January 1 2006

Turn to Page 6 to meet these Ones To Watch.

MEET RISING STARS They’ve been trained, mentored and measured, and now they’re ready to take charge. Our special coverage begins on Page 24 and includes:

HOW TO DEVELOP LEADERS

Smart CIOs know that nurturing IT leaders is good for organizations — and for them.

PROFILES IN LEADERSHIP

The qualities CIOs should be on the lookout for.

From The Editor

What is CIO India doing featuring people on the cover who aren’t CIOs?

Bringing up Talent If you want to nurture your brightest, you need to invest in their growth.

The answer is simple, we’re looking for the next generation of standout IT leaders. And we thought the New Year was the best time to do so.

I’m very pleased to announce Ones to Watch. It’s an exercise that identifies the rising stars in IT: Senior staff who are destined to become the CIOs of the future. To be recognized, these future CIOs must have demonstrated leadership, driven innovation and delivered value to the business; in short, they will soon be able to head up their own IT organization. All honorees were nominated by their CIOs and are currently their top IT lieutenants.

There are three basic reasons for Ones to Watch. For one, we believe that developing the next generation of IT leaders is essential to IT’s ability to add real and sustained value to the enterprise. Through this, we also honor those CIOs who foster leaders and showcase how they do it. Second, this ensures that we stay in touch with the people who are leading the profession as they advance in their careers. Finally, it is a way for us to serve our readers by helping them recognize their key staff in a positive and public way.

I believe that one of the most important responsibilities of a CIO is developing future IT leaders. Yet our research shows that many CIOs do not spend enough time and attention Would you turn down an on this. Somewhere between the pressures of opportunity to gain a team budgets and deadlines and the need to ensure that is able to increase business buy-in, the best of intentions amount your sphere of influence in to nothing. the organization?

All CIOs contacted for our special report were firm in their belief that the ROI from leadership development is really good. After all, would you turn down an opportunity to gain a team that knows how to align technology and business and is able to increase your sphere of influence in the organisation?

The writing is on the wall — If you want to nurture your best and brightest, you need to invest in their growth.

I’d like to know your opinion on our Ones to Watch initiative. Please direct your thoughts to vijay_r@cio.in. Here’s wishing you a year filled with good fortune and talent.

Vijay Ramachandran, Editor vijay_r@cio.in

J a n u a r y 1 , 2 0 06 | REAL CIO WORLD

Vol/1 | ISSUE/4

JanUary/1/2006 | Vol/01 | issue/04

Suren Shetty, Yes Bank

Dheeraj Sinha, Apollo Tyres

S.P. Giridhar, Godfrey Philips

Shiv Shankar Singh, Bse

Veena Vasanth, Biocon

Debashish Chakraborty, Honda siel

Jitendra Sarode, Pantaloon

Neeraj Bhargava, Group CEO and Atul Dawda, Senior VP & CTO, WNS Global Services

SPECIaL REPORT

ONES TO

WATCH

3 2

Leadership development | 24 With the Ones to Watch initiative, we honor a stellar group of future CIOs.

How Stars are Made A guide to developing your future leaders.

Feature by Rahul Neel Mani

What Leadership Looks Like coVEr ImagIng b In ESh SrEEdharan coVEr P hoto by Sr IVatSa Shan dIlya

Our 30 Ones to Watch honorees possess vision, the ability to influence others and a talent for getting things done.

Feature by Balaji Narasimhan

30 Rising Stars The 30 Ones to Watch honorees come from a wide range of backgrounds, but all share a passion and a talent for leadership.

Profiles by Team CIO

J a n u a R y 1 , 2 0 06 | REAL CIO WORLD

more Âť

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content

(cont.)

E-Governance is a mass movement for Dr. G.D. Gautama, Principal Secretary, IT department, West Bengal

6 0

departments Trendlines

| 13

Research | Rs 1,09,000 Crore and Counting Input Devices | No Shortchange for Shorthand Book Review | Work Smarter Ergonomics | Of Displays and Headaches Instant Messaging | Answers at Your Fingertips By the Numbers | Stressed, but Happy Mobile Technology | New Breed of Batteries Executive Moments | Scaling the Heights

Essential Technology | 64 Security | New Locks, New Keys By Galen Gruman Under Development | General Purpose Grids?

Pundit | Looking Out; Looking In By Eric Knorr

From the Editor

|4

Bringing up Talent | If you want to nurture your brightest, you need to invest in their growth.

By Vijay Ramachandran

Inbox

| 12

Govern Mindset Manifesto | 60 Dr. G. D. Gautama, Principal Secretary IT department, West Bengal, has done much to change perceptions and re-invent the way citizens interact with the government.

Interview by T. Radhakrishna

Savings Up For Auction | 56 We take a look at how three governments across India and Scotland have pioneered a way to hasten tenders, create transparency, and save the tax-payers crores.

Feature by T. Radhakrishna

Executive Expectations View From The Top | 44 Kwang-Ro Kim, Managing Director, LGEIL, reveals how LG uses IT to empower employees and the company.

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

c o.in

2 2

Interview by Rahul Neel Mani

Software and Systems Fixing The Requirements Mess | 50 The requirements process is destroying projects in ways that aren’t evident until too late. Some CIOs are stepping in to rewrite the rules.

Feature by Christopher Lindquist

J a n u a r y 1 , 2 0 06 | REAL CIO WORLD

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REAL WORLD M anagement

President N Bringi Dev

COO Louis D’Mello Edito r ial Editor Vijay Ramachandran

Bureau Head-North Rahul Neel Mani

Special Correspondents T Radhakrishna Balaji Narasimhan

Senior Correspondent Gunjan Trivedi

advisory board

Anil Nadkarni

Arindam Bose

Arun Gupta Sr. Director - Business Technology, Pfizer India

a_gupta@cio.in

Arvind Tawde

M D Agarwal

Creative Director Jayan K Narayanan

Mani Mulki

Binesh Sreedharan

26, 27

Borland Software

17

Canon

7

Epson India

9

Hewlett Packard (I) Sales Pvt Ltd. 2, 3, 70

CIO, Reliance Industries Ltd, a_chauhan@cio.in

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

Designers Shyam S Deshpande

APW President

VP & CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra, a_tawde@cio.in

D esign & Production

MANAGER - CREATIVE DESIGN Ashwin Ramesh Boricha

49

Head IT, LG Electronics India, a_bose@cio.in

Ashish Kumar Chauhan Editorial Director-Online R Giridhar

ADC Krone

Head IT, Thomas Cook, a_nadkarni@cio.in

COPY EDITOR Sunil Shah www.CIO.IN

Advertiser Index

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

Interface Connectronics Pvt. Ltd.

5

Microsoft

11

Oracle

69

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

Wipro Infotech

20, 21

Sanil Kumar Vikas Kapoor Anil V K

Photography Srivatsa Shandilya

Production TK Karunakaran

Neel Ratan Executive Director – Business Solutions, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, n_ratan@cio.in Rajesh Uppal General Manager – IT, Maruti Udyog, r_uppal@cio.in

E ditor ial & Sal es Contacts

Mark eting and Sal es

BUSINESS Manager Naveen Chand Singh

brand Manager Alok Anand

Marketing Siddharth Singh

Bangalore Mahantesh Godi

Prof. R.T.Krishnan

Bangalore

Associate Professor, IIM-Bangalore, r_krishnan@cio.in

IDG Media Private Limited 10th Floor Vayudooth Chambers

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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

S Gopalakrishnan COO & Head Technology, Infosys Technologies

s_gopalakrishnan @cio.in S R Balasubramanian VP - IS, Hero Honda Motors, sr_balasubra manian@cio.in

Fax : +91 80 3058 6065 Editorial: vijay_r@cio.in Sales: mahantesh_godi@idgindia.com Mumbai IDG Media Private Limited No. 208, 2nd floor, “Madhava”,

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Director, IIIT - Bangalore. s_sadagopan@cio.in

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Sanjay Sharma

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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.

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

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Fax: +91 11 5167 4233 CTO, Shopper’s Stop Ltd, u_krishnan@cio.in V Balakrishnan CIO, Polaris Software Ltd., v_balakrishnan@cio.in

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J a n u a r y 1 , 2 0 06 | REAL CIO WORLD

IDG Media Private Limited

rahul_m@cio.in Sales: Ph: +91 98 991 98980 sudhir_argula@idgindia.com

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reader feedback

Inbox

Analyze This The article on Air Deccan (LowCost Takes Off, Dec. 1, 2005) made for a wonderful read. Organizations have begun to realize the importance of the Net and its capacity to attract clients, cut costs and reach out to a larger base of customers. Of course, they also build good Internet sites.

But building a site is just not enough.

The big question is getting into the minds of customers logging onto the site. Analyzing how much time they spend on the site, their point of entry and where they go from there, which pages are read the most and what leads customers to shy away from buying are questions to which CIOs need answers from their web initiatives. I would really like you to carry an article on Web analytics.

Venu Gopal Peruri MD, MetaInfotech

Empower Readers

Since CIO India is published every fortnight, I honestly can’t do justice to 12

J a n u a r y 1 , 2 0 06 | REAL CIO WORLD

every issue, but I appreciate the fact that we finally have a magazine which puts CIOs on its cover. Its people-centric approach is a welcome change.

Readers have high expectations of the magazine and the CIO team has to be vigilant to live up to this. If this can be done, CIO will be able to play a leading role in educating its readers.

Today a CIO needs to step out of his or her safety zone - network infrastructure, hardware and software. As businesses grow dynamically and so must CIOs. They are no longer technology-only persons. In fact, technology is barely 20 percent of a CIO’s responsibility now.

We have to think business efficiency, profitability and change management. A CIO is also the right-hand of the CEO in most companies today.

CIO has to empower its readers in order for CIOs to live up to their responsibilities. CIO, as a resource, should look into these issues to be able to address our challenges.

Consider these suggestions, I am sure they will result in top-of-the-mind recall articles from among my peer group.

Gopal Shukla, VP - Business Systems Group Coca Cola India

While, the look and feel of the magazine is good, some of the stories could be shorter. I really like View From the Top. Ideally the magazine should be a little more focused on the future, keep a pulse on trends and watch for strategies 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

“Today a CIO needs to step out of his or her safety zone. As businesses grow dynamically, so must CIOs.” for success in a competitive world. As an operations person, I expect that from CIO. Tamal Chakraborty IT Head, Ericsson India

The past few issues have covered good topics. I particularly liked the cover story on the Business Continuity strategy of WNS Global Services (Keep Business Afloat, Dec 15, 2005) and the View From the Top section. Please continue to keep the mix of articles as it is.

R. P. Dumasia GM - I T, The Great Eastern Shipping Company

CIO India is impressive. You’ve also maintained an international look and feel. I really liked its simplicity but high quality and rich content. It carries good best management ideas which can be easily followed and implemented and is a valuable learning asset for CIOs. The contents were very well structured, focused, and well thought through. I particularly liked the Patricia Wallington column ‘The Off Switch’ (Nov. 15), and View From the Top. I’m passionate about reading articles on leadership, management and spirituality.

V. Subramaniam CIO, Otis Elevator Company

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trendlines new

*

hot

*

unexpected

Rs 1,09,000 Crore

IllUStratIoN by Shyam D EShpaNDE

and Counting!

RESEARCH Indian enterprise IT spending — hardware, software, telecom and IT services — is expected to reach an eye-popping Rs 1,09,300 crore in 2006, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.8 percent from 4 to 9 percent, according to research firm Gartner.

India can expect to see an annual enterprise ICT spending growth rate (AGR) of 23 percent in 2006, with Rs 73,900 crore being spent on telecom services and equipment (a 27 percent rise over 2005), Rs 17,200 crore spent on hardware (up by 13 percent), Rs 14,100 crore on IT services (a 22 percent increase) and Rs 4,100 crore on software (growing by 17 percent).

Announcing its trends for the year, Gartner says the impact of consumer technologies on enterprise IT will continue to spread rapidly, despite attempts to slow them down or policies designed to discourage their use. Gartner predicts that between 2006 and 2012 the majority of new information technologies adopted by enterprises will have their roots in the consumer market.

Many technologies have in the past been introduced and have found acceptance in consumer markets, only to be ignored by enterprises,” says Dion Wiggins, vice president and research director at Gartner.

Gartner sees Asia lag in the development of enterprise applications. The rapid maturing of IT development in China and India will see trade between the two explode, it predicts.

With open source software adoption rising rapidly, particularly in China and India, the research firm believes that by 2010 it will account for 20 percent of the global software market.

Gartner has identified a rising requirement for Enterprise Information Management (EIM), driven both by the need for process simplification and operational efficiency, and by enterprise agility and competitive differentiation.

The research firm also believes organizations that implement an effective incident response plan will experience an 80 percent increase in the speed at which they recover from malicious attacks.

No Shortchange for Shorthand D E V I C E S Those who crib that technology soon makes systems obsolete have apparently not bet on the ability of the old to piggyback on the new and redefine itself. A case in point being the new shorthand software system developed by the Chennai branch of The Stenographers Guild.

The system revolves around a software tool based on .NET architecture, which allows data input using shorthand symbols. The tool is compatible with applications like MS Office and involves special stickers being placed over a standard keyboard’s keys. All a user then needs to do is type out in shorthand and the tool converts it to standard text.

According to SV Ramaswamy, President of The Stenographers Guild, the software will be given to people who take a course in the new system called ‘Newrite,’ which has been developed jointly by The

INPUT

Vol/1 | ISSUE/4

Steno Trust, Washington, and The Stenographers Guild, Chennai.

The Stenographers Guild is making the software available free of cost to people who take the course. In fact, the Guild has actually taken the concept a step further by giving stipends to deserving students. So, not only do you get the software free, you also get paid for learning it!

The only drawback is the time taken to master the system — in order to attain a speed of 150 words per minute, one needs to train for around six months.

Plans for the future are equally interesting. The Guild is already working on software for handhelds. Voice recognition is also one of the features that is under contemplation.

Clearly, shorthand, far from being cowed down by modern technology, is actually using it to gain the upper hand.

—By Balaji Narasimhan REAL CIO WORLD | J a n u a r y 1 , 2 0 0 6

13

Different jobs demand different knowledge management strategies In the preface to his latest book, knowledge management (KM) guru Thomas Davenport admits that he’s not breaking new ground.

His thesis — that organizations can and should improve the performance of knowledge workers — is an idea that Davenport (who holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College) has been pondering for nearly a decade.

He decided to write the book now in part because of the

b o o k revie w

pressure that globalization is exerting on the American workforce.

Much of the content will ring familiar to anyone who follows KM. Knowledge workers — those who earn their keep primarily by applying, creating and distributing knowledge — resist meddling by management in how they do their jobs. Many don’t like sharing their knowledge, especially when outsourcing looms on the horizon.

But the real quandary whenit comes to improving performance

is: Many of the outputs of knowledge workers can’t be quantified or easily measured. Organizations are often at a loss trying to improve something that defies measurement.

Davenport does a good job establishing the challenges of improving knowledge work in today’s business environment. He delves into how different kinds of knowledge work require different strategies. For example, people who work collaboratively tend to improvise, seeking expertise for their teams as their situation warrants. Hence any attempt to improve their work by establishing formal processes will fail.

trend l ines

Work Smarter

Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers

By Thomas H. Davenport Harvard Business School Press, 2005, Rs 1,475.00

Davenport admits that making meaningful strides to improve knowledge work is difficult. The most practical advice he imparts has to do with how individuals can become better personal information managers. Among the tips in a list of best practices: Limit the number of information devices, and don’t entirely abandon paper.

If nothing else, reading this book may help a knowledge worker improve her personal performance. And as Davenport points out, making improvements on an individual basis is typically overlooked by organizations, yet is nevertheless valuable.

—By Megan Santosus

E R G O N O M I C S Headaches. Tired eyes.

Neck and shoulder pain. Sure, you’ve been logging lots of time at the office lately, and you figure you’re feeling the stresses and strains associated with all that hard work.

But if you spend hours each day staring at a computer screen, you might wind up suffering from computer vision syndrome (CVS).

The above symptoms “result from how our eyes focus — or more accurately don’t focus — on a computer screen,” says Jon Torrey, an entrepreneur. In the ‘80s, Torrey was doing some product development work with engineers who were heavy computer users; they often complained about eyestrain and headaches. Their gripes got Torrey thinking about what happens when people spend hours each day looking at computer screens.

He applied his curiosity to research by teaming up with an optometrist to create a diagnostic tool that simulates how eyes focus on

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a computer screen. Today, Torrey is president and CEO of Prio, a small company that he founded to develop and market tools to diagnose CVS. As Torrey explains, the lens in the human cornea focuses on objects by changing shape, a process that is essentially made easier when objects have distinct, defined edges. On computer screens, the pixels used to create images, whether it’s text, photos or graphics, have fuzzy, ill-defined edges. Therefore, says Torrey, computer users are constantly

yet imperceptibly focusing and refocusing their eyes; such ongoing efforts cause eyestrain and ultimately CVS. The discomforts of CVS, says Torrey, invariably end up taking a toll on employee productivity.

To solve the problem of CVS, computer users often need corrective lenses specifically prescribed for computer viewing, and that’s where Torrey sees a promising business opportunity. In 1993, Prio launched its first CVS testing device and began selling it to optometrists. The test takes about three minutes to administer and usually costs an extra Rs 450 ($10). To date, says Torrey, Prio has sold its tool to 10 percent of the optometry market. Also, Prio recently joined other lens manufacturers by jumping into the market of selling frames and lenses just for computer users.

