September 15 2006 by Sreekanth Sastry

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From The Editor

Why would CIO India write about the use of IT by a non-governmental organization

IT’s Noble Mission IT helps NGOs establish a reputation for credibility and transparency.

(NGO), even if it were one that has a presence in 42 countries? Is it because NGOs often run on an admixture of commitment, passion, values and a desire to bring about positive change? Or, is it that NGOs are hardly the sort of organizations that one would associate with technology? That’s not it at all. What I admire most about NGOs is their dedication to utilize the most wafer-thin of budgets to achieve their objectives. When you add IT to the equation, it gets a whole lot more interesting, as you may imagine. Sudha Parthasarthy, senior manager of Deepalaya, one of the NGOs we interacted with, was candid: from their website and databases to report generation — IT is the way to achieving efficiency, speed and greater transparency. By building in transactional efficiency, information technology also cuts the cost of raising and disbursing funds, ensuring that more of every donor rupee winds up with beneficiaries rather than getting pared on the way in By building in administrative expenditure and even the transactional efficiency, cost of raising funds. IT also pares the Funding from major donors can mean the difference between a program and an NGO’s cost of raising and success or failure. The equation is simple: no disbursing funds. money equals no activity. Funnily though, money is not the problem here; what is in short supply is the ability of an organization to build a community of supporters. To succeed an NGO needs to build its support base, which is a really precious resource — difficult to raise and easy to lose. In truth, IT helps NGOs and voluntary sector organizations leap over the biggest obstacles that they face with fund-raising, issues relating to credibility and transparency. It does this by helping keep donors in the loop about how their funds are being used. Finally, a critical reason for this issue’s cover are the learnings that the Nkonsonkonson rollout holds for CIOs regardless of whether they work for not-for-profits or dyed-in-thewool corporates. These relate to how cost-effective IT can pay off; how to manage integration across multiple locations; and the issues to consider while planning migration. Now those aren’t too different from those that you grapple with everyday, are they? Write in and let me know what you think of ‘Aiding Action’.

Vijay Ramachandran, Editor vijay_r@cio.in

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Migration

Executive Expectations

COVER sTORy | AIDIng ACTIOn | 28

VIEW FROm ThE TOp | 40 iGATE Global Solutions’ CEO & MD, Phaneesh Murthy, says IT plays a vital role in what his company’s puts out in the market.

P h OTO by Sr IVaTSa ShaNdIlya

If raising funds is your business, then creating efficiencies and transparency is imperative. ActionAid, an NGO with a presence in over 40 countries, leveraged IT to do both. Feature by balaji narasimhan

Interview by Ravi menon

EXECUTIVE COACH hARD pRObLEms, sOFT AnsWERs | 26 Your team is delivering quality, but the organization is not seeing it. Why? Because you’re not delivering on your relationships.

COVEr: ImaGING by U NNIkrIShNaN a.V

Column by susan Cramm & Don Reeve

Customer Relationship Management ALL ThAT DATA | 50 CIOs need a data management strategy before trying out Web-based technologies to integrate their customer data applications. Feature by Thomas Wailgum

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content

Communication

Essential Technology | 66 Storage | Data Looks for a Home By Cindy Waxer Communication | Body Language of Knowledge

Management By Michael Hugos

From the Editor | 4 IT’s Noble Mission | IT helps NGOs establish a reputation for credibility and transparency. By Vijay Ramachandran

Inbox | 14 NOW ONLINE

5 6 Govern Maine’s Medicaid Mistakes | 56 Maine’s attempt to build a new Medicaid claims processing system is a classic example of how not to run a massive project.

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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Feature by Allan Holmes

Evolving a Platform for Transparency | 62 Prof. Subhash Bhatnagar of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, says that the National e-Government Plan is a fertile plain for public private partnerships that can give people easy access to valuable services. Interview by Harichandan Arakalli

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reader feedback

skills due to multiple devices and the organization’s approach to managed security services. JethIn ChAndrAn Head-IT Infrastructure Planning & PMO, Wipro Technologies

Sharing Ideas This is a much belated thank-you for organizing and hosting the CIO 100 event. It was evident that the sessions were selected with thought. John Hagel's views were very useful, particularly at this point when we are undertaking a three-year technology strategy planning exercise. In fact, I noticed that there were several others who were taking detailed notes of his presentation. I would also like to thank the people who sponsored the event. Their participation in such events is appreciated and more so since they didn’t take an overtly open marketing approach. It takes maturity to do this and at the end of the day, mature partners are important for all enterpriselevel initiatives. AlAgu BAlArAmAn Exec. VP (IT & Corporate Development) Godfrey Phillips

CIO roundtable Thank you for inviting me for the roundtable. It was really useful and validated some of my observations. Can I suggest that we extend it a little more next time? There were a couple of things we didn’t discuss like the availability of 14

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It was a privilege to attend the roundtable ‘Layered Security: Prudent or Paranoia’. This sort of discussion will definitely +provide valuable inputs to CIOs who were present and to those who were not when CIO reports on it. Regarding Intel, I feel that in the future, you should explore discussions in three domains: people, technology and process. These address the life-cycle of IT issues. Technology companies like Intel tend to be more focused on technology, and how technology is equipped or getting equipped to empower people and automate, integrate or consolidate processes. To that extent, Intel shared their vision about what they think is the future of technology. m.d.AgrAwAl CM-IT, BPCL

Peer-to-Peer Thanks for inviting me for the roundtable. It proved to be useful in understanding the various viewpoints held by my peers. It may be helpful, though, if we asked everyone whether the objective of the roundtable was met. The Intel product feature was interesting. As a suggestion, it may be worthwhile to ask Intel to talk about the 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

“John Hagel's views were very useful, particularly now when we are undertaking a three-year technology strategy planning exercise. ” use of its product with an organization’s asset management system. AmrItA t gAngOtrA tA Group Chief-IT Solutions Engagement, Bharti Televentures

holistic design application integration would be critical for CIOs to cut costs without impacting operations (Cutting The Right Corners, August 15, 2006). In not doing so, companies will fail to derive the benefits of streamlining processes. IT has to maintain the old individual systems alongside the new monolithic ones. If a CIO does not take the complete business view initially while designing information systems, the organization may end up spending 40-50 percent of its IT budget integrating them through various connectors. The broader message here is that CIOs and other IT execs need to start focusing on generating revenue rather than only cost-cutting. CIOs need to more focus on following four key challenges to help their organization grow in revenues and to meet increased competition: cost saving, the need for fast response to changing market conditions, the need to innovate, and the need to satisfy customer expectations. n. nAt nAtA tArAJ CIO, Aztecsoft

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new

hot

unexpected

I m p l e m e n t a t I o n Vegetable mandis in Uttar Pradesh have got a technology fillip with the UP Agriculture Marketing Board’s decision to computerize 82 mandis in its jurisdiction in order to ease the administration of the markets and reduce manual work. The mandis operate like a warehouse; farmers deliver their produce by the truckload and the mandi distributes the produce in surrounding markets. The computerization will help mandis keep track of stocks and thereby pricing, which depends on supply and demand. Digitizing the market has the added benefit of making commodity prices available online, giving farmers access to live price updates of various agricultural produce.

For the board, the move will help keep a real-time track on revenue, the produce rolling into the state, the products in short-supply, and information on mandis that need attention. The computerization has been outsourced to Birlasoft, which expects the Rs 10-crore project to go live in November 2006. The full implementation across all 82 mandis is expected to take longer, and will only be completed in June 2007. Like with any corporate implementation, the UP Agriculture Marketing Board is keen on maximizing ROI. Pawan Mehra, deputy GM (sales) India, Birlasoft, believes that the project will bring about “an improvement in revenue generation and collection from market activities, centralization of storage and access to internal and market-related data.” Established in 1973, the board made Rs 416.3 crore in 2004-05 from Rs 366.99 crore in 2003-04. It hopes that the efficiency computerization brings will add to this growth. —By Balaji Narasimhan

IllustratIon by PC a nooP

Computerized Agri-Marketing in UP

Smarter I.t. Service Delivery manaGement R e p o R t If you think your It department delivers good service, think again. a recent paper by consultancy Macehiter Ward-Dutton says few organizations run It t efficiently while being responsive to business needs. tight It t budgets have forced CIos to do more with less, says the paper’s author, Jon Collins. “but efficiency only saves money on the It t budget,” Collins argues. this is because there’s a divide between the application development side of the It shop and the group responsible for operations and maintenance. Developers

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build new systems with little input from systems administrators who later run them. a holistic view of It t service delivery would factor the requirements of business processes into It t project decisions. He suggests a path to It service management maturity. as with good software development, establishing repeatable processes is key. Companies may begin without processes but along the path, It t organizations define formal processes and slas with business users. at the most sophisticated level, It t adjusts service delivery continually.

For example, a bank's It t might support call center applications. If the bank wants to add mortgages to the products it supports via its call center, It t needs to be able to quickly update the call center applications and adjust how it supports those apps. Collins recommends that CIos first build a business case to improve service delivery: CIos need to identify the most important It services to the business, investigate how to improve them, and determine the costs for technology, staff resources and training. — by Elana Varon

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m I C R o p R o C e S S o R S Could ultraviolet light lead to lower-cost microprocessors and then to lowercost PCs? It might, if a uK research project pans out. researchers at university College, london, have found a way to use uV light instead of energy-hungry blast furnaces to create the important silicon dioxide insulation layer on PC chips. Creating a film of silicon dioxide on silicon wafers is an important stage in chip manufacturing: this film serves as the insulating layer into which chipmakers etch electrical circuits, among other functions. Chipmakers today bake silicon wafers in furnaces at up to 1,000 degrees centigrade to construct this silicon dioxide layer quickly. the uK researchers have made the process work by using energy-efficient uV lamps, providing a cleaner and significantly less expensive solution. set to the right wavelengths, uV lamps can create the silicon dioxide layer at room temperature, the researchers say. Much testing remains, so it could be several years before the technology is ready for commercial use, says Ian boyd, the project leader and chair of electronic materials at the university’s Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. some chip manufacturers have expressed interest in the research work, boyd says, but chipmakers are famously conservative about making changes to their manufacturing processes.

— by James niccolai 16

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Mapping for iT SucceSS

IMagIn g by un n IK rIsH nan aV

Light

Mapping for iiT T Succe SucceSS SS

Cheaper Chips with

Mapping for iT SucceSS S t R a t e G I C p l a n n I n G Few travelers would attempt a drive somewhere new without a road map. An exponentially drive simpler version of what a driver will see, a map provides touch stones of what’s important to navigation. Similarly, a strategic road map distills what can be the complicated landscape of an organization’s business strategy into a one-page graphic. It answers three questions: where are we now? Where do we want to go? How do we get there? Strategic road maps can be particularly useful to an IT group, since developing one requires alignment with business goals and a common language, says Robert Phaal, professor at the Centre for Technology at the University of Cambridge. Phaal, who has worked with a wide range of companies to develop strategic road maps, says that because road-mapping principles are generic, they can be adapted to any type of ccompany ompany or strategy. They are especially useful in supporting innovation because they translate abstract ideas into something more concrete. For example, a company that makes display technology uses a road map to illustrate how technologies in the R&D phase are forecasted to progress by showing how they could be used by various products, first for a watch face, then for cell phones and finally for a computer display. Next to a picture of each product is two short lines about its technological features and a few more about its market implications. The display technology road map translates highly technical information into simple visuals and text that leaders outside the IT group can understand. That simplicity is deceptive, Phaal says. Representatives from across the enterprise must meet and develop the onepage view of business strategy, then synthesize their partial views into a holistic one. Creating the road map also points out gaps in the strategy or ways a project may become a dead end. For these reasons, Phaal says, “Many find the process of roadmapping even more valuable than the road map itself.”

—By Diann Daniel

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S E C U R I T Y Now that identity thieves have almost perfected phishing, they’ve moved on to ‘vishing’: scammers are using voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephone numbers to trick people into revealing credit card and bank information, says Paul Henry, vice president at Secure Computing. The Internet security software maker has seen just four vishing scams to date, but expects the practice to “explode,” Henry says. In phishing schemes, scammers send e-mail that looks like it comes from a bank, credit card company or PayPal. The e-mail typically says the recipient’s account has been compromised and needs information confirmed, and includes a link to an official-looking site. In ‘vishing’, identity thieves ask people to call a phone number attached to a VoIP account. Such accounts can be obtained easily online through services like Skype or retailers such as Vonage reselling VoIP products, Henry says.

trendlines

First Phishing, Now Vishing In one vishing case, scammers targeted PayPal users by including a telephone number in an e-mail. In another case, criminals used an automatic dialer to call potential victims and play a recording that warned of fraudulent credit card activity. The recording asked people to call a number (with a spoofed caller ID) and confirm personal data. Unfortunately, at this point there’s not much CIOs can do to protect their companies’ employees and customers from being vished, Henry says. It would be smart to alert your company’s employees and your call center reps who interact with customers to the vishing trend, though. Reps can instruct customers to hang up on a suspicious automated call and instead call the number listed on the credit card or bank statement.

— By Grant Gross

Flag Your Waiter It’s the frustrating part of going out for dinner: your waiter seems to have eyes for everyone but you. Trying to zap this annoyance, Fatz Cafe, a restaurant chain based in South Carolina, is deploying wireless technology to let patrons electronically communicate with their servers. Fatz Cafe has implemented the technology at one restaurant and has signed a contract with ESP Systems to install it enterprisewide at 32 locations. Steve Bruce, president and CEO of Fatz Cafe, says the technology has helped turn more tables and boost customer service. “It’s still in its infancy, but it addresses our needs more than anything I’ve seen,” says Bruce. Here’s how it works: each server, host and manager wears a watch that is connected W I R ELE S S

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wirelessly to a hub at each table. After the hostess seats a party, a server greets the diners and hands them a disc that is about 2.5 inches in diameter. Once the customer pops the disc into the table’s wireless hub, he or she can click down on the disc to ping the server’s watch and get attention. From a managerial standpoint, the technology helps supervisors see which tables need help and shift manpower quickly, says Devin Green, CEO of ESP Systems. For example, if a server is dealing with multiple tables on a busy night, the system catalogs the requests in the order they were received.

