April 1 2006 by Sreekanth Sastry

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From The Editor

Whenever I ask IT leaders about their key challenges, you can bet that IT-business

Alignment Algorithm A CIO has to ensure a place and a voice where strategic decisions are made.

alignment figures high on their list of priorities. I find that both remarkable and disturbing. Noteworthy because it indicates a desire among CIOs to work closer with management; and it’s worrying because in many organizations, business manadarins still lack an appreciation of the advantage and strategic value IT can provide. Is it because of the belief that IT is a commodity, a cost-centre, a tool merely to be managed? Or is the management not clear about the competitive edge that IT teams can give their organizations? Research by CIO reveals that your peers feel that the greatest risks they face by failing to get business on the same page are missed opportunities for innovation and growth (64 percent), continued inefficiency (48 percent) and cuts to the IT budget (43 percent). Ultimately, it falls to you to convince the doubters of IT’s value and turn them into true believers of IT’s potential to transform the enterprise. There are ways and there are ways to do this. Our research shows that while some practices are widely in use, they’re not necessarily the most effective. For instance, methods that are least Failure to convince effective in improving business’ perception of business of IT’s strategic the IT department include using leadership value can mean missed development and business education programs opportunities, inefficiency for IT staff, building value estimates into and IT budget cuts. business cases for most IT-business initiatives and formally managing risk. The most effective practices for IT-business alignment we see ensure that the CIO has a place and a voice where strategic decisions are made and ensure that practices involve responsibility and accountability for IT value by the business. This provides the CIO an opportunity to build superb relationships with senior-level management and influence how they view IT’s role and its value to the business. This gambit also guarantees that the IT team is not the sole creator or recipient of IT value, and instead that it shares responsibility and reward with the business unit sponsors. Perception about the value of IT is thus greatly influenced by the degree of ownership that business leaders take in IT projects. On page 28 you’ll find details of how some of your peers have gone about changing the perception and communicating the value of IT to their business executives. Let me know what you think of their efforts and more importantly, what you are doing in the same vein. You can catch me at vijay_r@cio.in

Vijay Ramachandran, Editor vijay_r@cio.in

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Executive Expectations View From The Top | 38 Ravi Uppal, Vice Chairman and MD, ABB India, is using IT to automate all noncreative processes to enhance productivity and reduce errors. Interview by Balaji Narasimhan

Peer to Peer The Vision Thing | 25 The first thing this CIO of a brand-new university had to do was lay out his vision to get IT up and running. Then, it was a race against time—and the inevitable glitches. Column by Rich Kogut Winning IT battles will not get you into the faithful’s heaven, believes Arindam Sinha, GM–IT, RSWM (foreground); prevailing over IT doubters needs a long-term strategy.

IT Value

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COVER STORy | Turning IT doubters into True Believers | 28 Too many business leaders have little faith in I T’s ability to deliver value. To save themselves—and their businesses—CIOs must change that negative perception into a positive belief in IT as a strategic partner.

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Executive Coach Survivor: The Organization | 22 Does it really help you to vote people off your IT island? Isn’t there a better way to build a staff of top performers? In fact, there is. Column by Susan Cramm

Technology High-Performance Computing: Supercharging the Enterprise | 44 Thanks to lower barriers to entry, computer clusters and grids are moving out of the labs and into the mainstream. Feature by Leon Erlanger

By Gunjan Trivedi & Stephanie Overby

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content

Essential Technology | 58 Ubiquitous Computing | Magical History Tour

By Michael Fitzgerald Pundit | The Integration Layer

By Christopher Koch

From the Editor | 8 Alignment Algorithm | A CIO has to ensure a place and a voice where strategic decisions are made. By Vijay Ramachandran

Inbox | 16

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NOW ONLINE For more opinions, features, analyses and updates, log on to our companion website and discover content designed to help you and your organization deploy IT strategically. Go to www.cio.in

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Govern Standards Guaranteed | 50 The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) is the country’s final authority on quality and safety. But as it sought to be a citizen’s touchstone, it faced challenges from within. BIS’ manual process was groaning under a growing number of products demanding their stamp of approval. Armed by the National Informatics Center and riding on IT, BIS has emerged a winner.

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Feature by Balaji Narasimhan

When Change Becomes the Catalyst | 54 Nirmaljit Singh Kalsi, Secretary IT, Government of Punjab, put the problem areas of e-governance projects on a mat by tackling the roadblocks that come in the way of success. Interview by Rahul Neel Mani 12

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advisory board

Ma nagemen t

President N. Bringi Dev

COO Louis D’Mello Ed itorial Editor Vijay Ramachandran

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Special Correspondent Balaji Narasimhan

Senior Correspondent Gunjan Trivedi

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Anil Nadkarni

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Head IT, Thomas Cook, a_nadkarni@cio.in Arindam Bose Head IT, LG Electronics India, a_bose@cio.in Arun Gupta Director – Philips Global Infrastructure Services Arvind Tawde VP & CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra, a_tawde@cio.in

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Neel Ratan Executive Director – Business Solutions, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, n_ratan@cio.in Rajesh Uppal General Manager – IT, Maruti Udyog, r_uppal@cio.in Prof. R.T.Krishnan Professor, IIM-Bangalore, r_krishnan@cio.in

Samsung

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S. B. Patankar Director - IS, Bombay Stock Exchange, sb_patankar@cio.in S. Gopalakrishnan COO & Head Technology, Infosys Technologies

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Mumbai Rupesh Sreedharan

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Japan Tomoko Fujikawa

USA Larry Arthur

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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, 10th Floor, Vayudooth Chambers, 15–16, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bangalore 560 001, India. IDG Media Private Limited is an IDG (International Data Group) company.

Printed and Published by N Bringi Dev on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, 10th Floor, Vayudooth Chambers, 15–16, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bangalore 560 001, India. Editor: Vijay Ramachandran. Printed at Rajhans Enterprises, No. 134, 4th Main Road, Industrial Town, Rajajinagar, Bangalore 560 044, India

Sunil Gujral Former VP - Technologies, Wipro Spectramind

s_gujral@cio.in Unni Krishnan T.M CTO, Shopper’s Stop Ltd, u_krishnan@cio.in V. Balakrishnan CIO, Polaris Software Ltd., v_balakrishnan@cio.in

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reader feedback

“Technology is a given. What’s unpredictable is human capital. A successful CIO is one who can keep his flock happy, kicking and together.”

People Watch My congratulations for launching CIO in India for Indian CIOs. Though we all have reading CIO Web editions and the occasional international magazine, having CIO in India with Indian stories is exciting. There are plenty of magazines that discuss CIOs, their challenges and their issues but most of them don’t have the flavor and certainly not the high-caliber write-ups that CIO maintains. CIO takes us beyond computing boxes and networking wires, which despite being essential parts of a CIOs life, are certainly the end. As the role of CIO continues to solidify and change form, both in western and developed countries, we have to think beyond systems and hardware. The value of business is more important to us. If we don’t know what business we’re in and how we can help it grow with information systems, its meaningless to deploy processes. This is where the CIO can lend a helping hand by walking with us to the next level of excellence. I am not referring to a particular issue but to a sense of belonging and bonding that we see emerging in our lives as CIOs, which is reflected in the content of CIO. Frankly, there is enough information to the point of overflow from IT publications. Everyday, we are forced to devote less time 16

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to each magazine but simultaneously give precedence to articles that are immediately close or related to our professional lives and this is what CIO provides. I’d like to mention specifically the CIO issue on emerging leaders in IT (Ones to Watch, Jan 1, 2006). No one, so far, has taken such a futuristic approach. I participated passionately in that issue because I knew the importance of the topic. It not only provided exposure to emerging stars but also served as a reflection of who we are, as CIOs, and what we’re doing to promote the culture of preparing a succession plan in our companies. If tomorrow a CIO leaves an organization, he has to leave someone behind who can hold the fort as completely as he did. Kudos to that edition. I would like to see more of those kinds of issues. I’d also like to mention that CIO seems to have made it a point not to follow a set of people and get their comments and views over and over again. Every issue gives its readers new people, new learning and new ideas to ponder. It’s so refreshing. I wait for more people related issues, which What Do You Think? We welcome your feedback on our articles, apart from your thoughts and suggestions. Write in to editor@cio.in. Letters may be edited for length or clarity.

editor@c o.in

discuss the problems of people management in greater depth and show how a 360degree view of how good teams are made. Technology, these days, is a given. What’s unpredictable and highly volatile is human capital. Personally, I feel that a successful CIO is the one who can keep his flock happy, kicking and together. That’s where CIO can help us by giving us more information on issues related to staffing, people management, etc. Keep the great work going at full steam. Hilal KHan Head IT , Honda Cars India

a Good Word There is a fine line between saying too much and saying too little. Apparently, walking that line comes naturally to CIO. I thoroughly enjoy reading CIO as it depicts a clear and concise form and content. I also share some of the articles with my associates so that they too might reap the benefits of knowledge and happenings in the industry. Keep up the great work. BHarat SHetty GM – Systems,PCS Technology

from some time I have been meaning to thank CIO. I read the magazine thoroughly and have found it very useful. The articles published are relevant and very informative. t ravi SanKar trivedi t. General Manager Andhra Bank

The cIO 5 newsletter is extremely useful. It’s my guess that deciding which five news items must be a hard choice. Continue the good work! K.r. reddy Director (Projects) Mccreade

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Revolution? I N N O v a T I O N Researchers at HP Labs in Bangalore, one of the giant company’s eight labs worldwide, are potentially opening up the Indian hinterland to computers. A touchpad with letters in the local Kannada language can help encourage the use of computers among India’s nonEnglish-speaking public. The touchpad aims to replace the more cumbersome bilingual keyboard that requires multiple key presses to obtain even basic words. A peculiarity of Indian languages like Kannada is that they do not have separate vowels. Matras (the equivalent of vowels) are added to ‘consonants’ as lines or curves. These languages also employ half-letters, that add to the complexity of using an Indic keyboard.

To get around the problem, the touchpad uses a pen to pick out letters. Users can then draws out matras over the consonants which the touchpad recognizes as matras.. A half-letter can be got by a quick double tap. The idea behind the invention stemmed from a strong correlation between English-speakers and PC-users in India; 60 and 54 million respectively, according to Ajay Gupta, Lab Director & Director, Mobility Solutions, HP Labs India. The inconvenience of memorizing various matra codes was keeping native-language speakers away from computers. “Our idea was to break away from the keyboard barrier,” says Gupta. The touchpad affords a quick learning curve.

Field test have proved that it takes about ten minutes to master the touchpad. But there are concerns that at about Rs 2,000—around four times the price of the average keyboard—the touchpad might not conquer the keyboard barrier. The people will have their say, but will they vote for the touchpad? —By Sunil Shah

World's Fastest Network Highlights IPv6 International teams led by the University of Tokyo have broken the records for highest-bandwidth, end-toend IP network. The upshot is that IPv6 is catching up to IPv4 in terms of its ability to handle high-performance applications. The Internet2 land Speed Records, as they are known, represent the fastest rate at which data is sent multiplied by the distance traveled. Records broken involved IPv6 and IPv4 single and multi-streaming. The University of Tokyo teamed J with Jgn2, microsoft, Pacific northwest gigapop and other institutions to break the IPv4 record

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with a data rate of 7.99gpbs over a path 18,641 miles long that crossed eight international networks. For the IPv6 record, the University of Tokyo again joined Jgn2, Pacific northwest gigapop and WIDE Project, and added Chelsio Communications and others, to transfer data at 6.18gbps across an 18,641-mile path covering five international nets. “For researchers and scientists around the world, this is a positive indication that IPv6 is now ready to be used in prime time for their high-performance applications,” said team leader Kei Hiraki, a professor at the University of Tokyo. The university has led three previous record-breaking efforts, which are commonly broken more than once a year. Internet2 is a collection of more than 200 US universities (including Harvard University) that work with government and industry on advanced network technologies. REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 , 2 0 0 6

