Yes, many marketers say they’re already seeing returns on their investment in big data, but a comprehensive multi-year investment strategy takes time to pay off. Initial returns may be small, but let those early returns give you the patience to continue building out your strategies in the more difficult phases of analytics and deployment.

Spend on people, not just technology. It’s true that technology is essential to making a big data initiative work, but it’s a critical misstep to overlook talent. People are the ones who make data meaningful, and not hiring the right employees or partners can cause your otherwise sound big data implementation plan to fail.

Additionally, McKinsey and Company have predicted that by 2018, the US will face a shortfall of 140,000 to 190,000 data analysts. Companies that hire early are likely to fare better. “Big data implementation is a multi-year process that requires sustained investment in technology and talent,” McRae says. “To maintain momentum, marketers need to create an intentional roadmap because big data cannot be tackled in a day.”

— Thor Olavsrud

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CMOs can better position the IT group to support big data plans by being open. “My counterparts in IT truly want one thing from me above all else: transparency,” says Hope Neiman, Chief Marketing Officer of Tillster. “CMOs can connect the dots for CIOs, making clear how new business initiatives are linked with enterprise and big data knowledge around customer experience and behaviors,” says Katherine Lee, Senior Client Partner in Korn Ferry’s CMO practice.

Syncsort CMO Gary Survis sees himself as marketing educator-in-chief for the IT group at the big data solutions company.

“Marketing has changed dramatically in the last few years. We are being held accountable for results as never before, for the ability to understand our performance, for diagnostically identifying opportunities, and for making rapid changes to strategy based on analytics,” Survis explains.

Share everything, advises Merry of Delaware North—not just what’s coming next month but what’s coming next year.

“I let my CIO know what we are trying to achieve, why, and what the desired outcome and KPIs are,” Merry says.

“And share the success, make sure that our leaders know that anything we as marketing achieve in this area couldn’t have been done without IT.” “To become a more effective partner to marketing, the CIO should meet regularly with the CMO to understand the analytics issues marketing is dealing with and offer practical ways to address these, not just the technology but also from a process optimization perspective,” advises Jonathan Block, VP-Technology at B2B advisory firm SiriusDecisions.

Never Say Never Just as CMOs must learn to open up around big data, CIOs must learn not to shut marketing down. That can be a tall order in this risky, emerging area of technology.

“The easiest thing for marketing to do is look at IT as the department of ‘no,’ where every request for new technology is met with resistance,” says Survis. “It isn’t secure enough. It isn’t robust enough. It

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Big Data

isn’t compatible with our infrastructure.”

At Tillster, there have been instances where the marketing team has wanted to implement competing tool sets. “In those situations, both departments weigh the risks and rewards, using one guiding light: ensuring the clients’ needs come first,” says Hope Neiman. Delaware North’s CMO Merry wants an IT organization that’s open to new analytics initiatives and can partner with marketing to manage such cutting edge projects. But marketing and IT don’t always agree. “Like any good partnership any differences end in a negotiation—but an informed negotiation,” says CIO Quinlivan.

If marketing wants real-time access to their customer data and models Quinlivan doesn’t say no. He might explain that going from near real-time to real-time doubles the cost of the infrastructure. The CMO may counter and explain the business cost of the one-minute lag in data. “This dynamic tension is healthy and productive as long as information is shared,” Quinlivan says.

Biogen Idec’s Meyers has invested in IT professionals who see themselves as part

Businesses need infrastructure on the back-end that enables the combination of data from various sources as well as the analytics power to make sense of it all. of the marketing team. “We need to be speaking the same language and mutually guided by the same compass,” he says.

“Too often, the geeks in IT like to talk about Markov chains, feature vectorization and edge-nodes on graphs. Marketing simply wants to know in a straightforward way whether or not competitors are having any impact influencing our customers, or how patients in social media are perceiving a new product. We do our best to apply the computing, mathematics and our contextual

understanding of the business to answer these questions in the most straightforward way possible.” Still there are times when IT might think marketing is off base. But, says Meyers, “it’s almost always because a request is showing up as a solution which isn’t the right solution. If you decompose the request, it’s usually grounded in a legitimate problem that’s worth solving together.” CIO

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from the TOP

Partha De Sarkar, CEO, Hinduja Global Solutions, says there is an immediate need to re-brand BPM as a ‘career of choice.’

On the

Right Shore

BY SHUBHRA RISHI

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

50

S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4 | REAL CIO WORLD

There are very few CEOs like Partha De Sarkar who have an amazing success story to narrate. The CEO of Rs 2,500-crore BPO firm Hinduja Global Solutions doesn’t base his company’s growth on revenue numbers. He’s more concerned about becoming the best in the business. And rightly so. For the company has been a late entrant in the global BPO market, but has chartered spectacular growth in the last decade. How it has managed this tremendous success is a story in itself.

The company has done plenty of the right things. That list includes being one of the few BPO players to enter new markets such as the Philippines and Canada, doubling its top line from Rs 1,000 crore to about Rs 2,000 crore at the end of 2013, offering new business models (called ‘Right Shore’) which allows clients to choose whether they want to be serviced from domestic locations in their geography, near shore, or offshore locations). It is also one of the few companies that’s gung-ho about NASSCOM’s attempt to rebrand the BPO industry and present it as a stable and careeroriented sector of choice. For De Sarkar, people are HGS’ biggest strength, and he’s using IT as a vehicle to drive them.

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PARTHA DE SARKAR EXPECTS I.T. TO Increase productivity Enable collaboration Build capabilities

PHOTOS BY FOTOCORP

CIO: Do you think India needs to re-brand its BPO business?

Partha De Sarkar: India’s BPM sector needs to be in line with what’s happening in the world—be it from the perspective of competition, technology, or trends. Other countries are now making a pitch here and we need to continuously re-engineer our capabilities to stay ahead. This way, we can build on our tag as the top destination for BPM services.

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At the same time, there is an immediate need to rebrand BPM as a ‘career of choice’ for our youth. Making them aware that this industry is a ‘place to stay and grow’ is critical to India retaining its competitive talent edge. NASSCOM is working with the government to establish BPM as a part of the curriculum at academic level, which I think is a great way of creating awareness.

Is retention a bigger challenge or finding skills?

We are one of the biggest employers of college graduates. A lot of fresh graduates get into call centers thinking that it's easy money. But it isn't really that easy; it involves night shifts, it means acquiring deep domain knowledge for sectors such as insurance and telecom. The reality dawns in the first 90 days. That's when attrition is at its highest. Post that, our retention numbers improve dramatically.

That’s the nature of the beast, and it hasn’t changed.

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View from the Top

What is HGS’ unique proposition over other BPO businesses?

Our client retention story is unparalleled in this business. Our oldest client is 40-years-old. There are very few companies that can claim that kind of heritage. More than technology and processes, it’s the people who work with clients, and I can say that we have a good set of employees who drive good results for our clients and businesses. That I believe, is our USP. Second, if you look at this industry, churn is very high. However, in our senior leadership, the amount of churn is the lowest in the industry. We also have a great mix of people which makes us truly multinational. There are people in our leadership team from all over the world which makes us culturally diverse.

We have spread our footprint in many parts of the world but have trusted local leadership to run our businesses. We believe that it gives us an edge in terms of nurturing familiarity with the market and different cultures.

game couldn’t be further from the truth. We have been in this business for a very long time and the only difference is that we know how to leverage technology, but we don’t develop it ourselves. For us, it’s a make or buy decision and we decided to buy it.

“All the noise about how pure play BPOs will become irrelevant as IT companies have got into the game couldn’t be further away from the truth.”

— Partha De Sarkar

What's the ‘Right Shore’ model about? And how is it helping HGS grow?

HGS offers a ‘Right Shore’ model as a solution to clients. They can choose whether they want to be serviced from domestic locations in their geography, near shore, or offshore locations. HGS did start off as an offshore player, but over the years, we have built capabilities and expertise across geographies including critical client markets. This has given us a big advantage when we approach clients for new business opportunities. Second, our global presence has also helped grow local economies and generate jobs.

Where does IT feature in your growth plans?

We develop platforms in-house for internal consumption. For instance, our employee portal is one such platform that has undergone a lot of customization in 52

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the last few years. It allows employees to connect, collaborate, and bring cultures together. We have also digitized our employee records for ease of use and increased productivity.

The truth is that BPM is no longer just about someone taking a call or sending an e-mail. Today, the model blends people and technology to offer high-end services to clients. While we don’t build the technology, we have formed alliances with IT vendors to leverage their platforms for BPM service offerings. This requires us to be current on technology trends, build strong alliances with IT partners, and know how to leverage these partnerships for our requirements.

All the noise that you hear about how pure play BPOs will become irrelevant because IT companies have got into the

You also have an aggressive acquisition strategy.

All our acquisitions have been to gain footprints in foreign geographies.

We needed to have operations that we could showcase from day one. In some geographies, we were the first players to enter the BPO market. Although we could have done it organically, it would have taken us five years, and we would have lost the opportunity. The same is true for acquiring capabilities. We could build them internally, or make it possible via acquisitions. We chose the latter.

For instance, 2003 marked our entry into international markets, with the establishment of our center in Manila. We were pioneers in acquiring a call center company in the Philippines, which gave us a five-year head start over other players. We were also one of the few companies to enter Canada, when we acquired Online Support, in 2011.

Today we have a global footprint of 58 delivery centers in India, the US, the United Kingdom, Canada, Mauritius, France, Germany, Italy, Jamaica, the Netherlands, and Philippines.

At HGS, decision making at the top level is decentralized. Is that an important differentiator?

