December 15 2005 by Sreekanth Sastry

Registered No. RNP/BGS/2113/2009-11. Licensed to Post at Manipal HO on 12th/13th & 27th/28th of every month. Printed and Published By Louis Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Mello On Behalf Of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027, India.

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From The Editor

Swiss psychiatrist Jung called it synchronicity—the simultaneous

Business Technology Leadership We’re changing the tagline to better reflect our global positioning.

occurrence of events that seem to be meaningfully related. Take this issue, for instance. On page 34 you’ll find veteran industrialist Adi Godrej elaborating on why it pays for a business executive to closely listen to the CIOs ideas and vice versa. And, in his column on page 18, author Mark Goulston offers a step-by-step guide to get both CIOs and CEOs out of their comfort zones and into harmonious accord. The final element of this triad of coincidences is the magazine itself. Two issues down, we’ve taken the decision to replace our tagline ‘The Resource for Information Executives’ with ‘Business Technology Leadership’ in line with the publication’s positioning globally. What’s in a tagline you might well ask, since nothing else in the publication seems to have undergone a metamorphosis? I feel that the earlier tagline, while good, had just a tad too much redundancy built in that didn’t sit with the ‘CIO’ in our title. The new tagline also better This mission involves reflects the magazine as it has evolved over the providing editorial years and across the globe. ‘Business Technology Leadership’ content with the correct clearly describes our position and our combination of business mission to provide IT leaders with relevant, and technology, strategy timely information to help them and their and insight, opinions and organizations be more successful. life experiences from your Godrej states unequivocally in his ‘View fellow CIOs. From the Top’ that in his organization “business managers and IT thinkers work almost as one” with business managers wearing the IT shoes and IT thinkers donning business clothes. That is the kind synergy we are attempting to help drive though this publication, its associated web site (www.cio.in) and the events we organize. My colleagues and I are clear that this mission involves being a fair and accurate channel to provide editorial content with the correct combination of business and technology, strategy and insight, opinions and life experiences from the experts our readers trust the most—their fellow CIOs. I’d like to hear your take on this issue. I know its early days for us, but the only way we are going to be able to service your information needs is by paying attention to your feedback. Please keep it flowing our way.

Vijay Ramachandran, Editor vijay_r@cio.in

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Building multiple redundancy helped Lyndon Rodrigues, Group CIO (left) and Atul Davda, Sr. VP & CTO keep WNS Global Services buoyed during the Mumbai deluge.

Business Continuity

Executive Expectations

COVER STORy | Keep Business Afloat | 26

View from The Top | 34 Adi Godrej, Chairman, Godrej Group, explains how the group deploys IT to remain innovative and builds value by connecting 3.5 million retailers.

cove r Imaging by jayan k n arayan an , Ashwin boricha cove r P hoto by Sr ivatsa Shandi lya

WNS Global Services, one of India’s leading BPO organizations, remained unshaken despite the deluge that paralyzed many businesses in Mumbai. The ace up their sleeves: A well-documented and tested business continuity plan that helped them seamlessly navigate out of troubled waters. Feature by Rahul Neel Mani

2 6

Interview by Gunjan Trivedi

Career Counsel How to Avoid Bumping Heads | 18 IT and business executives seem to hail from two alien tribes. Here’s how they can come to see eye-to-eye. Column by Mark Goulston

New Technology Grid Held Hostage | 42 You need grid computing. It could save you millions. It could provide competitive advantage. But to get it, you have to build it yourself. Why? Ask your vendors. Feature By Thomas Wailgum

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content

Essential Technology |

Virtualization | The Virtues of Virtualization under Development | Traveling by Wire pundit – Java Goes Wild By Eric Knorr

From the Editor

| 4

Business Technology Leadership | We’re changing

the tagline to better reflect our global positioning. By Vijay Ramachandran

Inbox | Reducing official intervention is prime for M. N. Vidyashankar, BDA's Commissioner.

5 2 NOW ONLINE

Govern pLOTTInG TRAnspAREnCy | 52 M. N. Vidyashankar, Commissioner, Bangalore Development Authority is on construction mode as he employs IT to bring new levels of transparency and accountability to his department.

For more opinions, features, analyses and updates log on to our companion website and discover content designed to help you and your organisation deploy It strategically. go to www.cio.in

c o.in

Interview by T. Radhakrishna

TAx BACK On TRACK | 48 Punjab’s excise and taxation department has made impressive inroads in revenue collection and seen operational efficiency rise and corruption drop. It also recovered its IT spend in less than a quarter.

2 2

feature by Rahul neel mani f

Total Leadership LET TALEnT BLOOm | 22 Cultivate innovation by moving high-potential employees around, up, and even out of your IT organization. Column by monte ford f

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REAL WORLD M anag ement

President N Bringi Dev

COO Louis D’Mello Editorial Editor Vijay Ramachandran

Bureau Head-North Rahul Neel Mani

Special Correspondents T Radhakrishna Balaji Narasimhan

Senior Correspondent Gunjan Trivedi

advisory board

Anil Nadkarni

Advertiser Index

Avaya

36, 37

Head IT, Thomas Cook, a_nadkarni@cio.in Arindam Bose Head IT, LG Electronics India, a_bose@cio.in

Borland Software

Canon

Epson India

Arun Gupta Sr. Director - Business Technology, Pfizer India

a_gupta@cio.in Arvind Tawde VP & CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra, a_tawde@cio.in

COPY EDITOR Sunil Shah Ashish Kumar Chauhan www.CIO.IN

Editorial Director-Online R Giridhar

Chief Manager – IT, BPCL, md_agarwal@cio.in

Creative Director Jayan K Narayanan

Mani Mulki

Designers Shyam S Deshpande

Binesh Sreedharan

Hewlett Packard (I) Sales Pvt. Ltd. 2,3

M D Agarwal

Design & P roduction

MANAGER - CREATIVE DESIGN Ashwin Ramesh Boricha

Advisor, Reliance Industries Ltd, a_chauhan@cio.in

IBM India Ltd.

20, 21, 31, 64

VP - IS, Godrej Consumer Products Ltd, m_mulki@cio.in Manish Choksi

Interface Connectronics Pvt. Ltd.

VP - IT, Asian Paints, m_choksi@cio.in

Sanil Kumar Vikas Kapoor

Photography Srivatsa Shandilya

Production TK Karunakaran Mar keting and Sales

Neel Ratan Executive Director – Business Solutions,

Microsoft

5, 25

Pricewaterhouse Coopers, n_ratan@cio.in Rajesh Uppal

Polycom

SAP India

Select

General Manager – IT, Maruti Udyog, r_uppal@cio.in

BUSINESS Manager Naveen Chand Singh

brand Manager Alok Anand

Marketing Siddharth Singh

Bangalore Mahantesh Godi

Santosh Malleswara

Delhi Sudhir Argula

Harkirat Sandhu

Mumbai Rupesh Sreedharan

Nagesh Pai

Japan Tomoko Fujikawa

USA Larry Arthur

Jo Ben-Atar

Singapore Michael Mullaney UK Sean O’Hara

Prof. R.T.Krishnan Associate Professor, IIM-Bangalore, r_krishnan@cio.in S B Patankar Director - IS, Bombay Stock Exchange, sb_patankar@cio.in S Gopalakrishnan COO & Head Technology, Infosys Technologies

s_gopalakrishnan @cio.in

Sun

Webex

S R Balasubramanian VP - IS, Hero Honda Motors, sr_balasubra manian@cio.in Prof. S Sadagopan Director, IIIT - Bangalore. s_sadagopan@cio.in Sanjay Sharma Corporate Head Technology Officer, IDBI, s_sharma@cio.in Dr. Sridhar Mitta Managing Director & CTO, e4e Labs, s_mitta@cio.in

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission from the publisher. Address requests for customized reprints to IDG Media Private Limited, 10th Floor, Vayudooth Chambers, 15–16, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bangalore 560 001, India. IDG Media Private Limited is an IDG (International Data Group) company.

Sunil Gujral Former VP - Technologies, Wipro Spectramind

s_gujral@cio.in

Printed and Published by N Bringi Dev on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited,

10th Floor, Vayudooth Chambers, 15–16, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bangalore 560 001, India. Editor: Vijay Ramachandran. Printed at Rajhans Enterprises, No. 134, 4th Main Road, Industrial Town, Rajajinagar, Bangalore 560 044, India

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

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reader feedback

Inbox “We have to evolve a balance between working 24x7 and taking stock of our mistakes. This, too, enriches the human experience.”

these challenges as well. How do they manage? I hope your articles will bring this out too. T. Suresh Kumar CIO, TVS Logistics Services

I’m glad that you found the column on work-life balance relevant. Your suggestion is pertinent, since such issues dog CIOs in India as well. We shall examine this in a future article. Editor

Limited Scope You asked an interesting question in the December 1 cover story (‘Low-Cost Takes Off’). Sales over the Internet are suitable for products with limited features, like movie, airline and railway tickets. They are characterized by fewer variable elements. Also, they do no need product explanation from sales personnel. Typically, the product is consumed the same day it is purchased. This short duration is not a trait found in products like washing-machines or computers. We live with these products for years. Internet sales are relatively easy for products in the first category, as is convincing the management to back such a plan. Sales using an Internet channel are only suitable for products that do not need an operating manual or post-sale service. N. Ramakrishnan Director, Induscorp India Pvt. Ltd

Balancing Act I enjoyed reading your editorial on outsourcing. You have rightly zeroed 12

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in on the fact that merely having SLA’s and NDA’s is not going to ensure that outsourcing will succeed. It requires effort on the part of both parties to ensure that operations run smoothly. I also agree that too much monitoring can be counterproductive. It must be noted though that if the effort required from an organization increases progressively, the line between the customer and vendor begins to blur. Such a situation would work against the outsourced company. Surprisingly, such situations exist. Also, the column ‘Your Work or Your Life’ by Susan Cramm was enjoyable. Susan has highlighted work-life-balance issues and the kind of remedies that need to be applied. We have to evolve a balance between being on duty 24x7x365 and taking stock of our mistakes and learning from them. This, too, enriches the human experience. The comment “As an ex CIO who managed to get fired before I died on the job...” clearly illustrated a dilemma CIOs face. I am sure many Indian CIOs meet 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

Broaden Focus My congratulations to the CIO India team. The first issue came across as professional and focused, on par with (and in some respects better than) the US issue. I liked the balance between CIO subjects in the enterprise and in the government domain. There is a promise of something of interest to a wide section of audience. It was also pleasing to see a business focus – although the proportion between business and technology is tilted, perhaps a little excessively, toward the business side. Covering other interesting and topical subjects will make the magazine richer. Here are two which I believe are of particular importance. The first is education. Two, observations which will necessitate large-scale changes in education: Industry moving from being dominated by technology-driven thinking to a much more business-driven model and the fact that India is going to need a lot of resources. Second, IT in NGO’s (including the selfgovernance of communities) which play a seminal role in today’s society and need to be recognized and covered. And, in most senses, IT heads of NGOs have similar questions and challenges as their brethren in enterprises and the government. Anand Sudarshan President, Adea International

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ttrendlines rendli new

hot

unexpected

IllustratIon VIkas kapoor

God Goes Mobile

Short-code services are the rage these days and Tirumala Tirupati Devastanams (TTD), which administers the Lord Venkateshwara temple is not going to be left behind. It has come up with a new SMS service that provides information of the availability of certain darshans. The facility, according to TTD officials, is an offshoot of the call center they established to answer devotees’ queries. For now, the

Mobile TeCHnoloGY

SMS facility only provides information. Users of the service can SMS ‘TTD’ to 6060 and will be presented with a choice to check the status of a darshan on that day (current booking) or one in the future (advance booking). Officials feel that the service will definitely prove useful, though they have yet to make estimates on how many people will use it on a daily basis. IT plays a major role in TTD because of the incredible number of pilgrims visiting the temple. By conservative estimates, the annual visitor count exceeds 14.6 million a year, something not witnessed anywhere else in the world. Interestingly, back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that a devotee spends a mere 1.8 seconds in front of the deity, given that the temple is open 20 hours a day and it has 40,000 visitors, on an average. The desire to be blessed by the temple’s deity has some darshans full-up for the next five years. Pull out your phone quick and book your spot next to God. —Balaji Balaji Narasimhan

Are the Laptop’s days numbered? p e r s o n a l T e C H n o l o G Y IT analysts have predicted the end of the desktop, when laptops would become the computing standard for mobile workers and cube-dwellers alike. But with advancements in converged devices (which combine wireless phone, PDA and applications such as email), it’s not a stretch to imagine the death of the laptop as well. “In three years, more people are going to be using smart phone devices than laptops in some cases,” says richard LeVine, an expert in mobile device security with Accenture. In the 1990s, laptops were a status symbol for executives. but cIOs report they are replacing laptops for executives and salespeople with

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converged devices. While vacationing, Joe Kraus, senior VP and cIO of Intelsat, talks on his Treo 600. Kraus can also send and receive e-mail, and manage his calendar without needing a hardwired connection for a laptop. but the small devices do have limitations. “Did you ever try to type a long message on one of these?!” Kraus writes in an e-mail. many heavyduty applications will always require a laptop’s functionality. Laptop makers say they’re not worried. “Notebooks and handhelds are optimized to do different things,” says carol Hess-Nickels, HewlettPackard’s director of business notebook marketing. —by Thomas Wailgum REAL CIO WORLD | D e c e m b e r 1 5 , 2 0 0 5

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A guide to success, whether you outsource a little, a lot or not at all In one sense, write Linda Cohen and Allie Young of Gartner, IT outsourcing has been a rousing success. Economists argue that it’s a major factor in corporate America’s ability to remain profitable. Companies that announce outsourcing plans routinely see their share prices rise. CEOs of such companies get paid more. And yet, half of all outsourcing contracts signed during the past three years will fail to meet expectations, say the authors in their book Multisourcing: Moving book

review

Beyond Outsourcing to Achieve G r o w th and Agility. Those failures can be traced to three problems: miscommunication, governance failure and poor coordination. The book provides a step-bystep process to prevent these problems, advice that includes creating a well-aligned sourcing strategy, evaluating and selecting service providers, and methods for long-term management and governance.