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The german Research Center Jülich unveiled Europe’s most powerful supercomputer this week, an Ibm Corp. blue gene system that will be used by European scientists to do environmental and particle physics research. Called JUbl, or Jülich blue gene/l, the system offers a peak performance of 45.8 teraflops, equivalent to 45.8 trillion operations per second. That makes it Europe’s most powerful supercomputer, said Dr. norbert attig of Jülich’s Central Institute for applied mathematics. It supplants another Ibm system, the marenostrum blade cluster at the barcelona Supercomputer Center. one of three supercomputing centers in germany, Jülich is already home to a supercomputer called JUmP (Jülich multi Processor), based on Ibm’s p690 servers. That system has a peak performance of 8.9 teraflops per second. The blue gene architecture offers several advantages over the p690, according to attig. Each processor in JUbl bl is less powerful, but there are more of them and they are packed more tightly together, giving better ‘gigaflop to floor space ratio.’ JUbl bl has 2,048 processors in each of its eight racks—a total of 16,348. The older JUmP machine has 32 processors in each of 41 racks—a total of 1,312. “The performance of each processor is lower, but the architecture gives more flexibility because you have less heat to transfer out of the machine,” attig said. The blue gene system also occupies less floor space—about 100 square meters, compared to 300-to-400 square meters for the p690 system, he said. Jülich made an agreement with Ibm not to discuss the price of the system. “However, I can tell you that Iowa State University bought a similar system with one rack for Rs 5.8 crore.” attig said. Researchers have so far used only about 20 percent of JUbl’s capacity, according to attig. one of the challenges has been porting applications from JUmP to take advantage of the blue gene system’s highly-parallel architecture. However, the new machine still lacks some basic management tools. “a a lot of software is missing or can’t be used conveniently.” attig said. “For example, we don't have a scheduling system right now, so we use a handwritten reservation system and that restricts the number of users dramatically.” JUbl is currently serving only about 10 projects and 30 users, while JUmP is hosting 150 projects and 600 users, he said. The number of users will increase soon. Such systems are needed to keep pace with growing demand for compute time from scientists and academics, which will increase by a factor of a thousand in the next five years, predicted Joachim Treusch, chairman of the board at Jülich. The world’s most powerful supercomputer is another Ibm machine at the US Department of Energy’s lawrence livermore national laboratories in California. It was measured with a linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 teraflops. The linpack benchmark is “a more realistic measure” of the blue gene system’s capabilities, attig said. JUbl has a linpack benchmark of 36.5 teraflops, he said. — by James niccolai MaNaGEMENT

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s O U R C E Senegal’s state IT agency is turning to open-source software to avoid paying what it sees as prohibitively expensive licensing fees for commercial software. “We are an underdeveloped country without enough funding for expensive software,” says Tidiane Seck, director of Senegal’s Agence Del’Informatique de l’Etat (ADIE) Dakar. Senegal, in West Africa, is a former French colony. The move has been under way for about a year, beginning soon after the formation of ADIE. The agency is charged with developing an IT infrastructure, including a high-speed network and applications for accounting, payroll, etc., for Senegal’s government ministries. ADIE runs Linux on its approximately 100 file, e-mail and directory servers and uses MySQL AB’s opensource database. The agency is also deploying ERP5 from Nexedi, a French software and services company. It also runs on Linux servers. Nexedi offered French government agencies free training on its software if trainees contributed to the software’s development, said Jean-Paul SmetsSolanes, Nexedi’s chief executive. No French agencies responded, but word of the offer reached Senegal where Mayoro Diagne, a developer with ADIE, took the training course and developed a new budgeting module for ERP5. The Senegalese IT agency has installed Nexedi’s payroll, accounting and budgeting modules internally, where they are used by about a dozen people, Seck says. “We are using ourselves as a kind of pilot, and we intend to push other government agencies to use these systems.”

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Europe’s Fastest Supercomputer

The Penguin in Africa

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How to Get aJob as a CIO Straight to the Top: Becoming a World-Class CIO By Gregory S. Smith John Wiley & Sons, 2006; Rs 1,847.50

one ne of the most valuable career experiences an aspiring CIo CIo can have is to work as a consultant.

B O O K R E v I E W Greg Smith became the CIO of the World Wildlife Fund five years ago at the age of 37. As he climbed the career ladder, he worked as a programmer, a consultant, and a senior IT manager and taught at a local university. In Straight to the Top: Becoming a World-Class CIO, Smith describes what he learned along the way. His purpose is to advise up-and-coming IT executives about the skills they should have in order to land their

first CIO position—among them, experience with project management, outstanding communication skills, expertise in managing vendors and a strategy for working with executive recruiters. The book is partly a review of existing literature on best practices in IT management and partly a forum for Smith and other CIOs to communicate their observations about how to succeed. Smith is best when he analyzes his personal

C O M P U T I N G With children clonking on keyboards, patrons downloading viruses and kleptomaniacs swiping mice, library computers quickly end up in PC morgues. “When we started offering Internet access, people would go in and change the settings and reset the computer every day,” says Nancy Ferguson, library access services manager at the Richmond Public Library in California. “People just destroyed the computers.” That was before Richmond implemented DiscoverStation, offered by Calgary. DiscoverStation uses one Linux desktop to power up to 10 workstations, leaving only monitors, keyboards, floppy drives and mice subject to public torture. Since its installation last July, the multi-user solution has allowed Richmond librarians to concentrate on what they do best—helping patrons find information. Prior to installation, a librarian spent up to two hours each morning deleting files people had left on PCs. But DiscoverStation clears personal information and other modifications users have made (including browser history and cookies) with each logout. Another time-

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experiences. In combing that terrain, he delivers an unusual insight: One of the most valuable career experiences an aspiring CIO can have is to work as a consultant. Consultants, he argues, listen closely to their clients. They develop topnotch communication skills, gain experience in multiple aspects of business and assimilate best practices for system development. It’s good preparation, he thinks, for a job in which success depends

on one’s ability to establish strong relationships with business users. Smith also argues that one key to advancing is to network. But it’s a challenge for technologists, who are typically introverts. Smith explains how he does it. He also prescribes golf as a way to build relationships. (He says it saved his sanity by getting him out of the office.) Even aspiring executives need to have fun once in a while. —By Elana Varon

saver: Staffers no longer spend time installing firewall protection because DiscoverStation features a builtin security system. Other features include Internet filtering (to block pornography, gambling and other sites deemed inappropriate for library use) and opensource software compatible with Microsoft Office. But for Kristin Shoemaker, reference and systems librarian at the Malden Public Library in Massachusetts, DiscoverStation’s biggest draw is its scheduling capability. The library previously used software that was so buggy that staff often resorted to pencil and paper sign-ins to manage user sessions. “People would cross out other people’s names on the grid, or were confused and put their name in the wrong places. Sometimes fights would break out,” she says. Shoemaker purchased 14 workstations, three years of support, an optional user authentication feature and a printer for under Rs 9.9 lakh. “If we hadn’t had the DiscoverStations, more than likely we would have gone without,” says Shoemaker. “Gone without adequate antivirus, gone without upgrading at all, and the machines would have gone further and further downhill.” —By Lauren Capotosto REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 , 2 0 0 6

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Time in Training Often Wasted Highly paid workers most likely to benefit from learning new skills. One in three workers thinks the time he spent in his last training session probably would have been better spent elsewhere, according to a survey by Hudson, a staffing and consulting services company. Among these workers, 12 percent think training was a complete waste of their time. Although the poll did not ask the 1,674 respondents what their jobs were, Rose Pagliari, an associate director with Hudson’s Learning and Development Group, says the results are relevant to IT workers. “Technology is constantly changing, and for these workers to stay abreast of what’s happening in the market, they need to keep their skills up-to-date,” she says. Self-improvement was the main reason for participation in training; 68 percent of respondents said they attended training because they thought it would provide useful, job-related information. Another 28 percent said they were told to go. Three percent went to training to meet people or to get out of the office.

Pagliari says that IT training programs could be made more worthwhile if combined teaching new technology skills with softer skills, such as business, communication and negotiation, “giving [workers] the ability to become well-rounded business people.” According to the survey, employees with the highest incomes are the most likely to participate and benefit from training. However, lower-income employees are the most likely to pursue future training opportunities. Pagliari says that companies usually invest more in training for their high-income employees because they are further along in their careers and make a more direct contribution to their company’s bottom line. In addition, she says, higher-income workers—because they already have specialized skills—often get more out of training because it’s more targeted to their needs. But training of lower-paid employees can help companies attract and retain talent.

Best Practices

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Prepare workers ahead of time. make sure employees meet any prerequisites for their training and know enough about the subject (including what they want to take away from the course) to actively participate. If the training is not appropriate for employees’ level of expertise, or if they lack enough experience and background knowledge, the training will be a waste of their time and the company’s money.

Follow up. It’s hard to tell how effective a training program has been until after the employees have been back on the job for awhile. according to Pagliari, a positive change in an employee’s job performance is the best way to measure success.

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Match training to jobs. Training should be related to employees’ job requirements and the skills they need to perform their work. Choose a training program that will teach employees skills that are in demand in their profession or that they will utilize within one to two months of taking the class. This is the best way to ensure that employees get the maximum benefit, Pagliari says.

The Bugs in the Carpet are RFI RFId d One of Germany’s best-known makers of vacuum cleaners and carpets aims to tap a new market: Intelligent flooring embedded with wireless chips. Vorwerk & Co. Teppichwerke GmbH & Co. KG is launching a textile flooring underlay equipped with RFID tags, Vorwerk spokesman Thomas Weber said. “After three years of research, we’re launching field tests with several companies that intend to use our smart-floor technology,” he said. “We’re now able to mass-produce the product.” The RFID-enabled flooring underlay is the result of a ‘thinking carpet’ project launched together with German chip maker Infineon Technologies AG in 2003. The smart-floor underlay can be used to perform a number of tasks, such as navigating automated transport systems in buildings, according to Weber. In a first step, together with InMach Intelligente Maschinen GmbH, a robot manufacturer, Vorwerk is offering a bundled ‘smart-floor’ package consisting of the RFID-enabled underlay, robots and software. The underlay enables robots to orient themselves in a room and move toward precise targets on the floor, using information stored in the embedded RFID tags, according to Weber. Systems administrators can manage the robots from a central point, sending data to them from a control PC via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, he said. The RFID tags consist of a microchip joined to an antenna coil and attached to an ultra-thin sheet of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic. Each tag has its own ID number, which can be detected and identified by the robot’s integrated RFID reader from up to 10 centimeters. The power required for reading the tags is supplied by the robot; the tags are passive, requiring no electrical voltage. Industrial floor cleaning could be one application. Data stored in the chips direct the robot to areas that have to be cleaned and away from those already cleaned. Vorwerk intends to market its smart-floor system to numerous groups, including building managers, hospitals and nursing homes. In a next step, the company aims to connect the RFID tags to form an intelligent network that can track movements and respond, according to Weber. The networked tags could be used to help secure floors from intruders or detect nursing home patients who have fallen on the floor, he said.

WIRElEss

—By John Blau

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Susan Cramm

EXECUTIVE COACH

Survivor: The Organization Does it really help you to vote people off your IT island? Isn’t there a better way to build a staff of top performers? In fact, t here is.

Illust ration UNNIK RIS HNAN AV

s you review your organization’s bench strength, the bottom of the bell curve is bugging you. A small percentage of employees just aren’t cutting it. Once upon a time, most of them were highly rated and, as a result, they’re sitting in big jobs. But you’re losing confidence in them, and they’re losing confidence in themselves. They’re becoming defensive or going underground. It’s natural to blame them. After all, their performance is affecting yours, and their previous contributions are fading in light of current challenges. Many organizations practice an extreme form of the ‘blame the employee’ game by using an up-or-out approach to management development. In the up-or-out process (typically done once a year as part of organizational planning), managers are asked to chart out their organizational needs for the future, assess their staff’s current capabilities, and identify the top and bottom 10 percent that should move ‘up’ or move ‘out.’ As a result of this process, people get promoted, reassigned, hired and ‘managed out’ (Read: Fired without an ensuing lawsuit). In so-called high-performance organizations, executives follow this process dutifully, with the understanding that their ability to manage out that bottom 10 percent is part of their job, albeit an unpleasant one. This ongoing ‘Survivor: The Organization’ game results in a corporate ‘kill or be killed’ mentality. The up-or-out process provides an easy road for managers who would rather focus on the low-hanging fruit of structure and talent assessment and defer more difficult decisions regarding strategy and career development. In many organizations, organizational planning has been reduced to endless hours spent tinkering with org charts (in the vain 22

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Susan Cramm

EXECUTIVE COACH

hope that some sort of a Suduko-type answer will emerge) and gossiping about others’ capabilities and potential (albeit in an organizationally sanctioned manner).