—By MS

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Il lustrat io n by Shyam D eshpande

That Headache May Come from Your Screen

Answers at Your Fingertips Like many large organizations, Cox Communications grapples with two conflicting goals for customer support: Improving it while keeping costs down.

The need to harmonize these clanging principles led Cox to implement a system on its website that uses an instant messaging-like interface to field customer questions via an automated text chat. The system, dubbed Instant Answers and deployed last November, costs Cox much less than having customer service representatives answer questions.

Cox provides high-speed Internet, cable TV and telephone services. When customers visit the support section of Cox’s website, they have the option to ask questions of Instant Answers’ “virtual customer service representative.” Those who choose it are taken to the Instant Answers interface. Customers then ask in plain English how to set up their e-mail application or inquire about digital cable service. Instant Answers helps customers refine their queries. In addition to returning answers, it also provides links to other relevant parts of the Cox website.

Through surveys during the months after the rollout, Cox found that between 9 percent and 11 percent of Instant Answers users decided not to call customer support because the chat system answered their question, says Suzanne Foy, the company’s director of customer care strategy and support. The system would pay for itself with a call avoidance rate of only 2 percent to 3 percent, so the results are exceeding expectations, Foy says.

Automated service agent technology has been around for several years, but adoption has been timid, says analyst Michael Osterman of Osterman Research. However, he says, its popularity is rising, thanks to increasing familiarity with IM and the need for lower cost customer service.

Agents can also be used with an enterprise IM system to help employees find information in back-end applications and databases. This is the plan at IntelliCare, which operates health-related call centers.

Agents will make it easier and faster for nurses to find the information they need to help patients, says IntelliCare CIO Jeff Forbes.

—By Juan Carlos Perez

I N S TA N T M E S S AG I N G

trend l ines

by the numbers B y J ON S U R M A C Z

Stressed, but Happy

all workers. Compared with employees in other industries surveyed by Hudson (a division of the staffing and executive search company Hudson Highland Group), IT workers generated the highest positive response rate to the job satisfaction question. Health-care workers were a close second at 76 percent.

Knaul cautions, however, that CIOs should continue to monitor staff morale because, now that the job market is picking up, some workers could be

Job satisfaction of IT workers is rising, but CIOs worry about burnout.

BEST PRACTICES

Even though IT jobs are stressful, IT workers are happier now than they were a year ago. According to the March 2005 Hudson Employment Index, compiled by independent research firm Rasmussen Reports, 77 percent of IT workers say they are happy with their jobs. In May 2004, only 66 percent of IT workers said they were happy at work.

Kevin Knaul, executive vice president of IT and telecommunications practice for Hudson

North America, says increasing optimism about hiring and the related prospect of a return to normal workloads has contributed to the increased job satisfaction scores. More than one-third of IT workers surveyed said that their companies were hiring. “There’s a return to normalcy,” says Knaul. “IT workers aren’t just happy to have a job anymore.”

In fact, the data shows that IT workers may be the happiest of

tempted to leave. “Turnover kills the productivity of an IT department,” Knaul notes.

A recent survey by CIO shows that IT executives are indeed concerned about morale. Among the top staffing challenges for this group surveyed by CIO: Preventing burnout (83 percent) and low morale (60 percent). The survey also cited stress as a major contributor to low morale.

A whopping 76 percent of IT executives said that stress among IT staff was high or very high.

1. Monitor morale.

2. Provide training.

3. Compete on salary.

Use 360-degree management surveys and employee satisfaction surveys to formally gauge morale. Informally, managers who spend time working next to employees will have a better read on morale than those who don’t.

IT workers want to keep their skills in step with current technology trends. If it’s not possible to give time off for training, try lunchtime or after-hours training sessions to satisfy their needs.

Even though IT workers aren’t likely to be wooed away by a few extra dollars if they’re well-trained and happy, Knaul says that companies must be in the ballpark in order to keep their best and brightest.

In Spite of High Stress Levels...

... IT Workers Are the Happiest...

How would you describe the stress level in your company's IT Department?

Workers who said they are happy with their jobs 64% 71%

High: 57%

Very High: 19%

76% 77%

Accounting and finance Accounting and finance

Health Care IT SOURCE: Hudson Employment Index, March 2005

Low: 3% Normal: 21%

...And Getting Happier IT Workers who said they are happy with thEir jobs May 2004 March 2005

CIO RESEARCH

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66% 77%

SOURCE: Hudson Employment Index

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Powering up a New Breed of Batteries No matter how portable gadgets become there’s a time when they all must come back to earth: Recharging time.

As a result, the quest for longer battery life still occupies much development time. Much of the work is focused on making batteries based on current technologies such as lithium ion last longer, and an increasing amount of time is being spent looking into new technologies such as fuel cells.

“Lithium ion has been improving at a rate of about 9 percent per year since a decade ago when Sony introduced the first battery based on this technology,” says Ric Fulop, cofounder of A123 Systems, a start-up that’s developed a high-power battery.

Fulop says lithium ion capacities have increased from around 2.2Ah (ampere hours) a few years ago to about 2.6Ah, and there’s room for continued improvement.

However, there are limits to the technology, Fulop says.

“You are reaching the limits and it’s not going to get much better,” he says. Making a better battery means messing with materials and that’s a battle against nature.

Companies are also working on speedier recharging so devices are up and running again faster. Toshiba Corp. has developed a prototype lithium ion battery that can absorb about 80 percent of the battery’s total power capacity in about one minute. That’s much faster than the typical charging rate of 2 percent to 3 percent of total capacity per minute. The new battery could make it possible to quickly bring a dead laptop back to life.

Although lithium ion remains the king in portable gadgets, one of the most talked-about new technologies is the fuel cell. These create electricity from a simple reaction, typically that of a methanol and water mixture and air. They’re generating interest because they can provide a relatively large amount of power from a small amount of inexpensive fuel and are environmentally friendlier than other batteries.

Both Toshiba and NEC Corp. have demonstrated direct methanol fuel cells (DMFC) for use with laptop computers. A prototype unveiled by Toshiba at this year’s Cebit show in Germany could power a small laptop for 10 hours before it required a recharge in the form of a squirt of methanol, similar to the way a cigarette lighter is refueled. The Toshiba DMFC can provide about 20 watts of power, as can a similar prototype from NEC. But no matter what happens with battery technology, perhaps the life of a laptop will never move much beyond eight hours. “The notebook guys don’t want to give you more than eight hours,” says Fulop.

—By Martyn Williams

Il lUSt rat IoN Sh yam S. D EShpaN DE

MobIlE TECHNoloGY

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Vikram Sen Special Secretary, IT Department, Government of West Bengal Sen succeeds ravi Kumar. Sen was earlier Special Secretary, Backward Class and Social Welfare. In his new assignment, Sen will function as nodal officer, driving IT industry and IT in the government.

Lokesh Jha, Principal Secretary, IT department Government of J&K Jha succeeds arun K Mehta. He is an IaS officer of the 1986 batch. Jha plans to drive the computerization of various directories in J&K – including treasury, transport, and the chief minister’s office. among other priorities , he plans to implement to a State Wide area network.

Dr. Jerry Smith CTO, Symphony Services Dr. Smith comes on board at Symphony Services, as its first CTO. He brings to the table a reputation for the successful executions of innovative ideas and new technologies. He packs years of experience as an IT strategist and offers expertise in world-class technologies and r&D processes.

In previous roles, Dr. Smith was vice-president of engineering and acting Chief CIO for IPr International. under Dr. Smith’s watch, IPr International was awarded the Ben Franklin Technology Partners Best Management Team 2004 peer award and the Gartner Midsize Enterprise Innovation award.

REAL CIO WORLD | J a n u a r y 1 , 2 0 0 6

17

TRENDlINES

ExECuTIVE Ex ExEC ECu uTIVE TIVE

Movements

Michael Schrage

IT WORK

Contract Sadness Too many CIOs cut enterprise software deals that look fabulous to the CEO and CFO but commit the people who do the real work to a nightmare of unrealistic expectations.

A

close friend who works for a global marketing company serves on the executive committee that oversees the design and rollout of an enterprise personnel system. The deployment, which will affect scores of the company’s subsidiaries, is running late and over budget. Everyone is frustrated, and the situation is getting worse. Surprise.

My friend and I mull over the corporation’s ulterior motive for the system: To consolidate and centralize all of the company’s HR functions. A couple of cheap but clever technical fixes suggest themselves. The best thing about the fixes — besides the price — is that they’ll be easy to test. My friend presents the ideas to her committee. She expects sighs of relief and a welcoming reception.

Doesn’t happen. To the contrary, the vendor throws a fit. Cheap and clever technical fixes are seen as diabolical and subversive threats. What’s more, the vendor insists that those kinds of technical fixes violate the terms of the contract. Although vendor “consultants” grudgingly acknowledge that they can’t possibly deliver anything near what they’ve promised anywhere close to on time or on budget, the contract ostensibly forbids this non-sourcecode-touching intervention.

My friend is incredulous; I’m merely disgusted. I’ve seen this before. So what’s happened? The CIO, in cahoots with the CFO, has negotiated a contract that is all about cost savings and servicelevel agreements (SLAs) and completely disrespectful of what it takes — and what it means — to implement a working system enterprisewide. The CIO has cheated and betrayed his people by committing his company to a contract that treats implementation as essentially irrelevant to how the system

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Michael Schrage IT WORK ultimately performs. That’s unprofessional and contemptible. It’s also shockingly common.

Surely you aren’t one of those oh-so-Olympian CIOs who view implementation as something that the little people may have to worry about but that is far too tactical to occupy the time and negotiating savvy of a C-level executive? Surely you aren’t a business leader who believes that implementation is simply the “black box” means to the end of accomplishing cost savings and SLAs? After all, we’re not negotiating these multimilliondollar global contracts for the purpose of promoting happy implementations but for the goal of satisfactory results.

CIO Eyes Wide Shut The reality is that too many CIOs cut enterprise deals that may look absolutely fabulous to the CEO, CFO and all the other C-creatures, but commit the people who do the real work

CIOs should share next-to-finaldraft vendor contracts with their project leaders. to a nightmare of unrealistic expectations and milestones.

The contract undermines the ability, ingenuity, creativity and initiative of people to do good work. The contract focuses on ultimate results at the expense of the healthy and coherent processes necessary to achieve them.

In short, too many CIOs and CFOs negotiate IT contracts with vendors as if the process of implementation is completely disconnected from the quality of the system that is actually deployed. This is particularly acute in outsourcing deals that trumpet cost reductions and so-called airtight SLAs. These CIOs and their colleagues believe that, so long as the vendor and the system comply with the SLA, everything will be hunky-dory. Who cares if the negotiated contract gets in the way of clever innovations that can slash time from schedules or money from budgets? If you’re a professional, you should.

One financial services company I know builds into its contract the provision that if it is experiencing the risk of a delay, it has the right to force the vendor to bring in a senior partner from one of the systems integrators for two weeks or until the problem is resolved—whichever comes first. For obvious reasons, the systems integrators and their senior partners take great pains to make sure that this option need never be exercised.

By contrast, a pharmaceutical CIO who negotiates hundreds of millions of contracts with outside vendors has put himself in the position where, by contract, his vendors don’t have to perform timely upgrades if their software touches open-source systems.

The vendor rationale? They insist that since open source isn’t formally tested, they’re entitled to wait and see how it

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works with their software before they help the onsite team do an upgrade. In other words, the presence of open source dilutes the SLA. Needless to say, the pharmaceutical IT employees who actually make the systems run are sick and tired of this arbitrary constraint.

To be fair, the SLA focus is understandable. In the first and final analysis, organizations want measurable and repeatable results. But for mature adults to actually negotiate contracts in which process quality is divorced from quality results is simply delusional. It flies in the face of everything we know about human behavior and systems deployment. Valuing good outcomes over good process guarantees that you’ll get neither.

To my disgust, I’ve observed CIOs who have grown so divorced from the implementation process in their own organizations that they don’t think twice about the implementation implications of the IT contracts they’re negotiating. Implementation? Not their job, man.

Sadly, the CFOs and CEOs typically understand (and appreciate) so little about what software design, testing and deploy-ment mean operationally that they can’t tell (and don’t care) how a contract can undermine what they say they’re trying to do.

Yes, many contracts have milestones, which serve as metrics surrogates for good process and good implementation, and these milestones must be met. But, frankly, they’re cop-outs for lazy CIOs. CIOs who truly care about leadership (and their people) will seek to negotiate contracts that explicitly empower their people (and their vendors) to be more creative and innovative.

CIOs have an affirmative obligation to prevent IT contracts from becoming straitjackets for the people who have to implement the technology.

I’d like to see more CIOs circulating their next-to-finaldraft vendor contracts with their implementation and project leaders. The goal would be to solicit useful comments and actionable ideas on what impact the agreement would have on the ability to implement a system that delivers the desired SLAs. This “implementation impact statement” could — and should — be both a powerful tool for savvy negotiators and, just as important, a document that gives the organization real insight into its implementation strengths and weaknesses.

If your organization consistently confronts implementation impediments with its IT vendors, the real source of the problem may not be the quality of your people or your processes but the quality of the contract you negotiate. Involving your implementers in your negotiations may turn out to be the smartest kind of delegating you can do . CIO Michael Schrage is codirector of MIT Media Lab’s eMarketing Initiative. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Mike Hugos

Total Leadership

How to Become a Change Agent If you want people to follow you, take a walk in their shoes.

I

have always been fascinated by how information technology can be used to make an organization more competitive.

And so I redesign existing business processes and design new processes and then try to get people to buy into these ideas.

In short, I am a change agent.

Sometimes I am welcomed like a new coach who the players believe can turn around a losing team. Other times I am received like a government tax auditor at a shareholders’ meeting. Leading change is a delicate business. We all agree that companies need to innovate and become more agile to compete in today’s global economy. But on the road between this general agreement and any new way of doing something, there are many pitfalls awaiting the change leader. Change stirs up a lot of resistance in people. As Mark Twain put it, “I’m all for progress. It’s change I don’t like.”

A leader has to get past this resistance and convince others to embrace new ways of doing things. But first, he needs to get people to listen to what he has to say.

Illustrat ion by b i nesh sree dharan

Leading by Doing Some years ago I was hired to be a director of systems development at a company that distributed electric wire and cable and electronic communication systems. After I had been with the company for a few months, the COO called me to his office. He told me that the four regional sales vice presidents wanted to streamline the sales process, but that IT had saddled them with clunky, hard-to-use systems. So they had requested money to hire consultants to build the new systems they wanted. “They are not getting their own IT budget,” the COO told me. “Your job is to figure out what they want.”

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Mike Hugos

Total Leadership

Spend time with the people you want to lead, listen more than you talk, and when they test you to see what you are made of, take the challenge.

When you don’t know what people want, you need to ask them. So I decided to spend time in the field. One day I was visiting a regional headquarters, talking with a salesperson about his job. He was telling me about the difficulties he was having with the existing computer system. I noticed the sales vice president watching me from his corner office.

After about 15 minutes he walked up to the cubicle where we were sitting and said, “Move over, Steve. Let Mike take your calls and see for himself what it’s like.” I looked up at him and I knew he could see the fear in my eyes. He said, “Don’t worry if you screw up. We screw up too.” Then he went back to his office.

It was clear to me that if I was to get anywhere with this project, I had to take his dare. I sat down in Steve’s chair and started taking calls. The afternoon’s customers were primarily building contractors who needed some cable or electronic gear in a hurry. My task was to sell them what I had at the greatest profit and at the same time be helpful and make them feel as if they had received a good deal.

The callers were busy, and they talked fast. I had to look up the products they wanted and see if I had them in stock. If something wasn’t in stock, I had to find something else that would fit their needs. At the same time, I was also supposed to quote a price based on the prices other salespeople had recently gotten for the same items, factoring in such variables as how much the customer wanted to buy and whether he would pick up his purchase himself.

What I Learned in the Trenches It was too difficult to get all the information I really needed to make the best decisions. Navigating from one screen to the next was hopelessly complex, requiring me to remember cryptic commands and to know which function keys to press — and in which order — to find what I was looking for. Sometimes I quoted too high a price and people said they’d get back to me later (which they never did). Other times I was intimidated into quoting a price that didn’t have much profit in it at all.

In a stroke of beginner’s luck, I managed to make the company some money that day, but more important for my purposes, I understood what type of system would help the salespeople become more profitable. I realized that their job was somewhat like that of a stockbroker. Prices were always fluctuating based on many factors, including supply and demand. The salespeople needed different information at different times to get a good feel for the best price to offer a customer. The most important data had to be displayed on just a handful of easy-to-access screens. And navigation among screens had to be fast so that you could retrieve information while you were talking on the phone.

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Call Me Mr. Credible The story traveled over the grapevine: An IT guy had taken sales calls. An IT guy might actually have a clue. After that, the salespeople knew who I was. They opened up to me. They wanted me to know about ideas they had for this or that feature of a new system. I fit these suggestions into the overall design for a new sales support system.

People liked the designs I showed them. They could see their own ideas reflected in them. I was able to create a consensus for changing and improving the sales process among a broad audience that included regional vice presidents, branch managers and individual salespeople. So how did I, an IT guy, get buy-in and support from a group of end users who had been threatening to go their own way? I got them to trust me.

Here’s the take-away: In order to be a leader, you must first be seen as a leader in the eyes of those you would lead. This means people need to see that you understand them and care about them. They need to believe that you are open to their ideas and that you will do what it takes to get things done. In other words, you need to have credibility.