Open Source Comes to Vending Machines It looks like a vending machine but what it spits out is something far removed from Coke or candy: free and open sourcesoftware (FOSS). The bright orange, refrigerator-size vending machine is equipped with a computer inside that burns CDs, a process also known as “toasting” in the open source community, hence the name: Freedom Toaster. The machine is up and running in more than 30 locations in South Africa, including schools, libraries, science centers and retail outlets, according to The Shuttleworth Foundation, which is sponsoring the project.

open sourCe

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Multisourcing: Moving Beyond Outsourcing to Achieve Growth and Agility By Linda Cohen and Allie Young Harvard Business School Press, 2005, Rs 1,850

Multisourcing here refers not to a specific sourcing model but to a manner of setting up and managing the right sourcing model for one’s company. Multisourcing is chock-full of helpful charts and lists, among them sample governance charts from DuPont and IndyMac Bancorp and a model outsourcing management dashboard. The “Eight Myths of Outsourcing,” detailed in the first few pages, is a great weapon for any CIO being pressured into outsourcoutsourc

Trendlines

A Source for Sourcing

ing; photocopy this page and keep it in your back pocket. Cohen and Young overstate the case when they conclude that multisourcing is a business revolution every bit as dramatic as the industrial revolution. And the book would benefit from a more in-depth look at some of the companies highlighted. Nonetheless, it’s a practical guide to creating a foundation for sourcing success. And given the failure rates cited in this book, CIOs can use all the help they can get. —By Stephanie Overby

Launched in 2004, the project has been gaining “considerable momentum” in recent months, a foundation spokesperson said. The device was developed by foundation member Jason Hudson. Founder Mark Shuttleworth, a prominent figure in the GNU/Linux community, is currently funding the development of the Linux- based Ubuntu operating system. Through a touch screen interface, users can obtain for free nearly 20 FOSS programs, including Linux, Ubuntu, Firemonger and Knoppix. All they need are blank CDs. On-screen information is available about the software users have selected, including how many CDs they’ll need to copy it onto. If they don`t have enough, they can quit and return later. Some locations offer CDs for sale at a nearby stores. With its Freedom Toaster, the foundation aims to help people in areas with limited or no bandwidth available to download the software. The foundation cites the Internet World Stats Report from July, which lists Africa with only 1.8 percent Internet penetration. Additional information about Freedom Toaster is available at: http://www.freedomtoaster.org. —By John Blau

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RFID Fuels Gas Savings for Philippines Army The constant rise in fuel prices may have reduced the fuel allocation for the Philippines’ military, but at least radio frequency technology or RFID is helping reduce unwarranted and unscrupulous gas consumption. Instead of giving away gas slips, military personnel are now issued key tags equipped with RFID chips that store information on monthly fuel allocation. The technology also allows the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to monitor gas consumption in real time. These RFID key tags (referred to as “keyfobs”) are preloaded every month and used when loading up gas at the Petron station at Camp Aguinaldo, which has eight pumps equipped with RFID readers. Fuel allocation varies according to military unit. But over the years, the allocation within the military has decreased because the budget stays the same even with the steady increase in gas prices, says Col. Bernardino Ricafrente from the Office of the Quartermaster General (OTQMG), which oversees the allocation supplies within the AFP. The OTQMG issued keyfobs to more than 40 AFP units, which then issued them to individual users. The average monthly allocation per user is 100 liters, also depending on the kind of fuel (gas or diesel). When scanned through the reader, the system shows remaining fuel allocation. “The system has helped reduce rampant distribution of gas slips even to civilians. And before, with the use of gas slips, users could easily get away with loading up more than what is indicated,” Ricafrente explained in an interview with Computerworld Philippines during a site visit at Camp Aguinaldo. The “fleet fueling” system is controlled centrally via a Web-based application called iTag Fuel Track developed by AC Corp., a local company that develops applications using RFID technology. The keyfobs are equipped with “passive” or non-battery powered chips than can transmit signals from about two to three centimeters on the 13.56 megahertz frequency. AC Corp. sources its RFID chips from Texas Instruments. Since the project began early this year, there have been more than a thousand keyfobs issued within the AFP alone, says Ivan Fojas, planning and development manager at AC Corp, which is also doing a similar fleet fueling system for the Philippine National Police (PNP). —By Lawrence Casiraya, Computerworld

wireless

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by the numbers b y l o r r a i n e C o s G r o v e wa r e

Phishing Sinks Confidence in E-Commerce Consumers, fearing Id theft, are more cautious about shopping online.

Number of consumers receiving phishing e-mail:

57 million

2005:

73 million

In the past 12 months, survey respondents: 77% 73%

Shoped online Accessed bank accounts online Paid bills online

63%

sourCE: gartner

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75% 33%

Use your website to educate customers abou t fraudulent sites. Warn them about phishing schemes you kn ow about, andinstruct them no t to click on links provided in e-m ails that purpor t to be from your company. Advise them to type yo ur address dire ctly into their browse rs to get to your site. If possible , provide online customers with so me type of auth entication, such as a personalized greeting, every time they visit.

Make it a polic y not to ask customers for personal information via e-mail, and remind them fre quently of this policy. Enforce the practice wi th employees.

Lack of trust affects online behavior: I am more cautious about where I shop online I buy less online due to my security concerns

Have a process in place to take action agai nst phishers when attack s occur, and to reassure custom ers. As part of this process, co llect informatio n from customer s about the atta ck, specifically, the IP address of the phisher. Co ntact the ISP an d report the incide nt, and then ca ll law enforcemen t.

ImagIng by b InEsh srE Edharan

2004:

Best practices:

Trendlines

Consumer confidence in the security of their online transactions is slipping due to the growth of phishing-related fraud and identity theft, Gartner reports. As a result, consumers are curtailing their online purchases. Phishing is the sending of an e-mail by cyberthieves with a link to a fake website that is disguised to look legitimate, in order to lure recipients into divulging personal information. Gartner estimates that 73 million adults who use the Internet received a phishing e-mail between May 2004 and May 2005, and that 2.4 million online shoppers lost money as a direct result of phishing. Most of the losses were repaid by banks and credit card companies. Nevertheless, 75 percent of the 5,000 online consumers who Gartner surveyed said they have become more cautious about where they shop online, and one-third reported buying fewer items than they would typically purchase due to security concerns. Eighty percent of those surveyed said they now trust commercial e-mail less, while 85 percent claimed to delete unexpected e-mails without ever opening them. Unless companies take steps to combat phishing, the report says, they will not be able to count on online selling and e-mail as methods to draw customers.

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12/10/2005 1:12:25 PM

Worry CIOs

Trendlines

Trojans, Thumb Drives

Free Software wins Backing Open-source groups are assisting the Union Government’s program to distribute productivity software for free in the country, even though the software being distributed includes some proprietary software. Though it is under considerable pressure from organizations supporting opensource software, the Centre as well as state governments have declined to take a decision favoring either open-source or proprietary software in education and egovernance projects. “We decided we could not allow the CDs with the software to go without free software, because then it would give proprietary software a clear advantage,” Kiran Chandra, convenor of the Andhra Pradesh state chapter of the Free Software Foundation of India (FSF India). “This was also an opportunity for us to proliferate free software,” he added. FSF India is an affiliate of the Free Software Foundation Inc. in Boston. The CDs are being distributed to Indian citizens by the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), as part of a government initiative to facilitate computing in local Indian languages. The CD contains productivity software such as a Web browser, e-mail client and word processor, as well as tools such as a spell checker and optical character recognition software, according to R.K.V.S. Raman, staff scientist in C-DAC’s National Center for Software Technology wing. The software can also be downloaded from www.ildc.in. C-DAC is meanwhile working on o a second release of the productivity software which is likely to be available by April next year. —By John Ribeiro

open-sourCe

Increasingly, technologies are becoming available that end users can use without the IT department’s knowledge, such as USB drives, inexpensive Web services and camera-equipped cell phones. These technologies can expose your organization to intentional or unintentional loss (i.e., theft or misplacement) of proprietary enterprise information. According to a recent CIO magazine survey, IT professionals are aware of these technologies and are very concerned that their organizations may be at risk. IT executives seem most concerned about Trojan horses and USB drives/portable storage devices and spyware, although close to half of the companies surveyed support some of these technologies. More than half of the respondents say their organization has a formal policy permitting the use of USB drives and camera-equipped mobile phones. The overwhelming majority (92 percent) of survey respondents indicated that they make a concerted effort to stay aware of new technologies and the issues they present. When asked about their level of concern regarding a list of technologies and the possibility of intentional or unintentional compromise or loss of enterprise information, IT professionals were most concerned about Trojan horses (63 percent answered 4 or 5 on a scale of 1 to 5), USB/portable storage devices (62 percent) and keystroke logging software (58 percent). Close to half of CIOs report that Web-based services including remote access, data synchronization and data backup (56 percent), and USB drives (45 percent), are in use and supported by their organization. However, these technologies are just as frequently in use and not supported, specifically camera-equipped mobile phones (44 percent) and USB/portable storage drives (42 percent). Less than one-third (29 percent) plan to formally implement use of USB drives and only 23 percent will implement Web-based services including remote access, data synchronization and data backup, and companies will roll out these technologies slowly over the next 12 months. When asked about Web-based services specifically, IT executives reported that employees use Web conferencing (61 percent), VoIP (25 percent) and remote access tools such as GoToMyPC (23 percent). Thirty-six percent of CIOs surveyed further reported that they block IP addresses for services they do not support and 15 percent said they monitor Web use for keywords related to specific services. —Lorraine Cosgrove Ware

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Mark Goulston

Career Counsel

How to Avoid Bumping Heads IT and business executives seem to hail from two alien tribes. Here’s how they can come to see eye-to-eye.

IllusTraTIon sHyam s. DesHpan De

o this, do that, get it done now, and I don’t want to hear any excuses.” Ever hear these words—explicitly or implicitly— from your CEO or another CXO demanding that you either fix or implement something? They think it’s just a matter of turning a switch, but here you are on the verge of a huge project, and they don’t want to hear about it. This endeavor will take a drastic reshuffling of manpower, may necessitate money the CFO will resent spending and could require what they least want to give you, namely their cooperation and patience. Before you go down the road of feeling victimized (even though to a certain extent you are) and make matters much worse by acting like a victim, take a deep breath, exhale and listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you. If you’re an IT person, there are three things that are likely to be true about you: 1. You’re better with things and information than you are with people (especially where confrontations are required). 2. With regard to technology, you’re as focused on what needs to be done to make IT work as you are on what it might actually do for the business. 3. You’re most likely male. Now consider where many top business-side executives, especially those with marketing and sales backgrounds, come from: 1. They’re better with people and information than things (Jack Welch said, “I was afraid of the Internet...because I couldn’t type.”). 2. With regard to technology, they’re more focused on what they want IT to do than what needs to be done to make it work. 3. They’re most likely male too. What is the significance of you both being male? Men will do anything to avoid humiliation. It’s the “pride” thing.