If the waitstaff is overwhelmed, the requests can be forwarded to a manager, who can help out or redistribute personnel within seconds. Fatz Cafe’s waiters have warmed to the idea, Bruce says. “With servers, you get a little apprehension at first and some skepticism,” he says. “But once they saw how much it helped them, they were very accepting of the equipment.”

—By C.G. Lynch

Illustrat ion by un n ikrishnan AV

Wirelessly

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The transferred data includes free text notes in the arrest records. “Now we can look for things like a silver gun or a tattoo, or search for a person’s name,” Onalfo said. The databases weren’t easy to import. The NYPD has about 55 databases scattered in various locations, most using multiple, older technologies that Tyler joked only “old ladies” like herself are still familiar with. The data warehouse, currently 80GB in size should grow to about 400GB by the time the third phase is completed, Tyler said. The third phase involves connecting additional data sources from within the NYPD and from outside agencies. In doing so, the NYPD is moving from homegrown data integration software based on Cobol to Informatica Corp.’s PowerCenter tools. Informatica already used to send 911 emergency call data to the RTCC, which transmits alerts straight to detectives. For the data warehouse, Informatica will help integrate sources such as the fingerprint databases run by New York state and the FBI, speeding up a fingerprint matching process that can take up to three weeks to one that is completed in seconds, Onalfo said. Other planned real-time features include generating alerts when a ‘stop and frisk’ report matches a name in an outstanding warrant. New York is even considering setting up thousands of cameras at intersections to scan license plates, Tyler said. The data warehouse can then find matches to stolen license plates and generate alerts. To speed up getting data from reports still mostly written on pen and paper, the NYPD is trying special wireless pens and pads from IBM that let officers handwrite reports in the field while data is uploaded in real-time into a precinct server, Onalfo said. — By Eric Lai

IllustratIon by MM sHanItH

nYpd Boosts data warehouse arehouse p o l I C e W o R k The New York Police Department, which has received a steady stream of plaudits since it launched its Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC) over a year ago, continues to build on the data warehouse underpinning it. The RTCC is essentially a centralized help desk that provides quick data to the department’s 8,000 detectives, who solved 74 percent of all homicides last year. Underway, is the addition of more data sources and real-time alerts to the data warehouse used by the RTCC and the rest of the 37,000officer force. “We’re in a war, so we need to give our guys in the front lines the best tools possible,” said CIO James Onalfo. The NYPD has spent about Rs 1,350 crore in the past three years on new technology. Though the RTCC has garnered more publicity, the data warehouse underpinning it is more fundamental to the entire NYPD. In the first phase two phases, the second of which is just completed, several years of historical data, including complaints, arrests, criminal summons, shootings and homicides, was imported into an IBM DB2 8 database running on a pair of IBM P650 eightway AIX servers, says Christine Tyler, an associate partner in the public-sector practice at IBM’s Global Business Services division.

DOS Lives! Open Source Reinvents Past SoURCe t twelve years after Microsoft said it would stop development of Dos, an open source replacement — FreeDos — has a 1.0 release. the FreeDos project was launched in a 1994 manifesto by free software developer Jim Hall, after Microsoft said it would stop developing Dos following the launch of Windows 95. the resulting operating system is fully open source, with most components covered by the gnu general Public license, and provides Ms-Dos compatibility to the extent of being able to run some versions of Windows. open

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the project was planned to hit 1.0, the mark of maturity in the open source world, in July. Developers said the os supports several features that never made it into the officially supported Microsoft versions, such as internationalization, power management and asPI. other features in the 1.0 version include long file name support in some applications, the F Fat32 file system, HIMEM, EMM386 and CD-roM. add-on apps include an audio player, a window editor, an HtMl l viewer and an archiver program. It can be used to run most Dos programs, including older business

software and can support embedded Dos systems like cash registers. the os supports hardware from the 1981 IbM PC through to current Intel-compatible processors and embedded chips. It can be run on dedicated hardware or in an emulator on top of most other operating systems, developers said. the project plans a CD-roM release and a full set of floppy disk-based images.

— by Matthew broersma

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Katrina Called for coMMunicaTion

Managed Dedicated Exchange Server Hosting

R e C o V e R Y A year has passed, but the day Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast remains a fresh memory for Mississippi Power CIO Aline Ward. Ward had scrambled to keep communication lines open from a command center near the coast. “We were on the second floor, but water came inside the building,” recalls Ward. Her IT team piled sandbags against the door and bailed water from the room to keep radio communications going. The result? Ward kept one radio system running throughout the storm, while her IT department logged 18-hour days for over a week after the storm to help restore power to 195,000 customers.

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NetMagic gives you the advantage of having your own Microsoft Dedicated Exchange Server, without the hassles of managing it.

The most important lesson Ward learned during Katrina: communication with employees is critical in getting an IT department and a company back on their feet. Before the storm, her department owned five satellite phones (cell phones often don’t work in disaster situations); but they were older models, and were heavy and cumbersome to use. Now the company owns 74 new, smaller satellite phones assigned to key locations. Before Katrina hit, Mississippi Power had installed an extensive, self-healing fiber ring network, which it owns and maintains itself, to ensure that operations centers get access to critical applications. When individual fiber routes failed during Katrina, the network was able to re-route data and continue working. After the storm, Ward added microwave systems, similar to satellite dishes, to give the company independence from leased telecommunications landlines. Ward is also working to upgrade software that tracks employees and power-restoration resources during a disaster. “I feel much better prepared than pre-Katrina,” Ward says. —By Susannah Patton

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Larry Bonfante

PEER TO PEER

No Marketing, No Sale People believe that if they work hard and do the right thing, others will notice and reward them. But in the real world, you have to beat your own drum.

any IT executives frown at the thought of marketing IT internally. It conjures up visions of loudmouths delivering sales pitches — the kind of people we’d prefer to avoid. If we wanted to get into marketing, we would have gotten into… well… marketing. But what marketing is really about is educating people about something that you’re passionate about. For instance, some of you probably spend hours regaling your friends about your tennis game. As CIO of the United States Tennis Association (USTA), I’d like to thank you for marketing our sport! Many of us grew up believing that if we worked hard and did the right things, people would notice and reward us. Unfortunately, things don’t always work out that way. The executives and board members who are critical to our jobs have countless issues being thrown at them all the time. Unless we market our ideas to them — communicate and educate — we will never capture their attention, attention that we need to succeed.

Why Names are Important Marketing is never more important than when you’re trying to turn around an underperforming IT organization. When I began my tenure at the USTA, our IT team had a bad reputation and no credibility. After I listened to my clients to understand what they perceived the problems to be, my first step was to develop and market an action plan to address them. I named this plan ‘Operation CPR’. The acronym stood for the three areas our clients had identified as shortcomings: communications, project delivery and responsiveness. Calling it an ‘operation’ helped my team understand that we were in a 22

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Larry Bonfante

PEER TO PEER

battle, and CPR reminded them about the areas in which we needed to improve. (It’s not only your clients to whom you need to market but your own people too. What your staff thinks, feels and says to others in the quiet moments when you are not around will have a more profound impact on how people see IT than the messages you deliver from the pulpit.) By giving the project a name and a brand, we made it clear to our clients that we were taking their complaints to heart. (I knew I had my work cut out for me when at my first board presentation, a member told me that CPR wouldn’t work ‘because the patient was already dead’.)

Getting the Message Out

Marketing is a key element of any successful organization. If you don’t believe me, just ask your CEO how important marketing the business’s services and products is to the success of the company.

When marketing, it is important that you are consistent and constant in the delivery of your message. We use every vehicle we can think of to drill home our focus on communication, project delivery and responsiveness. We developed an IT scorecard, administered twice a year, with almost all the metrics we track tied back to those three major themes. We present the results (the good, the bad and the ugly) as well as all the comments we receive at our IT committee sessions at USTA’s annual and biannual meetings. This audience includes board members, committee chairs and key executives from our 17 section offices. This level of transparency accomplishes two objectives. It allows me to articulate (that is, market) our progress and successes in a large public forum, and perhaps, more importantly, this level of candor lets people know that I can be trusted. At these meetings, we also host an IT ‘trade show’. This provides our constituency the opportunity to touch and see new IT systems as well as mock-ups of innovations we hope to deliver in the next 12 to 24 months. It also helps us drum up financial support and sponsorship. We publish a monthly newsletter that highlights our progress on our major initiatives and their business value. It’s critical that these IT missives be written in clear, concise business language and articulate business value. No geek-speak allowed! For example, last year, we upgraded the campus infrastructure at the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, New York, where the US Open is held. Nobody cared that we rewired the campus or that we architected and deployed a new secure network. Marketing those feats would have been useless. But people did care that our players had wireless access to the Internet and that our 400 media guests could converge on our media center at the end of the evening and file their stories for the morning editions of their papers. And that’s what we communicated to our stakeholders. Last but not the least, you need to take your message on the road. We have 17 offices to which we provide services. Each is 24

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a separate legal and operational entity. Last year, I visited with each of these groups to listen to their issues and to make sure that my message was playing in Peoria. There’s nothing like talking with people where they live to let them know they’re important to you. Executives who avoid these trips because they take too much time will have plenty of time to commiserate with other executives on the unemployment line. You can market your message successfully only if you are viewed as possessing integrity. Consequently, it’s as important to report your failures as your successes. You need to tell people what went wrong and why, and what you’re planning

to do about it. The ostrich approach is always a mistake. People are smart enough to know that there are issues whether or not you tell them about them.

It Works if You Work it So, has it worked? The results we receive on our scorecards have improved by 20 percent over the past two years. Our capital projects are now sponsored by our business unit executives, not by IT, and our credibility within the organization has improved to the point where we’ve evolved from being considered a level-two priority translation: a huge problem to being seen as an organizational asset. My team is doing a great job, and they’re recognized for it. Perhaps most importantly, when people see me in the hallways, they smile and come to talk to me instead of mumbling under their breath and running in the other direction. Sure, the team members have rolled up their sleeves and worked their tails off to improve and expand our services while dramatically lowering our operating costs, but who would know and understand that if we hadn’t marketed our plan and our progress? Marketing is a key element of any successful organization. If you don’t believe me, just ask your CEO how important marketing the business’s services and products is to the success of the company. I think you already know the answer. CIO

Larry Bonfante is CIO of the United States Tennis Association and a member of the CIO Executive Council and CIO’s Editorial Advisory Board. For more insights and tools from Council members, visit www.cioexecutivecouncil. com/public/content.html. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Susan Cramm & Don Reeve

EXECUTIVE COACH

Hard Problems Soft Answers You know your team is delivering quality, but the organization is not seeing it. Why? Because you’re not delivering on your relationships.

n IT executive recently said, “As you move up in the organization, people spend more time working on politics than they do on quality.” That’s a pretty depressing thought for those who’ve spent years developing their technical skills in the naive hope that the results will speak for themselves. But when it comes to perceptions of quality, poor relationships can cast a dull patina on even the shiniest portrait. On the other hand, for those who realize that delivery is never perfect, the fact that the perception of quality can be enhanced by strong relationships is empowering. If your team is delivering day after day without receiving the recognition it deserves, take a look at how you are managing the soft side of delivery. In our experience, we have found that there are two common barriers to building relationships: being selfish and confining your interactions to formal meetings.

Be the Guy Next to you It’s part of the human condition to live inside one’s own head — to assume that others have the same emotional needs, thinking styles and approaches to decision making that you do. But as the Army teaches: it’s all about the guy next to you. The best way to understand ‘the guy next to you’ is to observe him, using one of the personality preference tools, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, to help you figure out how to best interact with him. Most professionals have taken these personality tests at least once but don’t understand the power of the tool because they use them to understand themselves rather than to understand others. Once you’re armed with these insights, make sure you aren’t selfish in your interactions. You can’t build relationships if you 26

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Susan Cramm & Don Reeve

EXECUTIVE COACH

are always taking and never giving. One IT executive, Mrs Cold, called me recently and asked for a favor. We hadn’t spoken in a long time, and yet the call began without the necessary tea and cookies (no ‘How are you?’ or ‘How are the kids?’); instead, she dived right in to business. The interaction was cold and elicited from me a correspondingly cold response. Consequently, she didn’t receive the help she was looking for. Mrs Cold delivers, and she manages up well, but she doesn’t invest in lateral or downward relationships. One day, when one of her projects stumbles and she turns for help to those she has casually dismissed, she will find herself standing all alone. One of the most powerful concepts in influence is the idea of reciprocity, defined by Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: Science and Practice, as people repaying in kind. Mrs Cold would have evoked a different response from me if she had maintained regular contact, begun the exchange by focusing outwardly instead of upon her own needs, or followed up with some type of repayment (for example, an introduction to someone I wanted to meet, or a simple thank-you note).

Meet Outside of Meetings Relationships aren’t built in conference rooms, through e-mail or over the phone. Relationships are built one-on-one, over coffee and lunch, and in social settings. For example, consider the executive who is remarkable in his ability to get his team organized and deliver the goods. Mr Substance should be the next CIO but probably won’t be. The problem is, he’s all business all the time. Once you get to know him, he’s delightful. Unfortunately, he doesn’t interact with others in casual settings. Another influence principle of Cialdini’s is that of liking: people like people who like them. Mr Substance doesn’t reach out to others one-on-one because he is focused on what to say rather than on what to ask. Getting others to talk — and listening in an active, as opposed to a passive way (in which you are just waiting for them to finish so you can say your piece) — is the best way to identify common values, interests, pressures and goals. Successful questioning doesn’t look like a courtroom scene, it looks like a tennis game: serve up the question, return with added spin, pace or direction, and respond accordingly. It’s amazing how often people don’t play the conversation from where it landed and, instead, just pick up the ball and move it to another part of the court by ignoring their partner’s response and changing the subject. Relationships make work meaningful. Not only in the way they humanize daily existence, but in how they ensure that good work is recognized, rewarded and well used. It’s through relationships that you will be able to apply the tenets of marketing (‘Tell them what you are going to do, tell them that you are doing it, and tell them that you got it done’) in a way that isn’t viewed as self-serving but instead serves others.