If you are currently (or soon will be) in the role of change leader, ask yourself this: “Am I credible in the eyes of the people I will lead?” If you are not — as I was not — ask yourself how you will earn that credibility. My advice is to spend time with the people you want to lead, listen more than you talk, and when they test you to see what you are made of, take the challenge. It hardly matters what happens. People just want to see if you can walk a mile in their shoes before they decide to follow you. CIO

Mike Hugos is CIO of Network Services, a distributor of housekeeping supplies, janitorial products, packaging and paper goods. He is the author of Building the Real-Time Enterprise: An Executive Briefing. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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SPECIAL REPORT

ONES TO

WATCH With our Ones to Watch initiative, we honor a stellar group of future CIOs.

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A CIO’s job is never easy. He has to persuade management to invest in technology, keep abreast of endless developments and business objectives, stay a step ahead of hackers, re-define his role as organizations attempt to consolidate responsibilities and drive his team to perform new miracles. Then, he has to choose and groom a successor. When it’s time to pass the baton on, it is his or her duty to have cultivated someone capable of standing in their shoes.

Of all the leadership tasks that CIOs face, one of the most important is developing future IT leaders. It’s one of the many duties that CIOs perform as part of their role in running IT, a means of ensuring the long-term success of the enterprise and an important aspect of managerial responsibility toward employees. In today’s demanding environment, CIOs can’t possibly do it all themselves. But when talented people leave, the bench has to be stocked with others ready to step up.

Leadership development isn’t formulaic; what works for one CIO can fall flat in the hands of another, or within a different corporate culture. In “How Stars Are Made”(page 28), we detail current trends in leadership development, such as executive coaching and “action learning programs,” and report on the experiences of a few IT executives with leadership development programs in place. At Godfrey Philips India for instance, Senior VP (IT and Corporate Development) Alagu Balaraman doesn’t believe in a ‘10-Easy-Steps’ approach to developing leadership. His way ranges from individual mentoring to getting the chosen ones to perform under stretch to visits to other companies for a perspective change to even getting them to debate business issues and lay down a technology vision for the organization.

It’s in appreciation of CIOs who get leadership development right that we created Ones to Watch. This program identifies the rising stars in IT — staff who have what it takes to become the CIOs of the future.

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We approached a few proactive organizations, seeking future IT leaders not older than 40 years of age.

To put together this special report, CIO’s editorial team also drew on discussion with scores of IT executives and other business leaders and experts to identify the top strategic imperatives for success as a CIO today.

Ones to Watch honorees had to demonstrate expertise in a wide range of areas. They needed to have a list of on-the-job accomplishments in their backgrounds, such as leading a large project or conceiving a new business product. They needed to be risk takers, team builders, and change agents. After a final duediligence review by CIO’s editorial team, 30 honorees rose to the top — Our “30 Rising Stars” (page 40).

We then stepped back for a look at what our honorees had in common. We found three overarching characteristics:

Vision — an ability to see solutions in often chaotic situations.

Influence — the capability to engage business users and other stakeholders in IT programs in a way that doesn’t depend on the power of their position.

Execution — the bottom-line ability to deliver, time and again.

Each of our honorees demonstrated all of these traits. In doing so (“What Leadership Looks Like”, page 34), they benefited their companies, made their CIOs look good and served as testaments to the importance of leadership development. CIO

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How

Stars Are Made A Guide To Developing Your Future Leaders

By RahUl NEEl MaNI

Godfrey Philips India CIO Alagu Balaraman is in high spirits. Not only is the majority of IT in his organization outsourced, but he also has a small yet strong IT team with self motivated leaders. Balaraman doesn’t hesitate for a minute to say that S.P. Giridhar, his senior manager for IT Infrastructure, new technologies and aligning them with business. “As a leader, one must not be afraid of trying anything. From an infrastructure point of view that’s very important,” says Balaraman.

While Giridhar’s IT skills have reached a certain 28

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Reader ROI: IMagIN g BINESh SREEdh aRaN Photo By SRIVatSa ShaNdIlya

is passionate about ‘wandering’ into

The fundamentals of successful leadership development CIOs’ experience with various leadership development programs How to keep your rising stars from leaving

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If star employees aren’t challenged, says ALAGU BALARAMAN, CIO of Godfrey Philips India , they will waste away. He works hard to get his highpotentials to ponder business issues and formulate technology vision.

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perfection, Balaraman focuses on grooming him for business acumen and leadership skills.

If you aren’t blessed with IT managers such as Giridhar — up-and-comers who are doing great things for IT in the here and now — where do you find them?

The answer might be right outside your office door.

Future leaders in information technology aren’t born like that; they are made. By you. Giridhar’s abilities didn’t develop in a vacuum; he’s the beneficiary of Godfrey Philips’s and Balaraman’s emphasis on leadership development.

The honorees of our inaugural Ones to Watch report, including Giridhar and others whom we feature in “What Leadership Looks Like” (Page 34), have spent many years developing and honing their skills. Often, they were identified early on. They were challenged relentlessly, their weaknesses targeted for improvement, and only then were they promoted.

Most likely, a great boss or two has shown them plenty of attention — mentoring, guiding and pushing. Hilal Khan, Head of IT at auto major Honda Siel Cars India, firmly believes that IT leaders are certainly not born Leadership developthat way. “Identify a person who’s the best among the ment for staffers with good and help them realize their potential. Once you as spark can’t be done a CIO are able to do that, it then becomes your duty not half-heartedly says to let that asset go waste,” says Khan.

YES Bank CIO The elements of leadership development plans vary ADITYA MENON. by company and CIO. Some CIOs rely on mentoring It takes active, programs or classroom courses; others challenge their thoughtful participahigh-potential employees with cross-departmental tion from assignments or fast-tracking through the ranks. In a larger sense, though, the differences between the programs are inconsequential. What matters most is that CIOs make talent-building a top priority.

“As a CIO, I’m evaluated on how I groom my successor.

If tomorrow, I am assigned to a new responsibility in the company, business needs, these up-and-comers are poised to churn out the the successor should be able to take over without causing much next killer application or product.

For CIOs, a leadership development program takes time, disruption,” says Arindam Bose, General Manager IT LG Electronics India Limited (LGEIL). “That’s a good philosophy which all companies flexibility, forethought and patience. In short, it takes leadership should follow. It keeps business operating seamlessly and is a most from you. Even Godfrey Philips’ Giridhar isn’t perfect, which is why leadership development never stops. “He still needs grooming practical approach,” adds Bose.

All CIOs contacted for this story unanimously agreed that on dealing with business users,” says CIO Balaraman. leadership development should be a core part of a CIO’s activity. The degree of activity and involvement may vary, but there is unanimity of thought that any person who aspires to be a leader needs to be good at technology, skillful at aligning it with business and be able to manage people adroitly. here are certain foundation stones for any Leadership development programs are demonstrably worth the leadership development program. You can’t have effort, say CIOs who have implemented them. They end up with leadership development without support from the a staff of highly skilled employees who are steeped in the inner Board Room. If your CEO or CFO thinks leadership workings of both IT and the business. These IT managers extend development is a waste of time and money, chances the influence of the CIO, as they go about getting buy-in from the are your plans will be sunk. When the support is business side of the organization. And because they know what the there, leadership development is infectious, spreading out into the

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The Building Blocks of Successful Leadership Development

halls, cubes and conference rooms of the organization. Godfrey Philips, for instance, has a standard leadership development program in which IT leaders also participate. Critically, only if the content of these development initiatives is centered on the actual business needs of a company will your Board see the business imperative for creating such a program.

At the same time, the CIOs must have just as much skin in the game as their CEOs. CIOs need to be the role models, affirming that participating in leadership development is the only way to move ahead.

Bose feels that expecting “miracles” from potential leaders without adequate leadership development initiatives will be unjust. “If they need either leadership training or the development of interpersonal skills, they ought to be allowed access to it,” he maintains.

It’s very important to first assess business need before you choose the people for the leadership development. As part of Honda’s worldwide people development initiative, Khan has to conduct workshops and training sessions for his teams in which the discussions center on mapping the business needs of the company.

“We work on a three-year business landscape in which one year is the actual target and rest is projected. Each of my leaders has to contribute to it,” he says.

Godfrey Philips’ Balaraman doesn’t believe in a ‘10-Easy-Steps’ approach. “If there was, we would have wonderful leaders all around us,” he says. It is not easy to know the mechanism as well as the potential of people. Leaders are nothing but one class of people.

Balaraman emphasizes the need for selecting the right person. The chosen person should have the ability to adapt to each situation and also the right mental framework. When an IT professional joins a company he gets accolades for his technical skills; but as he grows, he needs to be rewarded for his skills to influence things and understand complex issues.

When Dheeraj Sinha joined Apollo Tyres as head of information services, he demonstrated the capability to comprehend the business needs of the company before deciding on IT solutions.

“Sinha has been an asset from a very critical juncture of our growth process. He is responsible for putting systems in place in a seamless fashion, while convincing the management about his decisions,” observes COO Neeraj R.S. Kanwar.

A person’s ability to stand out — first on his own, then among the peers — is one of the ways that Honda Siel Cars spots future leaders.

Its IT team is divided into four groups headed by team leaders, with the CIO sharing corporate responsibilities along with IT. “A leader can only be the one who can conceive, present, get budgetary approvals, put together a team of professionals and implement and sustain a project on his own. If that’s not the case, we are living with mediocrity,” feels Khan, the auto major’s head of IT. When you see talented persons all you need to do is to watch them from a distance and assist or train in only those areas about which they are not confident.

YES Bank is probably the newest entry among Indian private sector banks. And that’s why the bank didn’t want to own most of its IT infrastructure. CIO Aditya Menon feels that, though outsourcing offers flexibility and the openness to chose technologies and solutions, it also means managing a bunch of vendors, which at times is more difficult than managing technology. Suren Shetty, Vice President IT has not only prepared the blue print of YES Bank’s IT architecture but also manages the team of workers both internal and external and maintains vendor SLAs. “This is guaranteed to drive anyone up the wall, but Shetty has a flair for doing this amicably,” says Menon.

Ways to Develop Highly Successful People MetLife CIO Steve Sheinheit’s keys for cultivating talent

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Mentoring Relationships – essential to developing leaders in a company, whether the relationships are formal or informal. The people who grow in any organization and aspire to higher positions generally have had mentoring relationships throughout their careers.

Cross Organizational Assignments – experiences that go on outside of a person’s specific job role. IT staffers need to appreciate the importance of networking with people

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across and outside IT, because you never know what the next assignment will be.

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Outside Associations – with any number of organizations, whether industry-related, research groups or educational groups or educational associations. What’s importance is that employees are getting an appreciation of the outside world.

Enterprise View – broadening employees’ perspectives as they go up the ranks.

Incentives for establishing an

enterprise view are important for job effectiveness.

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Committee or Governance Board – participation broadens IT staffers’ enterprise views and shows them the dynamics of governance and how things get done inside a company.

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Job Rotation – crucial because an employee in a job for a long time tends not to develop as effectively as someone who moves across different roles and responsibilities.

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Choosing the Right Leadership Development Program

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ere are more options for leadership development than any one CIO could ever need. Therefore, it’s critical that CIOs choose carefully and implement programs that are best suited to fill the gaps in their staff’s skill sets and the overall company direction.

Stretch Assignments. One of the top leadership development tools found common across the Ones to Watch Honorees is stretch assignments — when an up-and-comer’s mettle is tested in a task beyond his abilities. For instance, Abhrajit De, Head of Infrastructure at Haldia Petrochemicals, was informed by his CIO that he needed to replace an ATM-based LAN with a Gigabit LAN with limited resources and time. He was also stretched to the extent that his team’s head count remained unchanged. But De wasn’t deterred and his confidence paid off.

“He has repeatedly proved his leadership skills in the company and has a deep understanding of the company’s business processes and resource limitation,” says CIO Anjan Bose.

Godfrey Philips’ Balaraman feels it is essential to stretch a leader, but not to the point where he fails. In some CIOs’ opinion, the target should be set so that at least 70 percent can be achieved.

“Stretching is a very subjective thing but in order to stretch, you better know how far something can go. That’s something you sit down and discuss with the leader,” says Balaraman.

At insurance major Aviva Life India, the business targets are already high because the company needs to catch up with the existing players. To support these goals it’s essential to have equally gutsy IT support. Abir Basak, IT Infrastructure head, was quick to figure this and in short order architected a Disaster Recovery plan. The initiative was achieved through consolidation of enterprise storage with its own replication logic, without going in for cumbersome server-based replication using third party software. The solution highlights innovation, skills and resource savings — all qualities a leader must have.

LGEIL, for instance, has two types of goals for the leaders. One is the normal one and the other is the “stretch goal” — based on the evaluation of the person who is projected as a leader. “Anyone who is not able to stretch or adapt to conditions of stretch is unfit to become a leader,” says GM – IT Bose.

Cross Training. At Honda Siel Cars, Head of IT Khan makes sure that each leader has the ability to handle crucial basic functions at all points 32

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in time. He’s divided his IT department across Infrastructure, People Management, Application Development and Customer Services. Despite having leaders for each domain, Khan makes sure that all leaders can cross function to prevent disruption in work. “Although no one person is expected to excel in each domain, they must be ready to take up any challenge at short notice. This requires constantly training those designated as leaders,” he says.

Similarly, it’s ensured that each future leader understands the business logic of the company.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer India also emphasizes cross training. For a couple of years now, Shiva Nair, Senior Manager Business Technology, has been managing multiple portfolios. Since he put the company’s IT infrastructure in order, he was asked to look at the technology risk management portfolio and manage the security of both electronic and physical data across every division at Pfizer. “A leader must know a little bit of everything. If a leader has to replace a CIO in any given organization, his ability to handle

It’s a CIO’s duty to not only identify brilliant team members but also to help them realize their potential, says HILAL KHAN, Head of IT at Honda Siel Cars. He does so with a firm belief in cross training.

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“As a CIO, I am evaluated on how I groom my successor. If

tomorrow, I am assigned to a new responsibility in the company, the successor should be able to take over from me without causing Arindam Bose, General Manager IT, LG Electronics India much disruption.” multiple portfolios is the best criterion to judge his leadership skills,” says Arun Gupta, Senior Director Business Technology at Pfizer. The power of cross-training lies in the multiple perspectives that are gained from it.

Action-learning Programs. Combine the classroom with crossfunctional teams that take on a demanding project and use it as a learning vehicle and you get action-learning programs. Since IT in Godfrey Philips is heavily outsourced, the key resources have started getting into a vendor-buyer kind of relationship. CIO Balaraman decided to start a concept dubbed the ‘conference’.

Leaders invited there mull over business issues and lay down a technology vision for the organization. “The technology vision that is articulated in such sessions is purposefully kept very high. Based on that, each person starts thinking what he can do to achieve it in both short and long terms. It keeps the action alive,” says Balaraman.

Direct Application – Other recent trends in leadership development include seminars in networking, presentation skills and expanding the influence of the IT leaders. “In LG we have business needs coming up from all sorts of users. It’s therefore essential to equip leaders with options where they can have an immediate tutorial on anything they lack expertise in,” says GM IT Bose. While LGEIL sends its leaders for higher training to South Korea – the worldwide headquarters – to both share their knowledge and best practices, Honda has a hightech center within its campus, which caters to training through class room sessions, online and other means. The company makes sure that any training which is helpful in enhancing leadership skills is made available wherever possible.

Another factor that has helped Godfrey Philips significantly is learning through one-on-one visits with other companies.

“We fix these visits in advance with a concrete agenda and share information. It shows people new avenues. In most cases, it’s targeted to change perspective. The leaders then try to up the ante and do better than what they have seen,” says Balaraman.

Sustaining the Enthusiasm

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nce CIOs have decided on a leadership development direction, they need to actively manage the program to make sure that the right people are getting into it and that it fulfills their intentions. Bose strongly feels that leadership development is not just about training and nurturing. You have to regularly check enthusiasm levels and interest. It’s also wise to collect ongoing evaluations of the program to build up evidence that it is delivering value. Otherwise, training

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funds can disappear when times are tough or a major emergency project can take away staffers.

Elements that prove value include: Peers and subordinates view program participants as more effective leaders; a majority of the leaders for high-level positions are internal promotions; and ROI calculations can prove the link between leaders and better business results. CIOs need to track how much money and time they have invested, and then see what changes people who have been through the program make when they go back to the workplace.

Not all rising stars stick around, waiting for that high-level job, of course. Inevitably, some leave for richer pastures or personal reasons. There’s not much CIOs can do to stop an employee who is determined to depart. There are, however, practical and crucial ways to lessen the exodus. Research shows that an employee’s boss is the single best determinant of whether a person will stay or leave. So you have to assign your high-potential leaders to the best bosses.

The potential leader has to be shown a succession path so that he lets go of what he is doing and moves on to a bigger challenge with better enthusiasm. “If they don’t see their CIO demonstrating that kind of confidence, they will either hang on with the routine job or leave for better opportunities outside the company,” feels Balaraman.

This also holds true for letting leaders learn from errors. A couple of errors must be forgiven in the larger interests of both the individual and organization. It’s part of a CIO’s role to pinpoint errors and put the leader on the right path. “When it comes to blatant errors, I take responsibility for them and don’t allow the management to bother my team leaders. All success is theirs and all failures mine. It’s my duty to understand why an error occurred and how can it be rectified before I let the management take any drastic decision. Otherwise, it can kill all enthusiasm to innovate,” explains Khan.