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Mark Goulston Career Counsel (Women suffer this less because any sense of their pride is usually bludgeoned by the way their children treat them every day.) Men feel humiliated when they feel incompetent and will do almost anything to prevent that sense of incompetence from being exposed in the light of day to others and to themselves. Men’s comfort zone is directly proportionate to their competence zone. The less competent they feel, the more uncomfortable. Nobody (CEO, CFO, COO or CIO) likes to be pulled out of their comfort zone, and they will fight it tooth and nail. Rather than feeling reassured by someone else’s competence, men often feel out of control and at the mercy of the more competent person. This is especially true for a CEO who has mistreated a CIO and now needs his help. Business executives resist being dragged into their area of incompetence, the world of “things.” Technologists resist being dragged into their area of incompetence, the world

Nobody likes to be pulled out of their comfort zone, and they will fight it tooth and nail. of people (especially people in conflict). And here’s the rub for many CIOs: These business executives are comfortable dealing with interpersonal conflict and confrontation (after all, their negotiation skills have helped them get where they are), whereas most CIOs feel like they’re in way over their head in such settings. So when a business executive demands that you get something done and get it done now, you stand transfixed like a deer in headlights. When they blast you with what they want, then stonewall you when you start to explain what you need from them (time, money and patience) to get it done, you are frustrated. No, that’s too mild—you’re appalled. You’re infuriated. And you don’t do infuriated well. You dig in your heels to weather the storm and stop yourself from saying that angry, but oh-so-relieving career-ending retort to this S.O.B. who crossed over from respecting your dignity to abuse a long time ago and who is making his unrealistic expectations your fault if you don’t meet them. If you were a hard drive, you’d crash. So what’s a mild-mannered, “just let me do the work you want me to do and get off my back” guy like you supposed to do?

How to Talk to Your CEO

Step 1: Make sure your expectations about your CEO’s behavior are realistic, not just reasonable. You might reasonably expect that you will be treated with respect if your CEO (or COO or CFO) wants to motivate you. But that may not be realistic. Don’t expect an impatient, over-the-top CEO to not act that way if he’s frustrated even in the least. Step 2: Establish leverage as soon as the boss gives you an assignment. Get him to be explicit and detailed and then repeat

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back to him the following, “Let me make sure I get exactly what you want me to do, so I don’t surprise you later on. You want me to [state here specifically what they have asked you to do] by [state the deadline] in order for you to accomplish [state the near term goal they’re working on]. Now tell me once again, you envision IT helping you by providing...” This is where you should have the CEO restate what he believes the technology will provide. Step 3: After you finish Step 2, say, “What else should I know to pass on to my people? I get the best out of them when they understand why we’re doing what we’re doing.” When you follow the above three steps, you accomplish several things. You empower yourself to have an exchange rather than feeling frustrated at being talked down to and doing nothing about it. You slow the CEO down and gain his (and your own) respect, which will cause him to treat you better by talking to or with you instead of over, or at, you. You cause the boss to see you as an intelligent person who can think, instead of a trained domesticated animal that just provides a function. Finally and most importantly, you will be able to take the following step. Step 4: Say to the CEO, “If and when we run into obstacles, roadblocks and bumps in the road, and after we have come up with the best way to solve them (you don’t want to worry the boss that you’ll need him to solve something in his area of incompetence), the most time-effective and efficient way to apprise you of it and obtain whatever additional resources we might need is...” Here you should pause and let him fill in the blank, which you will then refer back to if and when you hit those bumps. It’s pointless to expect “reasonable” behavior from impatient top executives whose typical approach is to hit you with unrealistic expectations and then rough you up if you do anything other than comply. Rather than allowing them to run over you with a diatribe, engage them in a discussion and, if possible, a dialogue. Do this by getting them to be more explicit and specific about what they want you to do, and then say back to them what they have told you. This will let them know you listened and understood them, and that you should not be treated as if you were mindless. Feeling a little resistant right now? It’s because I’m trying to pull you out of your comfort and competence zone as someone who may prefer to avoid confrontations with your CEO (which is what the above thinly veiled four steps are). It’s analogous to your trying to pull them out of their comfort zone and have them think more deeply (and realistically) of how to best use you. Just because you think you won’t be able to do this doesn’t mean you can’t. You can and should, and you may be pleasantly surprised with your CEO’s response. CIO

Mark Goulston, MD, specializes in solving business problems by applying emotional intelligence. He is the author of the just-released book, Get Out of Your Own Way at Work and Help Others Do the Same (Putnam 2005). Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Monte Ford

ToTal leadershIp

Let Talent Bloom Cultivate innovation by moving high-potential employees around, up, and even out of your IT organization.

IllusTraTIon shyam s. Deshpan De

nnovation. It’s the latest buzzword in IT. I’ve been hearing it everywhere: At a recent vendor conference, at my weekly staff meeting. I’ve read about it in CIO. The vendors, my staff and the media aren’t wrong. Innovation is imperative to every IT department. But if innovation is to be more than just a buzzword within our organizations, we need to manage our IT organizations in a way that encourages the growth and mobility of our employees. You see, people are what really matter in this equation. People create innovation, and not just on certain days of the week or in designated brainstorming sessions. In order to ensure that an IT organization is bringing innovative solutions to bear on business problems and opportunities, you must pay close attention to the talent that is flowing into, up, and even out of the technology group. A stagnant IT organization is incapable of producing fresh ideas. You need a constant infusion of new blood and the perspective that comes from having new experiences, even if that means accepting turnover among your staff and challenging those who remain by pushing them into unfamiliar roles. The CIO is responsible for setting the creative tone of the organization. I have found three ways to foster mobility within an IT organization in order to encourage a culture of innovation.

Accept Attrition I once worked at a company where attrition was almost nonexistent. Rather than a sign that the company was a great place to work, it was an indication of stagnation. Within the IT organization, the response to any new idea typically was, “But we’ve always done it this way.” 22

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Monte Ford

Total Leadership

The natural response to a new role is to take a fresh approach because you’re not vested in the old way of doing things. And so, anytime you put talented people in new positions, they tend to change things for the better.

One thing I learned from this experience is that moderate attrition invites a healthy flow of external talent into an organization. In an environment where innovation is encouraged, attrition is not something leaders are terrified of, because it opens doors for fresh ideas and new perspectives. Of course, no one wants to lose good people. But letting them go can have unanticipated benefits. Others may emerge from their shadows to achieve positive things that surprise management, their peers and sometimes even themselves. You can use attrition to strengthen your organization by redefining any open positions. Consider hiring a recent college graduate skilled in the latest technology for a new position. Or give an existing employee the challenge of creating a new job. Both of these choices force employees to bring new and creative ideas forward, ultimately requiring them to be innovative.

In addition to identifying promising talent, CIOs also must determine what skills or practices are missing in their organizations. Keeping employees up-to-date with information and training in the latest technologies and management techniques can mean the difference on whether an employee— and an IT organization—is able to innovate.

Address Management Gaps

One way to tell if your organization’s skill gaps are being addressed is to examine the types of problems the organization has to solve. If the problems are becoming progressively “better”—for example, you’re not dealing with the same infrastructure problems you’ve had for years or struggling with the same personnel problems you struggled through Invest in Top Performers Identify your top performers at multiple levels and decide which in the past—then you’re doing a good job addressing your of these people could learn to perform equally well elsewhere, group’s weaknesses. When I came to American Airlines four years ago, IT whether in another area of the IT department or another part of the company. The natural response to a new role is to take portfolio management was viewed as a nice idea, but nowhere a fresh approach because you’re not vested in the old way of close to a reality. Since then, my team and I have put a portfolio doing things. And so, anytime you put talented people in new management system in place and trained our staff on how to use it. The system itself was an innovation: Now, the executive positions, they tend to change things for the better. The only way this approach can be effective is to employ committee is able to see clearly how IT functions and how hands-on management of high-potential employees. At we make financial decisions. We are better able to direct our American Airlines, I require each project team to meet with spending to areas most closely aligned with the company’s me quarterly for a “deep dive” meeting during which we strategic plan, allowing us to think creatively about other review costs, schedules and the overall health of the project. I business problems. So the next time you hear the word innovation, remember expect all team members to attend these meetings, not just my direct reports. And I expect team members at all levels to be that the source of everything your organization creates is the people you employ. Without talented, smart people, our IT active participants. If a junior team member speaks up to offer a suggestion departments will fall flat. It’s up to us to create an environment about how to solve a problem that the team is encountering, that encourages people to perform beyond even their own I learn a lot about how that person thinks and what risks expectations. That’s where true innovation lies. CIO she is willing to take. At the end of each series of deep-dive sessions, I know not only how we are succeeding and where our challenges lie, I also have insight about the people in the organization. With this information as a backdrop, I meet quarterly with my direct reports to evaluate our list of high-potential employees. Those who are creative, who are willing to take risks and who won’t accept mediocrity will rise to the top. I expect my team to take detailed notes about these employees so that we can identify opportunities for their career advancement Monte Ford is senior vice president and CIO of American and for utilizing their unique problem-solving skills. Airlines. Send feedback about this column to editor@cio.in 24

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12/10/2005 1:08:13 PM

Keep Business

Lydon Rodrigues, Group CIO (left), Atul Dawda, Sr. VP & CTO and their Business Continuity Plan kept WNS’ head above the water, during the Mumbai deluge.

by Rahul Neel MaNi

Even as torrential rains paralysed Mumbai, the business continuity strategy of WNS Global Services ensured

smooth sailing.

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I ImagIng by b Inesh sre edh aran

A day stamped forever in the collective consciousness of Mumbai, started as another day of business for WNS Global Services, one of India’s leading BPO / ITeS organizations. By noon, WNS’ Vikhroli campus had shifted to high gear, with members of its top management in consultation with counterparts in another country as they pushed two crucial pilot projects through. In another part of the building, potential clients were being briefed. Even as new business processes were being put in place inside WNS, Mumbai’s civic infrastructure slowly eroded under a deluge that would make it to the record books. The relentless rain brought local trains to halt by mid-afternoon, between stations and still full of passengers. Reader ROI: By 4 pm, the city had come to a standstill. How the cost of business Cars were stuck bumper-to-bumper, choking continuity is easily the city’s arterial roads. Before the next day three recovered teenagers, trapped in their car by a jammed Why sticking to a script central locking system, would die. Telephone is essential to keep operaservices across providers slowly blanked out. tions going IT infrastructure and back-up power sources, Why people and processes kept mainly at ground level, began to fall to the are critical for business rising waters. A number of data centers were continuity inches from being submerged.

P hotos by srIvatsa shan d Ilya

July 26, 2005:

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Cover story | Business Continuity

t’s not surprising that, given WNS’ planned approach, 15 of its clients didn’t even figure that the city crunching their workload had been host to a natural disaster.

Four hours later, the city of seven islands had been parceled into patches of isolation as communications, transport facilities and power blinked, flickered and died completely for the next 48 hours. Already, parts of the city were under 10 feet of water and landslides had occurred in two places. Inside WNS, the crisis management team declared its preparedness to switch over to disaster recovery mode. They eased into it slowly but seamlessly. “Despite the near disaster situation we found ourselves in, and a sharp drop in personnel to staff the evening shift, we were determined to keep our commitment to provide uninterrupted service,” says Bhargava.

Survival Kit News of the disaster unfolding outside percolated into the WNS campus. “By 4 pm, we were convinced that the rains were something out of the normal. Over 900 millimeters can paralyze anything. But we weren’t worried, as we had a well documented and tested Business Continuity Plan (BCP),” says Pervez Workingboxwala, VP, Risk Management, WNS. At that point, Neeraj Bhargava, Group CEO, WNS, summoned the risk management team to review the situation at the crisis management command center. Over coffee, Workingboxwala read out the script that had been prepared to execute the business continuity plan. IT managers were asked to start a dry run, with key executives kept in the loop. Meanwhile, WNS teams continued to stay at their stations, troubleshoot client problems, talk by the water-cooler, unaware for the most part of the calamity that would go on to cost the city 376 lives and Rs 300 crore.