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Reader Q&A Q: I wonder how many executives understand that sometimes the keys to the outside world can come from their vendors. Many times, I do not sell services; I merely keep in touch. And if something arises where there’s a fit, I mention our ability to help. A: As a CIO, I referred vendors to my direct reports. The

vendors I developed relationships with were those who had something interesting to talk about, other than their product — for example, industry and competitive insights. Q: You say Mr Substance should probably be the next CIO because he delivers the goods but won’t be because he’s all business all the time. Since when has doing one’s job well become a liability? A: Doing one’s job is a necessary but not sufficient

condition for success. Not surprisingly, most people choose their work partners according to two criteria. One is competence at the job; the other is likability. What is surprising is the importance of personal feelings as a factor in judging competence. The research found that people are more likely to hire the lovable fool than the competent jerk. Polishing up your likability may be the best way to ensure that you receive the recognition and opportunities you deserve. Q: Can you mention other personality assessment tools, other than Myers-Briggs, that we can use to better understand ‘the guy next to you’? A: Another assessment frequently used within businesses

to improve awareness of self and others is the DISC personality assessment (the acronym stands for the four behavior dimensions identified in the assessment: dominance, influence, submissiveness/steadiness and compliance/consciousness), which is based on the work of Dr William Marston. CIO

Susan Cramm is founder and president of Valuedance, an executive coaching firm in San Clemente, California. Don Reeve is CIO at Wegmans. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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K. Parameswaran, global head of IS, ActionAid, created a support system that spans 40 countries and has introduced greater transparency and efficiency, thereby directly impacting ActionAid's fund-raising activity.

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Cover Story | Migration

action Reader ROI:

How cost-effective IT can pay off Issues to consider while planning migration How to manage integration across multiple locations

the global head of IS for ActionAid International, is the sort of gentleman who will invite you to his office and make you some coffee himself, the sort who is willing to get involved at the show-how level instead of merely at the know-how stage. It’s important because he has to manage IT across 42 countries worldwide — ActionAid helps millions of people in these countries — and the transfer of knowledge is critical if benefits are to percolate down. REAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 0 6

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K. Parameswaran,

Illustrat Ion s by an Il t

As an NGO spread across over 40 countries, ActionAid leveraged IT to ensure that its sponsorship programs are effectively and transparently managed. Both are crucial in its continuing effort to raise funds and fight poverty.

P hoto by srIvatsa shandIlya

By BAlAjI NArASImhAN

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Cover Story | Migration The number of people ActionAid reaches out to speaks volumes about the strategic importance of the organization’s IT. According to ActionAid’s Global Progress Report 2004, the agency reached a total of 19,031,185 people across Asia, America and Africa. Barring a few multinationals, few companies can claim to have influenced that many people. And yet, they have a motive: profit. ActionAid, on the other hand, has projects, and projects require sponsorship. Its existing sponsorship administration system worked reasonably well, but the direction of the organization changed, requiring a rethink on the use of IT. Pre-2000, in the days before the rethink, ActionAid used a package that had a standalone DOS system with no Webbased support, something critical to modern applications. It was also non-extensible and was configured rigidly. This caused severe constraints on what could be achieved. And because the system was completely outdated, modifying it to bring it up-to-date was completely out of the question. Says Parameswaran, “The older system was somewhat restrictive in terms of usability. It did not support nonchild supporter products, and was built on outdated technology. In order to overcome these limitations, ActionAid undertook a study to define the requirements for a new sponsorship management system, which could

cater to child-sponsor as well as non-child-sponsor products.” This system was christened Nkonsonkonson or NK after a West African Adinkra symbol that translates into ‘chain-link’ and stands for unity, human relations, brotherhood and cooperation. NK was necessary because ActionAid faced a paradigm shift. For many years since it was founded in 1972, ActionAid was largely a British charity that relied on child sponsorships. Around the turn of the millennium, it shifted its focus from child sponsorships to fighting poverty all over the world. The motive behind the move might be explained from figures gleaned from ActionAid’s own documents. Worldwide, 1 billion people are officially illiterate, while 40 million people live with HIV/AIDS. Fifty million people have been killed in wars in the last 60 years and 800 million people are permanently hungry. Figures in the book, Make Poverty History, released by Penguin Books in 2005, paint an even grimmer picture of global poverty. The authors of the book say that 270 million women and children worldwide have died from poverty since 1990, roughly the population of the US. On an average, 18 million people every year — 50,000 a day — die from poverty-related problems in developing countries. The impact of poverty on children is even worse and Make Poverty History reveals that one child dies due to poverty every three seconds. It was such numbers that propelled ActionAid to move on from child sponsorship and tackle the broader issue of poverty. In order to do this, the NGO came up with six themes, which it wanted to tackle on a global scale. These included women’s rights, HIV/AIDS, food and hunger, education, human security and governance. But to tackle these areas, ActionAid had to get funding from areas other than child sponsorship (child sponsorship comes with several disadvantages, chief among which is the fact that these funds can only be used for projects that are child-friendly in nature). If ActionAid had to do non-children-oriented projects, then

“NK's web-based design brought a marked change to data exchange and user access, especially with the system being used at various locations globally.” — K. Parameswaran, Global head of Is, actionaid International 32

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Cover Story | Migration they would have to look at other areas — and their IT architecture had to support them.

Designed to Fight Poverty

How IT Helps NGOs Diversify

Since a new system had to be specifically created to take cognizance of non-childnkonsonkonson konsonkonson has sponsorship projects on a global helped actionaid basis, a lot of thought went into its move from child planning. Despite this, however, the first version of the project, sponsorship to other which was rolled out between areas (such as poverty 1998 and 1999, failed. Among alleviation). however, owever, the major problems were data sponsoring children conversion (which was later on continues to be the managed successfully) and poor connectivity in some countries. largest slice of their Undaunted, ActionAid pressed sponsorship pie. on, and the second phase tasted success. “The first phase of the Year 2001 2002 2003 2004 failed NK project was on VB/SQL. Java/Oracle was the best option total Income t 641.2 691.1 694.6 792.3 during the second, successful (rs crore) phase of NK’s development,” says Tarun Bhatnagar, coordinator, Child international projects, ActionAid. sponsorship 379.6 287.4 284.4 312.8 The shift from VB/SQL to Income Java/Oracle was done primarily (rs crore) for reasons of compatibility. The Child systems of ActionAid in Italy Sponsorship 59 42 41 39 and UK, which were to interface (%) with NK, were Oracle-based, and this drove the decision. Similarly, Java was chosen to ensure interoperability. Outlining the strategy behind the technologies that were chosen, Bhatnagar by the Funding Affiliate System. Says Parameswaran, “The says: “Some of the key design goals of NK were usability, information on NK enables the funding planning process availability and security in the context of the global setup because it is possible to extract various commitment- and of ActionAid. A secure, Web-based environment was felt link-status information.” to be the best setup, and Oracle and Java technologies Users have also found the NK system more flexible and were reliable and state-of-the-art technologies at that usable compared to the old system. Tsega Assefas, a senior time. Moreover, these technologies have provided us sponsorship officer based in Ethiopia, says, “NK ensures interoperability in our diversified operational setup in accountability because it controls the links, communication different countries and locations.” and correspondence between a supporter and a child.” The proof of the pudding lies in the eating — NK has Another Ethiopian sponsorship officer, Meseret Zegeye, who delivered. Thanks to NK, it has become possible for ActionAid has been a long-time user of both the old and the new systems, to track supporters who have made a commitment to be feels one of the key benefits of NK is that, “on NK, you can linked to beneficiaries. NK’s abilities also allowed ActionAid control the outstanding activities and take action on time.” to link a group of supporters within one geographical region All this usability has been made possible by planning or a country-level program. NK does not manage information development properly. Because technology is not one of the on supporters and potential supporters, which was managed

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Cover Story | Migration core areas of ActionAid, development work was outsourced to a company based in Bangalore. In retrospect, it was a great decision. NK is a complex animal — it consists of 168 user screens, generates 38 reports, and has a database schema that contains 71 tables. Since fund raising is a core activity for entities like ActionAid, the performance of NK was crucial for the very survival of the organization, and outsourcing helped ensure that the code was robust. The new system had a host of features that has made managing sponsorships on a global basis far easier than could have been possible on the old system. NK introduced the concept of a ‘beneficiary’, which provides a mechanism for supporting multiple products like community sponsorship, general fund, and others. NK also did away with the centralized and rigid definitions and configurations of the old system, thereby optimizing the sponsorship management system. Most refreshingly, NK meant that ActionAid could shift from the older system, which was based on a standalone DOS system, to a Web-based design. “This brought a significant shift in terms of data exchange and user access considering the

use of the system at various locations of the organization globally,” says Parameswaran.

Rolling up Their Sleeves User satisfaction is a critical component of the system because NK is used by over 350 users in 28 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe and America. Since different people have different requirements, it was hard to have a one-size-fits-all approach. It was equally difficult to incorporate the suggestions of all the users, because that would have bloated the system. But according to Parameswaran, NK has served its users with at least an average level of satisfaction. One reason for this success is because, at a strategic level, ActionAid had partitioned NK’s development into three logical stages: testing, training and production, and deployment and support. User satisfaction apart, ActionAid still faced problems, primarily with connectivity, which they continue to tackle with various steps like standardizing the link at countries by dealing with local ISPs. To minimize outages, they hosted NK on servers where maximum uptime

How NK Builds New Links nk does the groundwork that enables the Funding affiliates engine to tap existing sponsors and help in new areas. It also enables actionaid to branch out into other areas from child sponsership.

over time, nK nurtures Mr Patel’s relationship with the children. nK is responsible for passing thank- you notes, ensuring that letters and photos reach Mr Patel, and generally keeping him updated of their lives.

InFoGraPhICs: PC ano oP In

overwhelmed by the destruction caused by the Gujarat earthquake in 2001, Mr Patel — who lives in Manchester, uK, — decides to sponsor three children.

the 2004 tsunami renders thousand of fishermen families homeless. thanks to nK’s work, Mr Patel decides to help them. nK has helped bring in more sponsorship and has helped actionaid to focus beyond fund raising for children. n.b b. this example is only illustrative of nK’s capabilities.

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Cover Story | Migration was ensured both in terms of availability and disaster recovery. Experts were also hired to periodically tune up the application and maintain uptime, and special systems and scripts were deployed in order to monitor the system’s status. This continues to be critical because, with many users across various time zones accessing NK, the system has to be available 24/7. Another area of concern was ensuring compatibility with the systems used by the funding affiliates (FA) of

NK fulfilled one of its commitments, and there's proof. ActionAid’s dependence on child sponsorship has fallen from 59 to 39 percent in four years. ActionAid, who use their own set-up. Tsegaye Ayele, NK systems coordinator based in Ethiopia, says that there are “clearly defined and specified communication protocols, which are implemented as interface programs either on the NK side or on the FA system.” Manual file transfers are also possible between both systems, and since some users of FA systems also use NK, they usually don’t have many problems where compatibility is concerned. A nice touch with NK is its support for multiple languages — NK supports English, Greek, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. However, a lot more needs to be done to make multi-lingual support truly robust. Sometimes, users of NK face corruption of characters while downloading files. “Some of these are known bugs of the developing tools, and others require more profound and permanent multilingual solutions,” says Parameswaran. Many of the problems with NK have been fixed over time through constant upgrades. In 2003, based on user feedback, the graphical user interface (GUI) was refurbished and the menu system was changed. Over 50 minor changes have been made since the rollout, based on changes in business processes, and various bugs have been fixed, along with bugs that were introduced along with the changes made for fixing bugs. Some of the changes made to NK since its inception have been more profound. “Initially the system was deployed on a single Solaris box. Later, we split the database and the application into a two-tier hardware environment and 36

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put the database on a new box to overcome the server’s poor performance,” says Parameswaran. Another major change was made in 2005 to the database, when NK was moved from Oracle 8i to Oracle 10g to get better database performance. In another move to improve the functioning of the system, ActionAid also performed coding operations to optimize and centralize the query system. Ayele in Ethiopia points out that, while “most of the upgrades are done as per the predefined and agreed-upon configuration management procedures, there have also been unplanned and emergency upgrades.” However, the advantages of the NK system and the upgrades that have been performed to it have been tremendous. To understand why, you have to understand the concept of funding itself. Typically, agencies like ActionAid suffer from one major problem with funding — it usually comes with riders and turns into ‘phantom aid’ because funds with conditions ultimately don’t generate much impact. For example, an NGO, which requested anonymity, received funds for building boats for fishermen who had been afflicted by the 2004 tsunami. The rider was that the boats could not be locally purchased or made — they had to be purchased from one specific company abroad. The boat’s relatively expensive sticker prices defeated the purpose of the aid. This is but the tip of the iceberg. According to a document titled Real Aid: Making Technical Assistance Work by ActionAid, phantom aid of Rs 166,500 crore was generated in 2004, which included aid not targeted at poverty reduction (Rs 31,050 crore), double counted as debt relief (Rs 25,650 crore), usage of overpriced and inefficient technology (Rs 53,100 crore), and others. One problem with aid from any government is that it frequently comes with clauses, and one way in which agencies like ActionAid strive to stay free of these is by getting money from individual donors. And NK, by oiling the fund-raising mechanism and by helping keep sponsors informed, has been a big help.