Why Up-or-Out Doesn’t Work Up-or-out is a ruthless, Darwinian approach that, very often, simply doesn’t work because it ignores two key realities. First, it assumes that if there is a performance issue it’s due to the shortcomings of the individual. In my experience, most individual performance issues are really management performance issues in disguise. Second, up-or-out assumes that the devil you don’t know is better than the devil you do. In reality, hiring someone from the outside is difficult, expensive and typically results in trading one set of problems for another. Try, instead, to entertain the idea that you have most of the right people right now, and spend your time assigning them to roles that they 1. want to do, 2. know how to do, and 3. in which they know what to do. You can do this by: Defining the strategy collaboratively. People will know what to do if they’re involved in the development of objectives, strategies and tactics. Only within a shared strategic context can individuals apply their experience, knowledge and social skills in a productive, collaborative fashion. Good talent can go bad when it’s assigned to an initiative that is ill-conceived and unsupported by others. Understanding your people. People are born with inherent talents and the drive to do the best they can in order to feel good and significant. Many times, performance issues crop up when an individual’s values, motivators and talents don’t jibe with the job they are assigned. People will perform best if their role connects with what makes them tick and leverages and enhances their strengths. Providing support. No one has a complete package of talents, skills and knowledge, and most are unaware of their relative strengths and deficiencies—especially when it comes to taking on a new challenge. Managers can help people learn how to do their jobs by providing them with the resources and support (oversight, coaching, education, colleagues, tools) that supplement and complement their abilities. Clarifying processes and roles. Managers can also help ensure that their people know how to do their jobs by designing processes that clearly define their accountabilities and how their work relates to others. In organizational design, it’s important to design processes and roles before addressing staffing questions. Wise leaders understand that many a prince has been made to look like a pig when faced with challenges that are outside of their control due to strategic misalignment, organizational chaos and role misfits. Before you decide that a person just can’t cut it, take a hard look in the mirror and make sure you have set them up for success, not failure.

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Reader Q&A Q: Jack Welch may not have been the first to use up-orout but he certainly popularized it and was lionized for employing it. But did it really work for him and for GE? Or was that just hype? A: Up-or-out has been misused by less mature companies

in their misguided attempt at focusing on best practices rather than appropriate practices. If all companies could sustain the growth and build the HR competence that GE has, up-or-out would not be a business problem (only a problem of conscience). Up-or-out cannot exist without growth because without growth, there is no up. GE developed a set of HR policies that ensure that upor-out is supported by clear performance expectations, frequent performance reviews, candid feedback and management accountability for talent development. In the words of a former GE employee, “When the organization holds the manager accountable for talent development—and in fact judges and financially rewards a manager by how many new leaders she produces—then you can mix in a higher desired turnover rate and mitigate some of the downsides.”

Q: What can one do about the employee who even after being given fresh challenges and help with direction and organization, continues to make costly mistakes, mistakes that threaten to lower morale and impede efficiency? When is enough, enough? A: It’s enough when you have assumed 50 percent of the

responsibility for the issue and you’ve done all that you can to understand the employee’s motivations, values and abilities, and, furthermore, you have placed him in a role that he’s well suited for and is excited about. The truth is, some people just aren’t in the right company, in the right place, and you do them a favor by helping them figure this out as soon as possible so that they can move on. If you do the career development and counseling right, they will realize that they don’t fit, leave on their own and thank you on their way out of the door. CIO

Susan Cramm is founder and president of Valuedance, an executive coaching firm in San Clemente, Calif. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Rich Kogutâ&#x20AC;&#x201A;

FIELD-TESTED IDEAS FROM CIO S FOR CIO S

The Vision Thing The first thing this CIO of a brand-new university had to do was lay out his vision for getting IT up and running. Then, it was a race against timeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and the inevitable glitches.

Illust ration UNNIK RIS HNAN AV

n Sept. 6, 2005, the University of California, Merced campus, opened its doors with 875 students, on its way to becoming a full-sized UC campus of about 25,000. The challenge of building a 21st century research university from scratch was daunting. Buildings needed to be built, faculty hired, curriculum developed, students recruited, and an entire organizational and governance model defined and staffed. I had joined this adventure about three years earlier in August 2002 as CIO, with the mission of deploying all things IT and telecommunications. At the time, California was in the middle of a budget crisis. When I came on board, the Merced campus had only 10 IT staff, mostly focused on desktop support and connectivity for existing staff in leased facilities. With only modest increases in staffing projected, we were expected to oversee the design and construction of voice, data and video network infrastructure in the five planned campus buildings and student residence complex; build the collaboration infrastructure (directories, e-mail, calendaring, document management, Web portal); and deploy major administrative applications (notably the student information system, which handles key functions such as admissions; course registration; billing, grade and transcript management; and financial aid). We also had to oversee the installation of AV facilities in classrooms, deploy instructional computer labs and develop a support organization for all of the above. Making things even more problematic, there were no governance structures in place for defining a vision, developing a strategy or prioritizing needs. Not only was the (small) founding staff entirely consumed by trying to build their own assigned pieces of the university, but only some of the deans were on board

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Rich Kogut

FIELD-TESTED IDEAS FROM CIO S FOR CIO S

Even with limited resources, vision allows us to make quick decisions about interim solutions compatible with long-term strategy. and no faculty members were hired. Nevertheless, people cared passionately about what IT facilities would look like. When I first visited Merced as a candidate for the CIO job, I was handed a draft mission statement for IT and a set of core values. But these contained little that was applicable in a practical way. I strongly believe in a mission statement that directly informs a set of strategies that can, in turn, guide technology approaches and decisions. So my first challenge was to establish a new mission statement and strategies without rejecting the principles that had been previously articulated. It soon became clear to me that we did not have the resources to build everything that people wanted. It was also apparent that we would always be understaffed. In short, we needed to build an infrastructure for a 25,000-student campus with resources that already were insufficient for the 1,000-student campus planned for opening day. The one advantage we did have was help from our sister campuses. For example, UCLA was (and still is) running financial and payroll systems on our behalf. I evolved my plan of attack: Focus on the users to create an experience that would make UC Merced unique. Build identity management as a core application and reduce staff needs via automated provisioning. Identity management is particularly critical in a university environment where individuals can be any combination of applicant, student, faculty, staff, alumnus or affiliate at the same time. For example, a graduate student may be an alumnus and is likely to be a teaching assistant. We needed to create a standards-based infrastructure that would be open, flexible, extendable and, above all, scalable. Making the user experience as easy as possible was a top priority. To meet that goal, I was determined to develop a universal portal, informed by the identity-management system so that access to appropriate information and applications would automatically evolve along with an individual’s role. This also meant integrating the user functions of administrative systems, such as the student information system, into the portal/single sign-on framework. It made sense for us to deploy open-source software developed by the university community, so we chose uPortal (developed by several JA-SIG institutions) and the Central Authentication Service (CAS, developed at Yale University). This would allow users to access applications from within the portal without having to re-enter IDs and passwords. Working feverishly, ‘just in time’ became our mantra. One day, before we started accepting applications in December 2004, we integrated the self-service feature of our admissions system and assigned user IDs. We deployed the first phase of identity management in early summer 2005 so that we could 26

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provision e-mail and other access to the incoming class. We completed networking the student residences at 9 the night before students arrived so they would have Ethernet drops and wireless connectivity from day one. Projection became available in the classrooms some time during the day classes began.

The Hard Road From Theory to Practice Not everything evolved in the state we had hoped for. We had last-minute surprises as we discovered that contractors had not completed all of the details. We wound up doing things such as keeping our electrically operated projection screens permanently lowered because there was no power to make them operate. Procurement of equipment, especially for AV, was sometimes delayed because of arcane rules governing state purchasing and the avalanche of requests that fell on the purchasing department. Even the receiving department wasn’t always able to distribute desperately awaited items on time. We had to resort to such workarounds as using a portable PA system and borrowing endof-life projectors from a sister campus. And, of course, we had the occasional bug in a software package. For example, we had to partially disable our state-of-the-art network-intrusion detection system when it began protecting the network so well that some new users were unable to obtain network addresses. Nevertheless, everything essential was ready in time for our first entering class. There’s a lot left to do, but we have a pretty good idea how to do it without having to undo anything we’ve deployed to date. For instance, we still need to integrate into our portal such applications as document management, calendaring and course registrations. Looking back, a very small but highly talented and motivated IT staff performed miracles. Nevertheless, I don’t believe it would have been possible if we had not established a very clear vision of what we wanted to do and how to get there. Even with limited resources, this vision allowed us to make quick decisions about interim solutions compatible with long-term strategy. For example, one professor wanted to have his students take online tests as part of a summer course he ran before our official opening. So we acquired a simple standalone package that used XML, allowing us to easily export the test questions for future courses. As a leader, the CIO’s job is to articulate and obtain buy-in to a shared vision. In my mind, it was that vision that enabled us to be ready for the campus opening on time, even if it was ‘just in time.’ CIO Rich Kogut is CIO of the University of California, Merced campus. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Pratap Gharge, Senior GM & Head-IT, Bajaj Electricals, says business should realise that IT cannot align with individual needs.

TURNING IT

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Cover Story | IT Value

oo many business leaders have little faith in IT’s ability to deliver value. To save themselves—and their businesses—CIOs must change that negative perception into a positive belief in IT as a strategic partner.

By Gu n ja n T r i v e d i a n d ST e p h a n i e Ov e r By

per cep tion n. a thought, belief or opinion, often held by many people and based on appearances. -Cambridge Dictionary of English

ImagIn g by b In ESh SrEEdharan

Oscar Wilde wrote, “The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” and today, within far too many businesses, his aphorism aptly describes the problem with the perception of IT. Those who doubt IT’s value (and rail against its cost) are everywhere—in the boardroom, among the CXO ranks, heading up business units and among the end-users. True, CIOs are making tremendous strides toward boosting IT’s credibility. Many are overseeing a balanced portfolio of IT work and practicing good project management. Some have figured out how to run their IT shops like disciplined businesses. And plenty of IT chiefs have a seat at the executive table. But data from CIO research indicates that the business side’s take on IT is still less

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Reader ROI:

Why business buy-in is more than a one-shot affair Why tempering business expectations is vital How making IT more than a tool creates conversion lift-off

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Cover Story | IT Value than stellar. Even among companies with a solid reputation in the IT community, the average business perception of IT’s value is an unimpressive 6.05 on a scale of one to 10 (with one being extremely negative and ten being extremely positive). The biggest complaints? IT costs too much. It takes too long to deliver benefits or doesn’t deliver them at all. IT is a commodity that fails to deliver differentiation. It doesn’t line up with business strategy. In many cases, these perceptions of IT are misperceptions, based on a lack of understanding or awareness. Not that it matters. “Usually the business side of an organization harbors the perception that once technology is deployed business will change dramatically. When this, naturally, doesn’t happen, IT is branded useless,” says Arun Gupta, Director-Global Infrastructure Services, Philips India. “And arguing doesn’t get you anywhere because this is a group of people who don’t usually bother to do a root-cause analyses before blaming IT.” Because people act on their perceptions, whether valid or not, a negative view of IT can have real consequences for the organization. Most notably, according to survey participants, companies that value IT less miss out on opportunities for innovation and growth and, ironically, spend IT dollars inefficiently. “If a business doesn’t believe in IT and doesn’t believe that investing in IT is a choice that will produce results, they can put themselves at a competitive disadvantage in comparison to companies that believe in IT and do invest,” says Michael Gerrard, vice president at Gartner. The good news is that CIOs can change how busibusi ness perceives IT and its value. Using a comcom bination of measurement and 30

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communication practices, with alignmentenhancing moves, CIOs can turn adversaries into allies and doubters into true believers— that is, business people who regard IT as a strategic partner capable of delivering high value to the enterprise. The CIO’s success depends on it. “The bond between business and IT lasts longer when business people consider IT as a business enabler and not a mere service tool. Adequate handholding from both ends is required to seamlessly run an IT-enabled organization,” says M.D. Agrawal, Chief Manager-IS Refinery System, Bharat Petroleum Corporation (BPCL). It won’t be easy. Business leaders are known to loath committing their time or resources to getting involved in IT, and lack of a clear framework for valuing IT can handicap CIOs seeking to raise IT’s

reputation. And perceptions, particularly long-held ones, don’t disappear overnight, or even with a success or two. Changing minds takes consistent effort, not only in terms of delivering IT value but in measuring that value, communicating that value and enlisting business to help IT deliver that value. But for those who succeed in making believers out of business, it’s worth it. Benefits amount to a virtual wish list for most CIOs: Increased credibility with business, closer alignment with business objectives and improved ability for the CIO to influence business. It’s impossible to improve how IT is perceived without basic competence in the function and some level of system implementation success, but simply being competent or achieving a major project win is not enough. CIOs must be proactive and consistent about spreading the good news of IT value with effective measurement, alignment and communication. Using a combination of these best practices tailored to their specific situations and needs, CIOs can attack the following typical complaints about IT.

For a commodity, IT costs too much.