Like other BPOs, WNS is bound by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to provide various levels of business continuity. To achieve this, WNS had put in place a dualsite strategy, which set the guidelines for diverting critical processes to another geographical location in case any one of its facilities was ‘damaged’. As a part of their BCP, the dual-site strategy proved crucial during the Mumbai flood. Many companies boast of foolproof business continuity plans. Few, though, can claim of watching their commitment to uninterrupted business emerge unscathed after the torrential rains that hit Mumbai. Given WNS’ planned approach, it’s not surprising that 15 of its clients didn’t even figure that the city crunching their workload had been host to a natural disaster. WNS’ business continuity plan has four distinct features. First of the essentials is its resilient information technology architecture, backed with multiple-level redundancy plans. This made it technologically possible to seamlessly split and divert critical processes to Pune,

What’s Your Disaster Recovery Plan? No Plan y consider disaster recovery a you secondary issue, something that’s probably been sitting on the back burner for sometime. y your company is one of a sizeable number of enterprises but don’t let this console you, you live on borrowed time. Knee-jerk reactions to disasters could leave you sans data and infrastructure. remember disasters aren’t prone to giving prior notice.

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No Plan, But A Sturdy Back-Up

Some Planning, But With Limited Resources

y you’ve shouted yourself hoarse convincing top management to buy into disaster recovery but have been turned down. your consolation prize is a regular (maybe y even twice a day) offsite data back up. you y are a good It t architect who will guard his information and data, but sometimes you have to make lemon-juice when fate deals you lemons.

y have dr, but it’s with the vendor. you you are far-looking enough to have fault y tolerant systems and data back -up. When your worst nightmare comes true and your data center is wrecked beyond recovery, it’s time to call your vendor. Under a pre-arranged deal, your equipment is shipped swiflty to your dr site so that you can set up shop with a minimum downtime. It’s like you’re renting your dr,, not quite like having your own.

12/12/2005 10:11:31 AM

Cover story | Business Continuity even while the Mumbai office worked with a skeletal staff and minimal resources. The BPO outfit’s BCP determines the criticality of different parts Finally, WNS built and certified its offices to withstand Seismic Zone 4 (high-damage risk) earthquakes, though Mumbai is located in Seismic Zone 3. Business Impact Analysis (BIA), according to WNS, was core to making correct assessments about how different processes impact the integrality of a client’s business. Based on the outcome of the analysis, WNS developed a business continuity strategy. WNS insists that clients evaluate its recovery-time objectives and satisfy themselves. Once the plan was rubber-stamped by the client, it was tested regularly.

What did the Mumbai deluge teach you?

hat the best of infrastructure is of no use without power. It took 72 hours to restore power in our area.”

Shirish Gariba, cIO, elbee express Limited

hat surprised me the most was my management’s top down approach and seriousness towards business continuity.”

Jason Gonsalves, VP - IT & Costing, Goodlass Nerolac Paints Limited

Technology Lifeboat WNS’ IT structure, like any corporate set-up worth its salt, has three distinct components: WAN, LAN and the desktop and other end-user devices. What’s unique to WNS is that every part of its IT structure works on a zero-downtime principle. “We ensure a nine-fives (99.999) dependability of every part of our IT structure. This is what differentiates us from the more run-ofthe-mill service providers,” says Lyndon Rodrigues, Group CIO, WNS. That’s easier said than done. But WNS buttressed this assertion with resilient network architecture and redundant systems. It stood head and shoulders above the competition when it deployed its own MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) network between India, the US and the UK. Its point-to-point mesh network architecture ensures that all its servers, routers and switches are duplicated across WNS sites, so that a failure at any place will allow another location to take over seamlessly.

t was a blessing in disguise and helped us do a performance check for business continuity planning.”

Sunil Mehta, Senior VP & Area Systems Director, J. Walter Thompson India

etting diesel for the gensets was a big challenge. It’s surprising how that could hit the running of the sturdiest and most secure IT infrastructure.” Sanjay Sharma, CIO, IDBI Bank

Cold Site

Warm Site

Hot Site

y are a rising star among CIos. y you you have convinced management to invest in a cold dr site: It’s fully equipped and ready to go on command. this, though, unlike a warm site, takes anywhere between 12-24 hours to become fully operational. y your data isn’t replicated live so you will lose some of it. but ut all the same, good for you! Just make sure you’ve got a solid data back-up system in place.

somewhere a wise, It-savvy t-savvy and disastert aware CIo is writing a proposal for a warm site disaster recovery plan. a warm site is equipped with the hardware, software and the other essentials. but it’s in hibernation till disaster strikes. a warm site will ensure that data is made available quickly and with minimal downtime.

the aristocrat of drs. this rarified strata is home to banks, stock exchanges, large-scale bPos and telecom service providers. a hot site disaster recovery plan will replicate your data center at a remote location. It’s redundant communication lines are used to copy data real-time. It duplicates critical application servers and can take over seamlessly when disaster strikes. It’s the ultimate approach to dr, even if it is expensive, difficult to set up and high on maintenance.

cover story (26-32).indd 29

12/12/2005 10:11:36 AM

Cover story | Business Continuity Most elements at the LAN level have their own power sources, separate UPSs and dual power sources. WNS handles its own routing. Everything it does is built around the idea of creating a structure with no points of failure. This is what paved the way for zero downtime during the floods. The need to create reliability drove WNS to work on a proprietary network – ‘WNSNet’. To guarantee the resilience and redundancy of each component required WNS to break away from the pack. It also runs independent circuits both at Mumbai and Pune. They employ varied service providers to ensure continuous uptime, for instance when underground cables are damaged by road repair crews. WNS’ redundancy plans ensure that its WAN is built on circuits provided by multiple service providers on three different undersea cables to ensure that there is no single point of failure. July 26 was not the only test for WNSNet. Post the deluge, a fishing trawler anchored off Mumbai severed two undersea cables on August 2. However, this did not impact any customer connectivity because the MPLS mesh instantly re-routed traf traffic to the undersea cable that was still in service

Rescue Operation WNS handled its normal workload on July 26. Switches between Mumbai and Pune use a load-balancing formula to detect the density of calls at any location. On the day of disaster, the switches juggled calls between Mumbai and Pune, based on the size of the workforce present at each campus. For the system to work, a divergence of process has to filter down to the people running it. “A process split demands that your employees, at different locations, are

trained for multiple processes,” says Atul Dawda – Senior VP & CTO, WNS Global Services. Pune, which wasn’t as badly affected by the rains, was alerted. The facility called for back-ups and shuffled the incoming workload between staffers on duty and those who were offshift, a situation that was replicated in Mumbai. Many of WNS’ Pune-based staffers worked up to 18 hours to take the pressure off the Mumbai campus. “It was hard striking a balance. The implications of achieving the two objectives - that of running the system and taking care of our people—were contradictory,” relives Bhargava. The DR document emphasized personnel security and safety. WNS realized that sending employees back home represented a greater risk than keeping them on the premises. A plan to get fresh food, beds and other essential commodities was put into into action. The risk management team took charge of the crisis management command center at WNS. When they discovered that the local telephone exchange was out of action because of water-logging, they set up a hotline so that families remained in touch with their loved ones. WNS broadcast the status of its employees on a local FM radio station for the benefit of those who could not get through the hotline and even requested CNBC to broadcast this over the channel’s news ticker. Right from the outset, it was clear to WNS’ decision makers that they would have to prove that they were dependable if they were to acquire end-to-end work from clients. WNS works with a number of Fortune 100 companies who look for reliability. They may forgive the failure

WNS Emergency Raft US Customer UK Customer

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Depending on the load and personnel available, the switch automatically re-routes traffic to WNS’ Pune facility.

UK Customer

WNS VLAN

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GurGaon, IndIa

lSr= label Switching router

12/12/2005 10:11:37 AM

o achieve uninterruptuninterrupt ed service, WNS put in place a dual-site strategy, which set the guidelines for diverting critical processes to another geographical location, in case any one of its facilities was ‘damaged’. of their own IT systems, but not those of the firms they outsource to.

Reliability Compass It was imperative that WNS prove that they were accountable, worked on processes and could provide unbroken service. They would have to take full ownership of service delivery. Importantly, their customers were willing to pay for this. The BPO company took its state of preparedness to the highest level by splitting all major and critical client processes across two locations and invested in risk management practices — a rare enough advance-planning initiative. From the beginning, investment in risk management was the part of the core infrastructure at WNS. It also became a part of its sales pitch to clients. According to Bhargava one phenomenon made this easier. Because of industry concentration, bigger vendors were getting more business. “The cost of BCP is being recovered largely from end-to-end deals. The investments we have made in DR and BCP work to our advantage. Customers demand strong business continuity,” he adds. The questions of investing in infrastructure, whether or not new clients wanted it, in quantifying cost-benefit and in justifying their investment in disaster recovery are difficult to answer. But Bhargava adds that it is WNS’ belief that business is just not about getting new customers but in retaining the existing ones too. There’s no need to look further than the two WNS’ customers who were in Mumbai to discuss an expansion of activities when the deluge struck. They saw WNS handling the crisis without any interruption. “Continuing to service our clients in a time of great adversity proved our commitment. And, it creates a favorable impression with potential clients. Isn’t that a recovery of investment?” asks Bhargava.

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From where WNS stands, infrastructure must withstand catastrophes whether or not the company gets a return on it and despite the cost. This is not only about redundant lines and dual sites. It’s about the right processes, people and an IT infrastructure that offers resiliency right from the start - not as an afterthought. “I used to say, in three or four years, the question of ROI will be no-brainer for each of us. And I now believe that we recovered the cost we incurred,” explains Rodrigues. Post the deluge, prospective clients were convinced of WNS’ disaster handling capability. Additionally, its ability to come out unhurt from the deluge has made the company more confident and positive about cornering new business. WNS won the hearts of its employees.

Strengthening the Keel WNS isn’t perfect. Its senior management wants to explore possibilities of bettering its response to disasters, with minimum disruption. July 26 taught the company a number of lessons. During the deluge WNS was involved in a pilot for an important client. Processes for pilots aren’t normally split across locations and, as a result, the project faced acute pressure. It was accomplished, but all the same was a close call. One that WNS doesn’t want to repeat. It has also learnt not to depend on a single service provider for even local telecom needs. When its telephone service went kaput it forced a father of an employee to walk for over nine hours to find out if his daughter was alright. Once the rains stopped, some staffers were afraid to return to work. “We had to visit them individually and convince them,” says Bhargava. Here too it met a hurdle in the shape of a staff database that needed updating (that will be fixed soon says WNS). Among the bullets points of the post-event analysis is one that demonstrates WNS’ ability to look at even issues that might seem trivial when it looks at redundancy planning. It’s a note to stock more than just Maggi noodles in the pantry. CIO

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

Share Your Opinion the past few months have seen three metros failing to handle the monsoons. has your organization built a business continuity plan? What level of redundancy do you budget for? share your thoughts (or fears) on this with your peers. Write in to editor@cio.in

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VIEW

from theTOP

Adi B. Godrej, chairman, Godrej Group, intends to connect 3.5 million retailers by using a bouquet of technologies to put the proper bonds in place.

Linking

the Value Chain By Gunjan Trivedi

The Godrej group is among the largest family-owned businesses in the country. Its legacy of innovation dates back to 1897 when founder Ardeshir Godrej turned his back on law and started to manufacture locks.

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connection to its three-and-a-half million retailers.

CIO: How is IT used to keep Godrej world-class? Adi B. Godrej: IT is used extensively in the group. We were among the first in India to introduce enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems about 12 years ago. Ever since, we have concentrated on extending our reach from our vendors to our distributors and retailers. Connecting everyone using our IT infrastructure

Photos by Sr ivatsa Shan dilya

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.

Godrej quickly became a household name, and went on to become a national symbol of innovation and self-reliance featuring an array of products that ranged from worldclass security equipment to soaps produced, for the first time, from vegetable oil. Adi B. Godrej, chairman, Godrej Group, leads the third generation. He is taking Godrejâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creative spirit into new territories. Backed by IT, the company already connects hundreds of suppliers and distributors, sharing critical market and logistics-related information in realtime. Godrej now plans to extend that

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Godrej Group Chairman, Adi Godrej expects IT to: Connect suppliers, distributors and retailers Make market and logistical information available in real-time Develop innovative processes

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12/12/2005 10:02:45 AM

View from the Top

helps us keep tight control over our working capital and manage our business better. It helps us tremendously in ensuring that our logistical systems and supply-chain work efficiently. This keeps our costs down, a benefit our customers eventually see. We have found that IT is an investment that pays excellent returns. This is why, in some of our companies, our IT investment is not concentrated in our factories. We have established strong connectivity with our distributors (project Sampark) and suppliers (project Sahyog) by deploying a supply-chain management (SCM) system. Now we intend to reach out to our retailers. This is going to be quite a challenge since we deal with about threeand-a-half million retailers. No country in the world, other than China, has as many retailers and there are no ready solutions we can turn to. We are working on various IT solutions employing different technologies, such as mobile messaging, to make it happen.

