CIO October 1 2008 Issue by Sreekanth Sastry

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From The ediTor

As companies look around and seek newer avenues to bring down costs and improve

Managing IT in a Downturn The onus of cutting costs lies a lot more on CIOs.

their liquidity, there is going to be some pressure on IT. A tough economic environment forces companies to defer buying new technology solutions, and also trim their IT budgets. “CIOs will have to be fiscally responsible more than ever before,” a top business executive at an Indian telecom firm said recently. In a report last month, a McKinsey analysts said that during a downturn, companies want to increase revenues without raising prices. Many Indian enterprises are already witnessing pressure on IT budgets. “We just shelved an RFID pilot scheduled to take off a month ago because nobody wants to experiment now,” IT manager at an Indian retail company told me a few weeks ago. So, how to manage IT in a downturn? Perhaps, there is an opportunity to demonstrate what IT can really do when it comes to helping an enterprise reduce operational costs, and also improve revenues. Some of the simpler ways of managing IT in a slump could be to look This is a chance to show at things such as server consolidation, or what IT can do in helping an even re-negotiate with vendors. However, enterprise reduce operational these initiatives might still not be helpful. costs and improve revenues. At a time when business leaders are preparing for a possible crash, it might be a good idea to get closer to the business, and discuss how IT can help. Cultivating a new set of business relationships might involve visiting operation heads more often, and discussing issues outside routine budgetary meetings. Also, with companies seeking to maximize revenues without wanting to raise prices, there could be an opportunity for IT systems to capture lost revenue opportunities. For instance, a tightly-integrated billing system could help a multi-circle telecom operator identify billing fraud, and avoid such customers. And finally, CIOs will need to look at the possibilities of IT outsourcing, especially in the context of their own, existing IT teams. A bigger question however is whether a downturn will have any impact on IT-led innovation. Will companies still show an appetite for doing things differently and invent newer ways of serving their customers? How are you planning to cope with these challenges? Do let me know.

Pankaj Mishra Executive Editor pankaj_m@cio.in

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content OCTOBER 1 2008‑ | ‑VOl/3‑ | ‑issuE/22

Deepak Ganju, GM, Project III, CRIS, led the team that found a way to create staff time-tables that employed railway crews optimally and spread out work evenly

Staff Management

Executive Expectations

COVER sTORY ON ThE RIGhT TRACk | 24

VIEW FROm ThE TOp | 32 Vinay Nadkarni, CEO, Globus Stores, says IT helps his company manage its supply chain efficiently, resulting in lower operating costs and faster time-to-market.

Bound by complex labor laws, the Indian Railways, the largest employer in the world, was desparate to automate the process of monitoring and assigning duties to millions of staffers.

I P hOTO h OTO by dr l O h I a

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Feature by Rahul Neel mani and saurabh Gupta

Interview by Gunjan Trivedi

Leadership NO BOuNDARIEs LEADERshIp | 18 CIOs must cultivate industry-wide leadership to succeed in a time of unprecedented growth.

C OVE OVEr: r: dESI d ESI gn by b I n ES ESh h S r EE EEdharan dharan

Column by John Von stein

Software OpENING up TO OpEN sOuRCE | 40 As a solution, the open source is winning converts among IT and business leaders, but barriers to enterprise adoption still remain, according to an exclusive CIO survey. Feature by Esther schindler

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content

Essential Technology | 60 Desktop Architecture | A Tangled Path for Macs in

the Enterprise By C.G. Lynch and Robert Lemos Pundit | Agility and the Future of IT

By Michael Hugos

From the Editor | 2 Managing IT in a Downturn

By Pankaj Mishra

NOW ONLINE

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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

Case Study Creating Better Vision | 36 As Sankara Nethralaya took on more applications to meet patient needs, its network went on a blink, leaving the hospital blind for hours. When the problem moved from being an irritant to life-threatening, it knew only a network management system could save it.