Though HGS is a global company, all our geographies have independent CEOs who are empowered to take decisions locally. They are experienced local leaders who understand the needs of business and the culture in their countries. This decentralized set-up helps HGS with its speed-to-market, with fast responsiveness to business opportunities, and with focused execution on delivery.

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View from the Top

SNAPSHOT

Your oldest client is 40-years-old. How do you create customer relationships of that caliber?

Paying attention to the client is an integral part of how HGS operates as a company. We do this by listening to them, identifying their challenges, and proactively offering them solutions. This is a part of our mission statement and we live by it.

Recently, a client in the US faced a challenge related to product recall and wanted HGS’ immediate support in dealing with customer queries. We set up a process for them in just 24 hours. Our endeavor is to be a true partner to clients by consistently exceeding SLAs. That’s the secret to our client stickiness.

You set yourself a target of $1 billion in revenues over the next three years. How do you plan on getting there?

There's too much importance given

Hinduja Global Solutions

to that statement. For me, size there are a lot of niche is of secondary importance. I players like us at play, and SALES: think the revenue figure of Rs the reason we get business Rs 2,504 crore 6,200 crore is just a milestone from top players such as DELIVERY CENTERS: in our journey. A year back, IBM and Accenture, is India, UK, US, Canada we were less than Rs 2,000 because we are smaller, Philippines crore. Today, we are at Rs 2,500 because we are more flexible, crore. My larger ambition is to because we are hungry, and become the best in the business; because we ready to walk the numbers and revenues are just measures to extra mile. That’s how we must continue determine that. to remain relevant in this industry as So yes, it’s a tough target, but my consumer behavior changes, demographics answer is that size is not important in our change, and younger consumers enter the game. If you look at the market size, the market. This is when the demands become BPO industry is a $160 billion (about Rs more acute as customer experience gets 9,600,000 crore) market, and it's predicted transformed; thanks to mobile and the selfto grow at a rate of 5-6 percent in the next service generation, because that’s where five years. If you combine the topline and the larger volume of transactions will come the top-10 players, you will find that very from in the future. CIO few companies have top line growth of more than a billion, and their combined aggregate doesn’t even total to 25 percent of market share.

Shubhra Rishi is a principal correspondent. Send It’s a fairly fragmented market where feedback to shubhra_rishi@idgindia.com

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43

THE FUTURE OF WORK

Travel into the future and take a look at what the future of work will look like. It’s all about four key areas.

By Jonathan Hassell 54

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Consumerization of IT

W

ith Microsoft moving into a “mobile first, cloud first” world, an Apple smartwatch coming any day now and everyone else buying into the cloud computing hype, it can be easy to lose sight of what all of these developments do: Drive business forward by enabling employees to be more productive. Essentially, it’s about the future of work.

But what might that look like? Travel into the future and take a look at what the future of work will look like.

It’s all about four key areas.

The Future of Work is Device-Agnostic

IS HERE

In a results-oriented world, what comes out at the end is pretty much the only thing that matters. You hear bosses say, “I don’t care how many hours a day you work; Reader ROI: I care about the fact that What would the future of your work gets done.” Users work looks like feel the same way, only it’s • Which key areas will be about their tools rather than affected their subordinates.

• What CIOs need to do Users can get work done to prepare on a variety of devices. They want to use their personal devices, with which they are already familiar.

Witness bring you own device (BYOD) programs.

They want to use a tablet when they’re consuming more than creating, they want to use email on a smartphone to stay on top of their inbox between meetings, and they want to be reachable via voice, text, email, video chat and the like on any device, no matter what’s in their hands. In the future, users will have less and less patience at seemingly artificial restrictions on what device can’t support getting some piece of their daily grind accomplished.

The takeaway for CIOs? Think hard about how your services and your infrastructure can support all devices, not just some. Also, reconsider any plan that throws up artificial barriers to using certain devices. Recognize that this isn’t always possible in highly regulated fields, but also know that this is a worthy goal.

The Future of Work is Location-Agnostic Today’s employees are mobile, even if their current jobs and roles don’t require travel. For most knowledge workers and white-collar professionals, work is no longer a nine-to-five engagement. You check email on

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Consumerization of IT

a weekend. You finish a spreadsheet at night after you put the kids to bed. You comment on documents on Yammer or SharePoint first thing in the morning after colleagues in a different time zone have had a chance to get their hands on the work and iterate on it.

It’s unclear whether IT has kept up with this style of work. Sure, you see SSL VPNs in big companies that purport to make it easy to connect from home, but is that really the case? Are you really enabling a frustrationfree experience by giving your employees laptop computers that take three minutes to fully boot up through the security checks and decryption process—and then making them connect through an SSL VPN just so they can download email? Is that truly the best you can do?

In the future of work, apps and operating systems will light up scenarios such that, whatever device you use, it’s the functional equivalent to being on the corporate network. We saw some of this with the DirectAccess feature that Microsoft enabled in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but this now extends in Windows 8 and beyond. No more user-initiated tunneling.

No more clunky laptops trying to boot up. A user will take a computer, unsleep it within a few seconds, and use it like he or she is on the corporate campus.

The takeaway for IT? Make the boundary between your network and your users as transparent as you possibly can. Look for ways to securely remove from the user any perception that his or her services are degraded because they’re away from the office. Make your network always on, anywhere, everywhere.

The Future of Work is Workflow-Driven Checklists, when consistently followed and applied, reduce the amount of errors and ambiguities in all sorts of high-pressure places, from airline cockpits to hospital operating rooms. The concept is fairly simple: There are lots of little details to check and aspects to consider, so keeping them all in one place in a consistent way builds a path for success. The pilot or surgeon can truly focus on more important, more valuable tasks 56

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Millennials Have a Work Wish List Just about every Silicon Valley tech company wants to fill its ranks with smart millennials—the future of the workforce. Wooing them hasn’t been easy.

Competition for their services is fierce. Giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are throwing wads of cash at them.

But what do these young, tech-savvy sharpshooters really want?

Aside from the usual suspects such as good pay, cool managers and job security, millennials have a major driving force in their job search: An unusual work-life balance, as in, there isn’t any. That is, millennials blend their work life and personal life into their daily life.

In terms of technology, this translates into mobility and consumer tech.

A blended work-life balance means millennials want to work wherever and whenever they want, not in a cubicle between the hours of 9 am to 5 pm. That’s the definition of mobility, and they’ll actually work longer and earlier. Millennials also want the technology they carry, such as a smartphone or tablet, to be used for both work and personal purposes, which is to say, they want their employer to have a bring-your-own-device policy.

An online survey of millennials from some 350 businesses conducted earlier this year by Survey Monkey on behalf of RingCentral reflects this thinking. The survey found that 70 percent of respondents work up to 20 hours or more outside the office every week. In support of BYOD, 73 percent don’t expect their employer to provide a smart device for work.

Then again, much has been written about millennials that, at times, seems contradictory. Last month, CIO magazine writer Lauren Brousell led a panel of techie millennials to dispel a few myths about their generation. It appears they’re not as needy for positive feedback nor as cocky in their grasp of technology nor as given to job-hopping as some industry watchers have suggested.

However, the blended work-life balance is still evident. “Panelists said that they are attracted to jobs that allow work-at-home days, and flexible schedules and companies with a great story to tell and a mission that millennials can contribute to,” writes Brousell.

— Tom Kaneshige

like actually flying the plane or removing the tumor, not obsess over details.

The future of work is already moving in this direction, abstracting away all of

the IT detail from a user’s perspective and just getting their work in front of them. We already see a lot of this happening with the Office Graph that Microsoft has introduced.

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It will be hosted at the opulent ITC Grand Chola, Chennai, this December. The program will be a heady mix of stimulating keynote sessions, engaging workshops, fascinating live demos and gala evenings.

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Consumerization of IT

The system looks at your colleagues, your mail and what you’re working on, then does computational analysis and machine learning to automatically pop up relevant documents and conversations in one place.

You don’t have to track where certain pieces of work are located, who has access to those pieces, and where the related conversation thread about that piece of work product is located and archived.

The future of work will involve IT, systems and devices taking care of the details of where things go and how to put them there. It will, in other words, take care of workflow. The future of work is about elevating the level of work so that the true thoughts, the true development and the true driving forward of business can be done by knowledge workers without making them also fuss with the details of their systems, their networks and their organizations. At last, freedom from the pesky details of making your IT work. This is what users want. The test of a good IT service organization is how transparent it can be to users—and the future of work will make this goal and objective all the more important.

The Future of Work is Service-Oriented In IT, you used to get all sorts of kudos and accolades if you were responsible for developing and delivering a service oriented architecture. This meant you built services that could be accessed by other services—an architecture where services could talk to each other, consume whatever the other was offering and, in general, link up in a standards based way.

Come up a few thousand feet with me, though, and look at today’s landscape. We live in a world where most of us don’t necessarily want products. We’re more interested in experiences. We don’t necessarily crave onetime transactions. We’re looking to develop ongoing relationships. For example, we use our smartphones, but what do we do with them? We connect them, via apps, to services on the Internet.

Getting work and getting things done will move in the same direction. To do work, we’ll need to connect to different services.

We’ll expect availability to be constant 58

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Mobilizing Your Team is a Challenge There’s been a lot of talk about all the great benefits companies reap from mobilizing their workforce, especially those in sales and services who work mostly out in the field.

Arm these road warriors with smartphones and tablets and awesome mobile apps, and you’ll be paid in kind with higher productivity and happier employees.

But not all employees need to be mobilized, right?