What interested you in allout IT projects like Sampark and Sahyog? Very clearly, from early on, we figured that the advance of IT could be leveraged in businesses that require interaction with large numbers of customers and vendors. IT allowed for rigorous statistical analysis and enabled our marketing and sales managers to monitor the nuances of changing scenarios, almost in real-time. We saw IT adding more and more value. Because of Sampark we know exactly what’s going on in the pipeline. We use this knowledge for replenishment-based re-supplying, instead of waiting for orders and then fulfilling them. This avoids a number of problems including running out of stock. Without IT, it is impossible to have a replenishment system that ensures a constant logistical flow. Developments in IT have helped us quite considerably and we continue to invest in them. 38

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called Godrej Agrovet, which uses IT. For example, we were among the first to use linear programming to perform leastcost formulations for the fields. Even our FMCG businesses have made fairly considerable rural inroads, but not on the lines of e-Choupal.

“Getting good consultants to advise us on how to deploy these IT investments is the most difficult part. Companies that don’t do that find their investment almost totally wasted.” —Adi Godrej

Does Godrej plan to use IT to address the rural market on the lines of ITC’s e-Choupal? We have no plans for an e-Choupal type of model. We leave it to ITC to do that. But, the Godrej Group does have a lot of rural businesses where we deploy plenty of IT. We have a fairly large agro-business

How do you see the Godrej Group maintaining its technological edge? Well, I think, our people and our leadership have seen the fruits of IT. I feel they will continue to view it favorably. We have some very good IT management people who are business-oriented. Our business and IT teams are not segregated. They work together to find solutions. Our people have to come up with great ideas and win-win solutions. That’s one of the reasons why we prefer not to outsource. In fact, we haven’t outsourced our actual IT processes. It’s not as beneficial as an international company outsourcing to India.

“Sales is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is reality.” How does the Godrej group use IT to stand by your motto? IT helps tremendously, because it cuts costs. When you cut costs you turn more competitive, and are able to pass on those savings to your consumers. They, in turn, are able to afford more of your goods, spreading your base. As your percentage costs come down further, you’re able to build a virtuous cycle. When I say sales is vanity, I mean sales for the sake of sales is not something that should be a goal. Increased sales to make increased profit is what the goal should be. And, IT enables that.

Given your stress on TQM and kaizen, how does IT improve quality?

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SNAPSHOT

Godrej

View from the Top

Group

Turnover

Rs 5,500 crore (as on March 31, 2005) IT Budget

I believe our insistence on quality is distinct from our ideas about IT. There is no direct link between IT and TQM (Total Quality Management) or TPM (Technical Performance Measurement) except to the extent that in many of our quality solutions and processes we use statistical models, where IT plays an important role. However, I would not say that IT has major role to play in TQM and TPM. I feel that companies need to be proficient separately both in their IT usage and quality management deployment. We look upon IT as a tool and not as an end, just as quality is a tool, not an end.

What role does IT play in seeing the Godrej group continue to innovate? Like quality, innovation is an important tool for business performance. Innovation is present in both products and processes. I don’t think IT can add too much to product innovation. R&D and imaginative employees contribute a lot more to this. However, increasingly, IT has a role to play in process. I think innovation in processes is as important as product innovation. Both need to go hand-in-hand. It doesn’t help if you have innovative processes but lack good products for the processes to support. Similarly, if you have great products but poor processes, your products won’t do you much good except for lying in your showroom or store window.

How do you get disparate, organization-wide, IT deployment right for various business units? All our IT deployment is business-result led. Unless there are strong business results to be obtained, we don’t make investments. Many of our businesses operate on negative working capital. There is no way we could have done this without extensive IT implementation. Efficient deployment of our resources, both financial and human, is extremely

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view from the top (34-39).indd 39

dependent on IT. I think that the onset of lowcost IT solutions has brought about tremendous business efficiencies and proficiencies. We are strong believers in the value of IT but unless we are satisfied, we don’t allow new investments.

This is an issue most CIO’s raise. How do you view the selling of ideas internally?

0.5% - 1% of sales

Total Employees

about 18,000 IT Staff

between 75 and 100 (excluding Godrej Infotech which has around 200)

Retailers

over 3.5 million Manufacturing Plants

approximately 100

Sales Offices

approximately 200 CIO

GCPL & Godrej Industries Mani Mulki

another Rs 4 crore or so on software. The rest was spent on what I call brainware. Getting good consultants to advise us on how to deploy these investments is the most difficult part. When you are investing in hardware it is easy to see where your money is going. When you are deploying something as ephemeral as brainware, it is far more difficult. Companies that don’t do that find their investment almost totally wasted. I think that was a difficult decision.

If you were to evaluate a Godrej Sara Lee CIO only by IT developments, Was it the most exSubrata Dey in isolation of business benepensive one too? fits, you will have this divide. Therefore, it pays for the business person A costly decision is when you waste to closely listen to the CIO’s ideas and vice money. If you get good returns from an versa. CIO’s should not live in ivory towers. investment, it isn’t costly. Moreover, once They need to constantly monitor ground the first decision is successful, it then gets level performance. easier to take larger and most expensive I’d also like to point to our organization’s decisions. variable remuneration scheme. A team’s remuneration is based on the performance Finally, what is your next of the entire business. While we also evalu- big IT move? ate an individual’s performance, it’s not a major part of his or her variable remuneraI am not a futurologist, but I think there tion. That comes from the performance of will be tremendous development. Using IT the company and business as a whole. This to garner consumer insight, to understand creates strong teamwork especially in the their needs, and in market research, will deployment of IT. add a lot of value. �� CIO Here, the business managers and IT thinkers work almost as one. The business managers end up wearing the IT shoes and IT thinkers end up wearing the business clothes.

What is the toughest IT decision you’ve made? Twelve years ago, we decided to invest about Rs 12 crore to 15 crore in an ERP system, of which only about Rs 2 crore to 3 crore was spent in hardware, and maybe

Senior correspondent Gunjan Trivedi can be reached at gunjan_t@cio.in

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You need grid computing. It could save you millions. It could provide competitive advantage to your business. But to get it, you have to build it yourself. Why? Ask your vendors. Most software gets hungry for more processing power from time to time, but Scott McKay’s insurance actuarial application at Genworth Financial eats like a shark--it swallows hardware whole and wants more. So in 2003, McKay tried something that few CIOs Sacred Cash Cow in industries outside of academia or financial services Grid blows up the traditional software licensing model, (where the need for massively parallel computing trumps which charges customers according to the computer all other considerations) have been willing to take a risk on processor that runs the application—in other words, until now: He adapted his custom application to work on a one application, one computer, one price. But with grid, grid—a vast, fluid pool of processing power that splashes no CPUs are dedicated to a specific application. McKay’s around in a motley assortment of spare memory from grid application draws on a river of power that may flow PCs and servers throughout his company. McKay’s shark across as many as 300 of his PCs in a day, but may only never runs out of food on this diet, and he now processes spend a few minutes on each. To date, vendors haven’t actuarial tables in 20 minutes instead of five hours. been able—or, say some critics, willing—to figure out McKay loves grid and the money he saves, but he also how to make their money with grid computing while knows why most of his CIO colleagues are still feeding giving users what they want—virtually unlimited CPU their sharks the old-fashioned way: Application software power without astronomical licensing costs. vendors won’t let their sharks eat grid. “The vendors haven’t come to grips Reader ROI: That means CIOs who want to save with how they’re going to license their How grid computing millions on their infrastructures have software,” says Jonathan Eunice, principal changes the software to build grid applications themselves— analyst with IT research company licensing model no mean feat. “There are a number of Illuminata. “Software licensing remains Why trust between vendors messy and wholly unsolved.” issues to make grid work,” says McKay, and CIOs is essential to who is CIO and senior vice president of At this point, vendors are unwilling to grid pricing operations for Genworth Financial. relax their traditional per-CPU software And the primary issue is (no The tools you need to begin licensing models to allow grid to surprise) money. flourish, according to a report from The your own grid project

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Software Licensing And when an insurance company can process its decisions faster than competitors, you’re not talking IT anymore, says McKay, you’re talking competitive advantage. “Grid is one of things that differentiates us as a business, not simply an IT shop," he says proudly. But vendors won’t vote themselves a reduction in revenue anytime soon, says The 451 Group’s Fellows, which means more CIOs will be left scratching their heads, wondering, Why not me?

The Meter Is Running Amok

When Genworth Financial CIO Scott MaKay wanted a grid, he had to build it himself. 451 Group, a research company. “None of the vendors are doing anything material to support changes [to the software licensing model] at this time,” says William Fellows, principal analyst at The 451 Group. The landscape is further cluttered by the conflicting claims that vendors make about their grid offerings in this hot, new market, says Carl Claunch, a vice president at Gartner Research. He says grid computing has been “hijacked by the marketing folks.” And even some vendors agree (about other vendors): “What all the vendors have done is to put grid under their umbrellas, [regardless of whether their solutions really qualify],” says Ken King, IBM’s vice president of grid 44

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computing. “That has created hype around grid, and confusion.” Other barriers to the creation of a solid grid market include a lack of standards and the high cost of reconfiguring standard client/server applications to work on grid. But despite all these problems, the grid buzz refuses to die because the potential for saving money, reducing complexity (for CIOs, anyway) and lowering maintenance burdens is far too compelling. McKay says he has slashed his hardware acquisition costs, chucked excess software and provided processing times that beat any of his competitors in the insurance industry.

For CIOs not steeped in the nuances of grid computing, cutting through the hype can seem daunting and not worth the trouble. Most of what vendors are offering is not grid. The list of grid pretenders is long, but it includes clustering, utility computing and virtualization. (See “What Grid Is—and Isn’t” for more clarity.) Once CIOs figure out whether a gridcomputing infrastructure is right for one or more of their software applications, then they have to decide how much help is really available from vendors and how much they want to pay. Finally, they have to be prepared to hurl themselves against the wall of software licensing. “The software-licensing model is the biggest impediment to grid computing,” says Gartner Research’s Claunch. “The vendors know they’ve got problems.” The few vendors who have tried to come up with a formula for grid pricing have ladled on the complexity, according to analysts. “If you look at the formal price sheets, it is a nightmare for the customer,” Illuminata’s Eunice says. “You can’t easily buy software that is intelligently licensed for the kind of dynamic infrastructure in grid.” Yet, alternative licensing models have been suggested, according to Fellows—such as one that would charge for actual usage of the application, not just for the absolute number of CPUs available in the grid. But these new models require vendors to embrace new forms of metering and billing mechanisms to track customer usage by time, users per month or transaction volume. Few mechanisms exist to measure the kind of application and component usage and license tracking that grid implies,

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although some are being tested. Even if those applications prove to be successful, there needs to be a huge leap of faith between the vendor and customer. Customers have to believe that they won’t be charged for time they aren’t using, and vendors have to believe that their customers aren’t somehow sneaking CPUs or users past monitoring tools. A few big companies with big vendor clout have been able to negotiate individual pricing and monitoring models, says Illuminata’s Eunice, “but for medium and small companies, it’s still too early.” Fellows says that CIOs he has spoken with aren’t asking their vendors to reinvent the wheel yet. They would be content with some modifications to the time-based usage models that they already have. “If their [vendor] made some incremental changes to license models, real simple things like rolling over minutes not used to a later time or not counting minutes used to review execution results,” that would be a start, Fellows says. “They just want some tweaks to what they are able to do now.” Though no vendor has publicly stated its intentions to alter its pricing model for grid computing (at least not in its purest form), a few vendors have taken what Fellows terms “baby steps.” SAP, for example, has been testing the open-source Globus Toolkit to grid-enable its products, which, if successful, might at least lead to pricing-model discussions. All it could take to liberate huge market share from competitors, says Fellows, would be for one powerful software vendor to simply change its model. Certain applications that have been developed in-house have no licensing costs, such as analytic, financial calculation and electronic design automation. Those have been on early adopter companies’ grids for years. But outside large corporations, analysts say there’s a lack of in-house grid talent to make those in-house solutions work.