Building for Another Day Ultimately, the test of the new system is in these small things. One such area concerns digital photography. Periodically, ActionAid sends photographs of children to their sponsors. Earlier, these photos had to be shot on film, and since the location of the sponsored child was usually a remote village that had poor road and rail connectivity, it would take a lot of time to develop the film and courier the photos to the sponsor. With digital photography, things are much simpler and sponsors anywhere can easily access photos of the children they have helped. While the system currently doesn’t use video clips, Parameswaran says that technically, it is possible to incorporate video into the system. Another ‘small’ NK module with a large impact is the NK Mail Merge (NKMS) module. This program takes data from NK and generates form letters, like new initiatives, that are

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Cover Story | Migration

How Other NGOs use Technology the It prowess of nGos in India. actionaid is among the few nGos worldwide that have sufficient funds to implement It. says sreekanth s. rameshaiah, executive director of Mahiti, which has worked with 100 voluntary organizations over the past six years, “depending on how you wish to segregate them, there could be around 50,000 nGos in India, of which only around 25 might be implementing cutting-edge technology.” 'Cutting-edge' is the operative word here. It doesn’t mean that most nGos don’t use technology at all. For instance, samuha has been a good user of technology, from the days of the 286 processor. this nGo, which works in the area of micro credit and rainwater monitoring in arid areas of north Karnataka, has automated gauges for recording rainfall data, which is then automatically fed into a database. the use of It,, especially in nGos s with a funds crunch, is need-based — and not practiced for its own sake. t take the case of deepalaya, eepalaya, which manages child sponsorships for education. as sudha Parthasarathy, senior manager (marketing) at deepalaya puts it, “as education is a long drawn-out process, it is essential that the sponsors are kept informed, animated and in good spirit so that the relationship [with the children] grows.” It plays a critical role and ensures that sponsors and beneficiaries are constantly in the loop, which is important since sponsors are more likely to contribute again if they are kept up to date about the people they’ve helped. transparency is crucial when you want to raise funds, and It plays a t major role at Give India. sponsors for a cataract operation, for example, merely have to visit giveindia.org and choose the nGo, through which they want to sponsor the operation. they are given a full breakup of what the operation costs, along with details of the nGo. t technology plays an important role in linking the donor with the beneficiary. among nGos, free and open-source software is popular. sunil abraham, director of Mahiti, says, “nGos do prefer applications like sugarCrM, a commercial open-source customer relationship management software, and Moodle, a free open-source software course management system designed to help educators create online courses.” — b.n.

sent to supporters. This keeps supporters constantly in the loop, thereby ensuring their active participation. Talking about future plans, Ayele says that they are currently reviewing NK and looking at areas of improvement. “We want to explore various possibilities, like reports on e-mail, information for supporters on the Web, and improvement of efficiency,” he says. Another long-term vision ActionAid has in this context is bringing together the beneficiary and the supporter over the Internet by facilitating direct communications between them. While ActionAid wants to do these changes to the NK system at the earliest, the changes will be performed only after the review results are out. But happy Internet reunions don’t cut it for the bean counters — ROI does. Parameswaran says that ActionAid has spent about Rs 9 crore on NK for development, implementation, roll-out and training. ActionAid also spends around Rs 130 lakh on maintenance, hosting and new features every year. As CIO, Parameswaran points out that it is difficult to put a figure on NK’s soft benefits. “The returns are mainly in terms of supporter satisfaction, quick linking of donors to beneficiaries, better management information and reduced cycle times.” In all these areas, there is no doubt at all that NK has delivered. But NK has also met one of its commitments that can be measured: reducing ActionAid’s dependence on child sponsorship. In 2001, child sponsorship as a percentage of ActionAid’s funding accounted for 59 percent. In 2004, this figure was brought down by 20 percent. While child sponsorship at 39 percent is still the single largest contributor to ActionAid’s funding, NK has ensured that other types of sponsorship are also gaining ground. And in the fight against poverty, every inch of ground gained is a life saved. CIO

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

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VIEW

from the TOP

CEO & managing director Phaneesh Murthy on how IT plays a critical role in iGATE Global Solutions’ offerings to the marketplace.

Towards a

Responsive IT Organization by RAVI MENON Over the four years since he took over the helm of iGATE, CEO Phaneesh Murthy has used his IT infrastructure to manage subsidiaries and provide robust offshore outsourcing and legacy application management services to large and medium-sized organizations. In this interview to CIO India, he explains how proactive IT leadership has helped fine-tune iGATE’s onshore-offsite delivery model, which includes software development, client-server design and development, conversion/migration services, data management and warehousing, package implementations and integration services.

CIO: How has tech strategy driven business at iGATE? And, to what degree is internal IT involved?

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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Phaneesh Murthy: At iGATE, we have formulated our business strategy based on market conditions, our competition, and finally, our own aspirations. While we are doing this exercise, advances in technology are always kept in mind, so that we can come up with strategies that are current with the times. Internal IT is always involved in the process of validating strategy feasibility and providing inputs on faster, cheaper and better way of doing things.

What is the nature of the IT infrastructure you have in place at iGATE? IT infrastructure at iGATe runs on L2 through L7 switching networks in order to provide reliability and performance. The infrastructure is secured using seven layers of defense according to the ‘Defense in Depth Model’. Our IT infrastructure is configured with one of the best available disaster recovery solutions in order to provide 100 percent uptime for missioncritical projects. Our network is largely IP-based on which we run data, voice and video. The ERP system sits on top of this for transaction processing

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PHANEESH MURTHY expects I.T. to Respond to the needs of internal and external customers Ensure that there are no failure points within the organization Procure information and insights to track the path of business

How much of your internal or customerfacing IT processes do you believe in outsourcing? At iGATE, we have been outsourcing around 10 percent to 15 percent of our total information systems and IT work. Our belief is that as long as the processes are governed by us and clear expectations and objectives are set out by us, we are comfortable in outsourcing the work to

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somebody else, provided they can do it more efficiently than us.

How do you view the role of a CIO at iGATE? We do not have a CIO designate. We have split the IT function into two: one, under the head of application and the other, under the head of IT infrastructure. Both report to the chief financial officer, and jointly play the role of a conventional CIO.

One of the reasons behind this appraoch is that IT plays a critical role in our offerings to the marketplace.

How are you equipped to handle applicationlevel issues that can be crucial to your and your customerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s businesses? We have a dedicated team to provide 24x7 support to all our applications that have customer touch-points. We have also

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View from the Top

provided dashboard and portal views for our customers.

SNAPSHOT

CIOs of IT services companies have begun to increasingly look at the customer. How should top managements help the CIO leverage this trend?

Rs 636 crore

iGATE Turnover (FY 2006) Annual IT budget

5% of total revenues

Key Business Verticals

IT consulting & services Software engg & development Application services

verticalization of the business? An important component of our t e ch n o l o g y infrastructure is that we have a fairly flexible and scalable architecture to which we add telecom bandwidth to connect to various offices and customers. As we add on complex securityconscious clients in verticals like financial services, we have come up with a way to firewall these customersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; networks more effectively, while giving us complete access to what we need to carry out our work.

Packaged software implementation At iGATE, we have ensured that the head of IT Headcount 5,500 infrastructure is integral in putting together our Number of IT staff 100 Infrastructure Management Service offering, our Branch offices & services centers SLAs involved with end Is there an 13 overseas, 4 India customers in managing ongoing development centers their expectations, and fully evolution in involved in putting a backyour technology end infrastructure to service our customers strategy as you expand most efficiently. We provide the internal IT team with into new geographies? How various opportunities for self-development, much of a say does your which includes courses on leadership, IT head have in internal IT communication and project management, procurement? among others. Based on the trend over the past years, we have been moving from expensive ISDN What do you think will be networks to the cheaper and more efficient IP the advantages of having a networks. We have enhanced security to have customer-facing CIO? multiple bootable systems to leverage multishift operations. We have used software and It is important for everybody in the tools tailored to different geographies to company to be customer savvy, so that they ensure optimal support to customers as well understand the needs of the customer. We as our people in the field. encourage all people in our HR, finance, IT While the broad directions and strategy and IS functions to be customer-facing. are set by the executive committee, the head of IT procures most components, subject to How have your technology a broad governance model. infrastructure and IT

systems scaled up to the challenges of geographical expansion and greater 42

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Internally, what are the key IT management principles that set you apart?

We believe in having the most responsive IT organization to meet the needs of both our internal and external customers. We believe that at the broadest level, the most successful IT organization is one which is invisible and proactively ensures that there are no failure points, rather than having facilities to take service calls. On the applications side, we have a strategy on the way our business is evolving, so that we get the required information and insight needed to run our business with more control.

Are there any specific IT/ systems upgrades in place to ensure uninterrupted customer service? If yes, how has productivity improved down the years as a result of this? We have always followed a strategy of having complete redundancy to ensure disaster recovery and business continuity. This is particularly imperative for us because more than 70 percent of our work is done out of India for customers overseas and we cannot afford to have any downtime for this large pool of productive intellectual capital. The good news for us is that as more vendors start providing sophisticated systems with redundancy built in, it becomes easy for us to leverage on these systems; and it also becomes cheaper for us.

What are the key metrics which technology will address keep your productivity at a high? For us, there are two primary metrics here: availability and throughput. Our IT and IS infrastructure are well geared to optimize this. CIO

Assistant editor Ravi Menon can be reached at ravi_menon@cio.in

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Holistic Approach to Security Enterprise security is not just about better awareness among the rank-and-file of an organization. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also about having multiple defensive layers and strengthening them. Technology has the solutions for CIOs to tackle issues of security and asset management. Enterprises today are in a similar situation. They are plagued by increasing economic and security threats such as malicious viruses, spyware and identity theft, while IT executives are driven to improve processes and customer service models despite shrinking IT budgets. Creating multiple layers of security around and across an

Executive Partner :

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Special Advertising Feature enterprise is possibly the only way to minimize risk, while ensuring business continuity. Given this scenario, Intel has debuted vPro technology for business PCs, which by taking the security layer up to the client, not only dramatically improves desktop PC security and manageability, but also allows for energy-saving computing performance and lower maintenance costs. “To us security and manageability go hand-in-hand. It’s about both the device as well as the patches that go into it,” says Surendra Arora, director, customer solutions group, Intel South Asia. In order to explore today’s threat scenario and how IT leaders are geared up for it, Intel recently organized a series of roundtables on layered security across Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai. The roundtables debated the people, process and technology aspects of the conundrum.

Waiting for a Disaster? All over the world, corporate businesses are seeing laptops stolen, hacked into, and even bursting into flames. Yet, top executives walking around with notebooks might represent the biggest threat to the security of their businesses’ computer networks, said V. Balakrishnan, CIO of Polaris Software. “We go through a dozen security audits on behalf of our customers. The conclusion is that there are methods of enforcing reasonable security,” Bala said. However, “the most vulnerable layer is the senior executive with the notebook — they are like Trojan horses — going out, connecting to unsecured networks, coming back and connecting to the corporate network, and god knows what they've got. Worse, because the people using these notebooks are senior, the devices are often part of multiple networks." Enforcing scanning software intrudes on the top management’s work, reduces efficiencies and irritates a lot of senior people. Often, security tools are complex and the senior business executives don’t feel comfortable with them. S. Sadagopan, director of the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore, said, “Typically, for top management, the security process involves hiring a consultant, getting a document, implementing it, getting a compliance report, and presenting it to the board — the attitude is, ‘save my shirt’.” Atul Kumar, chief manager of IT at Syndicate Bank, pointed out that Internet Banking implies that the end-user of the bank has access “right up to the databases”. The problem is exacerbated by the lack of application security, for when the applications are built, vendors are racing against

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each other and security measures often get short-shrift. Concurring with this view, C.R. Visveswaran, associate VP & principal architect, information security audits and architecture group, Infosys Technologies, said that 70 per cent of hacks happen because of loopholes in applications.

Know Thy Enemy Raghu Kasavaraju, global engineering manager, platform security, Intel IT, noted that attack vectors have shifted substantially with a change in the motives. “Earlier, it was mostly a geek who did it for the thrill of beating technology. Today, infosecurity threats have evolved to be practiced by organized crime syndicates. Many countries too are part of it, using hacking for espionage and counter-espionage by hiring experts,” he observed. As Visveswaran pointed out, four years ago, it took 338 days on average for a new flaw to be exploited once it was discovered; today, this has shrunk to two-and-a-half days. “The other challenge that CIOs face is that whenever a tool or technology solution is put in place many vendors do not ensure that all the holes are plugged. Therefore, administering patches becomes necessary and routine,” said Amrita Gangotra, group chief-IT Solutions Engagement, Bharti Airtel. Today’s attacks are also becoming more complex and blended involving a combination of attacks working at different levels. It is clear that with such ‘blended threats’, the question is not if but when. “This is where the layered security comes into play. These multiple layers typically comprise technologies from various vendors. Even if somebody manages to break in through one, there will always be the next barrier and so on,” said Satish Warrier, head information security, Godrej Industries. The emergence of portable hard disks and USB devices, means that security cannot be relegated only to the perimeter, pointed out Neeraj Kumar, GM-IT, NABARD. There are more boring and therefore easily overlooked sources of threats too. On the people front, one can’t rule out a disgruntled or greedy employee; and on the processes front, what needs to be guaranteed is that security practices are being actually followed by every person in an organization. Organizations should not only look at security data and information as a technological issue but people’s issue as well. This can be best addressed by implementing healthy practices and processes, feels M.D. Agrawal (chief manager–Refinery Information Systems), Bharat Petroleum.

Amrita Gangotra, chief-IT service delivery, Bharti Airtel, says IT and business need to be aware of tech implications.

Top executives with notebooks could represent the biggest security threat, says V. Balakrishnan, CIO, Polaris Software Lab.

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Security and manageability go together, says Surendra Arora, director, customer solutions group, Intel South Asia.

Portable devices means security cannot be relegated only to the perimeter, says Neeraj Kumar, GM-IT, NABARD.