Tech staffers who report to the office every day don’t sound like prime candidates for iPads and mobile apps, but actually they are, says James Gordon, senior VP-IT at Needham Bank, a 180-employee community bank in Massachusetts.

Needham Bank is a MobileIron customer and will be outfitting its five-person IT team with a new mobile app, called MobileIron Insight. On an iPad, an IT admin will be able to search for users and devices, tell whether or not mobile devices are in or out of compliance, troubleshoot issues, assign policies, unlock a device, and other mobile device management tasks.

Needham Bank’s IT staff also uses an iPad app that lets them remote-in to a Windows 7 desktop.

Ironically, before MobileIron Insight, Gordon and his team had to use a Windows desktop to manage their MobileIron environment of 115 devices. “Isn’t this a mobile world? Aren’t we mobile professionals?” Gordon says. “It was kind of laughable having to run to a Windows-based computer.”

Needham Bank isn’t alone in touting the merits of a mobilized IT staff. A recent Ponemon Institute study of 400 IT professionals found “agility and preparedness for change” was by far the most important factor to maintain an effective mobile strategy over time. However, mobilizing IT presents a big challenge. Let’s say an employee gets locked out of his or her mobile device at night or over the weekend. With MobileIron Insight, an admin can unlock the device. Given the dynamics of an always-on mobile culture, the employee can easily send a text, email or phone call, and, more importantly, expect the IT admin to solve the problem right away.

In other words, a mobilized IT staff might be expected to work around the clock.

“If you’re mobilizing all these processes, aren’t you by default getting extra hours of free work out of people? The answer is, sure,” Gordon says.

Gordon plans to confront this by educating users about expectations when they file a help desk ticket, say, over the weekend. He also tells his IT staff that they can resolve that help desk ticket, thanks in part to MobileIron Insight, but are under no obligation to do so.

In return, a mobilized IT staff gets some flexibility working remotely. “If one of their kids has a doctor’s appointment or dance recital, I can say that’s fine but I’m still expecting certain work to get done,” Gordon says. “Whether it’s writing policies or procedures, upgrading storage area networks, patching servers, those things can increasingly be done—often done better—when users aren’t there to encumber them.”

— Tom Kaneshige

and never interrupted. We won’t want our systems to give us information just one; we’ll want our systems to deliver information to us over time. Finally, we’ll want our systems to predict what information will be useful

to us, at what point that information would be useful, and then push it to us in a useful, non-intrusive way. CIO Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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The Dynamic 100 N. Balasundar, ABB India Sanjeev Kumar, Adhunik Group of Industries Sankaranarayanan Raghavan, AEGON Religare Life Insurance Ravinder Pal Singh, Air Works Engineering J.S. Sodhi, Amity Group Jayant Magar, AMW Motors Arvind Sivaramakrishnan, Apollo Hospitals Anil Kumar Veer, Aricent Venkatesh Natarajan, Ashok Leyland Avinash Velhal, ATOS India Rajat Sharma, Atul Shaji Abraham, Avantha Power and Infrastructure Harnath Babu, Aviva Life Insurance Rajeev Jorapur, Bajaj Auto Puneet Kaur Kohli, Bajaj Capital Pratap Gharge, Bajaj Electricals Anurag Chottani, Bajaj Finance S. Francis Rajan, Bangalore International Airport Deepak Bhayana, Bank of India Sachin Gupta, Bennet Coleman & Co Rina Sriwastwa, Bharat Aluminium Anil Kumar Kaushik, Bharat Petroleum Prashant Veer Singh, Bharti Infratel G. Radhakrishnan Menon, Biocon Sabyasachi Thakur, Century Plyboards (I) Sundar Venkitakrishnan, Chola MS General Insurance Valerio Fernandes, Continental Automotive Components (India) Ramnath Iyer, CRISIL (a Standard & Poor’s company) Vijay Pratap Singh, Daimler India Commercial Vehicles Viresh Shah, Dana Holding Corporation Munender Soperna, Dr. Lal Pathlabs Shirish Gariba, Drive India Enterprise Solutions Satyajit Sarker, DTDC Rajesh Chopra, EIH (The Oberoi Hotels and Resort)s Dr. Vishad Rahangdale, Electrotherm India Srinivas Tata, Essar Projects India Prakash Dharmani, Essel Propack Sachin Jain, Evalueserve.com Baljinder Singh, EXL Service Holdings Shailesh Joshi, Godrej Industries Yatendra Kumar, Gokaldas Exports Suresh Kumar, Grant Thornton India Vivek Khanna, Havell India Gure Govinda Rao, HCL Services Manoj Kunbhat, HCL Technologies Thomson Thomas, HDFC Standard Life Insurance Bhushan Akerkar, Hindalco Industries Rajeev Agarwal, Hindustan Aeronautics Sesanka Pemmaraju, Hitachi Consulting Software Services India Yogesh Kapoor, HSBC VOL/9 | ISSUE/11

Yagnesh Parikh, ICICI Chakrapani Perangur, Indus Towers Vijayeendra Purohit, Infosys Aniruddha Paul, ING Vysya Bank Ramandeep Singh Virdi, InterGlobe Enterprises Chandan Sinha, Jindal Saw Ajit Awasare, Larsen & Toubro Vinay Khargonkar, Larsen & Toubro, Heavy Engineering Suresh Shanmugam, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Atul Luthra, Matrix Cellular International Services Subramanyam Putrevu, Mindtree V. Seetaramaiah, Paradeep Phosphates Mohit Bhishikar, Persistent Systems Sreeji Gopinathan, Philips India Rajeev Mittal, Piaggio Vehicles Shashi Mohan, Polaris Financial Technology R.P. Rath, Quatrro Global Services Farhan Khan, Radico Khaitan N.K. Verma, Rashtriya Chemicals & Fertilizers Mukesh Kumar Jain, Reliance Capital Sayed Peerzade, Reliance Entertainment-Digital Srivaths Varadharajan, Reliance Securities Kamal Karnatak, RJ Corporation Rajesh Garg, Rolta India Mohammad Wasim, SapientNitro Pertisth Mankotia, Sheela Foam Manoj Shrivastava, Sistema Shyam Teleservices Kamal Matta, Sonic Biochem Nagesh Aswartha, SPML Infra Prasanth Puliakottu, Sterlite Technologies Ajit Manocha, Syngene International Muralidharan Ramachandran, Syntel Amit Jain, Tata Consultancy Services Susheel Navanale, Tata Global Beverage Beverages N. Ravishanker, TataSky Ved Prakash Nirbhya, Tech Mahindra Anjan Deb, The Great Eastern Shipping Company N. Varadarajan, The Ramco Cements Mankikar Ravikiran, The Shamrao Vithal Co-Operative Bank Bala Meshram, The Shipping Corporation of India Manas Mati, The Walt Disney Company Ranjith Radhakrishnan, TVS Motors S. Ramakrishnan, United Breweries Subodh Dubey, Usha International Sandeep Kulkarni, Viom Networks Anthony Thomas, Vodafone India Deepak Madan, Wave Infratech Raja Ukil, Wipro Suren Shetty, YES Bank Karvy REAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

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Honorees 2014 S

ituated on the leeward side of the Sahyadri mountain range, Pune is aptly monikered as the Deccan Queen. As the cultural capital of Maharashtra, Pune is a city of contrasts. From being the bustling Detroit of India to being a pensioner’s heaven, the city is a throbbing commercial hub and a balmy, sleepy retirement paradise all at the same time. The city is dynamic in every sense of the word.

And that makes it a suitable host for the CIO Dynamic 100 2014 awards.

In its ninth edition, the two-day symposium and awards ceremony, held on the 4th and 5th of September, at the sprawling JW Marriott, Pune, celebrated the spirit of dynamism.

The 137 honorees felicitated at the event reflect this spirit. This year, CIO India felicitated 100 winners and bestowed the coveted special awards on 76 winners in 12 categories.

The power-packed, two-day event offered an eclectic mix of keynote speakers like Ron Kaufman, internationally renowned author, management consultant, and founder and chairman of UP! Your Service; and Steve Donahue, the famed adventurer and documentary film-maker.

During the glittering award ceremony the audiences were enthralled with the electrifying performance of the legendary singer, Usha Uthup and Sudesh Bhosle.

Here are the highlights of the event.