“The organization

recognized our attempts

to use available technologies optimally and ceased referring to IT as a cost center.” – Arindam Sinha, GM–IT, RSWM, LNJ Bhilwara Group

At Rajasthan Spinning & Weaving Mills (RSWM), a large concern was whether IT could be a worthwhile investment given how much it cost. Especially in a manufacturing organization where IT was not part of the core business. Business people at RSWM saw IT as a cost center and were usually apprehensive of return on investment. “The business side of any organization isn’t going to invest unless there’s a probability of earning from it. Business people at most non-IT organizations

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are usually skeptical of IT’s business value vis-à-vis the investments made in it,” says Arindam Sinha, General Manager–IT, RSWM—a LNJ Bhilwara Group company. The company’s history of inhibition dates back to the days when business process re-engineering was initiated in 1999. Back then, the move to an organization-wide ERP deployment met the same concerns. RSWM’s management was apprehensive of the ROI that a Rs 2-crore investment would bring. Strategic planning and effective change management workshops made sure that the project rolled out successfully and management saw investments paying off over two years. This favorably influenced the management’s perception of IT. Getting a goahead for other IT initiatives became relatively easier, even if ROI concerns weren’t completely weeded out. IT’s first success had transformed adversaries into allies, but not doubters into the faithful. Sinha then faced the more longdrawn challenge of beating back business’ returning apprehensions and boosting its faith in technology. “With ROI materializing in the case of ERP, management at RSWM saw IT’s benefits, which whetted their appetite for more information. This encouraged us—even if we still followed a caveat of enabling the organization access to rich information without going overboard with the budget. I knew I would have to first optimize existing infrastructure in-line with IT costs before deploying the next generation of technologies,” says Sinha. To leverage the existing infrastructure and cut costs,

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The Top Perks Of Positive Perception Improving how business perceives IT pays off for both the IT department and the company by... 1 2 3 4 5

Increasing It credibility with business Fostering closer alignment between It and business objectives Improving teamwork between It and internal business partners Promoting wiser investment choices in It-business initiatives Improving the CIO’s ability to influence business

The Top Consequences of Negative Perception If CIOs fail to improve how business perceives IT, the most likely outcomes are... 1 2 3 4 5

Missed opportunities for innovation and growth Inefficient It operations It budget cuts A decline in It employee morale Internal customer resistance to business process change and system deployments

The Best Ways to Change Perception These endeavors are rated by IT leaders as the most successful in improving how business perceives IT’s value: 1

Have business sponsor share ownership and accountability with It for It-business initiatives. 2 Conduct strategic planning meetings that include business leaders. 3 Have a consistent governance process for It investment decision making. 4 Regularly present It efforts and achievements to the board, the executive committee and other governing bodies. 5 track It’s record in completing projects successfully. 6 Employ internal relationship managers to work with business. 7 tie It compensation or bonuses to businessoriented performance measures. 8 Conduct internal customer satisfaction surveys for It services and value. 9 Have the CIO meet regularly one-on-one with CXOs to communicate It value. 10 Encourage business sponsors and users to communicate the value generated by It-business initiatives. —CIo research

Sinha decided to enable video conferencing for interoffice communication and meetings. Piggybacking on already laid connectivity at 50 remote RSWM locations, Sinha saved the management travel expenses. “Many of these locations were so remote that there were no direct routes to reach them. The company spent a lot in terms of time and money to get there. The use of technology, without incurring significantly higher expenses, helped the organization register immediate savings of ten to twelve percent,” says Sinha. But this atmosphere of doubt had crept into the IT department. Sinha remembers when even members of his own team were skeptical of a project he wished to undertake. Sinha wanted to phase out the existing VSAT network and usher in VPN connectivity. It would, he believed, make his network more secure and flexible, while simultaneously pruning the running cost of maintaining his communication network. The costs of deploying VPN and replacing VSATs and the intricacies of managing VPN bothered management as well as Sinha’s team. Sinha decided he needed to run a pilot and convince everyone—by himself. He redeployed VSATs between RSWM’s Bhilwara (Rajasthan) depot and another remote location which had no way of exchanging data. He got data connectivity for the depot from a government telecom service provider. Then he brought in a private VPN service provider to deploy and manage the VPN between the Bhilwara depot and RSWM’s Mumbai offices. The reduced latency period of the VPN and its ability to effectively integrate different REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 , 2 0 0 6

Cover Story | IT Value

IT: Under New Ownership

communication technologies at both locations, toted up further cost-savings for the company. “The organization recognized our attempt to use available technologies optimally and stopped referring to IT as cost center,” he says. With much less resistance, Sinha recently got management approval to deploy additional load balancers and failovers for bandwidth and security infrastructure at RSWM’s data center in Noida. Video conferencing is also getting quite popular within RSWM, beginning at the top with the MD regularly videoconferencing across RSWM’s locations to conduct review meetings. “The increased numbers of true believers at different levels of the company’s hierarchy is evident. In fact, the management recently signed a three-year contract with a VPN solution provider to migrate the organization from a VSAT network to a VPN cloud,” says Sinha.

When business leaders champion technology projects, the perception of IT improves.

IT projects are always late, always over budget, and always hard to track. When Vikas Gadre took over as CIO of Rallis India over three years ago, the agrochemical major wasn’t even using email. A decade earlier, many Rallis IT projects had either been placed on the back burner or had disappeared from management’s radar. A large number of IT initiatives to usher in interconnectivity or roll out process automation were pulled into that black hole. Projects weren’t sticking to delivery schedules and were off-budget. “IT doubters mushroomed at various levels of the organization and business was fast losing faith in IT,” recalls Gadre. There were many executives within the company who dismissed IT saying,

Most CIOs believe that business ownership of It projects ultimately increases the success of technology adoption, which leads to more value coming from It initiatives, which creates a better opinion of It efficacy. According to CIO research, business ownership of It initiatives is the single most effective way to improve perception of It’s value. But it won’t happen without a push from the CIO. Arun gupta, head of It, Philips India, recalls that when he led the Pfizer India’s It team, “we were in a situation where the rollout of one of the systems, which was already running behind schedule, failed. Efforts to revive the project also bombed. Business immediately termed us useless.” gupta was forced to go back to the management and help them realize that successful It implementations require the active participation of business users. gupta spoke to them about the criticality of business ownership and the need to champion the project as an organizational initiative. It took several workshops to educate users of their role in a project before both business leaders and users came around and actively participated in It initiatives. Project champions can be relied on to bat for It. “Based on suggestions from users, we formalized the processes of driving It initiatives. We stressed on governance and relied heavily on processes and documentation exercises,” says gupta. “Business realized that formal processes made sense as the It initiatives grew more successful and their more of their requirements were met.” He maintains that users saw the benefit of business ownership as an approach because it rendered projects more transparent and helped capture domain expertise among users. “In fact, I embedded three people in the medical, sales & marketing and finance departments. they worked closely with process champions and users to understand their requirements and problems first hand. this information enabled us to proactively fine-tune the system,” says gupta.

“Nothing’s happened in last ten years, nothing’s going to in the next ten.” Gadre realized that the negative perception of IT within the business had to corrected immediately before he could even think of approaching management with long-term plans to implement process re-engineering and ERP. “The reputation of IT depends on performance. Our primary

goal was to successfully deliver value to the business in a short span of time and gain its confidence,” he says. Gadre approached the management with a plan to design and deploy a system that would collect information from sales on a daily basis, which would, in turn, improve business at all levels including inventory, accounting and sales. He was given a chance to save IT

“By involving users, we’ve turned review meetings into a series of compliments, from a series of complaints of bad alignment with business objectives.” – Pratap Gharge, Senior GM & Head-IT, Bajaj Electricals

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Cover Story | IT Value but he had to fix the problem quickly—all he had was 90 days. Although sales information was captured on legacy systems on a daily basis, it reached head office only once a month. Riding on the Internet and mobile telephony (SMS), Gadre empowered the sales force to transmit information almost at real time. The benefits were instantaneous and recognition phenomenal. Business saw reduced outstanding dues among dealers and sales-related expenses; planning had improved and with it so had productivity. At one stroke IT had cut short accountclosing time from four months to less than 15 days. “IT’s reputation bloomed,” says Gadre. “The managing director acknowledged the fact that after accountsclosure, sales information is available with Rallis’ decision-makers the very next day.” The project’s success buttressed Gadre’s initiatives to internally market IT, and helped him garner management’s approval and support for his long-

term process re-engineering plans. The SAP rollout materialized and now Rallis champions progressive IT initiatives and regularly experiments with IT to create more value for business. And the executives who had sniffed at IT? “They returned with a thank you note that said: Mr.Gadre, you have changed our lives,” he says with a smile.

You think you’re aligned, but you’re not aligned with me. Most CIOs rate this as a universal complaint. CIOs are faced with managers who demand that IT relate to individual expectations even as IT leaders they are expected to champion the organization’s business objectives. “People fail to understand that IT, at a corporate level, aligns with corporate strategies. Alignment does not mean aligning with individual objectives. An inability to grasp this concept creates trouble,” says Gupta of Philips. What compounds the problem is business’ view of IT as panacea, which takes expectations to bizarre highs. It becomes a CIO’s job to moderate these expectations and bring management back to ground gently. Pratap Gharge, Senior GM & Head-IT, Bajaj Electricals agrees. “There’s a general complaint about the rigidity of IT systems, which people say hampers work by not aligning to individual requirements,” he says. But Gharge also observes that it is myopic business people, who think that

“Business was fast losing faith in IT. The reputation of IT depends on performance. Our Photo by Foto CorP

goal is to deliver value and regain confidence.” — Vikas Gadre, CIO, Rallis India

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short-term benefits can be achieved by taking even shorter cuts, who usually gripe. While they sulk, what they are missing is that there’s no short circuiting validations, built into the system, that are meant to protect larger interests. Gharge also faced another challenge. Business puts IT initiatives on lowpriority, which translates into poor cooperation in terms of commitment, time and resources when IT starts a project. “People will not free up time in their daily schedule to attend analysis, design and testing meetings. But when a project is about to go live, they call attention to all sorts alignment issues,” says Gharge. He decided to resolve this problem for good before launching new initiatives. Gharge influenced the management to create an IT task force that included all department heads. The task force, with a set of users, would decide the focus and purpose of IT projects. It would be involved in various levels of a project’s lifecycle. They would also be updated at regular intervals in order for them to track the progress of various projects. “We also devised user satisfaction survey forms, which would rate us on a scale of one-tofive on various service parameters. Userlevel reviews helped us map out positive and negative trends, and enabled us to take corrective action to nullify the negatives,” he says. Gharge cites the online HR management system as an example where working with stakeholders resulted straight away into success. Bajaj Electrical’s web-based HR system is work-flow driven, and attempts to digitize all HR processes. The initiative was led by the HR department and IT developed the robust system, which works across the country. “Because the application touched all employees, HR believed that IT was helping the department save on lot of administrative effort, while delivering accurate information in real time. The department now believes it cannot function without IT,” he says. The project was completed in five months and enhanced the IT department’s credibility. “By involving users from the beginning of any IT initiative,

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we’ve turned review meetings from a series of complaints of bad alignment with business objectives to a series of compliments,” says Gharge.

Beyond the Money Pit Successful IT leaders keep an eye on anything that indicates positive or negative movement in IT’s reputation, from quantifiable things such as customer satisfaction surveys and post-implementation audits to more anecdotal evidence such as being invited to strategic meetings or the chat around the watercooler. “The simple way is to conduct end-user surveys. It definitely gives you the moving average. I stress more, however, on detailed informal discussions. Surveys aren’t usually very close to reality,” says Gupta of Philips. “In fact, when I headed IT at Pfizer India, I used to deploy my IT team to conduct one-on-one meetings with end-users to determine their take on IT’s benefits; on what they thought IT’s role was; and on how they would recreate IT in the organization if given a chance. This gave us a far clearer picture.” Gadre of Rallis relies on building personal direct relationships between the IT team and business users. He makes it a point to appoint his team members as IT relationship managers to various business units in the organization. “This helps us to understand the requirements of business people to a much greater extent, and develop a long-lasting bond between the two ends of the organization,” he says. CIOs agree that turning IT doubters into true believers is an ongoing process. Agrawal of BPCL says that the role of IT in any organization should be of an analgesic. One of its duties is to relieve users from pain. If IT fails to perform that, doubters will continue to exist, he says. “Proper handholding and user-training is required. The IT team needs to understand user's pain and the culture of an organization. They should help users tap technology’s full potential,” says Agrawal. “IT shouldn’t be restricted to a role of a fault-finder or a tool that shows the current status of business. It should deliver far more value and excitement to its users,” says Gadre, “I would compare it to mobile telephony. Today mobiles pack a lot more than voice communication. IT should add that zing to the lives of business users. This will help us turn people’s perception from negative to neutral and then to enthusiastic supporters.” CIO

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Ravi Uppal, Vice Chairman and MD, ABB India, is using IT to automate all noncreative processes to enhance productivity and reduce errors.

Powering Automation By Balaji Narasimhan

View from the top is a series of interviews with CEOs and other C-level executives about the role of IT in their companies and what they expect from their CIOs.