Above all, CIOs who have embraced leadership development say their programs aren’t just an IT thing; they are an outgrowth of company philosophies that are aligned with IT department priorities.

And when leadership development works, the S.P. Giridhars and other next-generation leaders of the world will give all that investment back to their companies with new systems and new ways of thinking that will make their CIOs very happy. CIO

Bureau Head north rahul neel Mani can be reached at rahul_ mani@cio.in

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Aashish Kshetry, Asian Paints

Daya Prakash, LG Electronics

Lekha Bajpai, AFL

Venkat Jagaduri, Polaris

Prasad Sohoni, Thomas Cook

Shiva Nair, Pfizer India

Abir Basak, Aviva

What Leadership L Our 30 Ones to Watch honorees possess vision, the ability to influence

Umesh Mehta, New Holland

Subbalakshmi Shirali, Shamrao Vithal Co-op Bank

G. K. Dattaraj, Alstom

Photos By srivatsa shandilya, FotocorP, sujith, chandroo, surEsh

Bharat Dave, Torrent

Abhijit Ghatak, Ericsson

Anish Shah, Reliance

N. Srinivas, Novo Nordisk

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ce

Alok Verma, ITC

Charles Padmakumar, Flextronics Software

C. Thangavel, NIC

Arun Shakya, Britannia

Pravin Bhosle, UTI Bank

Ravinder Sharma, Fortis

Looks Like

K. Annapurna Devi, A P Technology Services

Reader ROI:

How to find a future CIO on your staff The winning traits exhibited by these leaders Their character-forming experiences

others and a talent for getting things done

By BalajI NaRaSIMhaN

Suren Shetty, YES Bank

Dheeraj Sinha, Apollo Tyres

S.P. Giridhar, Godfrey Philips

Shiv Shankar Singh, BSE

Veena Vasanth, Biocon

NoT T PICTUREd: aBhrajit dE, haldia PEtrochEmicals, mahEsh Kumar PinnamanEni, auroBindo Pharma

Debashish Chakraborty, Honda Siel

Jitendra Sarode, Pantaloon

ONES TO

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HOnOREES

ummed up in just two words, the role of a CIO is to “Think Big.” Of course, when you are working with an organization like Reliance Industries, which has a market capitalization of Rs 1,12,500 crore and offices all around the world, one doesn’t have any option but to do so. Take the case of Anish Shah, a member of the IT team at RIL. While implementing a large IT project recently, he provided leadership to plan and implement a cost reduction of more than 50 percent in the IT Budget for an international project. The potential savings when the plan is implemented will be in excess of Rs 9 crore ($2 million).

“Shah is very good at managing large and complex projects where deliverables are not just the applications, hardware and software. At Reliance, deliverables for the IT systems mean providing easy to use process automation executed within the time for the overall project to be successful,” says Ashish Kumar Chauhan, Advisor, Reliance Industries.

What is it then that keeps a person like Shah ticking? An important factor is that he has a flexible agenda. He is not wedded to a particular technology or a platform and encourages his colleagues to work on multiple platforms that suit the business requirements. At the same time, Shah teaches them to understand the big picture by keeping the enterprise systems architecture in mind. He has been involved in multiple roles starting ANISH SHAH, a member from support to setting up of the It team at Reliance new projects to rationalizing Industries, came up with a plan to reduce costs by 50 percent systems. He has supported and thereby save Rs 9 crore. the organization very well, besides playing a key role during the company’s information systems organization restructuring. Big moves, indeed.

Keeping the big picture in mind is crucial for a CIO. Rajeev Seoni, Assistant Vice President and Head - IT, Flextronics Software Systems, states: “There are two major aspects of a CIO’s role — man36

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aging existing IT infrastructure and systems, and ensuring that IT strategy is in line with business objectives. Therefore, a CIO’s vision has to be in line with the company’s vision. He has to look forward and visualize the future requirements, plan for them and get them up and running in time — ideally, even before the users raise a request!”

This means that, if you want to become a CIO, it is more important to be proactive than merely reactive to the organization’s needs. The potential CIO should learn to anticipate where the company plans to go, and then prepare the IT infrastructure and ensure that it is capable of bearing the load. “To be effective, a potential CIO should understand the pain points and challenges that the organization faces on its path to achieving its vision, mission and objectives. Awareness of technology and its impact on the operations and strategy also contribute to success. So, if organizational effectiveness is a pain area for the business that is constrained by legacy processes, the potential CIO, with assistance from the CIO and the IT team, must provide the organization with tools that provide fast execution capabilities,” says Arun Gupta, Senior Director, Business Technology, Pfizer India Much of the credibility of a CIO actually rests on the shoulders of these almost CIOs. They are responsible for the success or failure of multicrore-rupee, enterprisewide initiatives. They manage your most critical employees. They act as your surrogate when you’re out of the office. And the best thing is, they do it all very, very well.

Potential CIOs start working under existing CIOs, and the more senior ones, namely the deputy CIOs, have to understand what their bosses are doing and manage operations effectively so that their bosses develop confidence in them and start grooming them for the role. Of course, in the interim period, they still have to manage the operational issues of the IT systems. The challenge before them is to perform their roles effectively, while also, at the same time, understanding the skill sets that they require in order to one day sit in the CIO’s chair.

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This effectively means managing the low while understanding the high. As V Balakrishnan, CIO, Polaris Software Lab puts it: “An effective CIO has the ability to register a case for changes in processes and structures as well as for technology investments at the board level, with a knack to avoid the trivia that always gets thrown at the CIO as proof of non-functionality. And then they should have the ability to tackle and solve or bypass the micro-level problem at the code or connectivity levels, which invariably bewilders the mostly inexperienced teams in executing the grand plans of the CIO.” There are some telltale signs that an IT leader is — or should be — headed for the top. Our 30 Ones to Watch honorees, recognized for their rising-star status in the IT world, display three overarching characteristics the wise CIO will watch out for. They have vision, often taking creative approaches to solving business problems. They exhibit influence, with superior communication skills and the ability to build consensus. And they get things done, executing enterprisewide projects successfully time and time again.

V

What to Watch For: VISION ision as a core competency is the kind of trait CIOs just know when they see it. It comes in many forms, from the ability to envision an executable plan to figuring out how to enable a new business product. But the qualities that lead IT up-and-comers to creative approaches to solving business problems are easier to boil down. They need a thorough understanding of the down-anddirty details of both technology capabilities and business needs, the flexibility to adjust to changing conditions in either or both, and the ability to bring the two together into a very high-level strategic plan.

“The success of a CIO depends on how he is able to visualize, plan and implement technology trends, evaluate the adoption of various technologies in his own industry and provide speedy, cost effective, flexible solutions to his users,” observes Reliance’s ChauStarting as a programmer, RAVINDER SHARMA, ashan. The potential CIO sistant Manager (It), Fortis cannot afford to ever mishealthcare, ramped up to judge the requirements reveal business acumen and of the users, and needs to people management skills. always be synchronized with ground reality.

In some cases, the path to vision could be merely an innate ability to fill in the gaps at the right time. For instance, check out Ravinder Sharma, Assistant Manager (IT), Fortis Healthcare. Sharma joined the company over

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half a decade ago as a programmer in Mohali, managing the Hospital Information System (HIS) at Fortis. The existing IS Manager quit suddenly, and Sharma was immersed in tasks which were out of his caliber. However, he was able to scale up his skill sets, and as a result, could take charge of both the HIS and the other IT projects. Today, he has shifted to Delhi to manage HIS from a strategic perspective. Under his command, HIS has already been rolled out in four locations, with more to follow. Even as a programmer, Sharma had the vision to understand HIS from a comprehensive strategic viewpoint, and as a result, he is today in charge of developing, deploying, and innovating the HIS rollout.

Commending him, Sunil Kapoor, CIO, Fortis Healthcare Ltd. says, “Sharma has shown great depth in whatever he is asked to do.”

Vision doesn’t mean just looking at top-level issues. It also effectively encompasses marrying the strategy of the board with the dayto-day needs of the company. “He [the potential CIO] should be able to understand business from the user’s perspective or customers’ perspective and then help them with technology which will support data analytics and processing, which will improve efficiency of day to day operations,” TS Purushottam, Corporate Manager, IT & Systems, Britannia Industries, points out.

But, how does a wannabe CIO show the board that he possesses vision? One way could be using IT effectively in order to cut costs. After all, the board — especially the CFO — is always willing to recognize vision that directly impacts savings positively.

And this is exactly what Abhijit Ghatak, Site IT Manager, Ericsson India, did. Ghatak, who has a keen eye for numbers, calculated that the company, which has a sizeable presence in India, was spending around Rs 13 crore per annum on national and international flights. He then suggested video conferencing, which bought down costs considerably, and earned him the respect of the board. This paved the way for his vision on the applications running the enterprise. When he suggested a new process, the company enthusiastically agreed, and burden came down by 50 percent. Tamal Chakravorty, IT head of Ericsson India, who refers to Ghatak as “Mr. Dependable”, says that “he will be ripe to be a CIO in a couple of years.”

The potential CIO can also depict his vision by pushing through large projects, as did Arun Shakya, Manager SAP Development, Britannia Industries Ltd. Shakya managed a complex SAP implementation and also acted as a catalyst for a project involving MRP purchases. According to Britannia’s Purushottaman, “Shakya also has great communication skills, something that potential CIOs must have.”

Clearly, communicating their vision is as important as possessing one in the first place.

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centers, thereby impacting 6,000 employees. He also created a frontend for managing revenue projections, invoicing, and accruals and connected this effectively with the backend systems. While technolf course, giving business users innovative new ogy skills are important, Jagaduri’s ability to influence internal users technology tools is one thing; getting them to use ensured that the project saw the light of day. His boss, V. Balakrishnan, these tools is quite another. That’s where influ- CIO, Polaris Software India Ltd., says: “I see tremendous potential in ence comes in. All of our Ones to Watch honorees him for achieving business goals by exploiting technology.”

However, according to Balakrishnan, CIOs and those with the must call upon a whole host of skills to get business buy-in for, and usage of, IT-enabled change potential to be one should go beyond influence to become effec— from being willing to learn more about what the business needs tive. “Influencing through logic and business benefits is a vital are to gaining the trust of key stakeholders to marketing big, enter- skill. However, influence is a poor substitute for authority. A CIO prisewide changes to building relationships with various (often very should be empowered to make vital business process changes to exploit technology investments for quantifiable business results,” different) constituencies.

Influence is particularly difficult but necessary when one is aim- he points out. This is not something that can be done overnight. The ing for an enterprisewide impact. Take for instance the case of Venkat almost CIO has to “…interact, be receptive, and be knowledgeable Jagaduri, Systems Manager, Polaris Software India Ltd. The software and approachable,” says CR Narayanan, CIO, Alstom Projects Incompany was staring losses in the face because invoices to clients, dia. This builds confidence in his ideas, and slowly, one can turn which were sent over fax and mail, could get lost. Jagaduri came up approachability into influence and influence into authority.

This was effectively demonstrated by Umesh Mehta, DGM IT, with a system that synchronized systems at all 15 delivery and billing New Holland Tractors. Mehta got his first opportunity when he helped manage BaaN in India with a set of process improvement procedures. When he succeeded, he was recognized for his prowess, and soon helped parent company Chase New Holland to effectively implement BaaN in its China office. Avinash Arora, Director IS, New Holland Tractors states: “Mehta is best at reducing the turnaround time for IT projects and that’s an appreciable quality when you have small IT teams and tight timelines.” Mehta has thus managed to enhance his circle of influence by providing the right skills when required.

Influence in some cases is also tied to initiative, as in the case of G. K Duttaraj, Project Manager SAP, Alstom Projects India. Dattaraj realized that the SAP implementation could not succeed without user authorization, and so he put in place well-defined processes to enable the same. In order to influence users, he performed a comprehensive risk-benefit analysis. His people management skills were critical to getting the project through, and his boss, Narayanan, calls him a “manager of captains.”

In some cases, when systems are heavily entrenched in an established and venerable company, one can build influence by tackling new projects with IT. For instance, Alok Verma, now CIO of ITC’s FMGC Division used IT extensively to manage the Wills Lifestyle brand, and utilized technology to create sophisticated tools to manage merchandizing. More importantly, he was involved with a project to forecast future fashion trends. He also leveraged G. K DUTTARAJ, IT to ensure the creation of a Just-In-Time manufacturing Project Manager environment. This naturally enhanced his ability to influSaP, alstom Projects India and LEKHA ence decisions, and now he manages the technology end of BAJPAI,Senior ManITC’s FMCG division. As VVR Babu, group IT Head, put it: ager, Software “Verma has the ability to get the buy-in of business manag& Services, aFl ers for the most crucial IT projects.” This ability, more than technology know-how, will define an IT executive’s ability to become a CIO one day.

What to Watch For: INFLUENCE

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What to Watch For: EXECUTION

that “Padmakumar gets us the best technology at a very affordable price.” One day, this ability will surely propel him into the CIO’s chair because CFOs love such people.

The final ingredient that makes an IT Execution skills are particularly noticeleader one for the CIO to watch is the capaable when the company one works for is unbility to stand and deliver. Yes, vision and dergoing a major IT upheaval. This kind of influence are essential qualities for future an opportunity presented itself to Lekha BaCIOs. But without solid execution, great jpai, Senior Manager, Software & Services, ideas and successful marketing campaigns AFL, when her company moved from a dequickly fall apart. centralized architecture to a centralized one.

In a way, execution tests the true mettle Ones to Watch honorees This necessitated the creation of three cusof the potential CIO because it concerns the — those likely to become tomized ERPs for different divisions of AFL, strategy of operations. Most potential CIOs the CIOs of tomorrow which Bajpai delivered admirably. Based manage the lower end of the IT spectrum, so upon this successful execution, she won the the know-how aspect is bound to dominate.

— need to be good at confidence of her superiors, who handed This desire to manage the nitty-gritty demany things. Critical her a project involving a J2EE-based threetails of a project should be balanced by the skills include: tiered ERP architecture with a rollout in 120 ability to delegate. According to Rajeev Seo1. Fluency in both technology locations across the country. With one sucni, Assistant Vice President and Head - IT, and the business cessful implementation after another, she Flextronics Software Systems, “One person 2. Ability to work at tactical and is now actively participating in the compawill generally not have the bandwidth to get strategic levels simultaneously ny’s B2B integration and the internal helpinto micro details. He has to manage the big 3. Foresight to connect disparate desk. “Based on her excellent track record, picture and learn to delegate.” pieces into cohesive solutions we have now involved her in formulating Of course, the potential CIO should avoid 4. Flexibility and implementing IT security policies and the pitfall at the other extreme — a complete5. Commitment to lifelong learning, with a readiness to stretch lead the business towards BS7799 certificaly hands-off approach, which means that he beyond core competencies tion,” says AFL CIO SR Mallela. With more doesn’t have any fingers in the pie. An ideal 6. Marketing competence such implementations under her belt, she way of approaching the problem is perhaps 7. Consummate communication is bound to get a 360-degree view of the orto do what K. Annapurna Devi, Senior Sysskills ganization’s IT requirements, a major asset tems Analyst, Andhra Pradesh Technology 8. Ability to find and manage for the future.

Services, did. While establishing a system top talent One of the finest things about execution for digital certificates in Andhra Pradesh, 9. vendor management is that it teaches potential CIOs a crucial lesshe relied upon her deep domain expertise expertise son in integration, which is something that in security management to implement the 10. Project management excellence needs to be effectively managed to keep the project successfully. The result — the project 11. Willingness to delegate life blood of any company flowing. Bharat has the potential to indirectly affect the en—Stephanie Overby Dave, AGM – IT, Torrent Pharmaceuticals, tire state’s population of about eight crore. faced this when he was asked to integrate While execution may be perceived as a SAP with a CRM solution that had been low-end function, an IT executive has to redeveloped in-house. He showed his execualize that successful implementation can also make him an agent for change. However, for this to happen, they tion skills by going live in just seven months, and wired it to must take care to bring the benefits of what has been achieved to 2,000 employees. Such actions enable an IT executive to build the notice of the CEO. As Jacob Victor, GM, Andhra Pradesh Tech- influence, besides also providing him with the vision needed for nology Services says, “change cannot come about without the influ- the future. Successful implementation also enables the potential CIO to win the admiration of his bosses. ence of the CEO.” And like all of our Ones to Watch honorees, it likely won’t be the A potential CIO also needs to understand that successful implementation could be the stepping stone for gaining influence and last chance Dave gets to test his hard-won leadership skills, either acquiring vision. As was demonstrated by Charles Padmakumar, in his current position or someday soon as a CIO. CIO Head IT, Bangalore Center, Flextronics Software. Padmakumar managed to use technology to uncouple Hughes Software Services India from Hughes Network Systems and integrate it with Flextronics. He also integrated three of the company’s offices into one facility, again gaining accolades in the process. Seoni, his boss, says Special Correspondent Balaji narasimhan can be reached at balaji_n@cio.in

Traits of a True IT Leader

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Rising Stars Lekha Bajpai, 39,

Our 30 Ones to Watch honorees come from a wide range of backgrounds, but all share a passion and a talent for leadership.

Senior Manager - Software & Services, AFL Bajpai heads a team of 15 developers who work on j2EE 2EE and Web-based apap plications. When aFl needed three ErPs Ps for different divisions, she was entrusted with developing them and other Web-based applications.