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Symposium Partners Keynote Partner

Special Award Partners

The Dynamic 100

Pg 61

Hall of Fame

Pg 78

Business Assurance Champions

Pg 67

Business Transformers

Pg 68

Cloud Conquerors

Pg 69

Dynamic Infrastructure Trailblazers

Pg 70

Information Masterminds

Pg 71

Infrastructure Evolution Futurists

Pg 72

Innovation Architects

Pg 73

Mobility Mavens

Pg 74

Networking Pioneers

Pg 75

Security Supremos

Pg 76

Sourcing Shoguns

Pg 77

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Associate Partners

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N. BALASUNDAR, ABB India

SANJEEV KUMAR, Adhunik Group of Industries

SANKARANARAYANAN RAGHAVAN, AEGON Religare Life Insurance

RAVINDER PAL SINGH, Air Works Engineering

JAYANT MAGAR AMW Motors

ANIL KUMAR VEER, Aricent

KAPIL MEHROTRA, Artemis Hospitals

VENKATESH NATARAJAN, Ashok Leyland

AVINASH VELHAL, ATOS India

RAJAT SHARMA, Atul

SHAJI ABRAHAM, Avantha Power and Infrastructure

HARNATH BABU, Aviva Life Insurance

RAJEEV JORAPUR, Bajaj Auto

PUNEET KAUR KOHLI, Bajaj Capital

PRATAP GHARGE, Bajaj Electricals

ANURAG CHOTTANI, Bajaj Finance

S. FRANCIS RAJAN, Bangalore International Airport

DEEPAK BHAYANA, Bank of India

RINA SRIWASTWA, Bharat Aluminium

ANIL KUMAR KAUSHIK, Bharat Petroleum

PRASHANT VEER SINGH, Bharti Infratel

G. RADHAKRISHNAN MENON, Biocon

MA NAYAGAM Canara Bank

J.S. SODHI, Amity Group

SABYASACHI THAKUR, Century Plyboards (I)

SUNDAR VENKITAKRISHNAN, Chola MS General Insurance

VALERIO FERNANDES, Continental Automotive Components (India)

RAMNATH IYER, CRISIL (a Standard & Poor’s company)

VIJAY PRATAP SINGH, Daimler India Commercial Vehicles

VIRESH SHAH, Dana Holding Corporation

MAKARAND SAWANT, Deepak Fertilisers & Petrochemicals

SANTOSH KUMAR SINGH, Dharampal Satyapal

SHIRISH GARIBA, Gariba Diesl Drive India Enterprise Solutions

MUNENDER SOPERNA, Dr. Lal Pathlabs

SRINIBASH SAHOO, DSP Blackrock Investment Managers

SATYAJIT SARKER, DTDC

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RAJESH CHOPRA, EIH (The Oberoi Hotels and Resorts)

DR.VISHAD RAHANGDALE, Electrotherm India

VIPIN KUMAR Escorts

SRINIVAS TATA, Essar Projects India

PRAKASH DHARMANI, Essel Propack

SACHIN JAIN, Evalueserve.com

BALJINDER SINGH, EXL Service Holdings

RAJESH SABOO, Future Group

SANJAY CHOWDHRY, General Cable Energy

SANJEEV PRASAD, Genpact

D VENKATA RAO, CIO, Godfrey Philips

SHAILESH JOSHI, Godrej Industries

YATENDRA KUMAR, Gokaldas Exports

SURESH KUMAR, Grant Thornton India

DARSHAN APPAYANNA, Happiest Minds Technologies

VIVEK KHANNA, Havell India

GURE GOVINDA RAO, HCL SERVICES

MANOJ KUNBHAT, HCL Technologies

THOMSON THOMAS, HDFC Standard Life Insurance

UDAY SAKUNALA, Hexagon Capability Center

BHUSHAN AKERKAR, Hindalco Industries

SESANKA PEMMARAJU, Hitachi Consulting Software Services India

YOGESH KAPOOR, HSBC

YAGNESH PARIKH, ICICI

SUDHIR KANVINDE , IL &FS Transportation Networks Ltd.

SANJAY AGGARWAL, Indian Yamaha Motor Pvt Ltd.

PROJJAL CHAKRABARTHY, Indian Oil Corporation Ltd

CHAKRAPANI PERANGUR , Indus Towers

VIJAYEENDRA PUROHIT, Infosys

ANIRUDDHA PAUL, ING Vysya Bank

SHARATH M AIRANI, Intellinet Data System

RAMANDEEP S VIRDI CTO, Interglobe Enterprises

CHANDAN SINHA , Jindal Saw Ltd

UMESH MEHTA, Jubilant Life Sciences

RAHUL V MAHAJAN K, Raheja Corporate Services

SACHIN GOEL, KPMG in India

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GS RAO, KSK Energy Ventures

SUDESH AGARWAL, Landmark Group

VINAY A KHARGONKAR, Larsen n Toubro

VIRENDRA KUMAR RAI, Lava International

SURESH SHANMUGAM, Mahindra & Mahindra Finance

SUBHASH KELKAR, Mahindra Holidays n Resort

ATUL LUTHRA, Matrix Cellular International Services

SUBRAMANYAM PUTREVU, Mindtree

SAURABH CHANDRA, One Assist consumer Solutions

V SEETARAMAIAH, Paradeep Phosphates

BASANTH KUMAR CHATURVEDI, Prefetti Van Melle

MOHIT BHISHIKAR, Persistent Systems

SREEJI GOPINATHAN, Philips India

RAJEEV MITTAL, Piaggio Vehicles

SHASHI MOHAN, Polaris Financial Technology

FARHAN KHAN, Radico Khaitan

NK VERMA, Rashtriya Chemicals n Fertilizers

MUKESH KUMAR JAIN, Reliance Capital

ALPNA J DOSHI, Reliance Communications

SAYED PEERZADE, Reliance Entertainment Digital

SRIVATHS VARDHARAJAN, Reliance Securities

RAJESH BHATIA, Religare Finvest

MONIKAY PHARTYAL, Renault India

RAJESH GARG, Rolta India Ltd

ANIBANDHA MUKHOPADHYAY, Royal Infraconstru

RANENDRA DATTA, Sabmiller India

MOHAMMAD WASIM, Sapientnitro

RAJENDRA PRABHAKAR DESHPANDE, Serco Global Services

NEHA KINI, Sesa Sterlite Copper

PERTISTH MANKOTIA, Sheela Foams

MANOJ SHRIVASTAVA, MTS India

KAMAL MATTA, Sonic Biochem ext

NAGESH ASWARTHA, SPML Infra

PRASHANTH POLIAKOTTU, Sterlit Technologies

AJIT MANOCHA, Syngene International

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AJIT SUNDAR , Awasaer Larsen & Toubro

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MURALIDHARAN RAMACHANDRAN, Syntel

AMIT JAIN, Tata Consultancy Services

SUSHEEL NAVANALE, Tata Global Beverages

N. RAVISHANKER, TataSky

V BALAJI, Tata Technologies Inc

VED PRAKASH NIRBHYA, Tech Mahindra

ANJAN DEB, The Great Eastern Shipping Company

N.VARADARAJAN, The Ramco Cements

MANKIKAR RAVIKIRAN, The Shamrao Vithal Co-Operative Bank

BALA MESHRAM, The Shipping Corporation of India

MANAS MATI, The Walt Disney Company (IFFCO Kisan Sanchar)

SACHIN GUPTA, Times Group

The ninth annual CIO100 awards celebrated 136 organizations and their CIOs—The Dynamic 100— that are using information technology in smart and relevant ways to deliver business value, whether by creating competitive advantage, optimizing business processes, enabling growth, or improving relationships with customers.

For the full profiles visit www.cio.in/cio100

RANJITH RADHAKRISHNAN, TVS Motors

RAVI RAMAKRISHNAN, Uflex Ltd Film Division

S. RAMAKRISHNAN, United Breweries

SUBODH DUBEY, Usha International

MEHERIAR PATEL, USV

KAMAL KARNATAK, RJ Corporation

SANDEEP KULKARNI, Viom Networks

ANTHONY THOMAS, Vodafone India

BURGESS COOPER Vodafone India

DEEPAK MADAN, Wave Infratech

RAJA UKIL, Wipro

SUREN SHETTY, YES Bank

ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN, Apollo Hospitals

AJIT PETHKAR, Zensar Technologies

RAJEEV AGARWAL, Hindustan Aeronautics

R.P. RATH, Quatrro Global Services

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The CIO100 Jury

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As practitioners who are not competing for the CIO 100 Awards, our Grand Jury scores reflected a true balance between technology and business benefits, all the while keeping in mind external, economic factors and constraints to select this year’s winners

TARUN PANDEY Aditya Birla Financial Services Group

K.T.RAJAN Allergan India

SANJAY MALHOTRA Amway India Enterprises .

SUDHIR KUMAR REDDY Aricent

MANISH CHOKSI Asian Paints

YOGESH BHAGWAT ZOPE Bharat Forge Limited

VENEETH PURUSHOTAMAN Bharti Retail

JOYDEEP DUTTA Central Securities & Depositories

SEBASTIAN JOSEPH Dalmia Cements

TAMAL CHAKRAVARTHY Ericsson Global Services

JAYANTHA NARAVI PRABHU Essar Group

G S RAVI KUMAR Gati Limited

GMR GROUP JOHNY PARAMIAN

VIJAY SETHI Hero Motocorp

S.T.SATHIAVAGEESWARAN Hindustan Petroleum Corporation

M SURESH Hyundai AES India

SUBHASH CHAND MITTAL IFFCO

S.RAMASAMY Indian Oil Corporation

S S SHARMA JK Tyre & Industries

SUNIL MEHTA JWT INDIA

ANANTHA SAYANA Larsen & Toubro

GIRISH RAO Marico

RAJESH UPPAL Maruti Suzuki India

RAJEEV BATRA MTS India

AJAY KUMAR MEHER Multi Screen Media

AVINASH ARORA New Holland Fiat

SUNIL SIROHI NIIT

V. SUBRAMANIAM Otis Elevator Company

SHASHI KUMAR RAVULAPATY Reliance Commercial Finance

DR. SANJAY SARASWAT Reliance Globalcom

SUMIT CHOUDHARY Reliance Jio Infocom

V. BALAKRISHNAN Reliance Jio Infocom

GOPAL RANGARAJ Reliance Life Sciences

ALOK KUMAR Tata Consultancy Services

DHANDAPANI TG TVS Motor Company

DHIREN SAVLA VFS Global Services

HITESH ARORA YUM Foods

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CIO 100

Event Report

Event Report | Special Awards

SPECIAL AWARDS

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HONOREES 2014 K.S.M. Shastry, Bank of India Yagnesh Parikh, ICICI Securities Mohammad Wasim, SapientNitro Basant Kumar Chaturvedi, Perfetti Van Melle India Santosh Singh, Dharampal Satyapal Neha Kini, Sesa Sterlite Ajit Pethkar, Zensar Technologies