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Feature by Kanika Goswami

The Strategic CIO An IT Team That Means Business | 22 The CIO of pharmaceutical testing company MDS has built a team that contributes to the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s top line. Column by Tom Gernon

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ADVISORY BOARD

Advertiser Index

Abnash Singh

Publisher Louis D’Mello Associate Publisher Alok Anand

Editorial Editor-IN-CHIEF Vijay Ramachandran

executive Editor Pankaj Mishra

Resident Editor Rahul Neel Mani assistant editors Balaji Narasimhan , Gunjan

Trivedi, Kanika Goswami

Chief COPY EDITOR Sunil Shah Copy Editors Deepti Balani,

Shardha Subramanian

VP-HR & Process Architect, Britannia Alok Kumar Global Head-Internal IT, Tata Consultancy Services Anwer Bagdadi Senior VP & CTO, CFC International India Services

SENIOR Designers Jinan K Vijayan, Jithesh C C

Unnikrishnan A V Sani Mani (Multimedia) Designers M M Shanith, Anil T, Siju P

P C Anoop, Prasanth T R

Photography Srivatsa Shandilya Production Manager T K Karunakaran

Rural Shores Chinar S. Deshpande CEO, Creative IT India Dr. Jai Menon Group CIO Bharti Enterprise & Director (Customer Service & IT), Bharti Airtel

Canon

IFC

CommScope

Fortinet

Interface

MRO-TEK

Oracle SAS Sigma Byte

IBC 35 1 & 17

Socomec

Tata Teleservices

Xerox

Manish Choksi Chief-Corporate Strategy & CIO, Asian Paints M.D. Agrawal

Events VP Rupesh Sreedharan Managers Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya Pooja Chhabra

4&5

C.N. Ram

DY. Production Manager T K Jayadeep Mark eting and Sal es VP Sales (Events) Sudhir Kamath GENERAL Manager Nitin Walia Assistant Manager Sukanya Saikia Marketing Siddharth Singh, Priyanka Patrao, Disha Gaur Bangalore Mahantesh Godi, Kumarjeet Bhattacharjee B.N Raghavendra Delhi Pranav Saran, Saurabh Jain, Rajesh Kandari Gagandeep Kaiser Mumbai Parul Singh, Hafeez Shaikh, Kaizad Patel Japan Tomoko Fujikawa USA Larry Arthur; Jo Ben-Atar

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VP & CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra

President & CIO — IT Applications, Reliance Industries

Girish A V (Multimedia)

Arvind Tawde

Creative Director Jayan K Narayanan

Vinoj K N, Suresh Nair

Arun Gupta

Ashish K. Chauhan

Lead Designers Vikas Kapoor, Anil V K

Customer Care Associate & CTO, Shoppers Stop

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Correspondent Snigdha Karjatkar Trainee Journalists Sneha Jha, Saurabh Gupta

President, IT Operations & Center of Excellence, UCB Pharma

Chief Manager (IT), BPCL Rajeev Shirodkar CIO, Future Generali India Life Insurance Rajesh Uppal Chief GM IT & Distribution, Maruti Udyog Prof. R.T. Krishnan Jamuna Raghavan Chair Professor of Entrepreneurship, IIM-Bangalore S. Gopalakrishnan CEO & Managing Director, Infosys Technologies Prof. S. Sadagopan Director, IIIT-Bangalore S.R. Balasubramnian Exec. VP (IT & Corp. Development), Godfrey Phillips Satish Das CSO, Cognizant Technology Solutions Sivarama Krishnan

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new

hot

unexpected

Should IT Form a Union? at-large members, mostly software engineers. But so far, WashTech has had limited success. A better alternative, say some, may be a professional organization modeled after the American Bar Association or American Medical Association. Less formal or rigidly organized than a union, it would allow technology professionals to speak with one voice on issues that affect them all. "The diversity of employers and job skills make unionizing IT workers unrealistic, other than within certain large employers," notes Kim Berry, president of the Programmers Guild, a non-profit that works to advance IT issues. "But clearly IT workers need a voice to level the playing field against the powerful industry lobbying groups." —By Dan Tynan

IllUStratIon by MM Shan Ith

Sixty-hour work weeks with no overtime or comp time, a BlackBerry hitched to your belt 24/7, — all for a job that could be outsourced. Is it time for tech workers to form a union and demand better working conditions? Unfortunately for would-be organizers, most experts agree that the odds against an IT union are long. Unions don't exactly appeal to the classic techie temperament.