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CIO: Over the past four years, ABB India has witnessed an impressive turnaround with employee productivity rising and turnover doubling. To what extent has IT contributed to this? Ravi Uppal: At ABB, IT is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end. What we have done is to integrate IT into business systems

in order to use its full potential. We basically believe that any operation is successful if systems are simple, avoid a duplication of effort and are integrated seamlessly. So, we performed an audit of our systems to see how they could be made more efficient, how we could ensure a single point of input for information and disseminate this information to all stakeholders. Basically, we have adopted a ‘4S’ philosophy at ABB. When I returned to ABB in 2001, I realized that we needed to focus on ‘Systems, Spirit, Simplicity, and Speed.’

Photo by Sr ivatsa Shandilya

Power and automation titan ABB (India) believes in a 4S philosophy: Systems, Spirit, Simplicity, and Speed. While speed is a natural outcome of IT, technology is also revolutionizing the three other areas by putting in place robust systems, simplifying processes that were hitherto manual, and infusing the company with the spirit of a pioneer. Now, as the company forges forward, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, ABB India, Ravi Uppal, the man recognized as the single largest force behind the transformation of the unwieldy behemoth into a nimble giant, talks about the innovations that IT can bring.

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View from the Top

”Activities, which do not require creativity, should be automated. Automation brings efficiency, and makes a system immune to manipulation.“

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IT contributes to each one of them. When IT enablers are integrated into your system, speed is an automatic result. Using Webbased mechanisms achieves simplicity. It’s vital to ensure that all systems integrate with each other and are not running in parallel. I have an unflinching conviction that IT has contributed to build efficiency. We’ve defined productivity by dividing total value by personnel expense. If you looked at our productivity level in 2001 it was around 1.8. Now it’s currently more than three.

Is there a common, unified strategy that encompasses ABB India’s IT operations? We think of the 25 business units we own as standalone companies because their products and services differ from each other. But, this doesn’t mean that people have free rein to do as they wish. We have an IT strategic group at the corporate level. We scan the environment and identify best practices. This group constantly evaluates what we need to introduce into the company. We cannot have 25 different ERP systems or 25 different ways of working with IT. On the contrary, seamless integration is desired. Seamless integration is only possible when you have common systems and practices in each business entity, so that they can communicate and integrate results. When we roll out an IT system, it’s across all business units. This is something that all the business heads appreciate.

How critical has your ERP implementation been from a strategic perspective? We took a decision in 1999 to go with SAP the whole way and rolled it out across all business units. It has been great blessing. I personally believe that you can only get the best out of an ERP system when you roll it out across the enterprise. You cannot take an approach that says ‘here we do it, here we don’t.’ Extracting full functionality requires 42

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“I am convinced IT contributed to efficiency. Productivity is value divided personnel expense. Our productivity is 3 from 1.8 in 2001.” — Ravi Uppal

an enterprisewide rollout, encompassing all business functions and processes. This implementation has bought us numerous advantages and has increased our efficiency as a business enterprise. We’ve also enjoyed a close relationship with SAP Labs. In fact, for some of modules, like HR, we’ve actually been both a beta and a reference site for SAP.

Did ABB face cultural issues during implementation? Implementing ERP is not a question of getting a framework ready and forcing it on people with ‘here from tomorrow, you're working with this.’ ERP has a very pertinent cultural angle, which is related to the systems and processes in place. There must be some compatibility between the processes and what the system can offer. Initially, we spent a lot

of time reengineering processes, so that we could align ourselves with the output of the ERP system. This also meant educating our people. They were accustomed to producing things by themselves, working on spreadsheets and being islands of information. They had to get used to working on integrated information, where what they were doing in one place would be visible thousands of miles away on a real-time basis. It was a process that had its share of novelty and challenge. One has to be patient and sustain people’s efforts.

Where does the CIO fit in all this? A CIO has to be a facilitator. He cannot take over implementation. What we did first was to sell the concept to every business unit, from the head of the unit downward. We then created an implementation taskforce which is led—not the CIO, because that is the first mistake—by the person who owns the business unit. We did this to ensure their buy-in. We gave them the freedom and time, and they gave us the dates of implementation. We also took help from external organizations, who were focused and had domain expertise in specific modules like finance and production. We carefully screened these domain experts and embedded some of their people into our internal teams. Our CIO was the one who actually identified competent organizations.

How do you look at ROI from IT projects? I don’t take on any project until there is some tangible benefit. And in IT’s case, the benefits are overwhelming, like building the company’s productivity, accessing information faster, and making sure that we cut down the number of people working in a particular area. The number of people, for instance, working

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View from the Top

in the finance department and HR is being brought down. With human intervention, processes and results can sometimes go awry or get inaccurate. I have an increasing belief that activities, which do not require creativity, should use as much automation as possible. Automation brings efficiency, it brings accuracy, and it makes a system immune to any kind of manipulation.

To what extent has IT contributed to raising the bar on quality? Quality is an important focus area for ABB. IT tools are embedded into all our systems now, and help us to access information on a real-time basis. Asia is becoming a very prominent market for us and, in terms of manufacturing, a lot of global activities are shifting to Asia. But with this comes one worry. It’s a bias people have: If something’s made in Germany or Sweden, then it is bound to be better than if it is made in China or India. We have taken a decision to ensure that the quality of the products we make in any country is absolutely identical to the quality we find in the West. We have gone a step further. We don’t even mention which country a product’s manufactured in—just ‘Made by ABB’. We’re on the road towards integrating our Manufacturing Execution System (MES) with SAP. We want to be able to track quality and defects at the assembly line stage. Right now, this process is done mechanically, and since we don’t get the data fast enough, it’s open to inaccuracy. We are completely reengineering the production lines and putting in digital devices, whereby data will flow automatically from the MES into SAP. This way we will immediately know when anything out of the normal occurs. It will help us to pinpoint the sources of failure more accurately and initiate action with suppliers, if that’s what’s required.

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What has been the impact of ABB’s web portal on your channel partners?

SNAPSHOT

ABB (India) PRIMARY BUSINESS:

from their datacenter to Reliance Web Worlds in 23 cities. We got all the candidates to take their aptitude and technical skills tests online. The evaluation was also done online, which quickly gave us a shortlist. Within half an hour of the tests, we were able to inform those who had qualified of the next round of tests. We intend to take this further.

Manufacture of Phenomenal. We started this power and control equipment portal in 2002, and every year it been growing exponentially. TURNOVER: Rs 3,014 crore Today, we do sales close to Rs 200 crore through the portal. EMPLOYEES: 3,500 Things have progressed so well that most of our channel Business Units: 25 partners prefer to transact over the Web rather than faceMANUFACTURING to-face. The portal ensures Can you outline UNITS: 8 accuracy in communications, some of the IT CHANNEL PARTNERS: and also provides a history of +500 initiatives in the what’s been discussed. CIO: pipeline? Every channel partner has Vivek Deshpande been given an account from We are constantly thinking which they can check which of integrating IT into our payments have been made and business processes. We are which are outstanding. It’s working with the finance also helped us keep in touch with partners department and are putting systems into in locations like Siliguri or Jaisalmer, where place that will close the company’s balance it is difficult to send sales people. Today, a lot sheet every evening. Today, this is done of the information that our partners typically manually but we want to change this. require is available on the Web. It will mean that we can close monthly We’ve also extended our web strategy by results earlier. Once we do this, we should launching a similar portal that helps our be able to get monthly data in just a day. At customers track projects. the moment, it takes us five days. We also want to put the company’s financial and business controls in automatic mode, so ABB slashed recruitment that problems are flagged immediately. time from 90 days to 12 We are also working with banks for an with videoconferencing and electronic drop box system, which will online recruitment tests, help us communicate our requirements for enabling 500 students from bank guarantees or letters of credit which can be processed automatically. CIO 23 colleges to participate. Is

this indicative of the future? Absolutely. It’s been a phenomenal success. This is a brilliant example of what the Web can do. Before, it was a very laborious process going to 30 engineering colleges, administering tests locally, and hopping from city to city. So, we tied up with Reliance, who beamed our questions

Special Correspondent Balaji Narasimhan can be reached at balaji_n@cio.in

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Technology

High-Performance Computing:

r charging the Enterprise

Thanks to lower barriers to entry, compute clusters and grids are moving out of the labs and into the mainstream. By Leon erLanger

IllUStrat Ion Un nIKrISHn an aV

Merlin Securities, a new prime brokerage providing trading, financing, portfolio analysis, and reporting for multibillion-dollar hedge funds, needed a competitive edge. Its larger rivals, such as Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and UBS, had the advantage of expensive mainframes that could consolidate and analyze millions of trades each day and return reports via batch processing the next morning that measured performance on a monthly basis. So Merlin outclassed its competitors by returning trade performance information in near real time with performance measured on a daily basis and Vol/1 | ISSUE/10

performance attribution on multiple levels, including in comparison to other securities in a market sector, numerous benchmarks, and other traders in the firm. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more, it did it using an inexpensive compute cluster made up of four dual-processor Dell PowerEdge 2850 servers. Merlinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s story is a perfect example of where the HPC (high-performance computing) market stands today. Multi-crore systems from Cray, Fujitsu, IBM, and NEC are rapidly giving way to clusters or grids of inexpensive x86 servers from mainstream vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. Meanwhile, REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 , 2 0 0 6

Technology

the specialized operating systems of yesterday have largely been replaced by Linux. “The HPC market has been turned on its ear,” says Earl Joseph, Research Vice President for high-performance systems at IDC. “Cray, NEC, and Fujitsu now make up less than one percent, while HP and IBM are at about 31 percent each, with Sun at 15 percent and Dell at 8.5 percent.” Up-and-coming Linux hardware vendors such as Rackable Systems, and Verari Systems have begun selling scads of standards-based server clusters into the traditional HPC/ technical computing markets, such as higher education, the life sciences, oil and gas, and industrial design. More importantly, inexpensive HPC is finding its way into much smaller environments than before, and into financial, search, and logistics applications previously outside its province. “The HPC market has shown more growth than any other IT sector,” says IDC’s Joseph, “It is up 49 percent in the past two years.” Does this mean that high-performance computing is coming to hundreds of enterprise datacenters near you? It depends on whom you ask. “The future server architecture for the entire enterprise is a cluster,” says Songian Zhou, CEO and co-founder of grid/clustering software vendor Platform Computing . “The server is just a component; the server operating system, a device driver. The real OS will be a layer of resource scheduling and allocation software.”

But Frank Gillett, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, is not quite as bullish. “High-performance clustering may be getting cheaper, but taking advantage of it is not really getting easier,” he says. “Clustering will become accessible at the rate at which software is written for the architecture, and it will be quite a while [before] that’s all sorted out.” For example, Merlin Securities built a highperformance cluster out of standard, relatively inexpensive hardware, but the application had to be developed in-house from the ground up.

Clusters and Grids The basic premise of HPC is simple. Instead of running compute-intensive applications on one large, specialized system, high-performance clusters and grids divide up the processing load among anywhere from two to thousands of separate servers, workstations, or even PCs. The actual architecture used, however, will vary depending on the nature of the application and where the hardware resides. Forrester Research divides clustering and grid-computing architectures into three categories: uncoupled, loosely coupled, and tightly coupled. The uncoupled architecture, best exemplified by Web server load balancing, is more relevant to handling streams of small requests than for HPC. In the loosely coupled architecture, a workload scheduler, usually running on a head server, splits up

Inside a HighPerformance Cluster

Cluster server node 1

User Application

Parallel app task with data Interconnect switch (Gigabit Ethernet/ Infiniband)

A head server running application, workload scheduling, and cluster management software splits the application workload into multiple, parallel tasks and sends them to individual cluster nodes for processing. Message Passing Interface (MPI) interconnects may be used for tightly-coupled apps.

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In fo graphics: Vikas Kapo or

Cluster head server with job scheduling and cluster management software

Cluster server node 2

Cluster server node 3

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large application requests into many smaller, parallel, independent tasks and distributes them, along with small amounts of data, among the servers making up the cluster. The job management software may or may not have to aggregate the results. For this scenario to work, the partitioned tasks must have high compute-to-data ratios and no interdependencies or order-of-execution requirements. One good example is a query search against a huge database in which the query is run concurrently against many separate database fragments. According to Forrester, this method is appropriate for such tasks as mathematically intensive risk calculations, engineering design automation and simulation, life sciences, pharmaceutical tasks such as protein folding, and animated film rendering. Hewitt Associates, a global human resources outsourcing and consulting firm, uses a loosely-coupled cluster to process what-if scenarios for its defined benefit (pension) plans on its customer website. These calculations can be numerically intensive, depending on the customer’s assumptions and the number of plan re-negotiations, mergers, and acquisitions that occurred during an employee’s term of employment. With help from IBM and grid software vendor DataSynapse , Hewitt was able to split off the most intense calculations to its cluster of Intel-based blade servers, now approaching 40 in number. Although many installations of this type consist of a single dedicated departmental or datacenter server cluster, another way to implement low-cost HPC is to distribute work across a number of shared, geographically dispersed resources in what is known as a grid. A grid can run across a few company departments or datacenters, or it can cross company boundaries to partner sites and service providers. For example, Nationwide Financial takes advantage of a concept called cycle harvesting, in which desktop PCs and workgroup servers are activated for grid computing when they are idle. Today, dedicated clusters are by far the most common. “When I go out and talk to people, I see lots of dedicated clusters running a single application, only a handful of shared grids spanning multiple geographies, and no examples of grids spanning multiple firms,” Forrester’s Gillett says. Cycle harvesting, in particular, is largely limited to universities, government research agencies, and altruistic grids such as Parabon Computation’s Compute Against Cancer project. “Most Fortune 1000 companies need to get the job done with a guaranteed quality of service, and you’re not going to get that with cycle harvesting,” says Verari CEO David Driggers. And then there are some scenarios for which the entire loosely-coupled clustering paradigm is unsuited.