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BUSINESS ASSURANCE CHAMPIONS Presented by

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Congratulations to the BUSINESS TRANSFORMERS Presented by

HONOREES 2014 S. Francis Rajan, Bangalore International Airport Shailesh Joshi, Godrej Industries Suresh A. S., Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services R.P. Rath, Quatrro Global Services Sayed Peerzade, Reliance Entertainment-Digital Prasanth Puliakottu, Sterlite Technologies Manas Mati, The Walt Disney Company (India)

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CIO 100

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SPECIAL AWARDS

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HONOREES 2014 Kapil Mehrotra, Artemis Hospital Monika Phartyal, Renault India & Nissan Deshpande Rajendra, Serco BPO Muralidharan Ramachandran, Syntel V. Balaji, Tata Technologies Meheriar Patel, USV Manoj Kumbhat, HCL Technologies

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CLOUD CONQUERORS Presented by

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Congratulations to the DYNAMIC INFRASTRUCTURE TRAILBLAZERS Presented by

HONOREES 2014 Uday Sakunala, Hexagon Capability Center India Yogesh Kapoor, HSBC V. Seetaramaiah, Paradeep Phosphates Mukesh Kumar Jain, Reliance Capital Srivaths Varadharajan, Reliance Securities Anibandha Mukhopadhyay, Royal Infraconstru Ranendra Datta, Sabmiller India

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HONOREES 2014 Venkatesh Natarajan, Ashok Leyland Shirish Gariba, Drive India Enterprise Solutions Sanjeev Prasad, Genpact Rahul Mahajan, K Raheja Corporate Services Sreeji Gopinathan, Philips India N. Varadarajan, Ramco Cements Raja Ukil, Wipro

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Congratulations to the

HONOREES 2014

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Sankarnarayanan Raghavan, Aegon Religare Life Insurance

INFRASTRUCTURE EVOLUTION FUTURISTS Presented by

Rajat Sharma, Atul Makarand Sawant, Deepak Fertilisers & Petrochemicals Venkata Rao, Godfrey Phillips India Thomson Thomas, HDFC Standard Life Insurance Sanjay Aggarwal, India Yamaha Motor Virendra Kumar Rai, Lava International

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HONOREES 2014 Rajesh Saboo, Future Group Sudhir Kanvinde, IL&FS Transportation Networks Projjal Chakrabarty, Indian Oil Corporation Subhash M. Kelkar, Mahindra Holidays and Resorts India Rajesh Bhatia, Religare Finvest Suren Shetty, YES Bank Shashi Mohan, Polaris Financial Technology

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INNOVATION ARCHITECTS Presented by

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Congratulations to the

HONOREES 2014 Jayant Magar, AMW Motors Harnath Babu, Aviva Life Insurance Sharat M. Airani, Intellinet Datasys Sachin Goel, KPMG in India Ravi Ramakrishnan, Uflex Sandeep Kulkarni, Viom Networks Gure Govinda Rao, HCL Services

MOBILITY MAVENS Presented by

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HONOREES 2014 Anil Kumar Kaushik, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Sanjay Chowdhry, General Cable Energy India Vijayeendra Purohit, Infosys Aniruddha Paul, ING Vysya Bank G.S. Rao, KSK Energy Ventures Rajesh Garg, Rolta India Baljinder Singh, EXL Service Holdings

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Congratulations to the SECURITY SUPREMOS Presented by

HONOREES 2014 M.A. Nayagam, Canara Bank Srinibash Sahoo, DSP Blackrock Investment Managers Darshan Appayanna, Happiest Minds Technologies Ramandeep Singh Virdi, Interglobe Enterprises Saurabh Chandra, OneAssist Consumer Solutions Alpna J. Doshi, Reliance Communications Anthony Thomas, Vodafone India

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HONOREES 2014 Sachin Gupta, Bennet Coleman & Co Vipin Kumar, Escorts Yatendra Kumar, Gokaldas Exports Umesh Mehta, Jubilant Life Sciences Farhan Khan, Radico Khaitan Pertisth Mankotia, Sheela Foam Manoj Shrivastava, Sistema Shyam Teleservices

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SOURCING SHOGUNS

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Muralidharan Ramachandran, Syntel Prashant Veer Singh, Bharti Infratel Rajat Sharma, Atul Sachin Jain, Evalueserve.Com Subodh Dubey, Usha International Thomson Thomas, HDFC Standard Life Insurance V. Seetaramaiah, Paradeep Phosphates

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Farhan Khan, Radico Khaitan Pertisth Mankotia, Sheela Foam S. Francis Rajan, Bangalore International Airport Shailesh Joshi, Godrej Industries Satyajit Sarker, DTDC Valerio Fernandes, Continental Automotive Components (India)

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9/18/2014 3:58:58 PM

Capturing the Power of a Superior Service Culture Service. It’s what differntiates the haves and the have-nots in today’s business environment. Ron Kaufman, founder and chairman, UP! Your Service, tells Indian CIOs how to walk that extra mile and attain excellence in the domain of providing service.

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KEYNOTE SPEAKER

RON KAUFMAN Presented by

A

Go Online!

You want to hear more from the master of service? Watch his entire presentation at www.cio.in/cio-tv/take-action-createvalue-customers-ron-kaufman

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ll businesses in today’s world are driven by one word:Service. Everywhere you look there is service. Outside a company walls there are external customers that want service, inside the company there are internal colleague looking for service. If someone works for the government they call him a public or civil servant, if one is in the military it is called ‘being in the service’ and even when we die, we get a ‘memorial service’. Service is something we receive and provide from the day we were born till the day we take our last breath.

“If someone in your office says we should meet customer expectations and someone else says we should exceed customer expectations, how do you determine who is right? Then, there is someone like Steve Jobs, who means to give customers what they want but they are unsure whether they will need it or not. It is confusing to decide,” said Ron Kaufman while speaking at a keynote session named Capturing the Power of a Superior Service Culture, at CIO100.

CIOs lead a very crucial internal department of a company; a department which, to a large extent, is responsible for satisfying customers indirectly. Therefore, the word ‘service’ has a very specific definition for business and IT leaders. If a CIO wants to consistently deliver excellent service experience from his IT organization, then the CIO must take up the challenge of building a strong service culture.

“Service is taking action to create value for someone else. There is a very important relation between service culture and service excellence. If someone walks the extra mile to provide exceptional service but comes back to office and finds out that his or her company

does not have proper service culture, what happens? That person is demoralized and wants to give up or leave,” Kaufman said.

Ron Kaufman classifies service in six levels. The very first level of service he terms as ‘criminal’ or in other words unacceptable, then comes ‘basic’, the third is ‘normal’ or ‘expected’, the fourth he calls ‘desired’, the fifth one is ‘surprising’ and above that is ‘astonishing’ or ‘unbelievable’.

“There is a reason why we cannot unanimously agree that excellence falls in any one of levels I’ve mentioned.

This is because the six levels of service I mentioned are not fixed, it is like an escalator which is going down. When you do something with a technology and say it is ‘new’, it is only new for the first time.

But then, it becomes nice, nice becomes normal and then normal becomes ‘no-bigdeal’. After this, everyone looks at the CIO and asks: What’s next?” said Kaufman.

With constant change in technology around, excellence for CIOs has become a moving target. According to Kaufman, service excellence is taking the next step ‘up’ to create ‘more’ value for somebody else.

“A service excellence culture is when every single person who comes to work says I am here to do my job and the purpose of my job is to create value for somebody else and look continuously for ways to step up and do it better,” Kaufman said.

A leader is the first person to derive satisfaction while taking an extra effort to make someone else happy.

“The moment you take action to take create value for someone, the first person who benefits is you and the not the person whom you created value for,” Kaufman said.

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9/18/2014 6:32:32 PM

Follow Your Compass, Not a Map Desert adventurer, entrancing storyteller, bestselling author, drummer, motivational speaker and keynote speaker at CIO100, Steve Donahue links lessons from his life to actions that accelerate individual change and organizational transformation.

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KEYNOTE SPEAKER

STEVE DONAHUE Presented by

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Are you facing change in your life? Do you want to learn how to better deal with it?

Listen to Donahue’s full talk at www.cio.in/ cio-tv/keynote-speaker-steve-donahue

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ith stunning visuals from his adventures across the Sahara Desert, Steve Donahue shared an incredibly rich desert metaphor, shifting between his experiences of crossing the Sahara and showing how, in his own life, he has coped with the metaphorical deserts everyone finds themselves struggling through.

He goaded the audience to find out what their ‘compass’, under constantly changing conditions and uncertainty. Donahue encouraged CIOs to use their inner compass and intuitive guideposts to plot their path.

To succeed as a CIO, one needs to answer three questions, said Donahue: How do you change yourself to become the go-to person on change within your organization? How do you develop the mindset and skillset required for a change agent? And how do you carry out the title of a CIO with the secret function of the unofficial Chief Change Officer?

Quoting the example of Apple, he explained how Steve Jobs steered his company out of bankruptcy in 1997 by “being different.” By identifying their underlying values, CIOs, he said, can be the agents of change. “Change is something we can count on,” said Donahue. And everyone faces change he said, whether it’s starting a new career, coping with an illness or a midlife crisis, getting married or divorced, or having kids move out.

Using an African storytelling technique he used ‘drums’ to show the audience the three rules of desert travel through blinding sandstorms, showing CIOs how they can navigate through the constantly shifting sands of their business.

According to Donahue, following your compass, moving away from campfires and having a destination beyond your imagination are the three key rules which will help CIOs seize opportunities across the shifting sands of work and life.