IT ManageMenT

"We're talking about people who are really lone gunmen," says Bill Pfleging, co-author of The Geek Gap. "They're good at what they do, they're paid well, and they can go wherever they want to. Not a good fit for working in a union environment." Then there's the sheer diversity of technical workers — from help desk personnel to programmers and developers to network and software engineers — each with their own, sometimes conflicting, issues and concerns. That's not stopping some from trying. The Washington Alliance of Tech Workers (WashTech) has been fighting for IT workers' rights for over 10 years. In November 2005, it organized about 1,100 employees at a Cingular (now AT&T) Call Center. The union is currently negotiating with AT&T over benefits; salary discussions are slated for next year. WashTech also has 243

Quick take

Suvanjay Sharma on Data Loss Prevention S e c u r I T y Data leaks have always been a matter of concern for CIOs. With increasing security threats, data loss prevention is gaining a critical place in the overall information security policy. Suvanjay Kumar Sharma, VP (corporate strategy) & chief enterprise architect, YES Bank, spoke to Snigdha Karjatkar:

How important is a DLP strategy in an organization’s roadmap? Today, 60 percent of data is exposed to the Internet. This becomes especially critical when you look at two types of automation: processes that are automated for customers and for compliance. Both customers and compliance play an equal role in company policy. As a company and its policies become more customercentric, compliance increases in importance. Being compliant is key to an overall information security strategy. What should a CIO pay attention to while defining sensitive data? Data can be categorized into moving and static. For us, moving data is sensitive. Different security and compliance policies

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need to be applied to these two. One has to categorize data and apply the appropriate policy accordingly. Is it difficult for CIOs to manage a DLP strategy with so much unstructured data? Every organization will always have unstructured data. Before starting we need to structure this simply because you cannot put unstructured data in the system. Of course, we will need to look for an automation tool that can help us in structuring data.

Suvanjay Sharma

What best practices do you suggest for CIOs to create an effective DLP framework? There are multiple entry channels for a data leak. If we use multiple solutions to address breaches, we are actually increasing vulnerability. We need to have one comprehensive tool. One has to watch closely for patterns and monitor the end-user’s system more closely. We need to put a policy in place which is more stringent at the user level than at the server or datacenter level. REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8

Has Outsourcing Worked for You? O u T S O u r c I n g Outsourcing is increasingly becoming a preferred mode of business. Despite the trend, not everybody is bullish about the idea. Some companies are beginning to identify the veiled threats associated with it. Sneha Jha spoke to some of your peers and here’s what they have to say about it.

“With outsourcing we have access to specialized skills and the expert services of those working for our outsourcing partners.” anibandha TrendlIneS

Mukhopadhyay Cto, and Sr. Vice President, Family Credit

"It is good if SOWs and SLAs are clearly defined with the partner. But if CIOs understand the domain and technology, then they must do it in-house." Rajesh Munjal head-It, t, Carzonrent India t

It has helped us ensure continuity of services to the end-user. Also, everything gets

properly documented and we have a large pool of human resources. suResh M.

GM-It, hyundai Motor India

lend youR

Voice

Write to editor@cio.in 12

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IT Budgets Shrink Even More I T B u d g e T Industry watchers are once again lowering their forecasts for IT spending as enterprise IT buyers report they are cutting budgets and approaching investments with caution. Goldman Sachs released the results of its quarterly IT Spending Survey that polls managers with decision-making authority at Fortune 1000 companies. The research firm adjusted its forecast for US IT spending to 4 percent for 2008. That number is down from 6 percent in 2007. "Tech's high correlation with the broader economy means that a deceleration in tech spending in 2008 appeared inevitable at the beginning of the year and seems even more pronounced as we enter [the second half of 2008]," the report reads. "Our IT spending indices hit their lowest level of the year, indicating that macro concerns continue to weigh on spending expectations." Separately Forrester Research reported that 43 percent of 950 senior IT managers have already cut their overall IT budgets in 2008. Another 24 percent put discretionary spending on hold. Forrester's study found that 49 percent of US companies are cutting budgets, as are 31 percent of companies in Europe. "This is not an across-the-board spending slowdown; the impact of the economy on IT budgets varies widely by industry and geography," stated John McCarthy, Forrester vice president and principal analyst, in a press release. But the research firms did find bright spots in spending plans. For instance, Goldman Sachs discovered a rebound in investing in networking equipment. The technology area had dipped to 42 percent of respondents expecting to increase spending in the firm's June survey, but jumped to 54 percent during this quarter. The quarterly research also showed that the percentage of survey respondents expecting to support the iPhone 3G within the next year had increased to 23 percent from 17 percent in June — which Goldman Sachs considers "a strong result." IT services represent another bright spot for spending. Forrester found that despite budget cutting, many of those 950 IT managers polled intend to continue to invest in IT services. Forty-five percent of firms plan to increase their use of applications outsourcing, while 43 percent are increasing their use of infrastructure outsourcing. Another 43 percent indicated they would be moving more work offshore. "With regard to the services sector, the slowdown has firms renegotiating rates, being more selective in choosing vendors, and examining spending more thoroughly, but they are still expecting to pay more for services," Forrester's McCarthy said.