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Technology

Habits of Perfect HighPerformance Clustering Applications

1 They are compute-sensitive. 2 Their processes are batch-oriented, rather than event driven. 3 They are mostly stateless—although some statelessness is OK. 4 They are built with components or a service orientation. 5 They have standards-based interfaces. 6 Their business logic is independent of the database and the

presentation layer.

7 They are licensed on a per-user basis, not per server or CPU 8 Their work is easily divisible into parallel tasks that can be

processed indi vidually.

9 Their parallel tasks are not interdependent. 10 Their parallel tasks have no order-of-execution requirements. 11 Their parallel tasks have a high compute-to-data ratio. 12 Their parallel tasks have modest memory requirements. 13 The results of their parallel tasks can be easily assembled for

presentation to the user.

14 They run on Linux or Windows 2003 Server. Applications such as weather forecasting, seismic analysis, and fluid analysis have to run interdependent calculations that require message-passing among cluster nodes during job execution, according to Forrester Research, which means they need a more tightly-coupled architecture.

A Small Matter of Software In contrast to the simple, Gigabit Ethernet-connected designs of loosely-coupled clusters, tightly-coupled systems typically use some incarnation of the MPI (Message Passing Interface) standard to communicate between processes, and the clustered servers are linked with a high-speed interconnect such as InfiniBand, Myricom Myrinet, or REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 , 2 0 0 6

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Quadrics QsNet. Applications usually have to be heavily modified or written from the ground up for tightly coupled HPC, although some vendors, such as Virtual Iron, provide virtualization software that claims to allow server applications to run unmodified across the cluster. “Writing for MPI is not easy,” says Ed Turkel, Product Marketing Manager, HPC Division, HP. “Most of our industrial accounts go to an ISV with a commercial application.” Vendors of these applications, including Abaqus, Accelrys, Fluent, Landmark, MSC.Software, and Schlumberger live in a different world from typical enterprise application providers. “Many of these applications tend to look more homegrown than off-the-shelf,” Verari’s Driggers says. Driggers adds that programmers are finding better ways to unleash applications from being tightly-coupled, but even loosely-coupled applications are usually either written that way from the start or have to be modified to support clustering. Most ISVs don’t see sufficient demand to be bothered to modify their applications for HPC, so customers are left to do it on their own—something they are seldom equipped to do.

A Full-Service Approach “Most enterprise users are afraid to modify an application without ISV approval,” Gillet says. “Some will approach the ISV, who will tell them to work with a vendor such as United Devices, Platform Computing, or Data Synapse,” which provide grid or clustering software and services for modifying applications to run on them. In addition, software licensing schemes are also typically not geared to clustering and grid scenarios, where per-server or perCPU pricing is prohibitive. For this reason, hardware vendors are moving toward providing customized, turnkey HPC solutions, either mixing open-source HPC components such as the MPICH, LAM, and the Globus Toolkit with their

The HPC market has shown more growth than any other IT sector, up 49 percent in the past two years. 48

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own components or partnering with grid and clustering software vendors or HPC application ISVs. “We go through a lot of pre-sales rigor with the customer,” says Victor Mashayekhi, senior engineering manager for high-performance clustering at Dell. “We’ll run their codes and make the performance results available, we’ll install the images, and we’ll merge all the hardware pieces into racks, cable them up, and ship the racks to them.” Hardware vendors also often integrate parallel cluster file systems, from vendors such as HP, Ibrix, Lustre, and PolyServe, which are necessary to make HPC work. Because of the relative difficulty in getting started, while the number of applications for HPC in the enterprise is growing, you’ll still find it primarily in the more technical departments. You’re also much more likely to find clusters of servers in the tens, or less, rather than in the hundreds or thousands. “You’ll find HPC in financial services departments running actuarial workloads and trading analysis, or in engineering design and manufacturing,” says Gillett. “We see HPC doing things like airline route scheduling to fill seats, and in the trucking industry to maximize the use of their fleets,” adds Dave Turek, Vice President for Deep Computing at IBM, noting that industrial design, digital content creation, and gaming are also strong markets.

Trickling Into the Mainstream Two recent developments hold some promise for pushing HPC more into the mainstream, however. The first is the entry of Microsoft into the HPC market in the first half of 2006 with Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. Microsoft is aiming squarely at the applications that now rely on Linux HPC solutions, by partnering with classic HPC application vendors such as Accelrys, MathWorks, Schlumberger, and Wolfram Research, who plan to build Windows versions of their HPC applications. “It wouldn’t be too difficult for a biologist to set up a small Windows Compute Cluster of servers in his office rather than having to go to the organization’s ‘high priest of clustering’,” says Jeff Price, senior director for the Windows server group at Microsoft. Northrop Grumman has already been testing Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 on an 18-node cluster of dual Opteron servers to analyze huge volumes of satellite data simulating the detection of ballistic missile launches. “It integrates easily with our current Windows infrastructure,” says Andrew Kaperonis, a systems/simulation engineer at Grumman. The second exciting development is the movement toward SOA (service-oriented architecture). Because SOA

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Inside Windows

which will be available for purchase separately. As is usual for Microsoft, the new clustering tools leverage a number of existing Microsoft technologies. ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) on the cluster head provides NAT for the cluster nodes, which exist on a private network. RIS (Remote Installation Service) provides unattended cluster node installations from the head node. The cluster management console is a plug-in to Microsoft Management Console. All authentication is provided by Active Directory, which allows for quick integration into an AD network. The backbone of CCS, however, is Argonne National Laboratory’s MPICH2 message-passing interface. Microsoft has done a significant amount of work to bring it to Windows and, more interestingly, has contributed that code back to the project. Kudos. Set-up and configuration of a CCS cluster uses a task-list approach, walking users through the necessary steps. As of now, this process is a bit too automated for my taste,

Compute

Cluster Server

It used to be that building a usable compute cluster took plenty of money, skills, and space in the datacenter. Although creating the actual applications that run on the cluster can still be difficult, nowadays building a Linux-based cluster is generally quite simple. Commercial and open-source clustering packages abound with features, open protocols, and streamlined installs. No surprise, then, that Microsoft wants a piece of this potentially lucrative market. I recently got a chance to test drive Windows CCS (Compute Cluster Server), currently in beta and scheduled for general release sometime in 2006. CCS is made up of several tools layered onto a standard Windows Server 2003 build. In fact, deploying a cluster node is identical to building a standard server and then applying the clustering package,

is inherently componentized, SOA application workloads are easier to distribute across a clustered environment. “SOA is all about abstracting away the fundamental plumbing, messaging, multi-threading, execution environment in a container done once so the application developer can just focus on writing the application logic,” says Platform Computing’s Songian Zhou. “SOA will make grid computing easier and grids will be a must for successful SOA.” Today, however, there remain significant challenges to building and managing a viable high-performance computing implementation and, particularly, finding or modifying the software to run on it effectively. HPC is still best suited to highly technical, processing-intensive applications with specific characteristics, and with extensive help from software and hardware vendors that can deliver a complete solution. As a growing number of enterprises begin to see the advantages of cluster and grid computing, they will undoubtedly work their way into other mainstream areas. “We’re seeing more and more instances of clusters and

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leaving those with clustering experience wondering exactly what’s going on in the background—and nowhere to look when troubleshooting. The current build of CCS is also quite raw in some places, such as the job scheduler, but then, it is still in beta. I haven’t had too much time to work with CCS in the lab, but so far I’ve managed to build a basic distributed DSA (Digital Signature Algorithm) key generation app running across the cluster, depositing generated keys to a common network location. Much further testing and more complex code will be necessary to truly put CCS through its paces, however. To test the software, Microsoft provided a RocketCalc Saturn four-node personal cluster equipped with eight AMD Athlon64 2GHz CPUs and 8GB of RAM. The Saturn is a cool piece of hardware regardless of the OS, and it highlights the market Microsoft seems to be targeting: The minicluster. Instead of running one large cluster in the datacenter, it’s feasible to deploy something like the Saturn to an individual engineer’s cube. Could this style of clustering become the eventual core market for CCS? Time will tell.

—By Paul Venezia

grids acquired for something like bioinformatics or financial calculations but then partitioned off for payroll and logistics,” says IBM’s Dave Turek. The combination of more widespread use, easier Windows-based clustering, and SOA may indeed one day make high-performance clustering and grid computing a fairly mainstream enterprise application. CIO

Infoworld

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e-governance

Illustrat ion BI N ESH SREEDHARAN

A meticulous use of IT has enhanced quality at the Bureau of Indian Standards, enabling the department to formulate new standards and implement existing ones in a more efficient manner.

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StandardS Guaranteed By Balaji NarasimhaN Reader ROI:

How to ensure user buy-in Why studying user requirements is critical How to tackle end-user training

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In 2003,

the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) was not happy with the standard of its own operations. Thanks to globalization and a buoyant economy, an increasing number of companies wanted BIS to grant their products the ISI mark of quality to get an edge over their rivals. BIS officers saw a sharp rise in their workload. According to Dr. D.K. Nayyar, Head of IT Services Department, BIS, “A decade ago, a field officer handled 50 licenses at any given time. That number has shot up to beyond 200.” What the increase in numbers doesn’t reveal is an exponential jump in complexity. It’s a tricky job handling all the documents related to various licenses. For each license a BIS officer’s paperwork spreads from inspection and testing, to operation of license and renewal to complaints, enforcement and finance. The obvious answer was computerization, but it wasn’t easy to implement. For two years, the Bureau had worked with two large integraters, trying desperately to get its Integrated Computerization System up and running. Unfortunately, the project seemed to be going nowhere for a lack of consensus among the three organizations—until the National Informatics Center (NIC) stepped in. Key NIC officials won the project after they made a series of presentations to BIS and provided prototype demonstrations. BIS moved quickly and earmarked Rs 10 crore to the project, which was to concentrate on two critical areas: The Certification Marks Management System (CMMS), which deals with product certification covering fields as diverse as agriculture, textiles and electronics and the Standards Formulation System Module (SFSM), which deals with the formulation of systems. REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 , 2 0 0 6

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e-governance

BIS considered metal thickness, safe pressure levels The NIC was now faced with an impressive task. Dr. and special coatings among other parameters. In Ranjna Nagpal, Senior Technical Director and Head, some cases, creating the list of parameters for a Food and Consumer Affairs Division, NIC, recalls, SNAPSHOT single product generated 800 documents. These “We were asked to provide an integrated solution REGIONAL OFFICES: documents are created by committees, which are to BIS, which included application development, 5 also responsible for re-visiting existing standards. setting up necessary infrastructure like supply of TECHNICAL Their brainstorming formed the basis of the BIS’ hardware, peripherals, software, LAN/WAN at HQ, DIVISIONS: intelligence and NIC realized that their contributions regional offices, branch offices, inspection offices, 13 couldn’t fall through gaps in the system. training institutes, and the central lab,” she recalls. COMMITTEES: But NIC still had two bases to round before The NIC began by attempting to understand 500 they got home. New products needed testing the various activities of BIS to determine how MEMBERS: and existing ones had to be reviewed. On an efficiency could be improved. It wasn’t an easy 10,000 annual basis, BIS reviews around 3,500 of task because BIS works in diverse areas including PRODUCT DETAILS: its 17,000 standards to determine if testing civil engineering, electronics, agriculture, medical 19,000 parameters required updating. equipment, textile, and water, among others. In each PROJECT COST: Taking a step at a time, NIC created two area, various BIS divisions work on product quality Rs 10 crore core software systems. One was the Standards and standards of safety. Each product has its own IMPLEMENTATION Formulation Information System (SFIS), which parameters, and standards applicable to a helmet TIME: would enable BIS to create new standards for wouldn’t hold true for biscuits. So, the department 2 years novel product categories, and the other was had to treat each product as a unique subset. This the Certification Marks Management System unwieldy structure that seemed impossible to tie (CMMS), which would give the ISI mark to products that together logically landed squarely on NIC’s plate. met its standards. The former handled critical aspects of The NIC team decided they needed to delve deeper if they were BIS and the latter was a workhorse application that applied going find one pattern that fit all. It was an anti-thetical process of each standard to hundreds of products. looking closer at the complexities of BIS’ processes and reaching a The NIC also created several smaller programs that ensured simpler workflow. NIC found that BIS handled two major areas: It efficiency to other areas. NIC created the Lab Management formulated product standards and tested them for compliance. Information System to optimize work in BIS laboratories, where Out of the two, formulating standards was the tougher part. much of its work took place. A Sales Management Information While creating quality standards for pressure cookers, for example,

BIS

Standardizing New Standards

Proposals are sent committees to explore quality and safety parameters. This could take between three and six months. They are then re-worked for a larger audience and sent to resident and industry experts worldwide. It is also uploaded on the BIS website for suggestions from the public.