In fact Chandrashekar Nene, VP-IT, Kingfisher Airlines, pointed to the need for organizations to have a proper security culture. “We need to work hard to make employees security-conscious. This will call for a change in the mindset of the staff,” he said.

The way forward, said Tamal Chakraborty, CIO Ericsson India, is to be more inclusive and involve everybody while framing security policies. “The big challenge is also to implement security policies that are in place. There has to be a lot of focus on education and training of employees as well,” observed NABARD’s Kumar. Technology plays its role too: organizations no longer work within a well-bounded geographic region, said Kasavaraju. Technology allows people to ‘tele-commute’, connect to corporate networks using hand-held devices and so on. The focus is the ‘client platform’, he said. Sadagopan said that people perceive and appreciate risk, but are unable quantify it in most cases. Even then, “they don’t have the wherewithal to put it all together.” Dr Sridhar Mitta, MD and CTO of e4e Labs, said even available technology isn’t often used effectively. There are also more basic problems, such as poor pay for physical security staff in the large buildings that house corporate offices. The poor pay ensures that really smart people never work as security staff. From physical security to electronic multiple-factor authentication, how does a CIO get his chief executive’s support? “Layered security is not limited to technologies at the perimeter, but it has got to do with another layer of training, education, policies, processes

The Delhi panel voiced its opinion across a wide spectrum of areas. Blended threats, a combination of attacks from various levels, was one. Layered security, plugging various loopholes was an answer everyone agreed upon.

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Special Advertising Feature and compliance. So, when you focus on both the dimensions of security, you get a complete, consolidated security for an enterprise. The key here is compliance whether from people and processes perspective or from the technology side. The key role of the CIO is to ensure this people and process compliance and manageability is a great tool in the hands of IT leaders to achieve this,” says Neel H. Bhatia, Asia program manager, IT@Intel.

"Layered security is not limited to technology at the perimeter, but with another layer of training, education, policies, processes and compliance.” — Neel H. Bhatia, Asia program manager, IT@Intel

Don’t Try Scaring Your Boss Recently, the CIO of a large telecom company hacked into his CEO’s laptop, just to show him how easy it was. The chief executive is then said to have approved whatever spending the CIO wanted on security. CIOs at the roundtables unequivocally said however, that, “scaring your boss is not a sustainable option”. Demonstrating the benefits of good security, on the other hand, works, said Anil Misquith, head-ISV Alliance Group, Intel India. Within Intel for instance, Misquith said, there are committees such as Ethics Compliance and Business Continuity, which have representation from every group in the company. They identify, for the next two quarters, areas that can be categorized as high risk areas, medium or low. This is done for both internal and external factors. “Security has to be comprehensive. And for that, it has to be defined with the correct processes, the

organizational structure and technology in mind. The critical question is: how do you implement policy in a manner that is useful to the organization? For this to be effective, both the IT team as well as business executives need to be aware of the impact of the technology and security implications,” said Gangotra. Compliance is often the path towards getting business and IT in sync about security. Take SEBI’s Clause 49, which talks about mandatory risk assessment, management and documentation within an enterprise and making the CEO and CFO responsible for compliance to security frameworks. “With this security awareness and responsiveness will definitely go up This will help us to convince managements and users of the security needs of our organizations,” said Pratap Gharge Senior GM-IT, Bajaj Electricals.

The panel also became a peer-to-peer forum, in which they advised each other not to look at security only as a technological issue. Layered security is a people issue as well and everyone agreed that there was a need to create a culture of security.

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Special Advertising Feature

"The security safeguards that CIOs put in place need an ROI associated with them — and shouldn't slow down business. That’s where vPro steps in." — Surendra Arora, Director, customer solutions group, Intel South Asia As Burgess Cooper, AVP-information security, HSBC, put it: “Quality is free. Compliance is costly. Non-compliance is costlier. However, the ratio between cost of the asset and cost of protecting the asset should not be skewed. For instance, the cost or business implication of protecting the asset should not be more than the asset itself. When that happens, security is bound to be unviable.”

Take Control Of course, as the head of IT strategy for an organization, it’s technology that’s mostly within the control of a CIO. That’s where Intel’s vPro technology stands out most since it’s been developed to help IT managers deploy PCs in their enterprises. With the advantages of built-in manageability, proactive security and the energy efficient dual-

core performance of the Intel Core2 Duo processor, IT managers are free to focus on more strategic initiatives to accelerate business success. Intel’s vPro platform also includes the Intel Active Management Technology (Intel AMT) and Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT). Desktop PCs with Intel vPro technology give CIOs critical capabilities not available in previous generations of PCs or in software-only solutions. When provisioned with third party manageability and security software, these PCs can be managed directly from the IT console, regardless of PC power state or the health of their OS. Offering businesses avenues to reduce PC support costs, Intel AMT helps manage, inventory, diagnose and repair PCs. Intel AMT offers the ability to isolate infected PCs before they impact the network and alert IT departments when there is a threat within the corporate environment. Further strengthening PC security, Intel VT allows for separate independent hardware-based environments inside a single PC, so IT managers can create a dedicated, tamper-resistant service environment — or partition — where particular tasks or activities can run independently, invisible to and isolated from PC users. “Ultimately, whatever security safeguards CIOs put into place, they must have an ROI associated with it. And, they definitely should not slow down your

Members of the Mumbai panel agreed that layered security was vital. But that's where the consensus stopped. They discussed questions, such as how far should they go, how many concentric circles they should create and to what depth should layered security run.

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Xxxxxxxx

Sharing notes over breakfast in Bangalore: CIOs exchanged intelligence, some of which pointed to the fact that the average time it took for a new flaw to be exploited, after it had been discovered, was two-and-a-half days — from 338 days four years ago.

business, that’s where vPro steps in. We’ve worked with Indian enterprises like ICICI, VSNL and Pfizer on the early samples of the platform and tested it out in a real-world IT environment. We’ve got positive feedback on vPro’s ability to help IT managers remotely manage PC assets even when the desktops are powered off,” said Intel’s Arora. For instance, VSNL’s analysis of PCs with Intel vPro technology showed it could improve security, ease manageability, and reduce maintenance costs of its PCs at True Value Hub locations and Railtel iCafés. The platform helped VSNL reduce deskside visits through authorized remote access to PCs to deploy upgrades, security patches and virus definitions, diagnose and resolve software problems without user intervention to improve security compliance, repair turnaround times, and reduce PC failures. The ISP also improved its hardware inventory audits, with Intel AMT enabling managers to review up-to-date records of its IT assets, including automatic logging and reporting of failure events, which eased administrative workload and reduced the costs involved in asset maintenance. Finally, vPro also helped VSNL’s technicians to quickly and proactively resolve system failures through the persistent hardware information and event logs of Intel AMT-enabled PCs, regardless of the system state. Support for Intel vPro technology is also evident from new applications and solutions

that are available from enterprise-class software companies that offer products optimized for Intel vPro technology. Solutions are available today and will continue to arrive to market in the coming months from companies such as Adobe, Altiris, CA, Check Point, Cisco, HCL, HP OpenView, LANDesk, Lenovo, Microsoft, StarSoftComm, Symantec, Trend Micro and Zenith. Dr Mitta offered a historical perspective on the Indian IT usage scenario from the software services industry. Software has been developed in India for quite a while. In 1990s, however, the challenge was to demonstrate to customers that the software developed here was both on time and of good quality. This put enough pressure on the industry to match and better internationally recognized standards. “Perhaps the time is right for something similar to happen in security,” he said.

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Customer Relationship Management

All That BY Thomas Wailgum

Smart CIos are experimenting with Web-based technologies to integrate their customer data applications without having to rip out their legacy systems. But before they plunge into the implementation, they need to craft a data management strategy.

IllUStrat Ion S By P C an ooP

places within the newly combined company, leading, of course, to he multiple mergers that formed insurer UnumProvident a great deal of waste. in the late ‘90s aggregated billions in revenue, assembled For the first couple of years after the mergers, UnumProvident thousands of employees — and created a quagmire of used a homegrown data-store solution as a Band-Aid. But by customer data systems that couldn’t talk to each other. 2004, the Rs 45,000-crore disability insurer felt compelled In all, between Provident, Colonial, Paul Revere and Unum there to embark on a new master data management strategy were 34 disconnected policy and claims back-office systems, all aimed at uniting the company’s disparate loaded with critical customer data. As a result, pockets of customer data, including account “it was very difficult to get your hands around Reader ROI: activity, premiums and payments. Core to the information,” understates Bob Dolmovich, Data management strategies UnumProvident’s strategy would be a customer UnumProvident’s VP of business integration and for CRM success data integration (CDI) hub, built on servicedata architecture. One UnumProvident customer’s Why business ownership of oriented architecture (SOA), using a standard account, for instance, might exist in multiple customer data is critical

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Customer Relationship Management set of protocols for connecting applications via the Web (in effect, Web services). The project, begun in early 2005, has already improved data quality, soothed multiple customer records headaches and created the possibility for a companywide, in-depth customer analysis. But as Dolmovich acknowledges, there’s still a long way to go. Of those original 34 systems, he has been able to get rid of only four to date. But he’s still optimistic. “The desired end state is a CDI hub that has information about all customers across all products,” he says.

The Quest for the CRM Holy Grail Despite the long, slow slog, Dolmovich is hoping that the new CDI approach will ultimately give his company the 360-degree view of the customer that has been promised by vendors since the dawn of CRM. In the late ‘90s, enterprise software vendors like Oracle, PeopleSoft and Siebel sold the single-customer view as CRM’s holy grail. But implementation flameouts and legacy integration nightmares soured many CIOs on these expensive enterprisewide rollouts. More recently, ondemand CRM has generated a lot of buzz, but it too has run into scaling and integration problems, particularly at large companies. A CDI hub differs from a traditional CRM solution in that a CDI hub allows a company to automatically integrate all of its customer data into one database, while ensuring the quality and accuracy of the data before it is sent to the hub’s central store for safekeeping. A standalone CRM system can’t do that because it can’t be integrated with

Bob Dolmovich, VP (business integration) of UnumProvident, wants a hub that has "information about all customers across all products."

the billing, marketing, ERP and supply chain systems that house customer data, and it has no way to address inconsistent data across platforms. What is also missing in many of these earlier CRM implementations, experts say, is a management strategy that identifies important customer data and lays out a disciplined governance process to ensure its quality and its integration with critical systems. “Unless companies have a broad strategy about how [to manage their data], no matter how good transactional systems are, they’re not going to be able to deliver,” says Ronda Krier, Oracle’s senior director of product strategy. An increasing number of CIOs are now realizing the importance of such a data management strategy and are experimenting with Web services technology to unite legacy systems with new applications without having to rip and replace everything. Many of these CIOs are building a service-oriented architecture that can integrate their divergent applications into a CDI hub via the Web. However, much like the CRM implementations that preceded it, this new approach is neither cheap nor fast. Ray Wang, Forrester Research’s principal analyst of enterprise applications, says that average CDI installations cost over Rs 22 crore for licenses and implementation services. And they can take much longer than expected. (UnumProvident’s CDI implementation, still unfinished, has taken a year so far.) But that’s still cheaper and quicker than ripping out all of a company’s old systems and installing proprietary enterprise CRM. A CDI strategy is especially relevant to mid-market CIOs who may not have the budget to buy proprietary CRM solutions or the time to invest in the typically arduous CRM implementation process which, according to Gartner’s guideline for enterprise CRM rollouts, can cost more than Rs 90 crore over a three-year period. The beauty of [the CDI hub approach] is that most organizations already have most of the pieces in place,” Wang says. “They just need to find a way to pull it all together.”

The Problem’s Not the Software; It’s You In the late 1990s, CRM vendors promised that their software could give companies the ability to leverage customer data to boost sales. That software cost millions and took years to install. Yet, after those marathons, companies were left with tools and systems they couldn’t or didn’t want to use. Integration often was incomplete, data frequently dirty, and all too often companies had no guidelines for who would own the data or how it would be input and reconciled among systems. Eventually, business and technology executives became disillusioned with the enterprise approach. Many companies turned to on-demand CRM, only to find out it also had problems with costly customizations and realtime integration challenges.

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Customer Relationship Management In a 2005 Forrester survey of 22 Fortune 1000 companies in North America, Europe and Asia, business and IT leaders voiced widespread disillusionment with their CRM implementations. Just 14 percent strongly agreed that their CRM applications had improved end user productivity, and only 10 percent strongly agreed that they had achieved the expected business results. CRM implementations “always seemed to over-promise and under-deliver,” says Dolmovich. For many years, UnumProvident’s CIO forbid his IT staffers from using the CRM word to describe their customer data management plans because of the negative connotations attached to the acronym. In the Forrester survey, executives acknowledged they were partly to blame for CRM’s bad reputation. They confessed that they had not spent sufficient time on defining data requirements and managing data quality. In another survey by Cutter Consortium, 64 percent of corporations admitted that they lacked a formal strategy for using the customer data they had spent millions to collect. When the company doesn’t have rules and policies [for data], the data has been largely corrupt,” says Anthony Lye, Oracle’s group VP of CRM products.