The Grid Horizon Keeps Moving There are no explicit technical barriers to putting an application on a grid, according to Fellows. “If you really want to, you can grid-enable anything,” he says. But if there is a legitimate argument to be made against 46

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What GRId Is—and Isn’t Grid computing connects storage and data, as well as CPUs from multiple systems, into a centrally managed but flexible computing environment. True grid provides distributed resource management of heterogeneous systems in which you can quickly add and subtract systems—without regard for location, operating system or normal purpose—as needs dictate. Utility computing is one of a variety of marketing phrases (others include autonomous computing, computing-on-demand, adaptive enterprise) applied to business models that let customers retrieve computing resources as necessary. grid is the underlying technology for all of these models. Clustering simply refers to collections of computers in a fixed configuration designed to operate and be managed as a single, high-performance machine. Unlike grid, computers cannot enter and leave the pool as necessary—once in, they’re in for good. -T.W.

a wholesale shift to grid, it is that converting existing applications requires lots of hard work, money and experienced grid developers (who are in short supply today). Unless an application consumes a lot of processing power, CIOs might not see a big payback, and vendors might be left holding the bag for an expensive rewrite. The financial uncertainty surrounding software conversion costs and licensing models means that early adopters will probably pay a premium for grid-enabled applications, according to The 451 Group report, further slowing grid adoption. So few applications have been rewritten for grid today (mostly analytical software) that CIOs are left with stark choices: Bug your software vendor; convert an existing application to grid yourself, as McKay did; or build a grid application from scratch. Here’s why converting an application to grid takes a lot of work: The essence of grid computing is the availability of computing resources from all kinds of PCs and servers inside and outside your four walls. One attribute of early grid computing applications is that one task doesn’t depend on the outcome of another task. (In big, number-crunching grid applications, for example, calculations are parsed into small, independent slices and can be added together at any time.) But many enterprise applications have

dependencies—one calculation or process can’t move forward until another finishes. Developers have to figure out how to divide application processing into pieces (called threads of execution) to allow those applications to be run in parallel, according to Gartner Research’s Claunch. Unless the code can divide its operations across dozens, hundreds, thousands or more threads, says Claunch, it will not be able to scale its performance when given the many computing resources that grid offers. Parsing the application takes work and requires a lot more than simply tweaking existing applications; it may even require a complete rewrite. For all those reasons, CIOs haven’t yet implemented traditional enterprise applications—including ERP and CRM—on grid, because in these, each task typically depends on the outcome of others, which is not something grids are good at yet, though any application can theoretically be grid-enabled. Forcing those applications, as written, onto a grid would be similar to strapping an Atlas rocket to a Volkswagen. “Your car would melt,” says Illuminata’s Eunice. The core algorithms inside many of these transactional applications would also need to change. Observers aren’t optimistic about the economic incentives for vendors to rebuild their wares for grid computing. “Grid will proceed at the pace with which the software

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Software Licensing changes,” says Forrester Research principal analyst Frank Gillett. “Glaciers move faster.”

Let’s Pretend to Agree Standard methods for gridding applications would help speed the glacial pace of grid acceptance by reducing the cost and complexity of the development process. Though standards bodies and alliances have emerged—such as the Global Grid Forum, Enterprise Grid Alliance and the Globus Alliance—competing grid definitions, proprietary technologies and entrenched vendor allegiances have caused them to collapse into warring factions, according to grid analysts. “Right now, we’re at the end of the first [stage] where everyone’s battling,” says Illuminata’s Eunice. “It’s not the prettiest of pictures.” There are two major steps left to go before grid becomes enterprise-ready: First, the different groups must agree upon a set of standards; second, vendors need to build those standards into their products. Fellows is not convinced the fighting will stop long enough to move beyond the first stage. “When users see more and more [standards] organizations, then users see more and more complexity,” he says. But open source may break the gridlock on grid. The Globus Toolkit (now in its fourth version) is free for anyone to use. Yet, the toolkit is limited; it’s good enough to be effective at some tasks—such as analytic and electronic design automation applications—but not good enough to be effective at everything, says Eunice. As for CIO uptake—who knows? The Globus Alliance, the nonprofit group that offers the toolkit, does little marketing and does not diligently track enterprise usage. Worse, grid skills are in short supply, which makes many CIOs unwilling to share project details, leaving neophyte gridders with no road maps to follow. For all its early promise and economic benefits, in the end, grid computing may end up being a mirage for CIOs. They will continue to hear about how grid computing is an idyllic solution that everyone will be using in 10 years or 20 years (which they have already been saying for 10 years). Right now, says Gartner Re-

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GRId On the MaRCh 1960s

distant Relatives

In 1965, the developers of an operating system called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, an ancestor of Unix) presented a vision of “computing as a utility,” which is similar to grid computing today, according to CERN’s GridCafé website.

1970s the Birth of Grid According to Grid.org, when computers were first linked by networks, the idea of harnessing unused CPU cycles was born. A few early experiments included a pair of programs called Creeper and Reaper that ran on the ARPAnet (the precursor to the Internet).

1980s Grid Refined Scientists used grid computing to connect multiple workstations, which allowed them to work on complicated math problems and software compilations, utilizing idle CPUs to reduce processing times. 1996 Free Grid! The Globus Alliance formed to conduct R&D for the technology, standards and systems that form the grid. Alliance members eventually produced open-source software that is central to nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of international science and engineering activities.

1997 the First on the net Distributed.net became the first general-purpose grid-computing network on the Internet, according to Grid.org. Distributed.net eventually brought thousands of people together to crack cryptographic challenges in a distributed environment.

1999 setI Phone home The SETI@home project launched at the University of California at Berkeley. It uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Anyone who has an Internet connection and some spare CPUs can participate by running a free program that analyzes radio telescope data. So far, more than 5 million people have signed up.

2001 top this! Launched in August by the National Science Foundation, the TeraGrid aims to build and deploy the world’s largest distributed infrastructure for open scientific research by linking major supercomputing sites such as the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology. -T.W. SOURCES: CERN’s GridCafé; Grid.org; Globus Alliance; SETI@home; TeraGrid Project

search’s Claunch, “CIOs can’t see how to get from here to there.” For the few who can, such as McKay, the view is pretty good. It’s taken his IT department more than two years to get to where they are now with grid computing, but it’s

been well worth it. “Our ability to execute more effectively, to achieve the business results, is huge.” Too bad most CIOs can’t share those results. CIO Send feedback about this feature to editor@cio.in.

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Tax

Road

Back On the

BY Rahul Neel MaNI Ma

ive years ago, thirty percent of truckers who crossed into Punjab didn’t own up to what they were carrying. Through kickbacks, connections and blatant intimidation, these tough boys of the interstate got away with under-invoicing their cargo and sometimes not registering their loads at all. Its down-theriver effects, in terms of sales tax (now VAT), cost the government around Rs 700 crore a year. Across the State, registered businesses also pulled down their shutters on the tax department with a sizesize able portion of sales tax slipping out of the net.

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The government realized it was time to get strict and smart. Instead of going after freight haulers and other defaulters in an ad hoc manner, it rolled out COSTIS (Computerization of Sales Tax Sales Information System). The idea behind COTIS was to plug tax evasion, enhance the collection of revenues, bring efficiency to tax collection and provide better services to tax payers. Putting COSTIS in place cost the department Rs 50 crore. But the system got them back Rs 174 crore in the next three months. It’s ROI unheard of in e-governance, making COSTIS the poster child of successful e-government projects.

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ImagIng by b In esh sreedharan P hotos by srIvatsa shan dIlya nad b hagIrath

Punjab’s excise and taxation department reduced evasion, cut corruption and recovered its IT investment in less than a quarter.

Reader ROI:

how e-Government ROI can be made tangible Why a process approach is critical to a smooth transition Why transparency increases buy-in from all stakeholders

E-Governance The 21 districts of Punjab are home to about 156,000 registered businesses, dubbed ‘dealers’ by the tax department. These establishments contribute Rs 5,000 crore a year to the state’s exchequer in tax (payments are made on a quarterly basis).

Wheeler Dealers Manually handling this large a number of dealers led to loopholes, which unscrupulous dealers were quick to exploit. D.P. Reddy, commissioner, excise and taxation, Government of Punjab woke up every morning with new cases of dealers making

transactions unaccounted for. His department found bills in the name of non-existent dealers and even those with fabricated consigner and consignee names. “The manual regime provided a safe haven for tax evaders,” says Reddy. The government knew that about 30 percent of dealers weren’t paying their taxes but could do little about it. Additionally, the absence of on-tap information meant that the tax department could not track dealers who had filed their returns on time. The law laid heavy penalties on defaulters – another revenue channel the manual system did not permit the government to mine.

D.P. Reddy, Commissioner, Excise and Taxation, Government of Punjab, is able to track transactions conducted at ICC’s. This allows him to better estimate tax revenues.

govern main (48-51).indd 50

But like many e-government projects, COSTIS had its fair share of inertia. Though the project was conceived in the 1990’s, it hobbled along for close to a decade. Transparency, an additional benefit of COSTIS, was neded but a lack of political will slowed the project. That was how the system remained till someone did the math and figured the extent to which defaulters were defrauding the government.

Speedy Recovery ETTSA (Excise & Taxation Technical Service Agency) was then quickly formed. “It took us just under two years to streamline work and put the initial processes in place,” relives Reddy. Led by H.M.S. Rosha, ETTSA’s CEO, the agency pieced together a plan to computer computerize ICCs (Information Collection Centers) located at all 36 interstate border barri barricades. Putting ICC data on stream was the next challenge. Their most daunting task, however, was creating and running a Sales Tax Information System online. This was crucial since information was only useful in the hands of the people who monitored and tallied what was coming in with sales tax dues. (See infographic: Chasing the Money). But no sooner had the Sales Tax Information System been deployed, that the Union Government introduced VAT. Transitioning from a sales tax regime with a single tax applied at point-of-sale to VAT where various taxes were collected at each stage of manufacture, unnerved many. But the move had to be made and it had to be done quickly before the project lost the support it had garnered. COVIS (Computerization of VAT Information System) was introduced and implemented in a phased manner. First, the gateways into Punjab – the 36 ICCs - which provided information about consignments that were going in and out of the state, were digitized and wired into a central sever, located in Patiala. Simultaneously, ETTSA also connected 10 out of the 21 district offices. The second and the third phases will connect the other districts and build a Disaster Recovery Site at New Delhi. The project joined 100 remote locations (46 via VSAT). COVIS was now piping active information to the desktops of 825 sales tax enforcers.

Online VAT was the department’s gift from Santa, almost literally. Within the first quarter COVIS sponged up Rs 174 crore. The government saw a 25 percent increase in revenue straightaway, almost all of it from defaulters. COVIS incorporates an Audit and Investigation module that intelligently isolates tax-payers suspected of forging their returns. The system also lists dealers, providing their contact information and the status of their quarterly filings.

Two-way Street Six thousand repeat defaulters lost their licenses soon after COVIS was launched. This made many regard COVIS as predatory, and focused on ensnaring dealers. But COVIS also brought justice to the system. Putting the contents and status of taxrelated case online, the Appeals and Revision module unclogs bureaucratic channels. It increased dealer confidence about receiving justice from the bench. “The aim was to shift to a paperless approach and provide a transparent process to the citizens of Punjab,” says Rosha. Among the most important contributions of COVIS is a module that captures information of goods that come into the state. “Especially under VAT, we need to know what goods are crossing the state line, because we need to levy tax on these commodities,” explains Rosha.