BIS receives a proposal for new products, new product categories, renewal for old licenses and requests to review existing standards.

In fo graphics: Vik as Kapoor

L SA PO

O PR

BIS

PROPOSAL

BIS probes whether a proposal is valid. A request to review an existing standard could, for example, be turned down.

Proposal reviewed by a final committee and the chairman before the BIS stamps its approval on a new standard.

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e-governance

“There was resistance to change to the new system, but users realized the benefits and cooperated to large extent.” —Dr. Ranjna Nagpal, Senior Technical Director & Head , Food and Consumer Affairs Division, NIC

System and a Personnel Management Information System were also created. Other modules were also created and covered finance and accounts, library management, and general administration. Creating a plethora of systems is useless if nobody wants to touch them. One of the key problems was a lack of user buy-in, since very little computerization had been performed at BIS until then. Though it is hard to usher change in any work area, government or otherwise, some buy-in is brought about by the stress a manual system inherently forces on its users. Some of this stress went a long way in ensuring that computerization was, if not exactly welcomed with open arms, at least grudgingly accepted. But there were other practical problems. For one, there was a the language barrier; government officials aren’t always comfortable with English. This hurdle was overcome by providing the CMMS software with a Hindi interface. Users were trained by the NIC covering all facets, starting from basic operation of a computer, troubleshooting, operation of the Hindi software and usage of the CMMS system. Special training was also given to system administrators, which covered server administration and backup. To handle day-today bugbears, each office was also equipped with a computer coordinator, who was responsible for guiding users. But getting buy-in only works in the long-term if new systems far excel a manual set-up. To ensure this, the NIC came up with a master plan that would link all BIS offices with the aid of MPLS VPN (Multi Protocol Label Switching Virtual Private Network). NIC also implemented a system that replicated data on a SQL Server and then hosted it online so that other government departments—and the common man—could also benefit. On another front, the NIC and the BIS had to iron out requirement differences between themselves. There were hiccups during the selection of hardware and software, which were resolved across numerous meetings. Other features that were added included remote access, thus ensuring that server management was improved. Since systems, especially in their initial days, go through various tweaks, the NIC also implemented a central patch management repository that kept all systems current and bug-free. The concept of centralization of control and management also helped

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in other areas like anti-virus management. In order to boost communications between the head office and the various regional offices, the NIC also implemented videoconferencing at all BIS offices, besides an intranet called IntraBIS. The entire project was planned and implemented in a parallel manner to meet a two-year deadline. The NIC is now working on BIS’ future plans. In the words of Dr. Nagpal, “In the future, IT-based solutions implemented at BIS laboratories are required to be inter-operable and, through secure VPN, the public information will be made online.” The new system has benefited companies applying for the ISI mark. Thanks to the computerization program, it is possible to file an application for a license through the BIS website. The ISI mark, once granted, has to be renewed every year, and this process too has been simplified. And a list of ISI-certified products are available online, the common man can check which products meet acceptable standards before he or she makes a purchase. Refreshingly, BIS has resisted the ubiquitous desire to create a paperless office. Dr. Nayyar says, “We don’t expect a major reduction in paper transactions but are aiming to improve speed and organization for effective decision-making.” Clearly, the focus is to improve the lot of the common man, and if it takes paper to do it, then so be it. For an organization that sets standards, that’s pretty non-standard. CIO Special Correspondent Balaji Narasimhan can be reached at balaji_n@cio.in

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Nirmaljit Singh Kalsi, Secretary IT, Government of Punjab, kept projects on course by focusing on change management.

When youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re leading an IT project, you need to be able to predict where potential hurdles will occur. Nirmaljit Singh Kalsi, Secretary IT, Government of Punjab earned the trust of his team when he foresaw that reengineering processes and managing change would flatten 75 percent of their e-governance roadblocks. 54

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Interview | N. S. Kalsi

When Change Becomes the Catalyst by Rahul Neel Mani

CIO: Where is change management being applied in Punjab’s IT set-up? Nirmaljit Singh Kalsi: Specifically, we’re

Ph ot o by Sr iv at

sa Sh an di ly

talking about a change in the mindset of the people working on e-governance projects. Change management will see you through approximately 40 percent of such a project. It can make or break projects irrespective of its size or geography. Process reengineering, which goes handin-glove with change management, constitutes another 35 percent towards success. The rest, from my experience, is a mix of technology and sheer luck. We must understand that e-governance is about transforming the way citizens interact with the government and vice-versa. Much of its success depends on a change in mindset on both sides— but more on the government’s.

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What were the difficulties you faced that led you to this belief?

The government of Punjab was the first state to prescribe to an e-governance policy in 1990. At the outset, we invited Dr. Sheshagiri, the then director general of the National Informatics Centre, to review our IT policy. Today, we continue in our endeavor to e-enable various departments. Our first efforts were directed at land records which we followed up with excise & taxation. It was at that point when we realized that the people, the processes and the policies all required to be changed. Our most difficult challenge was to win over workers to the idea that e-governance wasn’t going to take away their jobs. It was an impressive effort convincing them that ICT would facilitate accountability and efficiency and would benefit them. In fact, we’ve recently sanctioned an additional workforce, shattering the myth that computers replace people. REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 , 2 0 0 6

3/27/2006 10:32:59 AM

Second, government staff is disagreeably suspicious of sharing information. They view information as power, which they are likely to lose once data is put in the open domain. Unfortunately, this is true. In the process of change management, we’ve had to literally wage a war against many government officials to share information. Third, government e m p l oye e s a r e n’ t c o m f o r t ab l e with computers, or if I may say, anything new. They think that computers are meant for engineers and more educated people. It took plenty of time to get through these problems which is why I think 40 percent of the success of an e-governance project is about change management.

SNAPSHOT

link-Up State Capital District HQ:

2 mbps

District HQ - Subdivision:

128 Kbps

Sub-division – Block:

64 kbps

Finished Projects

reengineering. Without it, we’d have taken the same mistakes forward. Finally, we trained the people who were going to deliver these services. What did the process of reengineering base itself on and how did you define it?

We studied existing processes in the state. Computerization of Then, we looked at sales tax information processes from other Computerization of countries. Based on these land records learnings, we decided to Roll-out of Suvidha use ‘champions’ and counters in 16 engaged the services of districts PwC to help us reengineer Computerization of existing processes. Punjab and Haryana High Courts and Our aim was to reduce subordinate Courts time-to-response by 65 percent in the first stage. In the second stage we wanted reduced SWAN it by 85 percent. The State Database reengineering process State and District revolved around this goal. Datacenters Efficiency of services is also gauged by speed, simplicity, friendliness, transparency How did you manage change? The first requirement of large-scale and accountability. If all this is in place, projects is a vision. It is a necessary we think we’ve been able to successfully support in persuading stakeholders implement change management. Right now we are implementing and ensuring that we achieve what we set out to do. We put together a mission an end-to-end process reengineering statement and prioritized work. We at the Deputy Commissioner’s (DC) first took on the revenue generating office in Jalandhar and Patiala. We projects; the state government is more hope to complete them in next couple open to change management when of months. there’s a chance for additional revenue. Then, we focused on areas where How do you deal with the concerns of there was a lot of interaction between those who won’t share information? government employees and citizens. It’s a difficult task. To work around it, We wanted this interaction to take we employ a concept of ownership. In place via information systems. By the projects we undertake, we make it clear time we came down to computerization, that the IT department is only driving it was clear that we needed process from the back seat and that ownership 56

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In the pipeline

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lies with the department that initiated the project. A sense of ownership motivates top management. They know that IT will not take away their powers. We ensure these departments that much of the data they share with us will remain in their care. This is how we’ve been able to bring them over on our side. How does change management apply to citizens?

Normally, people would have just rejected the service centers we developed. Getting them to use these services, despite their experience with the government, needed change management. Take for example DC offices in Punjab, which is the stage for the most interaction between citizens and the government at a district level. These offices have a number of counters manned by government functionaries. They have, for instance, doctors to check a person’s blood group and physical fitness, both of which are required to apply for a driving license or a magistrate who signs and verifies affidavits. So that citizens don’t have to visit the DC’s office, we’ve introduced Suvidha services which are attached to all DC offices. Now they can go to these computerized and networked centers, which cut down the amount of interaction with government officials. There’s no dearth of resources for these services because they are paid for. District commissioners have deployed remote cameras at these centers to ensure continued quality. Even as we speak, we are extending these services to the subdivisional level. We plan to make them available at the block level. Ultimately, we want to see them at the village level. Now that you’ve navigated this successfully, what is the next step?

Our plans are in sync with the National e-governance Plan (NeGP).

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First, we’re going concentrate on the State Wide Area Network (SWAN). It’s on track. Our second priority is to create a state and district datacenter, again in accordance to the NeGP. Third, we need to set up Common Service Centers (CSCs). Ultimately, these centers will also integrate private services on a publicprivate-partnership model. The CSCs will be built on an entrepreneurship model and involve the local people. For the SWAN and datacenters we are working on a BOOT model wherein we will engage different agencies to work for us. We want to build the back-end of applications in the similar fashion. We have chosen 20 departments based on their interaction with the citizens and requirements from G2G and G2B services. We will develop applications for them. Soon these services will be rolled out. How do you save an ambitious project from being phased-out?

Services are designed the way the people of the state want them to be. We carried out a survey and based on citizen suggestions we crafted a service for them. We’ve ensure that we have understood people’s perception of satisfaction and ease-of-use. If, despite this, a service is not used, we discontinue it. What’s the point in wasting time and effort? There have been cases in which district commissioners have attempted local initiatives but they failed to get people’s support and these were discontinued. But at the state level we don’t embark on services until we are sure they are worth it. We’ve constituted a Punjab State e-governance Society which has experts and citizens who share their views on people’s requirements. Similarly, district commissioners also have groups called Sukhmani, which

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Change management will see you through approximately 40% of an e-governance project. It can make or break deployments.

more jobs and more opportunities. Third, Punjab is becoming a favored destination for BPO, software, ITeS, and telecom companies. What’s better proof of this than the fact that Punjab has already signed investment worth a whopping Rs 50,000 crore this year? Investment on this scale will create over 5 lakh jobs in the state. This success is related directly to the efficient use of e-governance. Since we took up e-governance on a war footing, efficiency has shot up by half. The revenues of the excise & taxation department alone have increased to Rs 1,200 crore. We will soon have more success stories coming from other state departments like transport, pensions, municipal offices, panchayati raj, and others. Are there definite signs of user satisfaction?

One of the studies carried out by state of Punjab says so. The satisfaction level was measured and 81 of a 100 citizens who have used these services found the speed, delivery and quality of the services satisfactory. We’re miles from perfection but I think we’re getting there. Our aim remains to provide top-class citizen services in least time and at an affordable cost. Any deviation from this and I’ll be the first person to call it a failure. CIO

consist of three experts and three citizens who are custodians of these projects and give the government regular feedback. Our projects don’t die without a very good reason. What are the direct and indirect benefits of this program?

To us, the best benefit is a citizen’s satisfaction. Second, it creates a lot of employment opportunities. Whether it’s ICT education or similar initiatives wherein we engage large numbers of entrepreneurs, we are creating

Bureau Head North Rahul Neel Mani can be reached at rahul_m@cio.in

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Essential

technology Museums lead the way to pervasive computing.