The Importance of Business owneRship The first step toward creating an integrated customer data system is to sit down with key business executives and ask them what they want. Once IT knows what the business side wants to achieve, IT can help the business identify which data sources are important and which are not. Next, the business and IT need to agree on an information management policy: who has access to what customer information and what can they do with it? How will they access that data? How will they make changes to it? For CIOs, the key to success is making sure the business takes ownership of customer data. At AmerisourceBergen Specialty Group (ABSG), a Rs 31,500-crore pharmaceutical supplier, the mantra that ‘the business owns the customer data’ has been critical to the company’s CRM success, says CIO Dale Danilewitz. In 1999, when ABSG broke away from its parent company’s systems, executives articulated what they wanted: more granular, reliable customer information accessible in one repository and accessible in real-time. It was Danilewitz’s job to make that happen. And although Danilewitz initially believed that an off-the-shelf CRM system might do the trick, he found that his business users’ needs didn’t align with what was on the shelf at the time. So IT cobbled together a mixture of applications and systems to form a homegrown CRM system, a conglomerate of custom-built applications and vendor platforms and databases. In the center, tying everything together, is a data warehouse that provides real-time and historic customer data, and is integrated with other data

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Stuck in the Middle Without an SOA Can CIOs at midsize companies just say no to service-oriented architecture? It ain’t easy. according to a 2006 Forrester report by VP randy Heffner, fewer midsize companies have enterprisewide plans for service-oriented architecture (Soa) than larger ones. the reason most often given, Heffner says, is that It departments at midsize companies are too small to deploy formal enterprise architecture teams. But, paradoxically, an earlier 2005 Forrester survey reported that 44 percent of small and midsize companies said that implementing an Soa was a high or critical priority. It seems that many small and midsize enterprises are too small to embark on an Soa implementation but too large to move the enterprise in a common direction without one. Scott Sullivan, VP of It and services at mid-market transportation company Pitt ohio Express, is, like many of his colleagues, stuck in the middle. Sullivan doesn’t have a formal architecture team and has no immediate plans for moving to an Soa environment “since we’re running software that has been built over the years and don’t have the need at this time to look at a different architecture,” he says. But, he continues, “It is something we will consider as we move forward depending on the nature of the work and how the approach will fit into our overall environment.” Which qualifies as a definite maybe. —t.W.

stored in ABSG’s e-commerce applications, financial systems and customer data applications. Today, Danilewitz says ABSG’s system satisfies users from the sales, call center and marketing sides. And because these business units understand the data’s worth, Danilewitz says, they take pains to ensure that they don’t add data that will ‘adulterate’ their own systems. “The business users check the data, run reports on the data to make sure it’s accurate, and run technical applications to check quality,” Danilewitz says. Data stewards from the business, as well as gatekeepers from IT, compose a CRM team charged with driving new data management solutions. But the business users are always in front.

Describe, Define, GoveRn Similarly, when Scott Sullivan joined Pitt Ohio Express, a Rs 1,071-crore, mid-market transportation company, as its VP of IT and services, one of the first things he did was sit REAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 0 6

Customer Relationship Management down with his business users and help them define what exactly the term customer meant to them. Sullivan helped the business narrow its list of customers from 450,000 to 10,000 active consumers of its services. He also pulled the plug on an ERP system rollout as he thought it wasn’t going to satisfy the company’s needs and was going to take longer than had been projected. (The project was greenlighted before Sullivan joined Pitt Ohio in 2001.) Since then, he has integrated an assortment of existing applications to form a customer management system for the sales and marketing group and the operations department. Sullivan also spent time ensuring that Pitt Ohio Express’s customer data was clean. Dirty data is hardly a new problem, but the fact that CIOs are still complaining about it, analysts are still noting its prevalence, and vendors are still selling solutions to address it indicates that it hasn’t gone away. Dirty data problems are amplified by the number of systems and users that touch customer data,

especially if there are no established governance processes or technology safeguards. For example, Sullivan points to the disconnect in address requirements between the sales and marketing department and the operations division. The sales and marketing group needs exact addresses, whereas drivers can get by with more inexact data. “If the address is ‘the back gate at the Kmart plaza,’” he says, “that’s OK for the driver, but not so great for sales and marketing.” And if no one takes ownership of making sure the data is consistent, “there can be up to 10 to 15 different versions of your customers [within your company],” says Tom Reilly, IBM’s VP of master data solutions. Once your management team has formulated a data management strategy — say it wants to improve the ways in which the company targets and contacts prospects — it’s time to consider the technology options available to integrate all the customer data so that sales and marketing will be going after the most appropriate customers. You can

The Top 10 Consumer data integration and master data management products in alphabetical order.

1 Customer Data Hub oraClE www.oracle.com Synchronizes information in a central location from all systems throughout the enterprise to provide a single view of company data.

2 Identity Hub In InItIatE SyStEmS www.initiatesystems.com Provides a system of record for each customer, household or company you do business with by identifying relevant duplicate and fragmented records wherever they may be and linking them across data sources.

3 Integration Server SaS-DataFlUx www.dataflux.com Integrates all relevant business rules throughout the It environment.

4 Master Data Management i2/tEraData

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wwww.i2.com Creates a single enterprise thesaurus to ensure data is consistently described, used and stored within an organization.

5 MRM SIPE IPErIan www.siperian.com Creates and delivers accurate and unified customers views to drive business actions across multiple channels.

6 NetWeaver MDM Sa aP www.sap.com Unifies integration technologies on a single platform and is preintegrated with business apps.

7 One Data Data FoUnDatIonS Fo www.datafoundations.com Centrally manages master data across multiple subject areas to improve accuracy.

8 System 9 MDM HyPErIIon SolUtIonS Sol www.hyperion.com Synchronizes master meta-data — such as business dimensions, reporting structures, hierarchies, attributes and business rules — across distributed data warehouses, data marts, analytic applications and transaction systems.

9 Universal Customer Master oraClE-SIEBEl l www.siebel.com Unifies customer data across business units and disparate systems to provide a single source of customer information.

10 WebSphere Customer Center IBm www.ibm.com Provides real-time, transactional customer data integration. SOURCE: CDI Institute MarketPulse Survey, May 2006

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Customer Relationship Management go the enterprise vendor route, or have your CRM systems hosted by an on-demand vendor like Salesforce.com. Or you can integrate existing customer-data systems by building a service- oriented architecture or structure using the Web to knit together all the customer information contained within a company’s business applications. UnumProvident’s Dolmovich decided to go the Web services route. Dolmovich says the first data loaded into the CDI hub in late 2005 came from business customers (companies or employers that bought or sponsored UnumProvident’s disability products) and brokers. With the new system, Dolmovich says, “We are able to assimilate and display a broker’s entire block of business and create some statistics and a profile of our relationship with that broker.” UnumProvident is now working to create individual profiles of employer customers so that when a new customer account is created or accessed — perhaps to change an address or add new customer information — all employees of the insurance company, regardless of what system they are using, will see that change at once.

The New, new hype Whenever a new CRM solution emerges, it’s inevitably followed by hype, complexity and confusion. CDI is no different, says Colin White, founder of consultancy BI Research. One challenge for companies embarking on a master data management strategy is getting all parties to agree on common definitions and labels for categorizing customer data. Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide is currently in the process of sunsetting its legacy mainframe system in order to move to an SOA environment. The aim, says Song Park, Starwood’s director of pricing and availability technologies, is to allow for more real-time and online reservation capabilities and transactions for its 900 hotels in 80 countries. But a major pain point for the groups working on the SOA migration has been hammering out the data labels and definitions for the Web services that will be consistent across the SOA implementation. How, for example, one group defines a specific hotel’s property identification label can vary from PID, to pID, to property ID, to name just a few of the possibilities, Park says. “How do you synchronize [those labels]? Who owns that data? Who’s mapping those things?” Park asks. Park says he’s pushing for a data dictionary of preestablished services so that the developers working on the project can employ a common set of labels. “And the developers need to talk to each other,” Park adds. Starwood has multiple systems containing customer data, including individual hotel systems, Starwood’s inventory and central reservation systems, a system that determines rates and another to coordinate all of the communication, says Park. Since these systems don’t communicate as well as they should, hotel managers have blind spots. They can’t understand, for instance, why some

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The first step toward creating an integrated customer data system is to sit down with key business executives and ask them what they want. customer interactions are successful and others are not. “Today, we can do that [success and reject] analysis to a degree,” says Park. But the business users can’t see the trends behind success or rejection on a broader scale. Starwood believes that after its move to an SOA environment, all these systems will be able to connect and automatically reconcile all reservations systems data with rate and availability data to ensure that accommodations are available at the right price, place and time. There’s so much data flowing through Starwood’s systems (upwards of a billion distinct pieces of data) that ironing out the metadata plan from the get-go is paramount. As is the case with all CRM-type implementations, the move to SOA and a customer data management solution won’t come cheaply. Forrester’s Wang says that an average CDI installation costs around Rs 4.5 crore for licenses and requires implementation services in the Rs 15.75 crore to Rs 18 crore range. In addition, rolling out a CDI hub often can take longer than what the vendors promise, which is what happened at UnumProvident. Dolmovich notes that while IT is adding customer data to the CDI hub, it still has to maintain some synchronization of data with the old system until it can be replaced. “It’s rare that the initial implementation of a CDI hub actually replaces its predecessor customer files,” he says. “There are often many reasons to sustain both, but you do need to begin a migration whereby the CDI hub becomes the system of record, and changes to customer data are propagated as necessary back to legacy files.” The big enterprise vendors have taken note of the rising interest in SOA and CDI, but CIOs will have to wait for new solutions that will play nicely with each other. Meanwhile, CIOs must figure out alternative ways to fix CRM disconnects. Wang, the move is a simple yet crucial one. “They need to take a step back and make a plan,” he says. CIO

Thomas Wailgum is a senior writer for the American edition of CIO. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Project Management

BY ALLAN HOLMES

Maine’s Medicaid Maine’s attempt to build a new Medicaid claims processing system is a classic example of how not to run a massive project. based Maine Medicaid Claims System to process Rs 6,750 crore in annual Medicaid claims and payments. The new Rs 112.5-crore program, which replaced the state’s old Honeywell mainframe, was hailed as a more secure system that would clear claims faster, track costs better, and give providers more accurate information on claims status. But within days of turning on the new system, Craig Hitchings knew that something was seriously wrong. There had been problems right from the start — an unusually high rate of rejected claims — but Hitchings, director of information technology for the state of Maine’s Department of Human Services (DHS), had assumed they were caused by providers using the wrong codes on the new electronic claim forms. By the end of the month, he wasn’t so sure. The department’s Bureau of Medical Services, which runs the Medicaid program, was being deluged with hundreds of calls from doctors, dentists, hospitals, health clinics and nursing homes, angry because their claims were not being paid. The new system had placed most of the rejected claims in a ‘suspended’ file for forms that contained errors. Tens of thousands of claims representing millions of dollars were being left in limbo. Hitchings’ team — about 15 IT staffers and about 4 dozen employees from CNSI, the contractor hired to develop the system, — was working

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Reader ROI:

The importance of having a contingency plan The consequences of skipping end-to-end testing 10 rules for successful project management

Il lustrat Ion by b In esh sreedharan

In January 2005, the state of Maine cut the ribbon on its new, Web-

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Project Management changes in managing patient health and 12-hour days, writing software fixes and records, the most significant of which was performing adjustments so fast that Hitchings protecting patient privacy. Maine, like other knew that key project management guidelines states, had to upgrade its systems to better were beginning to fall by the wayside. And secure Medicaid patient records. Under nothing seemed to help. SNAPSHOT Day after day, the calls kept coming. The Maine HIPAA, the state had until October 1, 2002, bureau’s call center was so backed up that many Medicaid to have a system in place that would secure providers could not get through. By the end of Claims and limit access to that information. At the same time, the federal Medicaid March, the number of Medicaid claims in the System program was becoming more complex. As suspended bin had reached approximately Cost: Rs 112.5 crore additional health services were added, the 300,000, and the state was falling further number of codes and sub-codes for services behind in its ability to process them. With Users: 262,000 grew, and payments to doctors and hospitals their bills unpaid, some of Maine’s 262,000 were parsed accordingly. Maine also needed Medicaid recipients were turned away from Claims Processed: 120,000 per week to give providers a way to check the eligibility their doctors’ offices, according to the Maine of Medicaid patients and the status of their Medical Association. Several dentists and Cost of Processed Claims: claims. Making this information available therapists were forced to close their doors, and Rs 6,750 crore online, they hoped, would cut down on the some physicians had to take out loans to stay number of calls to the state Bureau of Medical afloat. With the Medicaid program accounting Services, thereby saving the state money. for one-third of the entire state budget, Maine’s State officials knew that upgrading the old system would finances were in shambles, threatening the state’s financial be a Herculean task. Maine processes more than 120,000 stability and its credit rating. Yet, Hitchings was at a loss to Medicaid claims per week, and the existing claims processing explain what was causing all the suspensions. system — a 1970s vintage Honeywell mainframe — was not And every day brought hundreds more. up to the job, nor could it meet HIPAA’s demands or provide Since the new system went live, it has cost the state of online access. The state’s IT managers reasoned that a new Maine close to Rs 135 crore. The fallout has been broad and end-to-end system would be easier and cheaper to maintain. deep. In December 2005, Jack Nicholas, the commissioner The development of the new system was assigned to the of the DHS who oversaw the project, resigned. IT staff in the DHS, which decided it wanted a system built Even as late as April this year, Maine was the only state in the on a rules-based engine so that as Medicaid rules changed, union not in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability the changes could be programmed easily into the system. and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) — a striking irony Some service providers offered states the opportunity given that the new system was designed to facilitate that to outsource claims processing systems. But the DHS compliance. With 20/20 hindsight, state IT officials can now staff believed building its own system would give it more see where the project went wrong. Hiring a vendor with no flexibility. The staff also believed it could manage the experience in developing Medicaid claims systems was the system better than an outsourcer. “We had a track record of first mistake. That was compounded by the decision to build running the old system for 25 years,” Thompson explains. a new and relatively unproven technology platform for the In April 2001, the state of Maine issued an RFP for the new entire system rather than, as other states have done, integrating system. But by the end of the year, the state had received only a Web-based portal with back-end legacy systems. Third, IT two proposals: one from Keane (for Rs 135 crore) and another switched over to the new system overnight with no backup from CNSI (for Rs 67.5 crore). In this case, the low bidder system in case something went wrong. And making matters had no experience in building Medicaid claims processing worse, no end-to-end testing or training was conducted before systems. In contrast, Keane had some experience in developing the switchover. Indeed, the story of the Maine Medicaid Claims Medicaid systems, and the company had worked on the Maine System is a classic example of how not to develop, deploy and system for Medicaid eligibility. manage an advanced Web services system. The paucity of bidders and the 100 percent difference in “By the first of March, it was clear that we were missing price between the two bids should have been red flags, says any sort of basic management of this project and were in J. Davidson Frame, dean of the University of Management complete defensive mode,” recalls Dick Thompson, then head and Technology. of procurement for the state of Maine and now its CIO.