Bajpai’s closely involved in B2B integration with suppliers, vendors and customers using Edi/Xml ml, which has improved delivery time and provided transparency to customers. she he also manages an internal helpdesk. “We have now involved her in formulating and implementing it security policies and leading the business towards Bs7799 certification,” says cio s. r. mallela.

Abir Basak, 36, Head IT Infrastructure, Aviva Life Insurance inn 2002, Basak tacked down a blueprint and rolled out a hybrid network connecting 36 offices from scratch for aviva life insur40

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ance. h he’s developed policies to outsource it support to vendors, enabling the company to focus on its core competencies. he followed it up with formulating, executing and monitoring slas and maintaining uptime. among mong his other achievements, Basak put together aviva’s disaster recovery initiative that is remark remarkable for the simplicity of its design. itt consolidates enterprise storage with a unique replication logic, bypassing cumbersome serverbased replication using third-party software.

Pravin Bhosle, 35, Assistant VP – IT, UTI Bank Encouraging innovation and taking initiative are the two qualities that make Bhosle an asset to uti. v. K. ramani, President – it observes, ““he focuses on technology but, unlike others, prioritizes implementation according to business requirements.” among mong his more creative costcutting ideas was to streamline and optimize the organization’s back office. customers of other banks that use uti’s atm network

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account for only 13 percent of transactions. “however, owever, we have pruned costs to make that percentage cover the expenditure on the atm network’s back office,” says ramani.

Debashish Chakraborty, 32, Senior Executive IT, Honda Siel Cars India When chakraborty hakraborty joined honda, onda, almost half the it team was on its way out, with the dealer management software scheduled for rollout. Business sensitive apap plications, network infrastructure and messaging services — needed attention. hee proved his mettle by tackling the crisis and is now part of the core it team that creates three-year plans for the company. head it hilal Khan points out, “chakraborty hakraborty is a self-starter, who likes to see a job done. t too me, he is a bright spot in honda india”.

Bharat Dave, 39, Photos By srivatsa shandilya, FotocorP, sujith, chandroo, surEsh

Assistant General Manager IT, Torrent Pharmaceuticals When managmanag ers at tor t rent Pharma demanded that a homebrewed crm solution be integrated with saP, dave ave achieved the objective in seven months. his is work connected 2,000 field officers who previously had no access to ErP data. this his increased productivity by over 100 percent.

Within a year, the company doudou bled its turnover, thanks mainly to the integration. “hee is an excellent team leader and hits that fine balance between it users and it managers,” says vice ice President jyoti Bandopadhyay.

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Abhrajit De, 40, Senior Manager IS & Head IT Infrastructure, Haldia Petrochemicals managing it for a petrochemical gigi ant is a tough job, but dee handles it with grace. cio anjan njan Bose says that dee has repeatedly proved his leadership skills and has an understanding of the company’s business. de leads from the front and brings his experience to bear in problem solving. hee recently migrated a large atm atm-based campus lan to a Gigabit lan and showed quick results in terms of reduced tco. tco

K. Annapurna Devi, 38, Senior Systems Analyst, Andhra Pradesh Technology Services on the sorting table of future cios, s, devi stands out. her list of achieveachieve ments, including establishing digdig ital certificates for andhra ndhra Pradesh, demonstrates her understanding of both end-users and developers, a quality essential in an it leader. the he digital certificates project, which affects eight crore people, dug deeply into her knowledge of information security management. devi evi has a reputation for keeping herself schooled in new tech technologies and as lead auditor, she is responsible for ensuring that her department’s business objectives from it are met.

G. K. Dattaraj, 40, Project Manager (SAP), Alstom Projects India dattaraj attaraj was among the first to figure that unless user authorizaauthoriza tions were put in place, alstom’s lstom’s saP P implementation would be at

risk. hee took it upon himself to create a process and template defining user authorization and its associassoci ated risk-benefit analysis. hee then managed saP enhancements and oversaw the proper deploydeploy ment of a newer version. cio c.r. c narayanan arayanan says, ““i have many captains on my teams, but dattaraj attaraj is a manager who takes care of all my captains.”

Abhijit Ghatak, 34, Site IT Manager, Ericsson India this his telecom equipment bebe hemoth, with a sizable operation in india, ndia, has travel bills that totaled rss 13 crore a year. Ghatak suggested a video concon ferencing solution, which reduced travel costs by 10 percent. Ericsson also has over 70 applications whose maintenance cost falls in the region of rss 3 crore to 4 crore annually. since ince the maintenance sla did not take into account the usage of these applications, Ghatak developed a matrix to map the level of mainmain tenance versus usage and helped slash expenses by 50 percent.

S.P. Giridhar, 40, Sr. Manager IT Infrastructure (design esign & Management) Godfrey Philips India When Godfrey Philips india ndia chose to Webenable critical it applications as part of its roadmap for growth, Giridhar had to ensure that the applications were secure for hosting. ass the information security point man, Giridhar led Godfrey

Philips’ evolution from a clientserver information architecture to a web-enabled one. “Giridhar doesn’t believe in plain vanilla deployments and has the ability to exploit what’s new and integrate it with what ex exists,” says senior vice President (it and corporate orporate development) alagu Balaraman.

Venkat Jagaduri, 28, Systems Manager, Polaris Software India the use of faxes and snail mail to deliver client invoices left Polaris risking loss of documents. re-engineering the communication process meant synchronizing systems at 30 delivery and billing centers world worldwide. jjagaduri handled the job with aplomb, creating a system that con connected 6,000 employees. his task also included ‘selling’ the system to internal users. cio v. Balakrishnan says, “many projects never go live even after 99 percent completion. jagaduri agaduri has the ability to push them through to the finish line.”

Aashish Kshetry, 37, System development Manager, Asian Paints an mBa and BE in computer engineering, Khsetry straddles both technology and business with ease. “With an understanding of both business processes and customer requirements, he is able to map out technological solutions for business,” says vice President (strategic trategic Planning and it) manish choksi. hoksi. coming up with innovative and cost-effective solutions is his forte. For instance, to expand the home solution business of asian Paints, the company developed an

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indigenous application running on saP, P, much of which was Kshetry’s brainchild. hee is currently tending to an international rollout as asian sian Paints expands into 23 countries.

Umesh Mehta, 39, dGM IT, New Holland Tractors new holland olland t tractors india ndia faced an uphill climb trying to optimize its system running on Baan Er rP (now ssa Global) to meet business demands. mehta ehta diligently worked on process improvement and optimization, enabling the company to sustain increasing workload. he has an acute sense of business and an impressive amount of technitechni cal know-how. director is avinash vinash arora, says, “he’s e’s your man if you want to reduce turnaround time for it projects, an appreciable quality when you have a small it teams and smaller timelines.”

Shiva Nair, 34, Senior Manager Business TechTech nology, Pfizer India When nair air took apart Pfizer’s rss 50 lakh Wide area network etwork (Wan), the company didn’t know what was coming. he replaced the Wan with an on-demand service and provided a virtual Private network, etwork, effectively bringing down costs by 80 percent. nair air manages multiple portfolios.

Ever since he put the company it infrastructure in order, he has been asked to look at technology risk management and oversee managemanage ment of electronic and physical data at Pfizer’s various divisions. “h he is good at cost rationalization and resource optimization,” says senior enior director it arun Gupta.

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Charles Padmakumar, 40, Head IT, Bangalore Center, Flextronics Software a year-and-a-half ago, FlextronFlextron ics software oftware bought a part of hughes software oftware services india. ndia. the he challenge of integrating the infrastructure of what was hughes’ ughes’ with FlextronFlextron ics’ (and six other companies that hughes ughes owned) fell on the shoulders of Padmakumar. later, ater, he handled an integration of three smaller offices in Bangalore with zero downtime — 850 employees walked into their new offices and went straight to work. When Flextronics’ board went over the nomination for ones nes to Watch, Padmakumar was the unanimous choice. ““h he’s the most appreciated it executive within Flextronics,” observes rajeev r seoni, eoni, vP it.

Mahesh K. Pinnamaneni, 37, Head IT, Aurobindo Pharma Pinnamaneni’s score card, as penned by cio chittu hittu Babu, is fit for a plaque. as head it, it he already has a foot in his cio’s ’s world, a fact that’s responsible for one worry-line lesser on Babu’s forehead. his is analytical and technical skills distinguish him from the pack. it’s t’s a mix that his cio feels keeps Pinnamaneni on top of his responsibilities and still looking ahead. one ne of his most important strengths is an ability to never let a situation get the better of him, says Babu.

Daya Prakash, 38, Software Project Manager, LG Electronics India Prakash is one of four domain experts at lG Electronics india. ndia. lG G recently went live with oracle racle

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Business suite, uite, which involved a roll-out of almost all applications. itt took seven months of work and impacted thousands of users at over 220 locations. Prakash successfully led a team of 150, including the vendor and the system integrators, through many rough patches. ““hee is one of a small group that both looks into the future and aligns it with business goals. hee is my next star,” says Gm G it arindam rindam Bose.

Jitendra Sarode, 37, Head – IT Infrastructure, Pantaloon Retail cio chinar deshpande maintains that sarode arode scores a 9 out of 10 on punctual project execution, meetmeet ing the punishing timelines of the retail business. deshpande eshpande recalls that when the person heading the appdev project for Food Bazaar quit, s sarode arode was asked to fill in. “he “ spent two days with Food Bazaar staff at different warehouses and stores, getting clued into their expectations and requirements. the project demanded 30 days. sarode arode got it done in 15,” says deshpande. eshpande.

Anish Shah, 37, Member, IT Team, Reliance Industries Limited cutting utting operaopera tional costs is a priority at reliance industries, ndustries, and shah hah has come up with a plan to reduce more than 50 percent of the cost for an international project. once nce the plan is implemented, the potential savings are estimated in excess of rss 9 crore ($2 million).

Flexibility is one of his hallmark at attributes and he encourages his team to work with multiple platforms. summing umming up shah’s capabilities, advisor, dvisor, reliance industries ashish Kumar chauhan says, “his understanding of business processes is immaculate.”

Arun Shakya, 30, Manger SAP development, Britannia Industries corporate manager (it it & systems), t. s. Purushottaman feels that shakya has great communication skills. an engineer with an mBa a from iit, shakya’s dedication to detail and background work has paid off more than once. a project involving mrP purchases was pushed through thanks to his under understanding of the context. he recently led his team through a complex saP implementation. his strength lies in workflow improvement, a knack he’s honed from his days at tcs. hee is also Britannia’s soX compliance officer.

Shiv Shankar Singh, 34, Assistant General Manager IT, Bombay Stock Exchange With india’s premier bourse connected to 450 offices and over 10,000 traders daily, singh’s role requires constant innovation. his expertise came to the fore when B BsE set up its disaster recovery site. singh implemented a data extractor and replicator and was responsible for setting up most of the recovery site. his work has made singh ingh a critical resource for B BsE’s it team. ““it’s all the way up for him from here. h he’s a champion at delivering path-breaking it projects ahead of time,” says head it s.B. Patankar.

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ONES TO

WATCH

HOnOREES

Ravinder Sharma, 26, Assistant Manager – IT, Fortis Healthcare sharma harma joined Fortis five years ago as a programmer for Fortis’ hospital ospital information nformation system (his). ). When the it manager quit, sharma harma found himself called upon to do what he’d never done before. But, take over he did, and showed a knack for people management and business insight. Within five months, he was in charge of both the his and the overall it project. since then his has been rolled out at four other locations. “ravinder avinder has shown great depth of understanding in whatever he is asked to do,” says cio sunil Kapoor.

Suren Shetty, 35, Vice President IT, YES Bank cio aditya menon enon states that shetty hetty was a key asset in implementing yEs Bank’s it blueprint. With much of the bank’s it infrastrucinfrastruc ture being outsourced, shetty’s hetty’s wields his talent at bridging the divide between systems and users as he manages multiple vendor relationships. his is responsibilities, which include corporate banking applications, point to a multi-facmulti-fac eted manager with an attitude of getting work accomplished and enhancing the implicit contract between business and it — so eses sential to it governance.

Subbalakshmi Shirali, 39, Senior Manager, IT, Shamrao Vithal Co-op Bank apart part from being a core member of the it team, shirali hirali has also spent a considerable amount of

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her 18-years of experience being a part of banking operations. “shirali hirali has headed a branch and is aware of the monotonous activities that can be automated to ensure effective manpower utilization and business growth,” says dGm-credit & it ravikiran avikiran mankikar. datawarehous atawarehousing solutions and a head office ffice accounting ccounting application to enable straight through processing of the bank’s real time Gross settle ettlement transactions are some of the projects that showcase her innovainnova tive thinking thinking.

Dheeraj Sinha, 35, Head IT, Apollo Tyres three hree years ago, apollo tyres tyres brought sinha inha on board as head of information services to make it a 360 degree function. the he past two years have seen d dheeraj heeraj fulfill that mandate. hee has successfully deployed saP across 140 locations in india ndia and created a dealer ealer Portal — a first for the indian ndian tire industry. ann intranet portal followed suit. ““sinha inha has been an asset to apollo pollo during a critical juncture of our growth and has put systems in place seamseam lessly,” says coo neeraj r. s.. Kanwar.

Prasad Sohoni, 37, IT Manager, Thomas Cook India Business continuity is an untouchuntouch able variable as sohoni ohoni works on thomas cook’s ook’s it infrastructure.

With t thomas cook ook wired into a number of customer reservation

systems, sohoni has set up a secondary W Wan ensuring almost zero downtime and introduced a solution that simultaneously minimizes bandwidth requirement and keeps the network secure. incredibly, ncredibly, it came at a hundredth of the price that a solution from a global vendor would have cost. “sohoni ohoni demonstrates excellent business acumen and technologitechnologi cal maturity,” says head it anil n nadkarni.

N. Srinivas, 33, Manager Systems & Security, Novo Nordisk India “srinivas is authoritative, task-oriented and possesses a keen sense of follow up,” says it head ead Wilfred Prakash. the he pharma company turned to srinivas rinivas when it needed to convince its it-shy -shy sales team about a sales-force automation program. hee squarely faced the challenge of commissioning the project, winning the sales team over and train training them, while juggling network security and support. hee also found a way to complete the project under budget and on time.

C. Thangavel, 40, Technical director irector & Scientist, National Informatics Centre thangavel brings to the table 17 years of it expertise in government institutions. a deep understanding of both the technical and administrative worlds has kept him on top of the game and his projects on schedule, especially when he engaged in KaverEcom, a single-window service that genergener ates bills for Karnataka governgovern ment departments. thangavel hangavel led

KaverEcom from concept to execu execution and won global recognition for the project.

Alok Verma, 38, CIo FMGC division, ITC in an earlier assignment with itc’s retail business, verma remodeled the business on it.

Wills lifestyle and its fleet of 50 premium stores and warehouses became a leading retail chain mainly due to its ability to handle merchandize management and forecast fashion trends. verma was also responsible for making the supply chain work in a ‘‘just in time’ ime’ manufacturing environment. att present, verma spearheads it for the FFmcG division. he’s heading the upgrade to saP Enterprise Edition 5.0 and is working on devel developing information systems for field force automation.

Veena Vasanth, 33, deputy eputy Manager Systems, Biocon Putting together an ErP system for a biotech company takes grit, know-how and an abundance of emotional intelligence — all of which vasanth has. her ability to sponge up new technologies and wield them is what gets vasanth asanth her boss’ vote. ““she’s adaptive and has a high degree of natural intelligence. What differenti differentiates her from her colleagues is her commitment to work and initiative,” says r radhakrishnan menon, manager it at Biocon. she’s currently using some of that for building Biocon an intranet while getting herself an mBa.

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Empowering

Success

By Rahul Neel Mani

Kwang-Ro Kim, MD, LG Electronics India, is convinced that IT is the only way to foster a culture of success that’ll create a Rs 45,000 crore corporation by 2010.

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Everyone loves a dark horse. When LG Electronics India streaked to the Rs 9,000 crore mark in less than 10 years, it earned the respect of even close competitiors. Kwang-Ro Kim, Managing Director, LGEIL, says that IT empowers the company and View from the top is a series of interits employees, and expects his IT views with CEOs and team to create the platform that other C-level executives about the role of IT in will transition the organization their companies and what they expect from into an intelligent enterprise. their CIOs.

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View from the Top

CIO: Has IT helped power LG India's phenomenal growth over the past decade?

K.R. Kim: In our first year, we didn’t have any centralized IT architecture, though we touched Rs 90 crore in sales. At that time we operated only 10 branches. Today, we’re spread over 47 branch offices. If you count some of the remote offices, we are present at 220 locations across the country. It’s simply impossible to run a company of this size without IT; that much is evident.

But IT also drives my own philosophy: The most important element for a corporation’s success is how much it can empower its employees. In the 21st century, empowerment translates into information which requires IT. When we rolled out the Millennium (M) System (LG’s global ERP), it was our first enterprise-wide application and it was partially meant to network and empower our employees.

IT’s more noteworthy contribution to LG is replacing our offline learning model with e-learning. With e-learning, every relevant person knows the features of a product before it’s even launched. We’re now making this available to LG dealers on a pilot basis.

How does LG utilize IT to carry your vision forward?

My only concern is to make LG the most efficient and service-oriented company in the sector. IT already has the ability to update us on the status of sales, dispatches, inventory, returns, damages, etc. We would like IT to be able to make demand forecasts so that we can synchronize production accordingly.