Telling CIOs to think differently, Donahue said that the difference between managers and leaders is that, managers follow maps and leaders follow a compass.

“The only way to become a change agent is to expand your personal experience with change,” Donahue said while speaking about being different.

Donahue said that in the business of technology sometimes a sudden change occurs and a CIO might start thinking that it is not what he or she wanted. But if that change takes the CIO towards a desired direction, then it is better to take the risk and go with the change.

“My friend and I, when we were stranded in the Sahara desert, had to take a crucial decision. We decided to leave our campfire.

Campfires are like comfort zones. It is like the things that you are good at doing. All CIOs need a campfire. But if you want to master change and become the chief change officer in your organization, you have to step away from your campfire from time to time,” Donahue said.

“Stepping away from your comfort zone is not easy. But to start with, one can start doing exactly the opposite of what he or she does. For example, if a member of your staff approaches you with a problem and you happen to know the solution, instead of telling them, you should remain silent and see what happens,” Donahue said.

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9/18/2014 6:32:45 PM

The CIO Revolutions Vijay Ramachandran, editor-in-chief, IDG Media, leans on his decadelong exposure to Indian chief information officers to share some of the practices he’s seen IT leaders use to grow their organizations —and their careers.

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KEYNOTE SPEAKER

VIJAY RAMACHANDRAN Presented by

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Want to hear more about how some CIOs are growing their careers? Watch Ramachandran’s talk at www.cio.in/ cio-tv/cio-revolutions

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ijay Ramachandran discussed how CIOs take business goals and translate them using IT, in order to get effective returns for their organizations.

It has been almost a decade from when he first started to interact with CIOs to figure out what makes them tick, and with the passage of time, he has learnt how some are more effective than others.

“Over the last few years, since the slowdown really set in, the world of the CIO has gone topsyturvy. CIOs have been asked to take on different responsibilities. Everything a CIO does must have a business outcome as an end goal. This wasn’t so, 10 years ago. Ten years ago, if I asked a CIO about TCO or ROI, the answer would typically be a laugh,” he said.

Ramachandran drew interesting parallels to the game of ‘pithu’ and the putting together of the nuts and bolts of a strategy. He also delved on the point of CIOs being targeted or having to justify the value they are bringing into the organization. CIOs’ relationship with lines-of-business, who have started dictating IT spends, is another topic he talked about, .

Ramachandran said that currently the role of a chief information officer is following three parallel tracks.

First, managements and business consider IT extremely strategic, so a CIO is seen as a business enabler or a consultant; someone who has all the answers. This real-world experience lends a greater understanding to how technology affects a company’s bottomline, as well as a greater appreciation for a wide

“Over the last few years, since the slowdown really set in, the world of the CIO has gone topsy-turvy. Ten years ago, if I asked a CIO about TCO or ROI, the answer would typically be a laugh.” variety of everyday business challenges.

Second, business decides to hire someone with experience—from client service, marketing, or finance—to run the role.

Third, the management decides what IT really wants to deliver in an organization.

He went on to list many practices that the best of CIOs are implementing to help further shape their agenda. They need to do a bit of a soul-searching to graduate to where he really wants to be, said Ramachandran.

A CIO must be a master communicator to be able to bridge the gap between the IT and the rest of the organization, he said.

Moving out of one’s department to talk to dealers, customers and partners, at least once a day, is a good exercise, he said.

Ramachandran concluded by advising CIOs to talk to startups often in order to tap their technology. Celebrate what your teams are doing, he said, and the little victories in your organization. Plan your succession well and prepare your teams to take over!

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CIO 100

Event Report | Chat With The Editor

Speed, Scale, Simplicity: Changing the Game Gopesh Maindola, advance datacenter architect, APAC, Brocade, highlights how Brocade is redefining customer engagement with respect to virtualized datacenters, network function virtualization, SDN, and cloud orchestration.

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that it can contribute in the evolution cycle of data and application.

CHAT WITH THE EDITOR on

SPEED, SCALE, SIMPLICITY: CHANGING THE GAME Brought to you by

Vijay Ramachandran: Why is Brocade excited about datacenters?

Gopesh Maindola: All datacenters are going through some sort of transformation. In this journey, the networking bit still lags behind. This is where we come in the picture and work closely with customers.

We all know that the most important thing in a datacenter is data, and if you look at this data, which has evolved over time—from simple text files to media-rich files—the volume has immensely increased. IoT has enabled us to capture the kind of data we never imagined existed.

The second-most important thing in datacenters are applications. These have also gone through a long evolution cycle. They manipulate data to provide some sort of information—analytics is a classic example of the same.

What connects application and data is the network, the evolution of which has not been much over the years. We work with customers to help them evolve their network, so CIO

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Ramachandran: Does Brocade see technologies like SDN, NFV, and network virtualization as disparate or complimentary approaches?

Maindola: All these technologies have emerged on the same time cycle, so I believe that all are part of the same family.

I will describe how they differentiate among themselves. First, SDN. Building network needs a box, a switch, or a router. The configured version of it is the management plain and when one programs the same box to forward the traffic, we call it control plain. The control plai becomes worse when it grows in number.

So the control plain is centralized as a software. Now we can have a single point of management. This is the first time one can see the integration—where network starts talking to the rest of the elements.

NFV, on the other hand, is a device approach. One always buys a Firewall more than the required capacity. When he grows at a larger speed, the capacity runs short, and if not, the returns are pretty time consuming.

Considering Intel as an example we can say that the performance of the packet processing has improved a lot, and this has stuck the attention of the industry.

The third factor is network virtualization. It is where one has a single server but runs multiple virtual machines on it, and they behave as individual servers. So, we built a network once and then we can built virtual networks on top of it and utilize it again and again.

Ramachandran: Given all of these, why should CIOs and their teams be concerned about it now?

Maindola: The driving factor for the emergence of these technologies has been cost.

Apart from that, SDN has opened up the network for the very first time. Customers will now have a choice to pick and choose the best of the breed.

The third dimension, which is pretty important, is to improve user experience. Users are the primary IT team. With SDN, managing and controlling the network becomes pretty easy and accessible even for a small team. It also enhances the experience of the end client.

Go Online!

Do you want to redefine your datacenter? To hear more about how Brocade is using technology for optimizing its datacenter and enabling better customer engagement, visit: www.cio.in/cio-tv/chat-editor-brocade

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9/18/2014 6:35:18 PM

CIO 100

Event Report | Chat With The Editor

Driving Competitive Advantage in a New Era of Smart In conversation with IDG India’s Editor-in-Chief Vijay Ramachandran, Jason Mosakowski, director of software sales and marketing, IBM India/South Asia, has explained why Indian enterprises are on the cusp of business transformation, and how that can be achieved through the right approach to SMAC (social, mobility, analytics, and cloud).

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DRIVING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN A NEW ERA OF SMART Brought to you by

and description reporting. A lot of value creation is being unlocked now. We have case studies in retail and BFSI where there is tangible and measurable value in terms of real-time actions based on customer behavior.

Ramachandran: A lot of the front end of analytics is becoming mobile. How does building an ecosystem for apps to manage devices, and secure and enforce policies, happen?

Mosakowski: A recent global CIO study indicated that 50 percent of breaches happen through mobile devices. So, in the light of that, bringing devices in, and securing and integrating end points are the key challenges.

In order to integrate the rest of your infrastructure with a mobile environment, we have to take a platformbased approach in terms of development, testing, and run time. Our solutions MobileFirst, all integrated on one platform, offers enterprises a comprehensive set of mobile products and services to increase efficiencies and gain a competitive advantage.

Ramachandran: Given how Indian workers are getting younger and more social-media-savvy, will organizations be able to create collaborative ecosystems?

Mosakowski: Change management is crucial, especially with social; it has to be driven as a business strategy.

Some of our clients in India, and globally, have wellthought plans to transform their businesses, drive change management, adoption, accelerate time-tomarket, besides expanding communities within organization to share expertise.

Vijay Ramachandran: Why do you believe that cloud computing, analytics, mobile, and social media (SMAC) are not just critical, but foundational for business transformation?

Jason Mosakowski: If you talk of SMAC, security underpins all of it. Each as a stand-alone can be transformative. If you look at IT, most of the work now is around traditional systems of record, whether it is finance, HR or the supply chain.

But increasingly, where new value creation is being generated is in systems of engagement, be it cloud, social, or analytics. Combining these elements with systems of insight results in real-time analytics for actions, that can be taken with regard to employees, and citizens; these pieces make for business transformation.

CIO

Ramachandran: How can CIOs leverage and connect the dots with high-end analytics?

Mosakowski: If you look at analytics, there is traditional BI

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Ramachandran: Enterprise IT has always been a workin-progress. Since you believe the cloud is the fabric that ties all the pieces together, how does that work?

Mosakowski: Cloud 1.0 was about virtualization. Cloud 2.0 was moving towards a hybrid environment. Cloud 3.0 is about a deeper hybrid environment. With the emergence of PaaS, IBM Bluemix is what comes to mind. Through Bluemix, we have a catalogue of offerings, the economics of which pan out when customers can reduce costs and scale applications faster using flexible runtimes and cloud-based tools and services.

Go Online!

Is your enterprise at the cusp of transformation? Do you think the SMAC stack can help? To hear more about what Mosakowski has to say on the subject, visit: www.cio.in/ cio-tv/chat-editor-ibm

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9/18/2014 6:35:26 PM

CIO 100

Event Report | Chat With The Editor

The Future of Work: Productivity on the Go

Tyler Bryson, general manager, Marketing and Operations, Microsoft, says the company is targeting to become a productivity company, enabling experiences across devices and platforms.