Out With the Old

The Seeds of Failure

In the late 1990s, states were moving fast to overhaul their Medicaid claims processing systems. Driving the transformation was HIPAA, which required numerous

Most Medicaid claims systems contain bundles of code that have been tinkered with for decades to adjust rates, services and rules. Attempting to translate all of that human

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Project Management intelligence, gathered over thousands of person-years, into a system built from the ground up, was, at best, problematic. “It was a big misstep,” Frame says. But Thompson argues that the state was in a corner. Maine’s budget was tight. State revenue was dropping, and saving money was critical. Also, the deadline to become compliant with HIPAA was looming, and Thompson decided that the six months that would have been needed to redo the RFP was too much. “We had a requirement to get something in place soon,” Thompson says. In October 2001, the state awarded the contract to CNSI, giving the company 12 months to build and deploy a new high-end processing system by the HIPAA. As head of procurement, Thompson signed off on the contract. Almost immediately, it became evident that the state was not going to meet the deadline. To begin with, the 65-person team composed of DHS IT staffers and CNSI representatives assigned to the project had difficulty securing time with the dozen Medicaid experts in the Bureau of Medical Services to get detailed information about how to code for Medicaid rules. As a result, the contractors had to make their own decisions on how to meet Medicaid requirements. And then they had to re-program the system after consulting with a Medicaid expert, further slowing development. The system also was designed to look at claims in more detail than the old system in order to increase the accuracy of payments and comply with HIPAA security requirements. The new system checked 13 pieces, such as making sure the provider was authorized to perform that service on the date the service was provided, and the provider’s license. Looking back, Thompson says the DHS team was seriously understaffed. But Thompson says he was afraid to ask for more resources. “That is a significant problem in government,” Thompson says. “If I say I need 60 to 70 percent more staff because we need to work this project for two years, the response would be, ‘What, are you crazy?’ So, we just couldn’t make the turnaround times.” Just months away from the HIPAA deadline, the DHS team got a reprieve. The federally run Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services pushed back the deadline to October 1, 2003. For the next two years, CNSI and Maine’s DHS IT shop worked long hours writing code. Errors kept cropping up as programmers had to re-program the system to accept Medicaid rule changes at the federal and state levels. The changes created integration problems. The developers also had to add more storage capacity and computing power to accommodate the increase in information generated by the new rules, and that further delayed the development. In January 2003, John Baldacci was inaugurated governor. One of Baldacci’s campaign promises was to streamline state government, and part of the plan called for merging Maine’s Department of Behavioral and Developmental Services with the Department of Human Services to create the Department

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of Health and Human Services (HHS). That meant consolidating systems and databases that had resided in both departments and creating new business processes, diverting crucial resources from the development of the claims system. Thompson says the merger also diverted executives’ attention. Meanwhile, the cost of the project rose, increasing 50 percent to more than Rs 99 crore. The IT team could not meet the extended HIPAA deadline. In an attempt to catch up, they began to cut corners. For example, testing the system from end to end was dismissed as an option. The state did conduct a pilot with about 10 providers and claims clearinghouses, processing a small set of claims. But the claims were not run through much of the system because it was not ready for testing. Beyond a few fliers announcing the new system and new provider ID codes, HHS offered little or no guidance to providers on the use of the system. And there was no training for the staff who would have to answer providers’ questions.

Early Warnings Hitchings and his staff made the decision to go live in January 2005. The switch to the new system would be made in a flash cutover in which the legacy system would be shut down for good and the new system would take over. Codes

“By March, it was clear that we were missing any sort of basic management of this project and were in a defensive mode.”

— Dick Thompson, CIO, state of Maine

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Project Management identifying providers (tax identifier numbers) and Medicaid patients (social security numbers) had to be changed to meet HIPAA guidelines, and the legacy system would not be able to recognize the new numbers. Nor could it read the new electronic claim forms. HHS dismissed the idea of running a parallel system as too costly and complicated. Maine officials did have one contingency plan: they would pay providers for two to four weeks if the new system failed. Under the interim payment plan, if a provider’s claims were not being processed in a timely manner, the provider would receive a payment based on the average monthly payment the provider had received the five weeks prior to the new system coming on. On January 21, Hitchings arrived at his office to find the claims system up and running. The initial reports from the contractor and his staff were that the system was humming along, quickly moving through Medicaid claims. But the following Monday morning, Hitchings sat down with CNSI contractors to go over the file statistics for the system’s first three days. Something wasn’t right. The system had sent about 50 percent of the claims — 24,000 in the first week alone — into a ‘suspended’ file, a dumping ground for claims that have an error that is not significant

enough to reject the claim outright but that are not accurate enough for payment. Typically, the error can be fixed fairly quickly by a claims processor. But the 50 percent rate was very high; the legacy system had suspended only about 20 percent of claims. By the end of the month, angry calls from providers were mounting. Hitchings and CNSI began to look at the code and the design of the system. They found numerous problems. For example, without adequate guidance from Medicaid experts, the system had been designed to accept files with up to 1,000 lines of claim data. But many claims were much larger, some containing up to 10,000 lines, and the server was rejecting them automatically. The Medical Bureau staff asked providers to submit smaller files. Meanwhile, the IT staff would try to rewrite the software. At the same time, other errors began popping up. The state now owed health-care providers as much as Rs 225 crore in Medicaid payments, and the backlog of claims had reached almost 100,000. Providers couldn’t get through to HHS. When they didn’t get a busy signal, the wait to talk to a staff person at MaineCare (formerly the Bureau of Medical Services) was a half hour or more. Providers began calling state legislators.

A Call for Help

The IT staff was “running at 100 miles per hour trying to fix every software bug. They couldn’t see the forest for the trees.”

— Jim Lopatosky, IT operations manager for the state of Maine

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By early March 2005, Hitchings’ staff and CNSI were overwhelmed. For Rs 3.87 crore, the department hired XWave, an integrator and project management consultant, to take over the project. More people were hired to take phone calls. Governor Baldacci, saying “enough is enough”, ordered Commissioner Nicholas to have the claims system operable and running smoothly by the end of March. But March came and went, and nothing changed. Desperate, state officials decided to change the program’s management, and Rebecca Wyke, head of Maine’s financing department, appointed Thompson as CIO in late March, replacing Harry Lanphear. Thompson was put in charge of the project, and ordered to rectify the system as quickly as possible. By the end of the summer, 6,47,000 claims were clogging the suspended claims database, representing about Rs 1,395 crore in back payments. Interim payments were being made, but reconciling those with the claims was an accounting nightmare. Wyke hired the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche to audit the state books to determine if Maine would have enough money to pay Medicaid bills by the June 30 end of the fiscal year. The Rs 31.5-crore contract also called for Deloitte to consult on how to reconcile the Medicaid bills. XWave set up a project management office and steering committee that met weekly to establish priorities and monitor the progress of system software fixes. The goal was to get the new system to process claims at the same rate that the legacy system had, sending 20 percent into a suspended or rejection file. Thompson hired Jim Lopatosky, an Oracle database specialist in the state’s

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Steps to a Successful Project

Bureau of Information Services, as operations manager to act as a calming influence on the department’s battered IT division. When Lopatosky took over in June, he encountered a staff S cope out a detailed plan. describe what the system must do for users and how “running at 100 miles per hour,” trying you will measure the performance of the system and its output. to fix every software bug, with little direction on what was most important. Watch out for bad RfP bids. a low number of bids or bids that are not within “They couldn’t see the forest for the an acceptable range suggest that the requirements have not been properly trees,” he recalls. communicated or are unrealistic. Lopatosky prioritized tasks. He acted as a liaison between teams working on P lan ahead. line up subject matter experts who know the business processes different functions. He directed the for the new system and can provide guidance to developers and programmers programmers to fix those software bugs during buildout. assign a business expert full-time, or nearly full-time, to the that would resolve the largest number implementation, and create a steering committee. of suspended claims and postponed work on the portal, through which find the bottleneck. Many times, the delay is not from writing code but something providers could check on the status of else, such as finding time with a subject matter expert. so, resist hiring more claims. That could wait. programmers to speed up development until you analyze what is slowing down the But the intricacies of the Medicaid project — and focus resources there. program continued to thwart progress. Thompson needed a business owner D o not cut corners on testing. the last thing you want to do is ignore critical who could clarify Medicaid business pilot tests and end-to-end tests. ultimately, such corner-cutting will result in longer processes for the IT staff. Last October, delays later. If you need more time, ask for it, and defend why you need it. Dr Laureen Biczak, the medical director for MaineCare, agreed to take Develop a backup system. If replacing a legacy system, make sure the users can on that responsibility. fall back to the old system if the new system fails and needs to be reworked. “This is what brought it all together,” says Thompson. “It was Prepare other contingency plans. be prepared to communicate with system something we should have done from users, so that they can use the backup system and know what is expected the start: have someone who knew of them. the business [of Medicaid] working full-time on the project.” Train, train and train. Provide frequent training for internal staff on new business With Biczak’s assistance, the Bureau processes and system requirements. t train call-center staff on how to manage users’ of Information Services set up a triage questions. t train users on how to use the system and what they should do in case process for the help desk. Medicaid of failure. business-process questions would be sent to the Medicaid specialists; software Honesty is your best policy. In case of failure, provide honest answers to users and hardware questions would be sent and staff. to IT program specialists. The triage process was implemented in January. Triage fixes. In fixing a flawed system, prioritize fixing those requirements that By the end of the month, Thompson have the biggest impact on users and that provide basic, needed functionality. claimed the new system could process —a.h. 85 percent of claims as either pay or deny. However, Smith disputes Thompson’s claim, saying that the new system still rejects 20 percent of the total claims, most of Or forgiven. “They are supposed to be protecting the mostwhich meet accepted standards for payment. “Why are we at-risk people in the state,” says one doctor. “It goes beyond comparing this system to a legacy system that wasn’t good shock and dismay how utterly disrespectful the state has enough in the first place?” he asks. “Why spend Rs 112.5 been to providers and patients.” CIO crore on a new system that isn’t any better?” For doctors, the entire ordeal — the postponed payments, the lack of communication with providers, and the Allan Holmes is the Washington Bureau Chief of CIO-US. Send system’s continued fallibility — will not easily be forgotten. feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Prof. Subhash Bhatnagar, IIM-A, talks about the National e-Governance Plan that aims to tie together the governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s siloed e-governance initiatives.

Prof. Subhash Bhatnagar of the indian institute of Management, ahmedabad, says that the National e-Government Plan is a fertile plain for public private partnerships that can give people easy access to valuable services. 62

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By H a r i c H a n da n a ra k a l l i

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Interview |Interview Prof. Subhash | Sanjeev bhatnagar Gupta

Evolving a Platform for

Transparency T

he National e-Governance Plan has committed over Rs 12,000 crore to fund state and central e-Government projects over the next four to five years. This is a chance for public-private partnerships to help bring to bear one of e-Governance’s most celebrated gifts: removing corruption, says Subhash Bhatnagar, a professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, who has just wrapped up a World Bank-funded study of eight Indian e-Government projects.

ImaGING by UN NIKRISHN aN aV

P Hoto by al PESH D HolaK Ia

CIO: How is the government funding egovernance projects across the country? PrOf. SubhaSh bhatnaGar: There are projects at the central, state and local levels. The central projects tend to be funded by central agencies that propose the projects. For instance, if the income tax department has a project, it will fund itself. At the state level, there are a couple of sources. One, a department makes a proposal, which the state cabinet might approve with state funds. Two, there are also central funds that state governments use. Part of the funds used by Karnataka for the Bhoomi project, for example, are from the Centre. Increasingly, there’s a trend to use private sector funds by building public-private

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partnerships. Some successful projects in Andhra Pradesh (eSeva and e-procurement), and Karnataka (Kaveri), have been launched through such partnerships. Are there efforts to integrate centraland state-level projects when such integration makes sense?

In this early phase of e-Government in India, most projects are built largely in silos of individual agencies. There are now some efforts to bring together the delivery of many services under one roof. At eSeva service centers, for instance, a citizen can access 135 services in one place from a large number of state and central agencies. However, these services are not necessarily integrated. If someone’s address changes, it must be updated separately by them at every agency with which they have transactions. As a concept, integration is important, but we need to remember that we are at a stage where we are converting manual systems into computerized systems. Integration doesn’t exist within the state, let alone between the center and state centers. That is the next stage, though it is minimal today.

Is there any estimate of the total amount of money spent on e-Government projects in India?

The definition of e-Governance is still loose. For some, it is delivering services online. And for others, it is any kind of use of information communications technologies (ICT) by a government agency. My ‘guesstimate’ — these numbers are not available with any agency — is that the cumulative expenditure on online service delivery applications for all state, central and municipal projects is around Rs 3,000 crore to Rs 4,000 crore in the last five years. My definition of e-Government requires that it has a service delivery component. Services that involve processing transactions — that is, issue of certificates — are usually delivered at service centers, where operators access data and information from back-end servers through terminals that are online. Citizens, therefore, need not have Internet connectivity to access these services. Does the 10th Plan include a specific budget for e-government projects?

Instead of looking at Plans, it’d be better to look at a new e-Government initiative that the Centre has just set in motion. REAL CIO WORLD | S E P T E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 0 6

The National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), recently approved by the central Cabinet, has a proposed outlay of Rs 12,400 crore over five years. The project implementation unit has been set up and preparatory efforts are on. The program will perhaps be in full steam in 2007-08. This year, work will mostly be preparatory. Twenty-two missionmode areas have been identified. Government agencies can apply for funding. The NeGP encourages publicprivate partnership as a policy.