Another advantage COVIS SNAPSHOT out a refund in 60 days, we offers is swifter disseminadissemina promise to pay interest on the Sales & Excise Commission offices tion of information. It took refund amount. If we expect 100 months to react to information the tax payer to shell out inter interExcise & Tax Dept. presented by ICCs. Now, inforinfor est on late submissions, he employees mation can be retrieved and has the right to expect interest 825 analyzed at the click of a mouse. from us too,” says Reddy. ICCs “We know the amount of export ETTSA’s success has led to 36 and import each dealer makes a plan to introduce 500 ‘‘Bikri Average tax daily. Even inter-dealer tradtrad Kar Seva centers’ at high-traf high-trafrevenue (2004) ing information is available. fic areas in major towns. These rs 5,000 crore Cross-checking filed returns kiosks will bring tax-filing to a Registered dealers with information provided by citizen’s doorstep. 1,56,000 ICCs is now instantaneous,” The kiosks will offer serLocations consays Rosha. vices ranging from filing of nected by leased lines The streamlining of COVIS returns, submission of appli appli55 helped straighten the shoulshoul cations for registrations and Locations conders of many over-worked refunds to issuing statutory nected by VSATs tax officers. The number of forms. “We will also enable 46 defaulters at large and of tax payment of taxes, penalty, and applications in the pipeline interest through these kiosks,” were placed on a grid and says Reddy. monitored. Just this act brought down appliThe department is currently pushing to cation turnaround from a year to 60 days. web-enable ICCs. In the future, dealers will be able to give the ICC a heads-up of their trucks’ cargo, arm themselves with a VAT 36 Graft Decelerates form and save time. The upshot of this is the downfall of corRosha’s is going all out with COVIS to ruption. “We have taken away as much disshorten the queues at Punjab’s border, while cretion as possible from officials. They once keeping a look out for those who try to sneak had the discretion to impose penalties rangacross. Note to lorry drivers: Beware. COVIS ing from 10 to 150 percent. The system has slotted penalties and given people access to is watching. CIO information,” says Rosha. Bureau head North Rahul Neel Mani can be But what’s really gaining people’s goodreached at rahul_m@cio.in will is the refund module. “If we don’t pay

In fograPhIcs: vIkas kaPoor

E-Governance

Chasing the Money Monitoring in-bound cargo with COVIS helps track tax defaulters.

Kiosks

Registered businesses or ‘dealers’ use kiosks to track pending court cases and government refunds.

Central Server

The central server in Patiala is the heart of COVIS. It connects to 825 tax department staffers.

ICC’s

There are 36 Information Collection Centers (ICC’s) at Punjab’s borders. Freight haulers feed information of their cargo at this point.

Tax Department

With COVIS, tax department staffers can now instantly track what each dealer sends out or brings into the State, making it easier to monitor tax revenue.

Dealers

1,56,000 dealers sell or manufacture goods coming into the state. COVIS with its instant cross-checks brought more dealers into the tax net.

Plotting

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BDA believes in an automated solution with minimun human interaction.

M. N. Vidyashankar, Commissioner, Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) has almost doubled his department’s revenues by a proactive approach to IT. The 29-year-old agency he heads has also seen its IT budget rocket to Rs 45 crore this fiscal. His yardstick for success, however, isn’t restricted to the figures. Vidyashankar’s top priority is to drive BDA projects swiftly towards completion, restore the agency’s credibility and reduce public inconvenience.

CIO: Can you describe the IT framework BDA is putting in place? How does this fit with your agenda? M. N. Vidyashankar: Any development authority in the country, which deals with real estate, is a victim of two shortages – transparency and accountability. I’ve yet to find an example of one where both of these are practiced. Our agenda is to provide both at BDA. People have a right to know what we are doing. Keeping this in mind, we have launched an ambitious project to become a paperless office. This will do away with any ‘discretion’ used by officials. We have set March 2006 as our deadline. Hopefully, we should be in a position to launch by the end of January 2006. We don’t believe in meeting targets, but in beating them. My appointment at the BDA, in August 2004, came at a time when key projects including the flyovers and the Arkavathi layout were languishing. Given the state of affairs, certain tasks needed prioritization. BDA needed to complete these projects, reduce public inconvenience and restore government credibility. That’s when we realized that using IT would help speed up the process. The use of IT will cover all our functions across nine departments and four division offices. We aren’t introducing

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B Y T. R A D h A k R i s h N A

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Interview | M. N. Vidyashankar IT just for the sake of it. We are using IT to provide better services to our citizens and increase the level of efficiency in our functions.

2006-07. We will begin the second phase in 2007. SNAPSHOT

BDA

Turnover 2004-05

Rs 2,000 crore

Can you elaborate on the paperless office plan?

The �� paperless project comprises 27 modules, Projects Overseen 24 of which are being Rs �� 45 crore �� has been developed by HCL. Their earmarked for IT projects in ERP Metropolitan Spatial responsibility is to design, 2005-06. For this year, our Data Infrastructure develop, implement and priorities are a paperless (GIS) support an Integrated office and e-Pragati, which Digitization of Land Records, Documents Management Informais a multi-purpose kiosk. Paperless Office tion System (IMIS). This e-Pragati at present has a e-Pragati kiosks will automate business pilot running at two locations E-commerce processes in all BDA dein Bangalore. Soon, we will land COntrolled partments and divisions. issue a tender to construct 1036 sq km. We expect the project to 100 e-Pragati kiosks, which Staff reduce paperwork by 80 are going to be enabled with 927 percent and by this, cut GIS (Geographic Information Departments down turnaround time. System) color printers and 9 Part of the project will facilitate e-commerce. Offices requirement is for it to The paperless office project is 4 divisions mesh with existing IT worth Rs 1.5 crore and we have applications like OCMS already purchased the verifica(Online Complaint tion and validation tool for this. BDA is also hiring 400 computers Management System), IVRS (Interactive in December. Voice Response System), GIS and the eIf the need arises, we will even employ Pragati kiosks. Wi-Fi to increase productivity. We will need to train around 450 BDA We implemented the GIS project better employees for six weeks on the applications. known as the Metropolitan Spatial Data After putting the system in place, HCL will Infrastructure (MSDI) project, at a cost maintain the project for three years. of Rs 24.5 crore. We are the first development authority in the country to build a But, how does the IMIS help shrink turngeo-reference for our entire jurisdiction. around time? This project was completed in June 2005. The �� system has already brought down turnaround time to 12 months. Nor It took two years to develop the GIS. It mally, land allotment takes 18 months has 71 layers, to which we propose to add for undisputed plots. It is a time-con149. The GIS project basically helps us identify private and public properties and suming process because we have to follow the Land Acquisition Act, which their associated problems, if they have states that a public notice of between any. Using the GIS system, BDA, or its customers, can access a mine of property30 and 45 days must be given. We can’t related information. touch that. We are also the first government agenCitizens now get instantaneous inforcy to implement SAP. We acquired the mation related to land allotment. As it is, most of the information regarding onERP solution for HR, payroll and finance going BDA projects or land allotments functions and it cost us Rs 55 lakh. is available at www.bdabangalore.org. All our current IT initiatives are part The site also allows citizens to download of the first phase under the Master Plan BDA forms. And, for complaints and 2005-2015 for Greater Bangalore. We exgrievances, there is e-Pragati. pect to consolidate all our IT projects by What level of IT spend are you targeting for this?

interview (52-56).indd 54

IT Budget for 2005-06

Rs 45 crore

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BDA believes in a fully automated solution. I don’t want any human interface. And, it should be 24/7. Most of our services are free for the consumer, unless they’re printing downloaded information. Is it to reduce ‘human interaction’ that e-Pragati kiosks are being deployed?

As �� I’ve mentioned, the kiosks will be GIS-enabled and will offer information and a provision to register and monitor complaints. This will enable the citizens of Bangalore to access everything they need from the BDA without trudging all the way to our office. It is among the most ambitious customer-friendly initiatives visualized by any development authority in the country. e-Pragati will also be a first-itskind in Asia. The kiosk will be equipped with information updates, information on various application formats and the required documents, different BDA application forms and digitized, printable maps. It will even allow citizens to submit and receive approval for their building plans. Normally, that would entail a visit to a BDA office. e-Pragati will also help citizens to lodge a complaint at the kiosk and an IVRS will follow up, providing them feedback on their problem. The system will ask them if they are satisfied with the way their problem was addressed. It will give them the option to escalate the matter to the commissioner—which means that I will get an SMS detailing the complaint. Where will anyone get this kind of facility in Bangalore? We have already ordered the construct ion of 25 kiosk shells. Once they are done, another 25 will follow. We are in the final stages of zeroing in on our hardware needs. We have incorporated public feedback from the pilot to improve the kiosks. How do you go about increasing accountability? Does digitization of land records play a part there?

BDA �� has finished digitizing all its records. The process, implemented by a French company, SCE-Créocéan, covered lakhs of documents, including the land

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Interview | M. N. Vidyashankar records of 79 layouts, documents of 77 lakh customers and about 1.90 lakh owners. It took almost two years and the database is larger than 79 GB now. The process will fulfill our primary objective of using IT to increase efficiency. For instance, BDA recently developed new layouts in Bangalore. A few months ago, we were unsure of the status of these allotments. We didn’t know either how many parcels of land had been allocated or how many customers had received confirmation letters or even how many were waiting to be occupied. Now, we can answer all these questions and pin down the status of each allocation and share this information with the public. How has your experience of deploying IT at the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board helped at BDA?

I was faced with a lot of challenges at the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB). The labor union at BWSSB is very influential and they told me that the money we had spent on IT five years ago was not benefiting either the BWSSB or its customers. You see, the BWSSB ran a computer bill center pilot for three years at BTM Layout. It had a number of teething problems. People complained that their bills had errors and that they were delivered late. The labor union said that the pilot had failed and I would too if I gave it another chance. Despite a three-year uphill climb, we reinitiated the project in June 2002 and made sure we kept the customer in focus. Today, no other government agency in Bangalore delivers more faultless bills than the BWSSB. The initiative, known as KaverEcom, has set the trend for other government agencies in Karnataka. While the BDA is not a utility service, we are sure we can replicate BWSSB’s success. The most important thing is to keep the customer in focus. You can only bring out the best in a system if you get into the customer’s shoes.

“Keeping accountability in mind, we have launched an ambitious project to become a paperless office. This will do away with any ‘discretion’ used by officials.”

few months ago, we didn’t have accurate information about BDA’s properties, the status of different infrastructure projects and the position of land allotments. Now, we have this information, and most relevantly, reviews take place every week. As an offshoot to this process, we identified BDA properties running into hundreds of acres that were encroached on. These have been recovered. After the BDA documents were digitized, our collections have shot up incredibly. BDA revenue collection from 2001- 200�� was about �s 23�� crore. In the first eight months of this year, we have already collected �s 27�� crore. Collections from Property Tax, Auction Sites and �ents went up by 173 percent, 16�� percent and 190 percent respectively between 2003-2004 and 2004-200��. We must not overlook the fact that project management has become easier. And, that it brings BDA’s services to a citizen’s doorstep. We plan to achieve more. We are working to make Bangalore a global city. You’d implemented KaverEcom on Linux. What scope do you see for Linux in government projects?

Linux is good for all projects. It’s costeffective and Linux makes it easy to migrate or upgrade a project five years down the line. These are the two factors I view. The way things stand, all the applications at BDA run on Linux, except e-Pragati. Even here, although the pilot is running on Windows, we plan to migrate to Linux when we scale up. CIO

—M. N. Vidyashankar

I s t h a t h ow you define ROI?

We describe �OI in terms of valueadded services to citizens. For example, a 56

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T. radhakrishna can be reached at radha_t@cio.in

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Essential

technology Illustration S hyam S. Deshpande

From Inception to Implementation â&#x20AC;&#x201D;I.T. That Matters

Using software to model the future of IT may free CIOs from the risks and limitations of all that annoying hardware.

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The Virtues of Virtualization BY FRED HAPGOOD VIRTUALIZATION | During the past few decades, CIOs have stood at the center of one of the great technological revolutions in history: The replacement of the physical atom by the computational bit as the medium of commerce and culture. The profession might be forgiven for thinking that nothing is left for the next generation but tinkering. What could compare with a transition like that? Actually, something almost as big might be coming over the horizon: The replacement of the bit with the virtual bit. Virtualization is the substitution of physical computing elements, either hardware or software, with artificial impostors that exactly replicate the originals, but without the sometimes inconvenient need for those originals to actually exist. Need a 1 terabyte hard drive, but only have 10 100GB drives? No problem, virtualization software can provide an interface that makes all 10 drives look and act like a single unit to any inquiring application. Got some data you need from an application you last accessed in 1993 on an aging MicroVAX 2000 that hit the garbage bin a decade ago? A virtual Digital VMS simulator could save your skin.

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essential technology

Stated like that, virtualization can sound like little more than a quick and dirty hack, and indeed, for most of the history of computing, that is exactly how the technique was viewed. Its roots lie in the early days of computing, when it was a means of tricking single-user, single-application mainframe hardware into supporting multiple users on multiple applications. But as every aspect of computing has grown more complex, the flexibility and intelligence that

how to do everything faster. In this case, the company’s IT center concluded that their old server procurement system had to be accelerated. Servers, of course, are pieces of physical equipment; they come with their own processing, memory, storage resources and operating systems. What the Simplot team did was use virtualization tools from VMware, a virtual infrastructure company, to create software-only servers

Immortality for Aging Systems Computing is unlike most technologies in that it has two systems of preservation: Restoration, which it shares with every other technology, and simulation. Alas, restoration is not simple. Very few computer components can be made by hobbyists in their basement. Fortunately, there is the alternative:

As every aspect of computing has grown more complex, the flexibility and intelligence that virtualization adds to the management of computing resources have become steadily more attractive.