—By Denise Dubie

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Fueling the Rat Race

TrendlIneS

I n T e l l I g e n c e Four Asia Pacific countries — Taiwan, Australia, South Korea and Singapore — are ranked among the top 10 in the world in IT industry competitiveness, says a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). The study has ranked these economies as the second, seventh, eighth and ninth most competitive IT industries in the world. In Asia Pacific, Singapore provides one of the best environments for human capital development, the study noted. The study, sponsored by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and now in its second year, compares the IT industry environments of 66 economies. While the top 20 economies remain the same from one year ago, nine moved up and eleven went down in the rankings, said an EIU spokesperson. Three economies in the top five are new: Taiwan, Sweden and Denmark. While the top 20 economies remain the same from one year ago, nine moved up and eleven went down in the rankings, said an EIU spokesperson. Three economies in the top five are new: Taiwan, Sweden and Denmark. "This year's study shows that major shifts in rank stem from performance

in three main areas: R&D environment, human capital, and IT infrastructure," said Jeffrey Hardee, BSA VP and Regional Director, Asia Pacific. "Additionally, strong legal frameworks for the protection of intellectual property rights and systems to address e-commerce and cyber security are critical to ensure continued investment in technology and innovation. Leveraging these factors will allow economies in Asia Pacific, regardless of size, to bolster their IT sector." Other key findings: In 2008, Taiwan rose to second place in the world through its strengths in R&D and nurturing technology talent. The US ranks top of the index, with the UK, Sweden and Denmark ranking, third, fourth and fifth respectively. The brain drain of IT talent from emerging markets shows signs of slowing or reversing, as training opportunities expand in markets and IT professionals return home to work in established technology firms and start-ups. Emerging IT outsourcing industries in countries in the middle and lower index tiers like Vietnam would receive a

significant boost with faster, competitionled infrastructure development. In the region, Australia retains one of the world's most effective systems of IP protection and the most developed bodies of e-commerce and cybercrime law. East Asian economies like Taiwan, South Korea and Japan remain the index leaders when it comes to the R&D environment for technology production. According to EIU, six factors work together to create a sound environment for the IT sector. These include an ample supply of skills; an innovationfriendly culture; world-class technology infrastructure; a robust legal regime that protects IP like patents and copyrights; an open, competitive economy; and government that strikes the right balance between promoting technology and allowing market forces to work. The research emphasized how to step up competitiveness: investing in people, especially for domestic IT industries; ensuring that broadband markets remain competitive, establishing a legal environment that protects IPR and takes a robust approach to cybercrime. —By Zafar Anjum

Data Breach? What Data Breach? When it comes to reporting a data breach, 78 percent of It decision makers don’t believe the general public should be informed , according to a recent survey by content security specialists Clearswift. SecurITy

who should be informed of a data breach? it decision makers say:

95%

Industry Regulators:

42%

The Police:

35%

The Public:

22% Source: Clearswift

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In Fo GraPhICS by an Il t

Affected Customers and Partners:

CyBERLOAfIng Bears Fruits: study

—by Zafar anjum 16

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Are You Afraid off Da a Theft? Dat S u r v e y A survey of global executives has found that physical theft (41 percent) is the most common problem for companies in Asia, followed by information theft (31 percent) and regulatory or compliance breaches (28 percent). Globally, the average company loss to fraud has increased by 22 percent, largely driven by the credit crunch and tough economic climate. Companies lost an average of US$8.2 million (Rs 32.8 crore) to fraud in the past three years, compared to last year's US $7.6 million (Rs 30.4 crore). More than four out of five companies surveyed (85 percent) have suffered from corporate fraud in the past three years, up from 80 percent in last year's survey. For larger companies the proportion suffering from fraud rose to 90 percent. The survey found that the construction and natural resources sectors suffered the most incidents of fraud, due partly to high oil prices and an industry shift to higher-risk areas. Healthcare, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology saw an increase in problems with corruption and theft of stocks or assets, while travel, leisure and transportation reported increases in regulatory and compliance breaches and data theft or loss. The most common type of fraud amongst financial services firms is breach of regulatory compliance, a growing problem which, the report said, "receives too little attention". Compliance breaches continue to plague this highly regulated industry with 44 percent of financial service firms in Asia affected by such fraud in the past three years. Respondents in Asia feel most vulnerable to the threat of information theft (71 percent) followed by regulatory or compliances breaches (58 percent) and vendor, supplier or procurement fraud (56 percent). The Economist Intelligence Unit that ran the survey for risk consulting company Kroll talked to 890 senior executives worldwide. Thirty percent of respondents were based in AsiaPacific, one-third in North and South America, about a quarter in Europe and 11 percent in the Middle East and Africa. Anne Tiedemann, regional managing director for Kroll's operations in Asia, said that the findings showed that fraud was not only widespread, but also growing. —By Ross O. Storey

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IllUStratIo n by an Il t

TrendlIneS

W e B Employees feel that 'cyberloafing' — the non-work related use of their workplace computer — is acceptable and helps them work better. this is according to a study by associate Professor Vivien K.G. lim and Don J.Q. Chen of the nUS business School at the national University of Singapore. a total of 191 completed surveys were collected, yielding a response rate of 32 percent. Men made up 34 percent of the respondents. the study ' Cyberloafing at the Workplace: Gain or Drain on Work?' found that, on the average, employees in Singapore spend about 51 minutes per workday on cyberloafing. this compares to the 10 hours per employee a week, found by earlier studies, for example the US WebSense.com study. Personal e-mailing, instant messaging and visiting news websites were the commonly cited cyberloafing activities, noted the nUS researchers. In general, respondents to the survey felt that some form of cyberloafing at work was acceptable. they also perceived cyberloafing to have a positive impact on work. "Interestingly, findings suggested that browsing activities have a positive impact on employees' work engagement while e-mailing activities have a negative impact," the authors noted. HoW mucH cyberloafing iS acceptable? one of the questions in the survey was how much cyberloafing at the workplace was acceptable. respondents felt that cyberloafing at work was permissible insofar as it did not exceed 1 hour and 15 minutes per day. according to the survey results, about 75 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that 'cyberloafing helps make work more interesting', and 57 percent reported that engaging in cyberloafing help them deal with practical issues and personal issues. In addition, 52 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that 'cyberloafing makes them a better and more interesting worker' and 49 percent indicated that cyberloafing helps them deal with problems they encounter at work. based on the findings of the study, the authors have this piece of advice for companies: "browsing activities allow for some relief at work and may motivate employees to perform better. thus, in designing workplace Internet policies, companies should allow employees to use the company's internet access for non-work related online activities that have a positive effect on work."

John Von Stein

Leadership

No Boundaries Leadership Most CIOs leverage their enterprise-wide view of business operations. The CIO of Options Clearing must cultivate industry-wide leadership to succeed in a time of unprecedented growth.