Why is change management important and why is it hard to do?

e-Government changes the way transactions are processed, especially how lower-level officers do their work. Getting them to embrace change requires conscious effort. This involves taking people along by explaining to them the benefits that they and citizens can derive, by using coercion if necessary, and by steadfastly banning deviations. What role can hardware and software vendors play in the delivery of citizen services by government departments?

What is required to make applications citizen-friendly and eliminate agents or touts?

Citizen-friendly processes would require re-engineering to minimize the discretion of civil servants, removing their ‘gate-keeping’ role (delay or denial of service without documenting a reason), and simplifying procedures to make the processes transparent. Touts will exist as long as they provide a needed service. If the government is difficult to approach, then these people will provide that access. If a system is corrupt, an agent will pass a bribe to an official. Therefore, e-Government is also about encouraging transparency. Take the example of a person who applies for something and is rejected by a government official without documenting a reason. In a computerized system, rejected applications need a comment explaning why they were rejected. Once that is put on the system, people can use the Right to Information Act to access that data. e-Government services evolve through several stages: initially they are just about providing information. It is only later that transactions can be processed and paid for electronically. Websites are mainly for sharing information. Citizen-service centers are usually the places of actual transaction. For instance, a website can tell you how to get a birth certificate. But, it can be printed or corrected online only at a service center. The thing about websites is that they aren’t maintained and updated. They don’t follow

Our study of eight projects shows that computerization significantly curbed bribes in some projects, while it didn’t lower it in others.”

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standards, and are rarely user-friendly. Thousands of websites have been put up by different departments at central, state and local levels. The purpose of a website includes telling people what is happening to encourage transparency. Let people know how the government functions. Right now, citizens are not engaging. I know of a village panchayat that has put up data on how it spends its money, but officials say that hardly anybody visits the site. There is no discussion on the data that is shared. NGOs, the media and citizens should get involved. Sometimes government websites say, ‘We are not responsible for the data.’ But if they aren’t responsible for the data, why will people use their information?

There is a great opportunity for the private sector in rolling out projects under the National e-Governance Plan. In addition to the procurement of hardware and software for networking infrastructure and applications, government agencies will also be outsourcing work related to training, impact assessment, software development, process re-engineering and change management. The NeGP encourages publicprivate partnership in delivery of services through the build-ownoperate and transfer model. State governments have begun inviting bids from private partners to establish common service centers in rural areas. A total of 1 lakh centers will be set up.

By and large, is the NeGP working well?

There is definitely a feeling that eGovernance is one of the tools which can be used to combat corruption. It is an age-old problem rampant in many countries, and can’t be wiped out quickly. At IIM-A, we have just evaluated eight projects with World Bank funding — and projects with both outcomes have come to the fore: people saying that they paid significantly fewer bribes after computerization in some projects, and people saying that the project didn’t reduce corruption in any way. CIO

Assistant editor Harichandan Arakalli can be reached at hari_a@cio.in

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Essential

technology Storage needs increase as companies grow. But which competing technology should you bet on?

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From Inception to Implementation — I.T. That Matters

Data Looks for a Home By Cindy Waxer

| For a company whose bread and butter is producing crude oil, Newfield Exploration’s storage environment was fast running out of gas. Saddled with a mix of disparate systems, platforms and applications, the Rs 7,650-crore Houston company’s storage environment was “a mess”, according to Mark Spicer, Newfield’s vice president of IT. Servers had to be rebooted twice a day to ensure availability, and keeping tabs on an overburdened architecture was draining scarce IT resources. With a workforce growing at an annual rate of 20 percent, Newfield Exploration was in desperate need of greater storage capacity. “We were just starting to reach critical mass, so we really needed to overhaul the whole storage system to plan for growth,” says Spicer. Newfield Exploration could have opted for age-old fibre channel technology. Instead, in early 2003, the company turned to NetApp for its iSCSI-based storage area network. Unlike with traditional network storage protocols such as fibre channel, operating iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) requires only an Ethernet interface or any other TCP/IPcapable network. Gone is the pricey equipment and specialized hardware knowledge often

STORAGE

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essential technology

demanded of a fibre channel (FC) SAN deployment. With iSCSI, the promise is that companies can achieve a low-cost and easy-to-maintain centralization of storage. While it was risky to take a chance on a relatively new storage solution such as iSCSI, Spicer says the decision has paid off. By implementing NetApp iSCSI connectivity to store Windows application data such as Exchange stores, Web stores and SQL Server databases, Newfield Exploration has improved performance by 20 percent, leveraged its existing Ethernet infrastructure and greatly expanded storage capacity without having to add personnel — a cost savings of at least Rs 38.25 lakh a year. Newfield Exploration is just one of many midsize companies gradually making the move to iSCSI. Businesses have long relied on FC-SANs to offer rapid data transfer rates, enormous bandwidth and highly predictable performance for mission-critical applications. Such peak performance is especially critical to companies that depend on applications for

the installation of a high-priced host bus adapter and drivers, all it takes to connect a server to an iSCSI network is a gigabit Ethernet network interface card. Such easeof-use is particularly attractive to today’s midsize businesses with limited IT resources and tight budgets. And where FC-SANs often demand a hefty investment in storage administrators, most IT professionals already possess a considerable knowledge of Ethernet technology. “iSCSI has emerged as a completely legitimate mainstream alternative to fibre channel,” says John Sloan, a senior research analyst for Info-Tech Research Group. According to a recent Info-Tech study, while spending on FC-SANs is virtually nonexistent among enterprises with fewer than 100 employees, in enterprises with 100 to 500 employees, FC and iSCSI are receiving equal customer attention. Despite this increasing popularity, iSCSI has been surrounded by its fair share of controversy. For starters, promises of immediate cost savings have often not been realized, according to Robert

The allure of iSCSI is easy to understand. Its ease-of-use is particularly attractive to today’s mid-size businesses with limited IT resources and tight budgets. processing sensitive financial information and confidential customer data. But the arrival of iSCSI has heralded a user-friendly — and considerably cheaper — alternative for midsize and cash-strapped businesses. And vendors, such as EMC, EqualLogic, Hewlett-Packard and NetApp, are fast catching on to the trend, making iSCSI a key part of their storage solution portfolios.

iSCSI Pros and Cons The allure of iSCSI is easy to understand. Whereas an FC-SAN deployment calls for 68

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Passmore, VP of research at Gartner. “CIOs need to understand that the savings [of iSCSI] have been exaggerated,” he says. “Therefore, it’s important to look at the trade-offs and understand the positives as well as the negatives.” Chief among these negatives is the security risk iSCSI can introduce to the enterprise. In the case of FC-SANs, the cables are inside a data center that only employees can access. And even an illintentioned employee would have a tough time finding the tools he would need to

How to Secure an iSCSI SAN Answer: Unplug it For all its promises of user-friendliness and low-cost storage, a storage area network based on Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) can present some daunting security risks to today’s mid-market companies. After all, iSCSI is essentially a combination of two protocols — TCP/IP and SCSI — neither of which possesses built-in security features. Vendors have taken steps to deliver CIOs greater peace of mind by introducing password authorization provisions and optional protection mechanisms such as IPSec that act as a network layer, promising the safe transmission of data over unprotected networks (such as the Internet). But when it comes to guaranteed safety, Gartner analyst Robert Passmore says, “The answer is isolation.” By unplugging an iSCSI-based SAN’s Internet cable, a company can isolate iSCSI traffic on a separate network and prevent unauthorized users from accessing sensitive information. After all, says Passmore, “there’s no fundamental reason to connect iSCSI to a public network.” — C.W .

hack into fibre channel. But iSCSI is another story. “Anybody with a PC made in the last 10 years and some shareware can tap in and see exactly what’s going on over that network,” Passmore warns.

The Fibres that Bind The need for a reliably secure storage system drove Capital Region Orthopaedic Group to select fibre channel. Members of the 24-physician practice based in Albany, New York, handle nearly 90,000 office visits each year and upward of

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5,000 surgical cases. In early 2002, Capital Region Orthopaedic opted to move from paper charts and filmbased X-rays to an all-electronic health records system and a digital picture archiving and communications system, or PACS. While the transition was intended to help Capital’s physicians electronically access everything from exam notes to digital X-ray images, the size of the required database posed a problem. Each digital X-ray comprises several megabytes of data, and Capital Region Orthopaedic produces thousands of X-rays each year. “Once we looked at the level of needs and projections for storage necessities, we knew that we needed to move to a SAN,” says Raymond DeCrescente, Capital Region Orthopaedic’s CTO.

likely to be displaced by its more cost-effective counterpart anytime soon. According to Gartner, worldwide revenue for iSCSI-based solutions is expected to grow from less than Rs 1,350 crore in 2006 to nearly Rs 7,200 crore in 2009. But while combined iSCSI and fibre channel sales are projected to reach Rs 90,000 crore in 2009, fibre channel will represent a whopping 79 percent of that. What’s more, although iSCSI has typically been cheaper to acquire, fibre channel vendors are now driving down their costs with easy-to-install, out-ofthe-box offerings. “Everybody is pushing to extend SAN technology into the midsize and smaller [market], so vendors are being more costconscious. You just can’t get away with charging six figures for storage anymore,” says Sloan of Info-Tech.

Despite growing popularity, iSCSI is surrounded by controversy: promises of immediate savings are often not met and it introduces security risks. To support the PACS application, Capital Region Orthopaedic traded in its singleserver storage system for an FC-SAN from HP. This FC-SAN can be scaled up to 12 terabytes, providing instantaneous access to the past year’s images. It took three weeks to deploy the new storage system, which represents a Rs 2.16-crore financial investment, including servers, storage and fibre channel. Although far from cheap, it’s an expenditure which, according to DeCrescente, guarantees that the growing practice will have a secure solution apart from the HIPAA-required protection of confidential medical records. “While [fibre channel] is more expensive, it’s much more robust, more secure and less susceptible to some of the problems that you can have with iSCSI,” says DeCrescente. In fact, for all the strides made by iSCSI vendors, fibre channel isn’t

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Why You Don’t Have to Choose The rising costs of iSCSI is why analysts recommend looking beyond the bottom line when selecting a storage solution. While it’s easy to be seduced by a vendor’s promise of instant savings, companies need to recognize the respective limitations of both fibre channel and iSCSI. For example, an iSCSI deployment may cost a fraction of the price of a fibre channel installation, but those savings can easily be offset by the need for additional security measures. As it turns out, some companies are refusing to pick sides and are, instead, opting for combining both in a hybrid storage model. Growing midsize companies with an iSCSI solution already in place can easily add fibre channel onto the infrastructure as the need

Worldwide revenue for

iSCSI and fibre channel sales are

expected to reach Rs 90,000 crore in 2009.

Source: Gartner

for additional capacity arises. In turn, enterprises with large investments in fibre channel can opt to connect remote servers into the networks using iSCSI. “The key thing is that for many storage applications in the small to midsize enterprise space, iSCSI versus fibre channel is irrelevant,” says Sloan. “What matters is that you get the best storage utilization and management features for your dollar.” CIO

Cindy Waxer is a Canada-based freelancer. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Pundit

essential technology

Body Language of Knowledge Management Is there something about wild gesticulation that we're all missing? BY Michael Hugos

Communication | I recently had an interesting exchange with a senior systems architect of a Fortune 500 company that understands IT is a central part of its value proposition and makes its money by running a global, real-time operation powered by impressive systems. Carl has spent many years in the profession and one day he related some thoughts that may open up a whole new angle on how business and IT communicate.

“What is of particular interest to me is my relatives’ multi-channel knowledge transfer methodology. When describing a technique, or ‘process’ in our parlance, their conversation is animated with hand motions. I get tired just watching one explain how to tighten a strand of barbwire with nothing but a broomstick and some seagrass string, or how to pluck a chicken for supper on the kitchen table when it’s storming outside.

is different from the way we do things around here anyway. “I wanted to call this UML, Universal Motion Language, but I am told that TLA, Three Letter Acronym, has already been taken by some new upstart technology those smarty college new-hires keep wanting us all to do. We told them that’s not the way we do things around here. I toyed with naming this new technology Associative Symbolic

What we're missing are the hand motions. I recommend computer science centers pair up with psychologists in academia and begin to develop these visual clues forthwith. He said these insights came to him in August; that month when even the frantic North American work ethic is temporarily slowed down a notch or two. In that induced stillness, Carl told me, “I have noticed when I visit with my relatives who live in the country that they are mechanically astute. They can fix or jerry-rig almost anything. They work on problems at least as complicated as, say, an automated payroll system for hourly employees.” “This is profound,” I replied, “You must pursue this line of inquiry and tell me what you find.” “Okay,” said Carl and he went into deep ponder mode for the next 24 hours. I then received an e-mail of such brilliance that I feel compelled to share parts of it here. (The next three paragraphs are Carl’s thoughts.) 70

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“IT developers are no less creative and resourceful. But clearly what we are missing is the hand motions and body postures. I recommend computer science centers of excellence immediately pair up with psychologists in academia and begin developing these visual clues forthwith. I have worked up a few on a trial basis, such as inserting a new item in the middle of a linked list. I find the hand motions needed to help explain how to create a new relational table to be much less complicated than the motions for a linked list, though initial trials with my colleagues on the job have so far proved unproductive. It’s another case, in my humble opinion, of new technology being rejected by seasoned veterans who fail to see the value in something they didn’t invent themselves and

Signing, but my wife nixed that name, as she did Symbolic Exhibitive eXchange. So the name is still open to suggestions from the public at large. Carl’s got a point here; these insights offer a way forward for improved requirements gathering and communication between users and developers. I invite you, dear reader, to add your own wisdom to this foundation. We may be onto something that significantly adds to the IT profession’s body of knowledge. CIO

Michael Hugos is a partner in AgiLinks LLC and an award-winning chief information officer. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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