What I expect from IT boils down to just one need: Information should be available instantly to those who want it. I believe in IT so much that without the IT department’s approval we don’t open a remote office, since we need to clear issues like connectivity and communications infrastructure.

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SNAPSHOT I also discourage physical documentation and the IT team has been asked to solve this. Efficient companies are not known for cumbersome documentation, they are known for swift IT-empowered decision making.

LG

not only the best price, but also a wide choice of vendors.

Consumer ElectronOnce a vendor, is selected they ics, GSM Handset are provided a unique user ID Manufacturing, IT Peripherals and password and they merge into LG’s system. The por2004-2005 REvENuE: Rs 9,000 crore tal informs them of weekly, (expected) monthly and yearly producANNuAL IT BuDGET: tion and when they can expect 0.4 percent of their next consignment.

Where does the revenue Until the system was put dealer portal figure EmPLOyEES: into place, the purchase in this strategy?

3,000 (Approx.) department was skeptical of IT STAff: dispatch schedules and was LG thrives on its dealer6 permanent (94 on often clueless of stock status. distributor channel. We project basis) It led to improper planning. have a strong supply chain HEADquARTERS: Now we’ve shortened the that connects to our dealers Greater Noida (UP) production cycle and smoothand distributors across the PLANT LOCATIONS: ened the process of sourcing country. This benefits us as 2 from vendors. well. In business a sale is not TOTAL LOCATIONS: When LG India started its closed until money is in the 220 operations, we had inventory kitty. Constant and IT-powDEALERS: worth a month. Now we’re at ered accounts reconciliation 3,500 half of that. The IT team has helps us ensure that we only CIO: Arindam Bose a mandate to shrink this even have Rs 1 crore of bad debt in further. We are also trying to the market. For a corporation create a knowledge manageof our size, this is good. ment system that’s going to be In the initial days, when we had only 100 dealers, reconciliation was connected directly with the product develpossible without IT. Now, we have 3,500 deal- opment system and R&D. ers and physical reconciliation is impossible.

That’s why we created www.lgdealernet.com. Do you expect your new ERP We square our accounts with 70 percent of to provide an added edge? our dealers through this interface.

LG India has set a target of Rs 45,000 crore ($ 10 billion) by 2010, of which exports will LG is known as a Just-Incontribute 30 percent. Given this goal, it is Time company. How has IT necessary to adopt the fast track approach, impacted your production which we can only sustain if we empower our department? people and business with equally fast inforLG sells over one crore of products a year. mation systems.

Oracle 11i allows us to do just this. It will To keep inventory at a minimum it’s necessary to keep in touch with our vendors and suppli- empower our people to integrate seamlessly ers. LG’s IT team created www.lgesource.com with other LG subsidiaries worldwide. Secto make this possible and for us to find out ondly, managing four manufacturing plants (including contract manufacturing units) is what’s selling, what’s not, and why.

At LG, sourcing is done through an elec- only possible using a robust ERP. MSystem tronic bidding system. This allows us to get was great, but a time came when it was no lonPRImARy BuSINESS:

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Staying a leader in the years to come will call for an innovative use of our IT infrastructure. And to make that happen, I will empower the IT team.

ger possible to make additional amendments to the system.

Photo by B hagirath

Has IT changed the way you interact with customers?

LGezbuy.com is our answer to our B2C requirements. The portal targets Non Resident Indians who want to purchase goods for their families in India. It helps us push slow moving items, which are not always in demand. The site allows someone living in the United States to buy a product at the best price and we promise to have it delivered. If eBay can do it, why can’t LG? I have a dream of seeing at least 10 percent of our business coming through lgezbuy.com by 2010. At the moment it makes about Rs 20 crore.

LG is viewed as customer-centric company and we require strong customer feed-

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back mechanisms to keep this reputation intact. That said, we are only in the initial stages of a large CRM initiative.

What are your top three expectations from the LG CIO? One, I want LG to be the number one consumer goods corporation. Two, I want it to be a premier marketing organization. Three, I want to see LG as a first-rate operations company. These three goals have a lot to do with IT’s contribution. The CIO’s Key Performance Index (KPI) clearly mentions these three objectives. He is evaluated by how much he has empowered LG, how IT has pitched in to shrink decision-making processes and how much operational excellence he brings in. I think this is only fair.

We judge the sales head on sales figures, and we should be able to judge the CIO on

his KPIs. Even I’m held responsible if the region under me does not perform.

Moving forward, how do you view LG’s transition to an intelligent enterprise?

To create an intelligent enterprise, we have to depend on business intelligence powered

by IT. When we say that LG India wants to be a Rs 45,000 crore corporation, I see IT providing the platform to achieve that vision.

Remaining a leader is tougher than getting to the top. You become everyone’s target when you are a leader. Staying a leader in the years to come will call for an innovative use of our IT infrastructure. CIO

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

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11/16/2011 11:56:19 AM

The requirements process — literally, deciding what should be included in software — is destroying

By C h r i sto p h e r L i n d qu i st Hugh Cumming had his work cut out for him. The gap between what his not-yetimplemented call center management application at a large European company could do and the requirements list created by 40 eager business-side stakeholders now filled 3,000 pages and threatened to delay an already overdue call center consolidation effort Reader ROI:

How a broken requirements process can sabotage software projects Ways to rewrite the process for success Software that can help monitor requirements for problems

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another four to five years. “My first instinct was that the project had absolutely no chance of success,” says Cumming, currently CIO for ADP Employer Services, Canada.

Requirements, as every CIO knows, are a problem, but CIOs may not be aware of just how catastrophic the problem has become. Analysts report that as many as 71 percent of software projects that fail do so because of poor requirements management, making it the single biggest reason for project failure — bigger than bad technology, missed deadlines or change management fiascoes. Though

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CIOs are rarely directly responsible for requirements management, they are accountable for poor outcomes, which, when requirements go bad, can include: Project delays, software that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to and, worst of all, software that may not work correctly when rolled out, putting the business — and the CIO’s job — at risk.

Mishandled requirements can torpedo a project at any time, from inception to delivery. Start down the wrong road and you arrive at the wrong destination. And even if you’re heading in the right direction, making fumbling changes midstream

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ying

Software and Systems can be almost as deadly. Not integrating requirements with your test process can have you racing back late in the game to correct problems that might have been solved early on (and more cheaply).

It’s up to the CIO to establish an overall requirements process that works and to support it with the political skills necessary to get buy-in from both the business and development sides. The CIO must also have the organizational backbone necessary to shove wayward requirements processes back into line.

None of this is easy. Business users often don’t know exactly what they want, can’t prioritize what they do

requirements process that will produce positive results — and maybe keep your next project from becoming another statistic.

Forty’s a Crowd Cumming’s solution to his requirements nightmare was radical surgery. First — with backing from ADP’s chief executive — he stripped down the scope of the consolidation project, lopping off existing processes that worked as-is and didn’t need to be rolled into the new application.

He also pared the group of 40 stakeholders to five active participants. He allowed the others to stay involved, but

projects in ways that aren’t evident until it’s too late. Some CIOs are stepping in to rewrite the rules. want, request things IT simply can’t deliver (because of complexity or cost), or can’t describe their desires in terms that translate accurately into code. On the IT side, analysts, architects and coders regularly try too hard to please and don’t set realistic expectations for projects; they don’t use every means possible to guarantee that what they’re building is what the user really needs, and sometimes they even fail to make sure that they’re talking to all the right stakeholders.

In short, the traditional practice of requirements is broken. But some IT folks are doing everything they can to fix the situation. To a man, they say process is key. Exactly what process? They all have their own ideas. One executive decided to simply enforce rules that should have been enforced all along. Another rewrote the rules from the ground up. And a pair threw out the old rule books completely, one taking a business-process-focused approach and the other choosing to build applications with quick iterations rather than long requirements documents. But they all agree that you should choose a formal requirements-gathering process and stick to it.

Writing requirements is hard. It will always be hard.

But with a handful of smart decisions you can create a

only in the more passive role of reviewing the implementation plan and feature specifications, without actually adding feature requests of their own. He then repeatedly went back to the remaining five stakeholders and asked them if specific requirements were really must-haves or simply nice-to-haves. After less than two months of pressing the issue, his new requirements list was less than 10 percent of the original. And after the project went into production, it needed to accommodate only one major change before being rolled out to 12 global locations.

Cumming says the problem in this case — and in many cases — is that IT often does not take a leadership position in the requirements process, instead taking the attitude that “the business is requesting it, so it must be the best thing to do.” But that kind of thinking can lead to requirements lists that are unmanageable and unforgiving. Instead, he says, IT people need to develop a valuable skill: Saying no with a smile. “Really what you’re saying is, ‘Not yet,’” Cumming says.

To paraphrase Daniele Vare, managing requirements— like diplomacy—is the art of letting everybody have your way. When Cumming reduced his army of 40 stakeholders to five, he admits that there were some “interesting con-

Analysts report that as many as 71% of software projects that fail do so because of poor requirements management, making it the single biggest reason for project failure.

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Software and Systems

Business users often don’t know exactly what they want. On the IT side, analysts, architects and coders regularly try too hard to please and don’t set realistic expectations for projects. versations” about who would stay in primary roles, noting that people were worried they were going to lose features they felt were important to their business units. To ease their fears, Cumming and the core stakeholders created a “high-level vision” (a summary of the most important functions) for the project and spent time demonstrating how the final project lined up with that vision. He also showed all the stakeholders how they would get at least some value from the project — even if they weren’t going to get every single detail they wanted.

The more passive stakeholders were also encouraged to become more active as the call center system began rolling out. When the system moved into their departments, these stakeholders became directly responsible for sponsoring any necessary application changes within those departments. This task was assisted by the intense interest that senior management had in getting the project into production. Cumming felt he needed to know who really wielded influence in the company (versus what appeared in the org chart), plus he wanted to identify stakeholders with sufficient technical expertise to add value to the requirements-gathering process.

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“The list of people who would have the most to contribute to a requirement list always ends up being small in my experience,” Cumming says.

The Rules of the Roles Tired of his company’s hodgepodge of requirements practices, Jesse Hanspal, director of development technology services at Bank of Montreal Financial Group, decided to create his own process by combining pieces of existing requirements techniques and adding a quality assurance process as well. Hanspal says that after five years of effort, the bank has defined the requirements process at a level of abstraction high enough that it can be applied to any project or problem. After much consideration, the bank decided that it needed a process built around responsibility and job roles in order to guarantee that all necessary stakeholders had a say.

“It’s important to get all the stakeholders around the table and get the requirements from the horse’s mouth,” Hanspal says. And, he adds, by defining stakeholders according to their roles, you get a more accurate crosssection. For instance, he says, for a given project, you need representation of the end user role, of course, but also of the application administrator role, not to mention roles related to security and regulatory compliance.

Hanspal notes that in the past IT spent 10 percent to 20 percent of its time and energy on defining requirements.

“What we’ve learned is that once you have defined a process, then you go and get an ISO 9000 certification for that,” he says. Having the certification lets people know what is required of them. It also gives the bank a chance to evaluate effectiveness and improve the process. And Hanspal says the new process has produced results. For instance, the number of software defects related to requirements has dropped by some 50 percent since implementing the new controls.

Bank of Montreal also wanted to make sure that its analysts had the skills necessary to execute the new process.

Unfortunately, while it had been easy to find external certification for project management (the Project Management Institute) and functional testing (the Quality Assurance Institute), no similar body existed for business analysis.

So the bank created its own. The International Institute of Business Analysis now boasts some 800 international members, Hanspal says, and any company can send analysts for training in the Bank of Montreal approach.

Going Agile Given the trouble companies continue to have with requirements, some practitioners argue that the process needs to be more flexible.

Gregor Bailar, CIO at Capital One, is a convert to one of these anti-establishment philosophies: Agile development. Agile development advocates argue that old-style

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with a planning meeting and end with the group reviewrequirements processes are too rigid, put walls between ing test results before the start of the next sprint. users and developers, and, given the ever-changing nature He then tracked their progress against the historically of software and business, are fated to fail. Instead, they expected progress of the older method, and he was happy say, developers and users should sit down together and with what he saw. Agile reduced development time start coding almost immediately, stopping frequently to by an average of 30 percent to 40 percent (sometimes evaluate progress and make necessary changes based on nearer to 50 percent) while simultaneously improving user input without feeling the need to follow a monolithic the quality of the deliverables. He’s sold, though he requirements document. acknowledges that agile has its limitations.

“What we needed wasn’t more process but to get to the “There are lots of things we don’t use agile for,” Baivalue [in a project],”Bailar says. lar says, noting that the method excels where requireAfter piloting the concept in early 2004, Bailar ments are ambiguous and priorities are unclear, or began forming the ultra-lean, connected teams that for situations where you have the triple constraint are the basis of the agile method. Agile teams at Capiof “faster, cheaper, better” but can’t afford to drop tal One generally consist of three businesspeople, two one of the three. For extremely large projects or operations people, and five to seven IT folks, including those with very distinct and ordered requirements, a business information officer (in effect, a translator Bailar says more traditional approaches are probably who works between the business and IT sides), a proja better fit. ect manager and at least one of the 80 developers that Bailar sent to formal agile training classes. Along the way, some architects and security experts will add their skills as necessary. Each team gets its own agile coach (one of 20 Bailar hired) to keep an eye on the proceedings and offer advice and support. Teams meet in dedicated, open rooms, and initial requirements are limited to a goal for the project, a handful of cards with specific needs, and some models or prototypes for reference. Teams work together in close quarters throughout the project, and development stops regularly — perhaps three or four times in a typical nineweek development cycle — to assess progress and determine if changes are needed. Larger projects are built by breaking projects down into small pieces and assigning each subsection to an agile team (the method is sometimes called “swarming” in agile circles), with the overall progress controlled by a project manager.

To test the results of the system, Bailar took several in-development projCapital One CIO GREGOR ects and switched them midstream BAILAR is a fan of agile develfrom older waterfall-style developopment, saying requirements ment to “scrum,” an agile technique gathering should focus less that prescribes small, flexible groups on process and more on the that include developers and users and project’s business value. divides development into a sequence of 30-day “sprints.” These sprints begin

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IM AG ING BY BINES H S R EEDHA RA N

Software and Systems

Software and Systems Every Line of Code Connected to a Business Process Robert Sherman might not see it that way, however.

Sherman, the strategic methods leader for IT at Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals, isn’t a huge fan of traditional approaches to requirements. He considers requirements only one of the first threads in a tapestry that includes everything from business processes to a finished software application. And unless IT managers begin to realize the importance of this interconnectedness, he warns, countless projects will continue to crash and burn.

Like ADP’s Cumming, Sherman had a requirements epiphany in the late 1990s. At the time, he was involved in an effort to standardize all of P&G’s 150 factories on a single factory-floor information management system. He and nine other experts at the company compared a 70-page specification written by the supplier to a 200-page requirements document written by P&G. Experts and vendor alike agreed that the document contained everything necessary for a successful project. It was concise. It was complete. It also “went to hell in a handbasket,” Sherman says.

Poking through the rubble, Sherman at first couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. Why had the seemingly

ideal specification failed to produce a suitable application?

He hired a contractor who spent two months tracing every requirement to every relevant sentence in the specification.

P&G found that 30 percent of the deliverables were not adequately addressed. And from what Sherman could tell, the misfires were a result of being too dependent on team members’ recollection of document comparison.

The supplier had looked for common patterns that it could duplicate in order to reduce coding complexity. To Sherman and the others reviewing the specification, it looked — on the surface — as if those patterns matched exactly to the requirements. But they hadn’t. The problem, Sherman eventually decided, was that everyone involved had simply run up against the limits of their ability to comprehend extremely complex situations.

The management tools they were using were also unable to make proper connections between deliverables and the actual business processes they would support — connections that would have highlighted the subtle distinctions that turned success into failure.

Frustrated with the inability of requirements management software vendors to address the overriding disconnectedness he felt was at the core of many development

REQUIREMENTS TOOLS

Guardrails to a Good Process

"Tools never fixed a software problem,” says Richard Chennault, enterprise architect at Kaiser Permanente. But when it comes to managing the requirements process, tools can be a help — assuming good processes are already in place.

Whether you subscribe to the Rational Unified Process and own the complete suite of Rational applications or simply piece together your own toolset from smaller vendors such as Borland and iRise, tools can act as bearings and guardrails to help keep your requirements process moving and on track.

Some examples: The Framework for Integrated Test (FIT), developed by Ward Cunningham (who also invented the community-edited online Wikipedia), is a platform where requirements are literally written as tests — for a requirement to be met, the test must pass.

And FitNesse, which puts a wiki-like interface on the FIT methodology, allows business users (or more likely business analysts) to enter requirements into a spreadsheet interface that automatically produces test cases for later testing.

Sofea’s Prophesy (used by Bank of Montreal) lets

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customers and business analysts produce simulations and tests before any code gets written.

SteelTrace Catalyze (used by ADP) is a requirements-management tool that breaks requirements into functional and nonfunctional (qualitative) buckets, creates graphical storyboards of requirements and generates test documentation.

Telelogic’s Doors (used by Bank of Montreal and Procter & Gamble) integrates with Mercury Interactive’s TestDirector for automated testing.

Rise’s iRise Studio lets companies create rich prototypes of applications, allowing, if not functional tests, at least visual confirmation that requirements are being accurately modeled. "Short of having a simulation, you will get to the testing phase and have misrequirements,” says David Nix, vice president of online banking at Suntrust, an iRise user.