Il lustratio n by unnikrishn an AV

hen I joined The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) in 2004, options trading activity had reached 3 million contracts a day. Volume growth had been relatively flat for a few years in the wake of the dotcom bust, but the economy was improving. I had no idea what was in store; to get a sense of what capacity to plan for, I reached out to the CIOs who worked with our business partners — the various options and futures exchanges — to learn how much business they expected to send our way. We were all grossly off the mark! We're currently averaging slightly fewer than 11 million contracts a day. And on August 16, we cleared nearly 24 million contracts in one day, which is our current high volume day record. OCC has a rule of thumb that says we will maintain enough processing capacity to handle twice the volume of our most recent high-water mark, which typically is two to three times our daily average. And so we diligently prove our capacity objective with an annual test. But even though OCC's capacity management is critical to the efficient operation of the industry, this is not enough to ensure that the demand from the ultimate consumers — those who buy and sell the contracts — can be successfully handled by everyone involved with processing each transaction. Each link in the value chain needs to be strong, and our relationships across corporate boundaries make them so. The OCC is the financial guarantor of each options transaction, which we process on behalf of the six different options exchanges and three futures exchanges that comprise the US security derivatives industry. These trades originate 18

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John Von Stein

Leadership

Ask yourself: Do I have an opportunity to be an industry leader as well as an enterprise leader? Then, put on your business hat, get out of your office and start collaborating. from consumers (retail customers and professional traders) and come to OCC through approximately 130 broker/ dealers, our clearing members. With all these players exchanging data, and with a 40 percent compound annual growth rate in trading volume since 2004, operational performance can get out of sorts quickly if we're not reaching out to our clearing members and exchanges regularly. OCC can't finalize trade processing until we have all the data from the exchanges and clearing members. Likewise, they cannot finalize their processing until OCC is finished with its part of the transaction. So it's important to be sure we all have the capacity to handle the increasing volumes and also the resiliency to manage operational problems or disasters if or when they happen. Therefore, although most CIOs have an overview of everything within the four walls of their organization, at OCC we think beyond them, to the industry as a whole.

Seize Opportunities to Make Connections As companies in other industries become more dependent on cross-company operations, CIOs will need to increase their collaboration and leadership role in their industries. Besides our routine interactions, we also come together via industry roundtable meetings. OCC chairs four operational roundtables with the exchanges and clearing members each year, as well as three technology roundtables with the IT staff from those same companies. So I have at least seven opportunities each year to sit with our suppliers and customers to talk about operational and technology issues, new products, efficiency opportunities and more. These meetings help keep everyone abreast of industrywide issues and initiatives. They are also very valuable in helping us establish and build relationships among our industry constituents. I chair the technology roundtables. The meeting coordinator and I come up with an agenda and circulate it among the participants to tailor it to their interests. Sometimes we'll seed the conversations by asking participants about some hot topic, such as Vista adoption or what they think about SOA. We have a healthy exchange of ideas, and we share information and experiences about common points of interest. These meetings have been great for championing industrywide issues. One example is the industry's options symbols. Currently, every option has a unique 5-byte identification code. This is the most fundamental data element in our industry — used everywhere and in every system. But it's 20

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difficult to interpret and error-prone and simply not flexible enough to handle the demands of the industry in the future. OCC is helping to coordinate an initiative to define a new, more robust and easy-to-understand code that is due to go live in 2009.

Relationships are Essential Strategic collaboration and influence within the industry would not be successful without the relationships that many of us in OCC have with a lot of the key people in our industry. When you have good relationships, you can start asking tough questions like: what happens if our current volume grows 10 times over the next five years — what does that mean for us operationally? Or systems-wise? Then we can leverage our relationships and work collectively to resolve potential problems over time — and the industry as a whole can enjoy and prosper from growth rather than toil to survive it. A fundamental step in building relationships is to get out of the office and meet with people. Every company has suppliers and customers. When I meet with people from the exchanges and with the clearing members, I'll ask what they are doing with new products, how they are handling volume growth, and, most important, if there are any opportunities for doing business better, cheaper or faster. When I leave my office for these meetings, I don't wear an IT hat. It is important to wear a business hat outside your office so that you prompt discussions of business issues rather than merely technology issues. That way you can understand the big issues in your business and theirs, and be able to talk about what help you can provide to them to help meet their needs. Many of these forays with customers yield new knowledge and insights. What we learn may not be directly reflected in a project, but it helps us gain insight into the business or the needs of the customers. We discuss what we heard and determine if there is something OCC can do to add value to the industry. And we strengthen our relationships with our constituents. Your company may not be the operational linchpin for your entire industry, but I suspect that there are many different enterprises and stakeholders both upstream and downstream who dependon your company and its systems. Ask yourself: Do I have an opportunity to be an industry leader as well as an enterprise leader? Put on your business hat, get out of your office and start collaborating. CIO John Von Stein is executive vice president and CIO of Options Clearing in Chicago. He is a member of the CIO Executive Council. Send feedback to this column on editor@cio.in

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Tom Gernon

The Strategic CIO

An IT Team That Means Business The CIO of pharmaceutical testing company MDS has built a team that contributes to the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s top line.