From Inception to Implementation — IT That Matters

MagicalHistoryTour BY MICHAEL FITZGERALD

| One of the neatest tricks in all the Harry Potter novels is the Marauder’s Map. Armed with this magical tell-all, wizard-in-training Harry could see the whereabouts of anyone inside the Hogwarts school. And thanks to some clever technology, visitors to several Smithsonian museums can take advantage of their own magical map. Through the use of wireless handheld devices, visitors to the Smithsonian Information Center at the Castle, the National Museum of American History, the National Postal Museum, and the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center can track their progress through the exhibits. (A fifth museum, the National Museum of Natural History, is slated to adopt the technology in mid-to-late July.) Rent one of the handhelds, and you get not only a map but also an interactive list of exhibits, guided tours to follow, even instant messaging and location tracking for other members of your group—a great feature when it’s time to round up the kids. The Smithsonian isn’t alone; other museums are busily implementing a variety of forms of ubiquitous (a.k.a. pervasive) computing to assist customers. Some would argue that their efforts are not truly pervasive—the zenith of which would be environments that simply react to people without direct input or cumbersome interfaces. However, what

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the museums learn about things such as delivering personalized multimedia content to mobile users, luring visitors to lesser-known exhibits and identifying how people react to interactive surroundings will help create applications for retail, entertainment and other industries.

Big SI Smithsonian’s map is but one part of the SIguide (pronounced ‘sigh guide’) initiative, an ambitious two-year pilot project slated to launch by the end of the summer that will study handhelds’ effectiveness in the museums. My Le Ducharme, SIguide’s project leader, says she hopes the project will produce a better museum experience for visitors, allowing them to ‘spend more time here and learn more.’ She notes, for instance, that the average visitor spends only a few

showing customers a video of a product in action on their PDA or cell phone.) The handhelds will also enable museum-goers to build centrally-stored scrapbooks of their visits. Leave one museum to go to another, and you’ll leave the handheld behind. But you’ll bring your session identity with you, which you can use in the next museum, or even on your next trip to Washington, D.C. The handhelds also use locationtracking technology to make sure that content related to nearby exhibits is available. Interested in a particular work or artist? The map will show you where to find other displays you might like.

Putting the RFID in Art

New Uses for Olde Tech

detailed information about how visitors

The technology behind these projects isn’t particularly advanced. Off-the-shelf (with some minor tweaking) wireless Hewlett-

about what happens if someone comes in

Given the privacy issues surrounding radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, it might seem too controversial a technology for a museum. But the Cleveland Museum of Art is planning to deploy it this October. The museum’s upcoming exhibit—The

Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and the Americas, 1880-1920: Design for the Modern World—expects to feature a modern twist: RFID. The tags will collect use the museum and will answer questions a group instead of alone and what exhibits interest visitors the most. The over-arching

Current projects presage interesting potential for how environments will interact with people.

goal is to determine how the museum

minutes in the huge gems and minerals hall. She hopes that an interactive guide might prompt visitors to spend more time in this and other underutilized exhibits. SIguide represents a significant project in pervasive computing. With its 1,000 handhelds in place, it is “by many orders of magnitude the largest project of its type in the world,” according to Ted Paschkis, CEO of Wivid Systems, which developed the Smithsonian’s system. In addition to the maps, the handhelds will link visitors to hundreds of video clips and pictures; in due time, they will also invite users to go on scavenger hunts for objects throughout the museums. Museum-goers can even use the handhelds to view interactive video clips of items that people can’t actually see, such as the inside of Thomas Jefferson’s desk. (Retailers and others could imagine similar technology as a sales tool, perhaps

track anything personally identifiable.

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Packard iPaq HX4700 handhelds connect to standard back-end servers using the now-pedestrian 802.11b standard, and a good amount of the content is pulled from existent multimedia exhibits that the Smithsonian has developed over the years. The scrapbooking feature is simply website bookmarking in a different context. The commonplace nature of the bulk of the technology is helping other museums get in on the activity as well. Projects are in the works at places such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, the Cleveland Museum of Art and many others. “That familiar, already-paid-for infrastructure is starting to show up in a lot of places,” says Alex (Sandy) Pentland, a professor at MIT who has conducted pioneering research in fields such as

should accommodate new technologies in a major renovation that is expected to begin in September and is due to finish in 2010. Leonard Steinbach, Cleveland Art’s CIO, says the museum doesn’t expect to Rather, it wants to get a better sense of a patron’s viewing habits so that the museum can deliver content in the most effective manner. For example, one visitor might look at the painting first, while another might look at the plate providing background information about the artist in question; it all depends on the visitor’s personal preference. By using technology that adapts to visitors, Cleveland Art curators hope to create an experience personalized for each visitor. Succeeding would earn it admiration for more than just its collection.

—M.F. REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 , 2 0 0 6

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essential technology

wearable computing and pervasive systems. With the infrastructure mostly in place, “customer resistance, capital costs and reliability have all been taken care of. The age of pervasive computing has finally arrived,” he says.

What Makes IT Pervasive? Of course, not all of the museum projects are pervasive, according to the strict definition. In fact, “a lot of what we see at this point, like the installation at the MoMA in New York, if you explained it to some of the luminaries of pervasive computing, they would scoff at it,” says Alex Ledin, a senior consultant at SRI Consulting Business Intelligence. He says they would probably call it merely wireless data access, since the technology doesn’t yet respond to users without their direct input. Still, Ledin agrees that what museums are now doing shows that the wireless

Orwellian television monitors use iris-scanning technology to force-feed specially targeted ads and information to Tom Cruise’s on-the-run lead character. Privacy advocates can be thankful that this kind of pervasive technology remains safely in the realm of science fiction. But experiments are already under way to study how museums’ environments can influence what people do in them. The Smithsonian’s interactive maps are just one example. Another comes from Cornell University’s Johnson Museum. In one of the museum’s galleries, sensors monitor for the presence or absence of motion. When they detect minimal activity in a certain section of the gallery, the sensors set off bird noises, which sometimes draw visitors to that section. Kirsten Boehner, a Cornell PhD candidate working on humancomputer interaction issues, points to this

The weakest point in pervasive computing is the lack of wellintegrated software that is smart enough to interact with people in a wide variety of places. networking infrastructure needed for pervasive computing is coming together (although wireless networks continue to have dead spots, issues with interference and other as-yet-unresolved flakiness), and that the hardware is ready to go. The weakest point is the lack of well-integrated software that is smart enough to interact with people in a wide variety of places. Even so, Ledin says that the current spate of projects is significant. “They presage a time when you will be able to get information about something around you using a wireless device,” he says. They also presage some very interesting potential for how environments will interact with people. Not in the sense of the movie Minority Report, in which 60

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as a way to help curators create richer museum experiences for visitors. It’s easy to imagine a subliminal ‘blue light special’ at a retailer using similar technology to draw shoppers through a store.

Pervasive Problems Maintaining pervasive environments presents a particular challenge for museums. Technology changes rapidly, and the handheld platforms in particular present issues: Museums can’t afford to build content that will run on every type of handheld. The cheapest, most widespread versions, cellular phones, aren’t yet very good for displaying video or accessing the Web, because many don’t have color screens or are underpowered for multimedia content delivery.

The Smithsonian collection includes 143.7million items. More than 20 million people visited the Smithsonian museums and national Zoo in

2004.

But when sufficiently powerful technology does reach ubiquity, many museums will be ready with the content. For now, Peter S. Samis, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s associate curator of education and program manager of interactive educational technologies, jokes that despite installing a wireless network, the museum’s technology is anything but pervasive. But Samis says he’s focused on building up the museum’s multimedia content (currently available primarily through its visitor education center), attending conferences such as ‘Museums and the Web’ and watching how handheldbased projects unfold at other museums. He expects that the hardware platforms will stabilize in a couple of years, and wireless networks will be much more reliable. When that happens, he’ll be ready to go with his well-developed content library. Management and cost issues, not to mention the potential for damage and theft, aren’t the only concerns museums have with handhelds. One of the biggest issues is that people tend to spend more time looking at the screen than at the exhibits. To

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combat this problem, technology designers are trying new techniques. Ubiquity Interactive, the company that built the systems in use at the UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, developed what it calls ‘conavigation’ techniques, in which the screen prompts users to look at aspects of the art. For instance, one of its most famous pieces is the late Bill Reid’s wood sculpture ‘Raven and the First Men.’ Ubiquity swathed the 7-foot-tall sculpture with infrared light, so as visitors walk around it, the picture of the sculpture onscreen turns so that they’ll see the same view onscreen as in the room, with accompanying comments from a curator. “There’s this back-andforth thing between the screen and the actual artifact,” says Lars Meyer, one of Ubiquity’s principals. How museums handle these issues may prove telling for commercial ventures that are looking to adopt pervasive computing. “Museums can benefit from a greater range of technology than almost any other industry,” says Leonard Steinbach, CIO at the Cleveland Museum of Art. His technology needs range from digital imaging to X-ray technology to infrared, and he’s working on a project that will deploy RFID. “Our need for this technology is as complex as a sophisticated marketer’s; we’re creating a communion between art and the viewer on the viewer’s terms. That’s a really daunting supposition.” Wivid’s Paschkis thinks there are huge opportunities still to come in pervasive technology. He envisions using nanogyroscopes to get much more precise location information than is currently possible. That will enable museum-goers to, say, take their handheld and pass it over a sarcophagus to view a streamed X-ray image of what’s inside. But that’s tomorrow’s pervasive magic. CIO Michael Fitzgerald is a freelance-writer based outside Boston. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Under Development

This Game’s on the Air Wireless | A Beautiful Mind, Ron Howard’s Oscar-winning film about noted economist John Nash, briefly gave popular regard to economic game theory—that is, the idea that relatively simple rules can be woven together to create models of complex economic relationships. But game theory may have additional relevance beyond economics and Academy Award nominations. Allen MacKenzie, an assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (a.k.a. Virginia Tech), is trying to apply game theory to another complex and seemingly amorphous pursuit: Wireless networking. “I think there’s a recognition in the wireless networking community that we’re missing some of the tools we need to really understand how wireless networks work,” MacKenzie says. The current state of wireless network analysis, he notes, is dominated by simulation and rules of thumb. But rules of thumb are far from exact, and simulations based on sets of equations become increasingly difficult to produce as wireless implementations get more complex. (Consider, for instance, a wireless networking provider that tries to manage connections, client device power usage and interference reduction in a metropolitan area with hundreds of thousands of users, some of whom are standing still while others are rapidly moving down the highway.) MacKenzie says he believes that game-theory-based models of such environments may one day provide more precision than rules of thumb, while not requiring the complexity of detailed simulations. The ultimate goal is to create analysis tools that wireless engineers could use when designing and managing their networks. Wireless providers have yet to come knocking on MacKenzie’s door. (“We’re not quite ready to answer the types of questions they’d like to ask,” he says.) But the National Science Foundation was interested enough to give the professor a Rs 1.8 crore grant to continue his research. MacKenzie can’t say for certain when his theories will yield practical results, although he says that tools are at least a year or two away. — Christopher Lindquist REAL CIO WORLD | A P R I L 1 , 2 0 0 6

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Pundit

essential technology

The Integration Layer The idea behind services is simple: Technology should be expressed as a chunk of the business rather than as an arcane application such as ERP or CRM. By Christopher Koch

it strategy | IT is in a mess because we have business processes that are locked into source code that is difficult to change or modify—that’s the real issue underlying the argument that makes customization a dirty, expensive word. My sense is that a lot of processes change to fit the software because that is the most economically expedient way around the problem.

There needs to be a separate layer in the architecture for integration and business process change and coordination. Though web services aren’t always at the core of the layer, the concept of services is. The idea behind services is simple: Technology should be expressed as a chunk of the business rather than as an arcane application such as ERP or CRM.

Lydian want to use ‘get credit’ in a new application or workflow, they go to the repository, grab it and build a quick software link to the service interface. I realize that web services aren’t the complete answer to integration. I hear lingering doubts about security (though standards are fast emerging to take care of that problem) and bloated code that drains resources. But the concept of the

There needs to be a separate layer in the architecture for integration and business process change and coordination. I’m sorry, but I have a hard time believing that preserving old systems and processes always translates into paving the cow paths. But what if we could change the economics of process change? Maybe I’m drunk on the Service Oriented Architecture electrolyte that is poured so liberally at conferences these days, but it seems the way to separate business process changes from the penalties associated with changing the code or creating exit paths from them. I’m seeing companies beginning to build a separate integration layer in their architectures that is independent of the data and application layers. 62

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The service is a composite of different applications and data, all hidden behind a complex interface that is built to make linking to the service easy. Those building the links don’t need to know anything about the applications or data in the service to do their job. Even better, the services are reusable. For example, Lydian Trust’s enterprise architects designed a service called ‘get credit’ that is used by several different product divisions within the company for different loan application workflows (autos, mortgages and so on). ‘Get credit’ is a Web service that seeks out credit ratings over the Internet from the major credit bureaus. Anytime developers at

separate integration layer and of services as the way to structure it seems sound. Between web services, proprietary middleware and the other tools out there today, it seems possible to build this layer inside your company today. We’d like to write about companies that have done it. Tell us how you’ve done it, or send us email at editor@cio.in CIO

Christopher Koch is CIO's Executive Editor (Investigations). Send feedback about this column to editor@cio.in

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