Borland Caliber RM allows simplified requirements modeling.

But, while all these products can simplify the requirements in your life, "you have to focus on process first,” says Chennault. "You can do all this stuff with a notepad and a pencil if you have a great process.”

—C.L.

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Software and Systems problems (not just this one), Sherman decided to build a system using his own schema and a collection of tools that now includes Visio and Telelogic’s Doors. The premise, he says, was simple: Granular traceability. His vision was to be able to take a piece of code and quickly trace it back and then — rather than stopping there — map it all the way back to every affected business process to gauge the application’s impact.

Getting to this point has taken five years and has required the IT team to gain an encyclopedic understanding of business processes, but the results have been worthwhile. Using complex pharmaceutical project lifecycle management tools as a benchmark, Sherman says he produced the application at one-quarter the cost and with fewer than 10 percent of the expected defects compared with outside development estimates.

The P&G schema has produced numerous side benefits as well, Sherman adds. For instance, an approach called “initiative scenarios” helps IT teams identify potential enterprise-level stakeholders, with the aim of converting them to sponsors. Since every requirement links back to a business process, Robert Sherman, strategic methods stakeholders can trace their way through leader for IT at P&G Pharmaceuticals, the organization. As an example, Sherman believes that going beyond a certain levpoints to an Electronic Lab Notebooking el of documentation in the requirements (ELN) application (a digital data collection process leads only to more documentatool for researchers) that P&G had been tion instead of execution. having trouble getting rolled out. Previous attempts at delivering the ELN limited the requirements analysis to the lab bench and the scientist who combining these pieces, but Sherman believes that going used the notebook. But Sherman was able to demonstrate beyond a certain level of documentation leads only to a domino effect that showed how notebook data would more documentation — and greater complexity — instead affect acquisitions, divestitures, patent filing and more. As of execution. a result, the IT group was able to seek additional sponsors and the project is heading toward 4,000 users.

Required Thinking “If you’ve done the appropriate joins [to these work proAs these cases show, requirements processes must cesses] and you understand the linkages back to the roles, change, and CIOs need to drive the charge. Fixing your broyou can get the clearance ahead of time — or kill the project ken process probably won’t be easy or quick, so start now. if you don’t have the buy-in,” Sherman says.

“Today, survival depends on game changing — cerThe schema also has a dramatic impact on compliance. tainly for IT it does,” P&G’s Sherman says. To change the Sherman says that compliance experts can trace legal development game, “IT is going to have to understand the requirements all the way from business process to final intersections between requirements and business procode. And the schema’s chartlike format makes it possible cesses.” Failure to achieve that understanding could have for anyone to trace a path, which helps users and develop- dire consequences, he warns. ers to prioritize requirements.

“If you’re not rewriting the rules of the game,” Sherman Even so, Sherman says, successfully using the schema says, “then you deserve to have your job offshored.” CIO requires a couple of rules. Projects must be broken down into pieces. More complex applications can be built by Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Savings

Up For Auction

BY T. Radhakrishna

Not all agencies take the handrailed path to e-Government. Here are three instances from

India and Scotland that have pioneered a way to hasten tenders and save the tax-payers crores.

T

he blue and grey colors of the Karnataka State Police Housing Corporation (KSPHC), website wash over a large room in its Bangalore headquarters.

The room’s empty except for the stray department member. But its emptiness belies a palpable excitement as the corporation tests its first etender on January 7, 2003.

The KSPHC is on the lookout for someone to colocate its web servers, since its service provide is shutting shop. Using the traditional process of placing a tender, going back and forth with a handful of bidders and getting authorizations at each stage, could take them up to six months — time it can not afford.

On the big screen firms from across the country log onto the site, their identities hidden behind screen

Reader ROI:

Why departmental buy-in is critical How to keep stakeholders in the loop Why suppliers need training and hand-holding

names like Green123 and Santro. Though they’ve all been put through the ropes, they’re a little nervous.

Some of that apprehension filters across as screen names blink expectantly.

The bidding opens at Rs 32 lakh. Green123 bids Rs 2 lakh lower. The display tracks the project’s price like a stock graph in a bear market. There are only seven bidders left in the fray 85 minutes and 200 bids later.

In a frantic attempt to corner a new account, they push through 16 more bids in the last five minutes.

When the virtual hammer comes down the project goes to the company that quoted Rs 7.80 lakh — 75 percent less than the opening bid.

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), it is later known, took the project home. Some of the others that participated in that e-tender included VSNL, Reliance Infocomm, Bharti, HCL and SIFY. “This isn’t only about driving down suppliers’ prices. e-Procurement strengthens the process of procurement,” says R. Sri Kumar, DGP and chairman and managing director, KSPHC, the agency that builds houses for the police, the fire and prison departments.

The online tender also reduced the chances of KSPHC playing favorites or of bidders forming cartels.

How do you build a sound e-Procurement strategy? What are the rules that define the game? To find answers, CIO approached the Government of Andhra Pradesh, the Scottish Executive, and the KSPHC, all of whom have set e-Procurement benchmarks to address unique business challenges.

Illustration by Shyam Deshpande

e-Procurement

tom Wilson

Director, eprocurement scotl@nd programme (eps), Finance and Central services Department, scottish executive

What were the objectives of ePS? Our objective was to transform Scottish Public Sector Procurement, and make it more efficient. Others include reduced cost of sales for suppliers and creating an e-procurement service assessed via a web-browser from across a range of platforms. Digitizing all purchasing activities from requisition to payment, supporting the procurement process from advertising to awarding contracts and providing detailed MIS are among the objectives.

What has the system achieved?

We have 60 public sector organizations now using ePS. Their combined procurement permits a recurring saving of about £200 million a year.

The Scottish National Health’s requirement for disposable latex gloves is a recent example of how this is done. The reverse auction saved £500,000 over a 12 month period. For example, on an average, we achieved a 15 to 18 percent saving. Through purchase orders being placed straight into suppliers’ sales order processing systems and automated payment (through an embedded Visa Government Procurement card).

How was the turnaround time for procurement brought down?

There are two aspects to this. The traditional authorization and placement of an order could take anything up to two to three weeks because paper-based forms are forwarded to a central requisitioning area where purchase orders are placed. e-procurement reduces this to two to three hours on an average.

There is also a marked improvement on payments. The use of the Visa Government Procurement Card sees to it that suppliers are paid in three to four days. Tendering by electronic means through the new European Commission legislation is reduced by 12 days as against the traditional paper method.

—T.R.

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Government in the Lead A few years ago, a lack of transparency, delays, reams of paper and even threats to the lives of bidders formed a fair description of the procurement system of the Andhra Pradesh government.

In a determined attempt to shrink procurement time and inject integrity back into the system, the then chief minister put a cabinet sub-committee on the job. The panel recommended creating an e-Procurement Exchange with a dynamic pricing system.

Based on the advice of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), the Andhra government selected C1 India to implement the exchange. It started out by identifying project managers and key officials in each department. These officials were subsequently trained by IIM-Ahmedabad to think like CIOs and function as a bridge between domain experts and firms vying for projects and assist in bringing about legislative changes to streamline the procurement process.

To effectively communicate the objectives and benefits of the project, extensive concept selling and workshops were conducted for both the department and bidders (termed ‘suppliers’). Four hundred department users and over 1,000 suppliers received hands-on training and detailed training kits were distributed to all departments.

A pilot launched in January 2003 covered four agencies: Public Works Department, Andhra Pradesh Technology Services, Transport Corporation and Health & Medical Infrastructure Corporation. The proof-of-concept lasted nine months during which the state made e-Procurement mandatory for all procurement over Rs 50 lakh. After the success of the pilot, e-Procurement was compulsory for all departments and purchases above Rs 10 lakh.

The e-Procurement Exchange has lent transparency to the procurement system and slashed processing time by over 70 percent. In the last 28 months, the state has processed 9,600 tenders that tally up to purchases of Rs 36,000 crore. The number of its suppliers has jumped to 6,000. In fact, the state saved Rs 1,000 crore in 2004-05, a year that saw e-Procurement touch Rs 15,600 crore, accounting for 80 percent of the state’s total buying. Interestingly, the government saved Rs 3 crore by not placing tender advertisements in publications.

Run on a Build-Operate-Transfer model, the Exchange does not require state funding. Departments pay a fixed hosting fee and a percentage of the project to the service provider. C1 India gets 0.4 percent of the estimated cost of project.

Online procurement of services and engineering contracts has benefited both the government and suppliers. “Without e-Procurement, we’d never have been able to hand out such an astounding number of tenders in so short a time,” says Dr. J. C. Mohanty, former principal secretary, IT department, Andhra Pradesh.

Today, 70 government agencies use e-Procurement. The IT department has already drawn a roadmap that includes new modules like a contractors’ database and an online payment facility.

Initially it was tough to secure buy in. “It was one thing to set up the e-Procurement Exchange but quite another issue to convince stakeholders to use it,” says another official. The implementation had to be buttressed by an enormous effort in change management.

Invest in Stakeholders Pertinently, Tom Wilson, Director, eProcurement Scotl@nd Programme (ePS), believes that e-Procurement is a misleading term. e-Procurement, he says, is about changing the business culture in organizations and then locking those changes in place.

“It is not an IT project and can not be run as such,” he observes.

The project Wilson oversees was started by the Scottish Executive (SE), which is responsible for education, health, justice, transport, and rural affairs. In 2000, SE initiated a cross-sector Procurement Steering Group to rectify a number of issues in the way that public sector purchases were conducted.

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e

e-Procurement

Following considerable market research, the SE recog recognized that the traditional tender process did not address ROI. It also realized that early e-Procurement solutions were buyer-centric, a stand they needed to steer clear of if they wanted the system to appeal to suppliers.

In conjunction with an early adopting group of local authorities and health organizations, the parameters for an e-Procurement platform were frozen. After an international competition, the Scottish Executive handed the contract to Cap Gemini in November 2001.

As of September 2005, the Scottish Executive’s administration had 1,400 officers in over 40 central public sector organizations who have drawn on ePS services. More than 10,000 firms have received orders through ePS. The SE realized early that unless stakeholders were shown the benefits and were trained in the use of ePS, implementations could fail. E-learning techniques were

e-Procurement Success Stories Organization

Govt. of AP

Scottish Executive

KSPHC

Tenders Processed

Rs 15,600 crore

Rs 24,000 crore

Rs 132 crore

Cost Saving

Rs 1,000 crore

Rs 1,656 crore

Rs 9.95 crore

Users

65 departments

60 organizations

1

4,000

550 (A+B Grade)

Suppliers Project Cost

Rs 1.20 crore

developed to guide suppliers through the system. The initiation formed an important aspect of e-Procurement success, says Wilson. Another was the use of created credit cards designed in collaboration with ISA. This change in doing business delivers measurable benefits due to reduced transaction costs, greater purchase discipline and a more effective deployment of staff. If the target to increase participation to 125 public sector organizations by 2007 is met and they spend a projected Rs 24,000 crore to 32,000 crore (£3 billion to 4 billion), it could result in savings of Rs 1,600 crore (£200 million) a year.

Wilson says a successful procurement change requires strong and senior leadership. And if effective procurement rests on developing relationships between buyers and bidders, the same applies for etendering. e-Procurement is a two-way street. Its aim is not merely to cut costs for the buyers but to benefit suppliers as well.

Simply put, an organization cannot maximize the potential benefits of an e-Procurement solution if suppliers can’t connect to the system or refuse to participate.

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The Joy of Choice Karnataka State Police Housing Corporation’s suppliers too quickly grasped that if they wanted to be in the running, they had to participate in the reverse auction process because the lowest bid determined who took home the project.

The traditional method typically saw only 5 class-A bidders and 10 class-B participating in tenders routinely.

Now, KSPHC has 444 class-A and 106 class-B civil contractors registered with it.

“With the reverse auction, orders are finalized swiftly.

Everyone knows who made the lowest bid and the work order is often issued within 24 hours,” says KSPHC’s chairman and managing director R. Sri Kumar. The contract also binds suppliers to making progress reports through the web-based PMS. Interestingly, KSPHC’s foray into e-Procurement started off as a one-off attempt to beat a deadline to colocate its web servers. “Our objective for the first e-tender was to save time. We didn’t expect anything more,” says R. Sri Kumar.

After the success of its first e-tender, KSPHC decided to use the process with all its civil contracts. This brought them good techno-commercial offers at the lowest of prices. The result was a boom in construction. In the two years starting 2004, 5,000 quarters have been built (as compared to the 9,964 structures worth Rs 238 crore put up from 1985 to March 2003).

As part of its IT strategy, KSPHC has invested about Rs 1.2 crore towards the e-tender system. Using an eProcurement solution, KSPHC saved 8 percent over the traditional system. In 2005, KSPHC finalized 61 contracts with price tags that range from Rs 32 lakh to Rs 5.55 crore. On contracts worth a total of Rs 132 crore, the department has saved Rs 9.94 crore. An additional benefit is that projects start earlier since the system bypasses post-bid negotiations.

The system, however, is not without its pitfalls.

KSPHC, looking ahead, has deployed a backup system in case of Internet disruption. In a real crisis, it could abandon an auction and start afresh. It’s also possible for quotes to fall below a level where the quality of work becomes doubtful. In such a case, the organization can apply a circuit breaker by intervening in the proceedings. Online tenders can result in a possible violation of the KTPAA Act, 1999 (Karnataka Transparency in Public Procurement) although there is now a move to amend it, to take advantage of the incredible savings through the system.

Who said governments agencies can’t lead an IT revolution? CIO special Correspondent T. Radhakrishna can be reached at radha_t@cio.in

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Mindset MANIFESTO Militant labor unions ensured that computerization got a bad name in West Bengal. Dr. G. D. Gautama, Principal Secretary, IT department, has done much to change that trend and re-invent the way citizens interact with the government.

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Interview | G.D. Gautama CIO: What were your concerns when you took charge in 2003, given the state’s reputation for unions that disliked IT?

Dr. G.D. Gautama:During the early 90s, West Bengal was seen as being almost hostile to IT. Militant unions in government organizations were only one of several reasons. My biggest concern was to correct this perception, not only outside the state but within as well.

To this end, we held roadshows and participated in exhibitions. We also appointed cricketer Saurav Ganguly as West Bengal’s IT ambassador. We’re currently stressing on the need to employ IT in administration to provide a better citizen interface.

Of course, we had to build everything from scratch. So, based on the IT blueprints of other states and on discussions with various government agencies, we set our course. West Bengal is determined to put itself back on India’s industrial map.

This requires the government to restructure its mechanisms and change the mindset of the labor unions.

SNAPSHOT Policies: n IT Policy-2003 n IT-Enabled Policy-2005 Infrastructure: State WAN

also started to build a system to reduce the number of tax defaulters. This involves connecting five out of the 26 border check-posts to a central system using VSATs, thus making it possible to monitor goods entering and leaving the state.

What about land records?

Photography: foto corp

Currently, land records in 238 blocks out of 341 in the state have been comG2C Initiatives: puterized.

The digitization of maps has n Tele-medicine also been initiated. The Hooghly disn Text to Braille trict has a pilot project running. Along n CLTP (e-Learning the same lines, a land acquisition inforproject) mation system was recently deployed n Emission Monitorto reduce time spent in court. The sysing Information tem generates various reports related System to the notification, declaration, allocation and pricing of land.

G2G: We have launched three tele-medin KPICN (Police cine projects in the state using a lowintranet) speed WAN. They cover 19 centers and n Finger Print government rural hospitals and aim Analysis to provide quality healthcare facilities to rural folk in the fields of cardiology, radiology, pediatrics, neurology and tropical diseases. This will take telemedicine to all government hospitals in the state by September 2006.

How much support do you get from the state to The project bagged the IT department the ‘Bronze Icon’ make this happen?

We’re trying to get the state to allocate two percent from the Government of India for exemplary impleof its entire budget to IT. We expect to spend Rs 23.97 mentation of an e-Governance initiative.

The State Pollution Control Board, through a unique crore in 2006-07, which includes Rs 14.16 crore from G2C (government to citizen) interface, is opening the the Central Government.

We haven’t yet studied the business value of IT proj- department’s EMIS (Emission Monitoring Information ects, because we are focusing on social benefits. If it System) to citizens. This will permit online application increases transparency, accountability and responsive- for industrial environmental clearances.

Our milestone project is the Computer-Aided Text to ness among government departments, I will look at it Braille System, which enables visually impaired chilas positive and beneficial. dren to access and read documents from the Internet using special printers located in select schools.

Has West Bengal then taken a different approach to West Bengal is also the first state in the country to e-Governance?

Our stand stems from our belief that the benefits of undertake a State Wide Area Network (WBSWAN). technology have no meaning unless they percolate to It’s currently on pilot and one of our chief priorities in the masses. Thus, we have focused our efforts on those 2006 is to scale it up and take it to the villages. departments that interface heavily with citizens. These include the departments of higher education, finance, How will WBSWAN benefit citizens at the Panchayat and rural development, labor, transport, tour- village level? ism, forestry, youth services, and municipal affairs WBSWAN (West Bengal State Wide Area Network) The finance department, for instance, has automated simultaneously carries voice, video and data over IP. It its process to distribute funds to its offices. All major started with connecting 18 district headquarters to the revenue collection offices under the commercial tax capital using a two-MBPS leased lines rented from directorate have been computerized, as have over 60 BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd). Subsequently the percent of the treasuries. The revenue department has network was extended in April 2003 to cover eight

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Interview | G.D. Gautama more commercially important subdivisions. The pilot project cost Rs 4.96 crore.