S imulation. With the right virtualization software, old hardware can be brought back to life as programs running on PCs. The virtue of simulation is that old documentation is a lot easier to store than old hardware, and often the memories of techies reach far back. With the goal of mining some of that old documentation and memory, the Computer History Simulation Project is trying to create PC-compatible simulators for a wide range of significant computer hardware and software

virtualization adds to the management of computing resources have become steadily more attractive. Today it stands on the lip of being the next big thing.

Raising the Dead The Computer History Simulation Project, coordinated by Bob Supnik at SiCortex (see sidebar ‘Immortality for Aging Systems’), uses virtualization to fool programs of historical interest into thinking that they are running on computer hardware that vanished decades ago. Supnik’s project has a practical end as well: Sometimes old systems are so embedded in the corporate landscape that they must be kept running. If the real hardware is unavailable, the only way to keep the old machines running is to virtualize them. In a more contemporary example of the power of virtualization, about three years ago J. R. Simplot, a Rs 13,500 crore (US$ 3 billion) food and agribusiness company in Boise, Idaho, found itself in a phase of especially rapid growth in server deployments. Of course, with rapid growth comes the headache of figuring out

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that interacted with the network just like hardware servers, although they were really only applications. Whenever Simplot needed another server it would just flip the switches appropriate to the server type (Web, application, database, e-mail, FTP, e-commerce and so on). From that point, an automated template generated the virtual machine on a specific VMware ESX host machine.

systems and publish them as freeware on the

Virtual Improvements

practical and cultural issues. Often there will

According to Tony Adams, a technology analyst at Simplot, there were gains all across the board. The time to get a new server up and running on the system went from weeks to hours or less. Uptime also increased, because the servers were programs and could run on any supported x86 hardware anywhere. If a machine failed or needed maintenance, the virtual server could be quickly moved to different hardware. Perhaps most important were the gains in utilization efficiencies. Servers are built for specific roles. Sometimes demand for a particular role is in sync with available resources, but usually it isn’t. In the case of

be some residual versions of those machines

Internet. Examples of simulators currently available are the Data General Nova, Digital VAX, IBM System 3 and MITS Altair 8800. The problem these simulators address is that computing systems lose value quickly and are rapidly discarded, together with their applications and documentation. Ten years after a computer is brought to market, it might as well have never existed. This raises both

running somewhere in the world for which lack of support is a critical problem. Useful or significant data might be stranded on media that only those machines can read. Also, these machines represent important chapters in our history. It seems strange that we should know more about the technology of the 19th century than that of our own time, but older machines typically lasted longer and were better documented. For more information about the project, visit http://simh.trailing-edge.com.

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essential technology

“real” servers, if there is a mismatch, then there is nothing that you can do about it; you’re stuck with what you have. If you end up with an average utilization rate of 10 percent per server, so be it. (The need to provide for peak demand makes the problem worse, and utilization can often be far below even 10 percent.) Low utilization means IT is stuck with unnecessary maintenance issues, security faces unnecessary access issues (they

Adams wants one machine to look like many machines, but it is just as possible to virtualize the other way: Making many machines look like one. Virtualization underlies the well-known RAID storage tricks that allow many disks to be treated as one huge drive for ease of access, and one disk to be treated as many for the purpose of robust backup. Another prime use for virtualization is development. The hardware world is growing much

Quite possibly, the growth of virtualization predicts a deep change in the responsibilities of a CIO.

2007

By most new PCs and servers will incorporate virtualization technology. SOURCE: Gartner

have to worry about protecting more machines), and facilities must deal with unnecessary heat and power issues. Virtualization fixes these problems. The power to design any kind and number of servers that you like allows you to align capacity with load continuously and precisely. In the case of Simplot, once Adams’s servers turned virtual, he was able to deploy nearly 200 virtual servers on only a dozen physical machines. And, he says, typical CPU, network, disk and memory utilization on the VMware ESX boxes is greater than 50 percent— compared with utilization of around 5 percent on dedicated server hardware. Virtualization also makes disaster recovery planning simpler, because it allows you to write server clusters appropriate to whatever infrastructure you have on hand. As Adams points out, conventional disaster recovery schemes force you to have an exact clone of your hardware sitting around doing nothing. “But personally, what I really like,” he says, “is the remote manageability. I can knock out new [servers] or do repairs anywhere on the Net, without even going to the data center.” 60

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more complex all the time: Product cycles are turning faster, the number of device types is always rising, and the practice of running programs over networks means that any given program might come in contact with a huge universe of hardware. Developers can’t begin to afford to buy all of this hardware for testing, and they don’t need to: Running products on virtualized models of the hardware allows for quality assurance without the capital expense. Virtualizing the underlying hardware also gives developers far more control. Peter Magnusson, CTO of Virtutech, a systems simulation company in San Jose, Calif., points out that you can stop simulated hardware anywhere you like, any time you want, to investigate internal details.

Unreal Future During the next year or two, virtualization is on track to move from its current success in storage, servers and development, to networks and data centers. So CIOs will then be able to build software versions of firewalls, switches, routers, load balancers, accelerators and caches, exactly as needed. Everything that was once embodied in cards, disks and physical equipment of

any kind, will be organized around a single point of control. If virtualization vendor promises materialize, changes that once were out of the question, or that at least would have required considerable manhours and operational risk, will be done in minutes, routinely. What those changes will mean is very much a topic for current discussion. For instance, all the new knobs and buttons virtualization provides will raise issues of policy, because it will be possible to discriminate among classes of service that once had to be handled together. You will, for instance, be able to write a Web server that gives customers who spend above a certain limit much better service than those who spend only half as much. There will be huge opportunities for automation. Infrastructure may be able to reconfigure itself in response to changes in demand, spinning out new servers and routers as necessary, the way load balancing is done today. (Certainly IBM et al. have been promoting just such a vision of the ondemand computing future.) Virtualization examples so far have all been hardware-centric, because the inherent inflexibility of hardware means

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the elasticity advantages of virtualization are greater than with software. However, virtualization can work anywhere in the computing stack. You can virtualize both the hardware and the operating system, which allows programs written for one OS to run on another, and programs written for a virtual OS to run anywhere (similar to how Java maintains its hardware independence through the Java Virtual Machine). Quite possibly, the growth of virtualization predicts a deep change in the responsibilities of CIOs. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future no CIO will ever think about hardware: Raw physical processing and storage will be bought in bulk from information utilities or server farms. Applications will be the business of the departments or offices requiring them. The center of a CIO’s job will be the care and feeding of the execution environment. The very title of CIO might vanish, to be replaced, of course, by CVO.

Illustration Shya m S. Des hpa nde

essential technology

Under Development

Traveling by Wire

Taking It All In

ROBOTICS | The attendees for your 1 p.m. meeting have begun to arrive. But they’re not

In that world, virtualization could graduate into a full-throated simulation of entire systems, the elements of which would not be just computing hardware, as now, but all the motors, switches, valves, doors, engines, vehicles and sensors in a company. The model would run in parallel with the physical company and in realtime. Where now virtualization is used for change management, disaster recovery planning, or maintenance scheduling for networks and their elements, it would in the future do the same for all facilities. Every object or product sold would come with a model of itself that could fit into one of these execution environments. It would be the CVO’s responsibility to make sure that each company’s image of itself was accurate and complete and captured the essentials. And that would not be a virtual responsibility in the least. CIO

coming through the door. Instead, solid, 3-D models magically self-assemble around the table, looking, moving and talking like impressionistic interpretations of their long-distant human counterparts. Professors Seth Goldstein and Todd Mowry, along with Intel Principal Investigator Jason Campbell, are building “claytronic atoms” or “catoms”—centimeter-diameter pellets embedded with electromagnets that will enable them to connect to and move around other catoms. By controlling potentially billions of catoms as a unit, the researchers foresee creating accurate, active models of 3-D objects. For remote conferencing, attendees could be recorded using a combination of video and motion sensors, with the collected data sent over the Internet to a waiting pile of catoms. The researchers even imagine a time when doctors could control catom-based representations of themselves for remote examinations. In the interim, less sophisticated catom technology might allow engineers to quickly create 3-D replicas of their projects, with on-screen changes in a computer-aided design program instantly appearing in the catom model. Catoms could also be used as an input device. “Imagine that an architect is planning to remodel part of your house,” Mowry says. “They could show you a physical model, even though they live in a different city. If you aren’t happy with the design, either you or the architect could modify it in real-time. [You] could simply grab the model and move walls, make stairways larger, resize windows [and so on].” The professors acknowledge that they are many years away from their goal. Their current catom models work only in two dimensions and are approximately 1.75-inch-wide rods, not centimeter-diameter spheres. They also note that designing software to control legions of catoms may be a bigger challenge than engineering the hardware itself. But the researchers believe catoms could dramatically change how we interact with computers. “This technology could potentially make the display-keyboard-mouse interface look as antiquated someday as punch cards look today,” Mowry says. — Christopher Lindquist

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Pundit

essential technology

Java GoesWild Dissatisfaction with enterprise Java development options has also erupted in a surge of creativity.

Vendors need to give programmers what they want—or open source may take it by force.

BY ERIC KNORR OPEN SOURCE | A funny thing happened to me a few months back after I moderated a panel on Web portals for Sun’s JavaOne conference. A guy came up to me after the proceedings—let’s call him Open Source Angry Guy—and, snarling with disgust, read me the riot act for inviting only suits (from BEA, Plumtree, Sun and Vignette) and excluding the open-source community. I didn’t have anything to do with the lineup, so I cheerfully admitted he was right. In hindsight, I now think that Open Source Angry Guy may have been a walking omen for the software industry. I’m not just talking about open-source software, wild-eyed zealots or even IBM’s challenge to Sun to create an open-source version of Java. I’m talking about the open-source model of feedback that’s popping up everywhere, in which customers are wrenching control over product development out of the hands of vendors. Early last year, for instance, IBM called for Sun to release a core open-source Java version to increase proliferation, reduce complexity and accelerate innovation. Without actually acceding to IBM’s demand, Sun has made several strides, beginning with the release of OpenSolaris last June. Then there’s the Mustang project on Sun’s Java.net, which 62

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lets fans catch weekly updates to Java SE 6 as it edges toward release in 2006. Plus, the company decided to throw its Java Desktop System into the opensource cauldron. The whole theme of JavaOne, in fact, was participation. The most striking proof of that intent was the announcement of the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification, otherwise known as JSR 208. Its goal is to create a standard Java integration environment to support Web servicesbased business process management and orchestration. The community can participate by working on Sun’s open-source Enterprise Service Bus, which is based on the JBI 1.0 specification. Dissatisfaction with enterprise Java development options has also erupted in a surge of creativity. A flood of opensource tools and frameworks have arrived: Spring, Struts, Ant, MyFaces and more. The most radical Java departure, however, has been led by the proponents of dynamic scripting languages, such as PHP, Perl, Python, JavaScript and Ruby. Until a few years ago, I bought the industry line that Java, VB and C++ were so dominant that not much else mattered. But Web apps surged to dominate enterprise application development. The lightweight nature of dynamic scripting enables many more iterations than in, say, some lumbering

Enterprise JavaBeans project, so that the final result is closer to what the business side wanted in the first place. But scripting languages lack the reliability and security offered by Java and Microsoft .Net. So a new scripting language named Groovy—which runs in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and incorporates elements of Python, Ruby and Smalltalk—has spawned on Codehaus. org. And there are other JVM scripting alternatives, including Jython, JRuby and Rhino. Instead of some slow, graphical, integrated development environment on top of Java, developers get the scripting flexibility they love. Programming languages are not software, and few areas of technology attract so much activity around the edges as Java. But the software industry should take stock of what’s going on with Java and the free-for-all network of wikis and blogs that provide the mechanism for its interactive evolution. The software industry, the media I work in, and so much else in our society used to be all about control. But when change proceeds too slowly or when those in charge forget how to listen, the Open Source Angry Guys don’t just get mad, they take over. Eric Knorr is executive editor at large at InfoWorld. Send feedback about this column to editor@cio.in

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