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perience that people need to have. Mobility will enable that journey.

CIO CONVERSATIONS on

THE FUTURE OF WORK: PRODUCTIVITY ON THE GO Brought to you by

Ramachandran: When we talk about mobility, it is not just about getting devices. It is also about the app and the ecosystem you build around it. Some apps and devices are Microsoft and some aren’t. How do you join the dots?

Bryson: We embrace an extended ecosystem. As a platform company, we want to enable experiences across all devices and ecosystems. We have to stop focusing on the app and the devices, and focus more on the users’ need and deliver the experience on their device. Microsoft will create these experiences anywhere, anytime across devices and platforms. This helps us solve many problems.

Ramachandran: Mobility allows organizations to derive value from things like having analytics where end users really need it and when they need it. How are you looking at it?

Bryson: Mobility is a great enabler. The motive is to get the data to where people are and need it the most. It is because of mobility we have more devices, more technology enabled things. The challenge has been, while we have been great at collecting the data, we have not been great in getting the data back to the people in the format they need and can work with. Microsoft is investing to bring the richness of the information back to them in a way they need it on a regular basis.

Vijay Ramachandran: What does a cloud-first or a mobile-first strategy entail? How does it connect to the future of digital work?

Tyler Bryson: Our strategy is to create digital work and digital life experiences and to reinvent those for the mobile-first and cloud-first world. We at Microsoft think the experience people have with technology needs to be re-invented. We want to be a platform and productivity company.

CIO

Ramachandran: Over the years, my idea of Microsoft is that it is a provider of platforms. Now you are making the transition into a provider of productivity. How? Bryson: We have a long heritage of being a productivity company. Over a billion people globally use our productivity tools daily. Productivity is rich in our heritage, but it needs a reinvention around a mobile-first, cloud-first world.

Our vision is to take it beyond documents, data, and applications, and think more broadly about the end-to-end ex-

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Ramachandran: Microsoft has a role in the entire SMAC stack. It did so by design but integration becomes a huge challenge. How do all the dots connect?

Bryson: It is one thing to say you have implemented all those technologies and another to make them work together the way they were intended to. Microsoft came into this through a combination of design and demand.

Our customers led us to these scenarios that need to be solved. Meanwhile, engineering team was working on solving some of these bigger issues.

Go Online!

Do you want to become a productivity company? Enabling performance across devices and platforms? To hear more about what Bryson has to say on the subject, visit: www.cio. in/cio-tv/chat-editor-microsoft

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9/18/2014 6:35:36 PM

CIO 100

Event Report | CIO Conversations

UC: Collaborative, Creative, Commercial Panelists Sridhar VS, SVP-Sales Global Enterprise Solutions, Tata communications; Mandar Marulkar, VP & global IT head, KPIT technologies; and Anil Veer, VP-IT, Aricent, discuss how unified communication makes an enterprise agile, creates opportunities, helps meet customer needs, and achieve new operational efficiencies.

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CIO CONVERSATIONS on

THE THREE C’S OF UNIFIED COMMUNICATION Brought to you by

Anil Veer

VP-IT, Aricent

One of the major driver for UC is geographic diversification.

When the company expands, its footprint becomes global, and its employees feel the need to collaborate anytime, anywhere, and on any chosen device. This business need made UC a strategic imperative for Aricent. When you are mobile and you find that 60 to 70 percent of your workforce needs to collaborate with global customers, you need to leverage UC as a strategic initiative. India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are the only countries in the world which do not allow the integration of PSTN with IP. So, in India we are setting up two networks, one for PSTN and the other for VOIP. Where we want to have a global end-to-end voice over data network, India becomes a challenge, because we cannot integrate IP with PSTN. Other than that you are carrying a legacy with old EPBXs because of which having end-to-end solution overnight is difficult.

You have to start your journey with point solutions.

interoperability. And the third is security. CIOs tell us they have a legacy environment. They want us to help them protect it. They often say they have new age solutions and the shadow IT. So they need to have a platform, and then secure it.

Mandar Marulkar

VP & Global IT Head, KPIT Technologies

Mobility and UC are quite interconnected. One part of mobility is to allow your employees to work from anywhere and bring in the simplified aspect of allowing them access on any device they like. If you want them to be productive, you require the appropriate software, hardware, data, and communication.

We use a lot of collaboration technology like Office 356, Cisco IP telephony, and telepresence. But there are challenges relating to interoperability. Connecting the solution of one service provider to that of another can pose a challenge.

On the CIO Conversation Panel: Anil Veer VP-IT, Aricent

Sridhar VS SVP-Sales Global Enterprise Solutions, Tata Communications

Mandar Marulkar VP & Global IT Head, KPIT Technologies

Sridhar VS

SVP-Sales Global Enterprise Solutions, Tata Communications

We approached the enterprise market space from an endto-end perspective for providing connectivity solutions. We discussed that as users are proliferating, the need to have legacy as well as new age solutions is very important. Second, in terms of managing this infrastructure we need end-to-end

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Go Online!

To know more about how unified communication can benefit your enterprise, visit www.cio.in/cio-tv/cio-conversationtata-communications

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CIO 100

Event Report | CIO Conversations

The Power of Visual Analytics On the sidelines of CIO100 2014 a distinguished panel—Venkatesh Natrajan, special director-IT, Ashok Leyland; Deepak Ghodke, India country manager, Tableau Software; and JY Pook, VP-APAC, Tableau Software—explored how organizations can combine the horsepower of analytics with user-friendly visualization and empower any business user to optimize decision-making.

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J.Y. Pook CIO CONVERSATIONS on

THE POWER OF VISUAL ANALYTICS Brought to you by

Venkatesh Natrajan

Special Director-IT, Ashok Leyland

Today, IT is viewed more as a value center than as cost center.

Organizations are now attempting to move to next stage of being IT-led. As organizations transition to this phase, they will witness a tighter alignment of IT strategy to the business objectives. In IT-led organizations, SMAC technologies play a very important role. But I’d like to call it the I-SMAC technologies where ‘I’ stands for Internet of things. All these technology approaches put together are very important. We are doing a lot of work on the Internet of things in the area of telematics.

Deepak Ghodke

VP-APAC, Tableau Software

If you look at the top trends in the area of analytics, mobility plays a predominant role. In today’s organizations, mobile devices are the primary mode of interaction. People want access to the data while they are working and while being on the move. A supervisor walking down the factory will want a mobile device to access the data. It’s easy, simple to use and fast.

Then there’s self-service BI. Some years ago, there were stenographers who took dictations and documented it. Today, we use e-mails. Similarly, the days of backroom specialist engineers and people accessing data is gone. If you try to find data in today’s fast moving economy you will be outpaced by competition.

Business realties have changed and a fresh set of questions are waiting to be answered. It’s a reiterative process.

In the fast paced business environment we need to answer business questions fast.

This business imperative has brought the idea of agile BI to the fore front. Business wants to do its own analysis of data whether it’s at the desk or on mobile. With Tableau, all the power will come to the users.

On the CIO Conversation Panel: Venkatesh Natrajan Special Director-IT, Ashok Leyland

Deepak Ghodke India Country Manager, Tableau Software

India Country Manager, Tableau Software

IT is striving to become a value driver for the organization.

When people work with data they typically want IT to create a report based on the data available with the department.

The time taken to get the data and build the report is way too long. Tableau is championing the idea that the business user should have clean and good data based on which they can take informed business decisions.

It’s the business users who know what to do with the information and they are the ones taking the decisions on the field. One of the primary driving factors in this discussion is the ease of use. This is our key value proposition. We ensure that users find it easy to get data and make business critical decisions from it.

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JY Pook VP-APAC, Tableau Software

Go Online!

To know more about how the power of visual analytics can enable optimum decision-making, visit www.cio.in/cio-tv/ cio-conversation-tableau-software c o.in REAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

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9/18/2014 6:37:48 PM

CIO 100

Event Report | CIO Conversations

Crossing the Chasm Given the dynamic nature of business, datacenters should be designed with utmost flexibility and efficiency. The panel—Sachin Jain, CIO-Global Operations, Evalueserve; Jaybalan Vellayudhan, director-Business Development, Schneider Electric; Aniket Patange, director-Professional Services, Schneider Electric; and Manas Mati, executive director, Walt Disney—delved into the various aspects of datacenter management.

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CIO CONVERSATIONS on

CROSSING THE CHASM Brought to you by

Aniket Patange

Director-Professional Services IT Business, Schneider Electric

I would look at three things—safety, efficiency, and energy savings. We have proficiency in monitoring systems in real time. We give a single dashboard to CIOs on what are the parameters of the critical physical infrastructure. Once they have a real time view of their assets they can do two things— they can predict the efficiency and the utilization of their assets and they can move from reactive monitoring to a predictive monitoring. Thus, we are able to predict failures before they happen in an environment that is very dynamic. They are looking at day-to-day operations. All critical assets are viewed in real time, so statistics help us set performance benchmarks. And they do not suffer downtime.

On the CIO Conversation Panel: Sachin Jain CIO-Global Operations & CISO-IT, Evalueserve

Jaybalan Vellayudhan

Sachin Jain

CIO-Global Operations and CISO-IT, Evalueserve

Given the way technology is shaping up, we have shifted some of our workload to the cloud, but we are also trying to manage our DC. We have to live with both. We can’t migrate to the cloud completely. The green field DC is one such approach.

Jaybalan Vellayudhan

Director-Strategy and Business Development, Schneider Electric

Aniket Patange Director-Professional Services IT Business, Schneider Electric

Director-Strategy and Business Development, Schneider Electric

The different phases in datacenter deployment start upstream.