It will serve as a foundation for further e-Governance applications. Soon six sub-divisions, 31 blocks and 278 Gram Panchayats will be hooked up. This will enable people living in the rural areas to access citizencentric applications.

It will improve service delivery and empower small businesses by giving them access to information. We’re also planning to use the system for file transfers between government offices and the public distribution system.

West Bengal was also among the first states to computerize its police directorate. What was the reason for this?

The basic objective of the project was to increase operational efficiency. Our first step was to roll out the Kolkata Police Intranet and Computer Network (KPICN) under which 45 police stations and 35 other offices were

can be scaled up to beyond a lakh. It also has a mobile FACTS unit which is instrumental in bringing police resources to crime scene.

Looking ahead, what are your plans for 2006-07?

We are focusing on capacity building, common service centers and nine Mission Mode Projects. These projects fall under the National E-governance Plan and cover land records, property registration, transport, agriculture, municipalities, Gram Panchayats, commercial taxes, treasuries and the police.

The departments involved in the project have already prepared their road maps and cost estimates with assistance from PWC and the National Informatics Centre (NIC).

Before we can successfully implement the Mission Mode Projects, we need to get the state WAN and the state data centers off the ground. All our activities are converging to a point where we can establish citizen ser-

“Our stand stems from our belief that the benefits of technology have no meaning unless they percolate to the masses.” computerized. It has now been operational for over two years and connects police stations allowing them to share their morning reports. In the next phase, we computerized all the police stations under the West Bengal Directorate. This has a three-fold benefit of increased efficiency due to daily monitoring, better crime control and closer ties with the police-related cases in court. Webel Technology Ltd — a state enterprise — is driving the program home in 407 police stations and 52 courts. So far it has achieved over 90 percent of this target.

Interestingly, the state police also launched Finger Print Analysis and Criminal Tracing System (FACTS), which was designed, developed and implemented by CMC Ltd. It’s an advanced system that uses pattern recognition and neural network techniques to match and identify finger prints. It’s fixing issues that traditional fingerprint bureaus face including archiving large volumes of paper-based fingerprint records. The system currently contains about 40,000 fingerprints, which 62

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vice centers in the rural areas, which will bring modern services to the villages.

From an administrative point-of-view, West Bengal plans to set up a State Nodal Organization and an e-Governance Mission Team, which will act as a single-point project monitor. We are also looking to appoint a consultant to see us through capacity building.

The Panchayat Raj department is establishing Common Service Centers (CSC) in villages, using a private-public partnership model. The department, in association with an NGO, will run CSC pilots in the districts of Bankure, Burdwan, Jalpaiguri and Hooghly. The centers will be located in the existing Panchayat offices and will be manned by the local entrepreneurs. CIO

Special Correspondent T. Radhakrishna can be reached at radha_t@cio.in

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Essential

technology Illustration by Shyam Deshpande

From Inception to Implementation — I.T. That Matters

CIOs need to examine options for authenticating users — or risk their companies becoming the latest data theft headline.

New Locks, New Keys

BY GALEN GRUMAN security |No doubt all the breaches of customer data this year have forced you to defend your security strategy. And no doubt you’re being pushed to improve security without increasing costs or scaring away users in the process. You might be hoping the pressure will subside as the breaches become distant memories, but both the federal and state governments aren’t likely to give you that break.

CIOs at retailers must analyze the current security measures they take for data in three areas: in transit online, at the point of sale and where it is stored. The analysis of each area should determine how data is secured, accessed and utilized, and what the risk is at each step, says John Pironti, principal security consultant at Unisys. At the same time, CIOs of financial services companies must work around the fear that outwardly visible — and constraining — security measures could send customers fleeing into the arms of a competitor.

When They’re Buying,Who’s Watching?

Of the three security areas, the point of sale is perhaps the least risky. While it’s possible for properly equipped crooks to compromise computerized point-of-sale systems, it’s simply easier for the bad guys to buy or steal information on the Internet than to physically invade 64

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essential technology

a POS location or to shadow customers to get their credit card number, PINs or other data, says Matt Curtin, founder of the security consultancy Interhack.

The popularity of credit cards has also made it hard to justify any significant form of authentication at the point of sale. Credit card companies have long limited consumers’ liability, relying on fees paid by merchants to cover the cost of fraud, which is involved in about 1 percent of all transactions, says Avivah Litan, vice president and research director for payments and fraud at Gartner. And

The Vulnerable Database Gartner’s Litan expects thieves to increasingly target the systems that store customer data as more and more financial and retail systems are linked together. Standalone host systems (often aging mainframes) weren’t originally built to defend such networked connections, so “more and more companies are centralizing security again,” returning to the single security architecture approach that worked well for mainframe systems, says Jeffrey Margolies, lead for Accenture’s security services and identity management practice.

Thieves are expected to increasingly target the systems that store customer data. Standalone host systems weren’t originally built to defend such networked connections. credit card companies depend on sophisticated fraud-detection systems that can reveal patterns of fraudulent use after very few transactions, limiting the losses.

Some retailers would love to drop credit cards because of their high fees. That’s why Piggly Wiggly Carolina, a South Carolina– based grocery chain, has debuted a payment system from Pay By Touch in which customers use a finger scan and an ID number to establish their identity at a sales terminal. No credit card information is needed at the sales terminal, because the user identity is matched at a service provider — Pay By Touch — and the charge is then deducted from a linked bank account, says Piggly Wiggly VP of Information Services Rich Farrell.

The use of a second authentication factor (the PIN) also helps secure the new Blink card, a wireless card from Chase Card Services that uses radio frequency to transmit cardholder information to a sales terminal.

The technology limits the card’s wireless range to just two inches, so thieves can’t use portable readers to snatch account numbers over the air, says Tom O’Donnell, a senior VP at Chase.

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CIOs should consider these two basic approaches to secure stored data, Pironti advises: Encrypt data that is not being used; and better manage access so a rogue insider doesn’t have the privileges necessary to steal data. Most CIOs also need to acquire a thorough understanding of the flow of customer data and its potential weak spots, such as the use of unencrypted backup tapes, Pironti says, rather than rely on technological fixes.

“In the short run there’s a higher expense to process thinking, but in the long run it’s cheaper,” he says.

On the Web, No One Knows You’re a Crook Analysts warn that electronic data theft is growing fast, even as other types of data theft stay level or decline. A Gartner survey, for example, shows phishing attacks grew 28 percent in 2005. In addition, increasing numbers of online thefts and hacking attempts are being perpetrated on behalf of organized crime, which has started hiring hackers, says Litan.

To combat phishing attacks, bank regulator Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. plans

The Biggest Fraud ofAll And it can be fixed easily. The largest percentage of fraud involves thieves using stolen consumer information to open up new accounts, says Unisys security consultant John Pironti. A fraudulent account can go undetected for months, because the consumer never sees any bills, and the financial provider and retailers have no previous history with the account that would make it possible for them to detect unusual patterns. Often the fraud is detected only when the consumer whose information has been stolen undergoes a credit check, such as when he’s buying a home or applying for refinancing.

Repairing the damage from identity theft can take hundreds of hours (330 on average, according to a 2004 study by the Identity Theft Resource Center), but because the number of victims of this kind of identity theft is still small, there’s been little incentive for data brokers to take stronger preventive measures.

Also, because it’s very hard to prove where the stolen information came from, data brokers and processors can safely dodge liability for the damage, says Matt Curtin, founder of the security consultancy Interhack.

But a straightforward and relatively inexpensive technology could address this problem: Notification. If a customer has an e-mail account or a telephone, it should be a simple matter to send a real-time alert to a cell phone number or e-mail address when a new account is opened, says Jeff Schmidt, CEO at security consultancy Authis. Credit bureaus already alert consumers when someone opens a new account in their name — but only if the consumer previously had his identity stolen and requested such notifications to prevent further activity without express permission. Requiring this notification for every new account could considerably eliminate identity theft.

–G.G.

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In 2003, 5.7 million credit card numbers were stolen and used to purchase an average of Rs Analysts warn that electronic data 36,000 worth theft is growing fast, even as other types of data theft stay level or decline. of merchandise, totaling Rs 20,250 crore in losses for credit card companies. to issue guidelines for online banking this fall that require authentication beyond user IDs and passwords. The agency isn’t dictating what technologies companies must use, giving the financial and retail industries a chance to develop their own standards and technologies.

Two-factor authentication’s success in the physical world has made it the choice of technology to protect online transactions as well.

“It minimizes the theft of identity online,” notes former national security adviser Richard Clarke, now chairman of security consultancy Good Harbor Consulting.

in the middle” attacks, where communication between the customer and the company is intercepted, Clarke notes.

That’s why some companies are trying token-based methods, such as scratch cards, where customers scratch off a protective covering on a card to reveal a one-time access code. In the United States, E-Trade Financial is implementing the high-tech version of this approach using RSA Security’s lipstick-sized SecurID device, which produces new, one-time codes every 60 seconds and displays them on a small LCD screen. Users enter the code showing on the screen when

Several companies are experimenting with two-factor authentication approaches.

For example, Bank of America is deploying a system from PassMark Security that requires the user to answer a personal question from a rotating set and to choose from a collection of pictures supplied by the bank, with only one picture matching the “validator” picture the customer selected when opening the account. And online bank ING Direct rotates personal questions to provide a second challenge when the user logs in. Some banks and online retailers are using technology from such companies as Actimize, Corillian, Cyota and The 41st Parameter that creates a profile of user access, noting the IP addresses from which users log in, the time zone and so forth.

If a thief logs in from Argentina posing as a customer from Delaware, the profile won’t match and the bank can issue an additional challenge question to verify the identity. (That extra step allows access by legitimate users who are traveling.)

Still, any data — even biometric information such as fingerprints — that’s stored as an authentication mechanism is vulnerable: If a thief breaks into a bank’s systems, he gets the validating data along with everything else.

Such systems can also be vulnerable to “man

logging into their investment accounts. If the device is stolen, a phone call from the customer flags it as invalid, so a thief could not use it. And even if the consumer’s computer has been hacked and a keylogger installed to steal passwords, the code’s ever-changing nature means a thief would still be stymied, says Joshua S. Levine, E-Trade’s chief technology and operations officer.

But token-based authentication makes many companies nervous, analysts say, because of the implementation and support costs. They also say that consumers won’t tolerate having more than a very few such devices. Alternatives do exist, of course.

Canadian cash-card provider SolidPay, for instance, uses cell phones for two-factor authentication. It has deployed StrikeForce Technologies’ software, which calls customers’ cell phones and prompts them to enter their PIN on the phone’s keypad when they try to, for example, transfer money to their cards. And to combat device proliferation, RSA plans to launch a form of federation service this fall that would let consumers use the same SecurID authenticator device for accounts at multiple companies.

Some analysts believe such systems are inevitable. The federal government’s require-

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SOURCE: Gartner

ment that passport holders, transportation workers and government employees all use smart card IDs will create a critical mass of adoption for a standard token, says Good Harbor’s Clarke. He ultimately envisions ID cards that everyone carries, just as most now carry a driver’s license and a credit or debit card.

The Slow Road to Security Wary of the cost of token-based authentication and of annoying customers with extra steps such as answering validation questions, financial providers are implementing frauddetection systems similar to what credit card companies have long used, Litan says. For online access, most are focusing on methods

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that don’t require user action (for example, checking a user’s current location against his profile of usual access locations).

A second low-impact approach — this one designed to limit the damage caused by phishing attacks — is the use of server-side certificates to verify that users have in fact reached the bank or retailer they intended to contact, suggests David Meunier, CSO of CUNA Mutual Group, which provides processing services to credit unions.

This approach means that the browsers should have SSL and Validation turned on, enabling the browser to display the certification results, so users will know if they have arrived at their intended site and not a sinister look-alike. (Students at Stanford University recently released such software for the Mozilla Firefox browser.) Meunier acknowledges, however, that this technology would not stop phishing via e-mail (which has no similar widespread certificate standard in place as of yet).

Another browser-security option according to Chris Novak, senior security consultant at Cybertrust, is a browser plug-in that detects password or account entry fields and scrambles them with a key known to both the browser and the legitimate server. Considering the small number of browser types in wide use, it should be straightforward to distribute such a plug-in if the financial industry agreed on a standard for it, he says.

Given the fractured nature of the financial services and retail industries, analysts agree that it’s likely that improved security for customer data will come from efforts that combine numerous techniques such as those mentioned above. While government regulation could push reluctant companies to implement more-intrusive technologies such as two-factor authentication for at least some online transactions, public pressure is the more likely way slow-moving companies will be spurred on, especially if consumers view security as an asset rather than as a barrier to commerce. CIO

Under Development The Dawn of General-Purpose Grid?

UTILITY COMPUTING | All those computers, sitting on desks throughout your office, most of the time doing — nothing. Grid computing proponents have long promised to tap those machines, providing a new and low-cost source of processing power. But thus far, the applications for grid have mostly benefited scientists, derivatives analysts and people trying to extract alien messages from galactic background noise.

Now one of grid’s biggest boosters is hoping to change the situation, creating a truly general-purpose grid by turning networks of computers into a single virtual machine. (For more on virtualization, see “The Virtues of Virtualization,” December 15 issue) Platform Computing’ s Enterprise Grid Orchestrator (EGO) purports to offer a standardized way of consolidating, managing and sharing computing resources spread throughout a grid, one that will put those resources to use for Web services, service-oriented architectures, and — through partnerships — general applications.

It’s nothing we haven’t heard before, of course, but Platform has some deals already on the books that make this look somewhat promising. Cognos, for instance, this past summer demonstrated its Cognos ReportNet business reporting software running on EGO. Platform has also partnered with VMWare to create the Platform VM Orchestrator, software that will allow corporations to pool IT resources (CPUs, storage and memory) and automatically carve out environments for running applications on virtual machines, in much the same way as VMWare currently lets customers divide single computers into virtual partitions, each with its own operating system and resources.

The benefit of such a system is that it would allow applications to run unmodified on VMWare virtual environments that could scale up or down quickly depending on requirements and available resources. Getting a sudden surge in usage on the business intelligence application?

Suck a few more idle desktop PCs into the pool and put them to work doing something besides warming a desk.

Both EGO development kit and Platform VM Orchestrator are available now.

—By Christopher Lindquist

Thus far, the applications for grid have mostly benefited scientists, derivatives analysts and people trying to extract alien messages from galactic background noise.

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Looking Out; Looking In Outsource what makes sense, but create some new internal opportunities for yourself.

As you outsource in some domains, you can actually insource new territory.

BY ERIC KNORR CHANGING TECH | This is the age of outsourcing. The reason behind the trend is simple: The financial crystal balls at most companies are still cloudy, which puts a damper on capital expenses.

As you stare at your list of backlogged projects, the practical appeal of outsourcing is undeniable, since it’s an operating expense. But strategic insourcing is also a viable option—one where you may be able to do more than shore up your defenses and actually gain new ground. It’s all about balancing the outside with the inside.

Selective Sourcing First, get a good handle on your outsourcing. I’m always perplexed when people equate it with offshoring and the exploitation of cheap programming talent.

Application development should be one of the last things you farm out, particularly to places where intellectual property is hard to protect, because that code often contains unique business value. If it doesn’t, you should probably just license commodity software—or avoid licensing costs altogether by opting for a hosted solution.

Yes, I mean services like Salesforce. com, but that’s only the most obvious example. How about e-mail? I still hear plenty about the pain of managing and scaling mail servers. A good specialized e-mail hosting service such as Zantaz’s 68

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Hosted Exchange Archive Solution can take that off your plate.

Application monitoring is another good prospect. Mercury Interactive says that half of its monitoring customers opt for a hosted solution. It makes sense, since Mercury probably has a lot more experience poring over those logs than your staff ever will.

Then there’s content management.

CrownPeak, Clickability and iUpload all offer capable hosted solutions. Grand Central even purports to integrate hosted applications before they touch your enterprise.

People also talk about using managed security providers, but outside of VPNs, I find that idea dicier. There’s security trend— known as security event management or security information management—that provides a consolidated view of the “threatscape” by capturing and filtering security events from devices and software all over the enterprise. I have yet to see a managed service in this space that provides as comprehensive a view as, say, an in-house implementation from ArcSight or NetForensics.

So there’s no such thing as a totally outsourced enterprise IT department yet.

In fact, although IT is shrinking in some respects, it’s also expanding into new areas.

So, as you outsource in some domains, you can actually insource new territory.

VoIP is the most obvious example of a new frontier of inner space. Under the

right conditions — a highly distributed workforce, a call center hobbled by old equipment — putting the phone system on the enterprise data network can wow the business side with immediate payback.

Just remember to resist with all your might when someone inevitably suggests that VoIP get its own dedicated network to ensure quality of service. Instead, use VoIP as the perfect excuse to upgrade your network to gigabit Ethernet. Along with enjoying a nice bandwidth boost, your control over phone service — a whole new domain — will make the IT department even more indispensable (though your power grab may be enjoyed less by your current telecom people).

Electric Company Big IT operations might consider pushing the envelope even further, all the way to electric power. Some IT organizations have gotten into enterprisewide power management with constant voltage transformers and fuel cells for backup. Heck, you might even consider the data center as a heat source for an HVAC system. It’s been done. Remember, your budget may be constrained, but if you think creatively and grab a new area outside of conventional IT, that’s new money. CIO Eric Knorr is executive editor at large at InfoWorld.

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