At the planning phase you look at customer requirement. Next comes design where we have to think in terms of how business will scale up and how the datacenter will operate. Post design you get into a building stage. Post the build comes the operating phase. Last is the stage of optimization. These are some factors that come in the life cycle of a DC.

Manas Mati

Executive Director and Technology Head, Walt Disney

It’s difficult to predict the scale of business in the next five years.

Forward planning is needed. We are in content business so we can look at a business horizon across five to eight years. Effectiveness and optimization is the key to assessing your DC capacity.

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Manas Mati Executive Director & Technology Head, Walt Disney

Go Online!

Want to know more about effective datacenter management?

To view the whole conversation, visit www.cio.in/cio-tv/cioconversation-schneider-electric c o.in

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3-5 DECEMBER, 2014

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CIO is pleased to announce the Eighth Edition of the program.

It will be hosted at the opulent ITC Grand Chola, Chennai, this December. The program will be a heady mix of stimulating keynote sessions, engaging workshops, fascinating live demos and gala evenings.

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TECH

SPOTLIGHTS ANALYTICS BIG DATA CLOUD DATACENTERS ENTERPRISE APPS INTERNET OF THINGS MOBILE SOCIAL SECURITY

CHENNAI, DECEMBER 2014

ESSENTIAL

technology IMAGE BY MASTERFILE.COM

DATA SECURITY

What are companies doing with your personal data? Not as much as you might think—at least not yet.

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Locking Up Personal Data

BY ROBERT L. MITCHELL

SECURITY | The large trove of data that's out there largely includes traditional offline data gathered by credit bureaus and data aggregators, user account data collected and retained by businesses, data from online activity including searches, social media profiles and tweets, mobile app activity and Web browsing habits.

Add to this relatively new data types, such as that from “scoring” methodologies that use data about people to predict their future behavior. This would include the data from fitness devices and other “Internet of things,” emerging retail store tracking systems, and location data from your smartphone that lets apps track where you are, how fast you're moving— even the direction in which you're heading and where you're likely to be going given your previous travel history.

It's no surprise, then, that people worry about what businesses are doing with all that information.

More often than not, however, the answer is that businesses aren't doing as much as they could be. Enterprises face regulatory and technical hurdles that make combining the data they have difficult; some data types and uses of consumer data are highly regulated; and companies usually don't like to share core customer data externally for competitive reasons. When they do, that data is usually boiled down to basic demographic and REAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

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interest categories and then aggregated for marketing purposes. If the data is being shared with third parties for the purpose of online advertising, personally identifiable information is usually removed.

company now has privacy professionals aligned with each business unit. “Privacy will be a competitive differentiator for companies over the next five years,” he says.

Too Many Silos

Regulatory Minefield

Most businesses can't even integrate all of the data silos they have cost effectively, much less run sophisticated analytics across all of it or accommodate new data sources, such as the unstructured data streams derived from social media.

In the online advertising world, the behavioral advertising industry has developed a high level of sophistication and expertise, but most of corporate world— including the manufacturing and consumer products sectors—remains in the early stages of data integration, says Jim Adler, vice president and chief privacy officer at Metanautix, a firm that specializes in data integration within and across companies.

“They're still trying to understand what they have” and the data flows for all of it, he says.

Traditional types of data—such as healthcare information and banking records— and some uses—such as for identity verification, insurance underwriting, employment or to assess creditworthiness—are regulated. But the increasing use of personal data for marketing purposes, gathered both offline and online, has fewer regulatory controls. That's a big data bucket. And inappropriate use of that marketing data—such as for making hiring decisions—can get a company into hot water with regulators.

Businesses face a jigsaw puzzle of laws and regulations that govern certain types of data assets as well as how information may—and may not—be used for some types of decisions, says Tony Hadley, senior vice

Businesses need to consider how private the data is to the individual and how perilous to the consumer the outcome might be if the data is divulged in unexpected ways.

As those repositories of consumer data continue to slowly, steadily converge, however, the ways in which businesses interact with consumers will need to change if they are to head off the kinds of consumer privacy and trust headaches that have already confronted traditional data aggregators and the online behavioral advertising industry.

“Transparency overall will need to increase as these environments become more complex and intertwined,” says Leigh Feldman, chief privacy officer at American Express. The financial and travel services 106

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president of government affairs and public policy at data aggregator Experian. “The overarching regulation of marketing data comes from a mosaic of smaller state and federal laws,” he says, as well as from the standards governing ethical practices put forward by the Direct Marketing Association and other professional groups.

One problem, says Metanautix's Adler, is that when companies use marketing data about consumers for purposes other than marketing they can get into trouble. For example, a business that uses information from Facebook or Twitter

42%

Of Indian CIOs say security will have the most profound effect on their role this year. to make a negative hiring decision—and does not disclose to the applicant that the information was used in that decision—can run afoul of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which governs how data may be used for employment purposes.

“You cannot use marketing data for credit or employment eligibility. There's a firm firewall between those two uses. If you break it the FTC will come after you,” says Hadley. “And if someone is taking consumer data and mining it in such a way as to be abusive to customers, that's something the FTC could clean up under its deceptive trade practices.”

Using Data the Wrong Way Businesses need to consider how private the data is to the individual and how perilous to the consumer the outcome might be if the data is divulged in unexpected ways, Adler says. He cites retailer Target's textbook case of unwittingly sending a mailer targeted at expectant mothers to a pregnant teenager before her father knew about her condition.

Target used analytics to determine that there was a high probability that the woman was pregnant, and had assigned her to that category. “They knew which customers were pregnant based on what they were buying. And that's where the conversation ended,” Adler says. But the retailer failed to think through the implications of sending targeted marketing materials that clearly implied that the customer was pregnant—a sensitive subject that the customer might

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not be ready for others to know. It also feels a bit creepy, says Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum. Marketing is about having a relationship with the customer, he says.

“Where it breaks down is when marketers don't understand the boundaries of those relationships. Here was this very personal experience and the user had no clue that this analysis was happening.”

Marketers need to bring people along rather than let them uncover what may seem like unpleasant facts, he adds. For example, a few years ago Orbitz users were shocked to discover that visitors using a Mac were shown pricier vacations and accommodations than those using a Windows PC. “People were surprised and outraged,” he says, but Orbitz might have avoided the problem had it been more transparent about how the recommendations were made—and why— at the time the user viewed them.

Similarly, misunderstandings over variable pricing practices online by Staples drew fire, in part because customers were left in the dark as to what the retailer was doing and why. Online businesses don't selectively raise prices when and where they can get away with it, says Jennifer Barrett Glasgow, chief global privacy officer for data aggregator Acxiom.

“In 40 years in this industry I've never seen an instance where someone was charged more than the published price,” Barrett Glasgow explains. Most of the time, “the question is, will I get a discount?” The answer might depend on factors such as the customer's proximity to a brick-andmortar competitor. But absent any kind of explanation, people can assume the worst.

And the criteria used for making pricing determinations matter to regulators as well as consumers, says Adler. For example, variable pricing by location might also appear to single out a minority community.

“When do price distinctions become price discrimination?” Businesses need to think through that. CIO Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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DATA EXPLOSION

The Convergence Era CONVERGENCE | Just a few decades ago businesses knew very little about their customers beyond name, address and what they bought—if they used a credit card.

Data aggregators like Acxiom and Experian provided personalized demographic data to marketers—that you are 42 years old, own a truck, like to golf, are married and so on—to help companies better target advertising and marketing dollars to customers and prospects. That offline data was—and still is—culled from public records, surveys and what Acxiom chief global privacy officer Jennifer Barrett Glasgow calls “summarized or aggregated purchase information.”

Businesses buy these buckets of consumer demographic data to match up with their own customer records for direct marketing and upselling, and they can buy a prospect list of people assigned to an interest group that presumably will be more likely to buy a given product. The advertising message then gets disseminated either through direct mail, telemarketing, email, or text messages.

The evolution of online data has led to different practices for gathering data, but with the same objective, says Mike Zaneis, executive vice president and general counsel for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry trade association.“Consumers don't care if you send them relevant ads, but they don't want you to know their browsing history,” he says. So advertisers use cookies to track online activity of website visitors, and that activity is linked to a cookie ID tied to a specific browser on a specific device.

The offline and digital worlds have been converging for some time, but those two worlds have very different rules as to how consumer data may be used.“The offline world is all personally identifiable data. The online world is either anonymous or identifiable," says Barrett Glasgow. Advertising networks track online activity and build interest profiles that link to cookie IDs rather than PII—as required by the code of conduct put forth by the Network Advertising Initiative, an industry trade association.

— Robert L. Mitchell

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ROBOTICS

* BY JOAB JACKSON

The robot uprising must surely be close at hand, as Ivy League scientists are diligently working to give machines the ability to collaborate with themselves without intervention from humans. A group of researchers at Harvard University has figured out a way for thousands of robots to coordinate their actions so that they can complete a single task, such as arrange themselves into a star formation. The work, led by Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences' computer science professor Radhika Nagpal, is part of an ongoing effort to investigate ways that machines can mimic biological processes, using AI (artificial intelligence) algorithms.

The researchers built 1,024 small, mobile, three-legged machines that can move and communicate with one another using infrared laser beams. Humans can issue a command to the robots, such as telling them to form into a sea star or the letter 'k,' and the bots will coordinate with each other and arrange themselves into the desired pattern. The idea is that just as simple organisms can work together to a complete a task, so too should machines be able to self-organize to complete a task, without the detailed instructions from a single master controller.

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IMAGE BY T HIN KSTOCKP HOTOS.IN

A Robot Army