Illustration by MM Shanith

n today's weak economy, companies tend to think of IT mainly as an engine for cost reduction and increased efficiency. But in many industries, including the pharmaceutical testing business in which MDS operates, IT can and should drive top-line growth. The path to being an effective partner in growth begins with an IT team that has a strong understanding of the business, a commercial orientation and a focus on the end customer. A commercially-oriented team needs a core of program managers and business analysts. They can sit down with the business, understand what business users want, and then translate that to internal and external technology partners. Your reputation as the right group to deliver commercial solutions rests on the shoulders of this group. I've been involved in delivery of big applications, including, in 1996, the first customer website at Fidelity Investments. Projects that fail, I have found from experience, are most often the ones in which IT has an internal mind-set. The successful ones tend to involveIT staff who appreciate the external customer. For example, as I learned early in my career, it's one thing to have a bug that affects internal people. You can quickly react to it and have direct dialogue with the end users about the problem. That's not the case with external customers. And this has larger ramifications. When I know what we do will affect a customer, I look for people who have good business sense and who understand what it means to have a commitment to the customer. 22

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Tom Gernon

The Strategic CIO

The Competitive Advantage When I started at MDS two and a half years ago, we had a key project that had gotten off to a rocky start. We were developing a system to help manage customers' clinical trials and deliver results from these trials. It seemed that whenever we got the technology side working, the business side broke, and when we got the business side right, the technology side broke. To set the project right, we paired a good high-level project manager from the business with one from IT to get a more focused view of the features this application needed. The IT manager brought a good understanding of the business, strong skills in managing the necessary compromises and a drive to see the project completed. Within six months we had it ready. The expectations within the business were that this system would put us only at par in the marketplace. But customers have said this system is the gold standard in the marketplace and a competitive differentiator. We are winning customers — and growing the top line — with this system.

A Customer-focused Team We have team members with strong business skills because I recruit for and develop them. Furthermore, I have not centralized my application teams; I want people to develop strong industry knowledge in order to support specific business units and understand their particular customers. My entire team goes on sales calls; it's important for IT staff to hear directly what the customer wants. The salesperson isn't going to ask what kind of systems customers would like or what technology our competitors have. But IT can engage customers in that conversation, and the salespeople hear the answers. That can build momentum for a specific initiative. I have not imposed a quota for going on sales calls, but I've hired people who like to do it. They're harder to find, of course. In fact, that's the biggest staffing challenge I have. But I think people who like to work with the business tend to like to be in front of customers. Their idea of success is making sure they meet business needs, not only that they are putting in a great technology solution. Meanwhile, an affinity for our business is essential to career development in my organization. I have a preference for buying systems rather than building them; we build our own when there aren't viable solutions in the marketplace. Because of this, I'm not sure I can always give developers the best career path that will lead to more senior development roles. But I know I can offer a great career path to somebody who is a program manager or business analyst — or even a developer who wants to move into one of these roles because his skill sets can easily translate to the skills needed to become IT directors, to support the IT needs of a business unit and ultimately to

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How to Talk Business With the Board Board members don't want to hear about technology. You need to tell them how you're helping the company make money. I never want to look like the IT guy who talks just about technology. So when I presented to the MDS board of directors at its last meeting (as I do twice a year), I spoke about some of the commerciallyoriented initiatives IT has been driving or enabling. These include our system for managing customers' clinical trial data, which is helping us generate new sales. When it comes to working with the board, I do almost everything in partnership with a business peer. So I'll have the business unit president in the room with me, and we'll support each other. It's important to show that IT is a business-focused and businessenabling function. A lot of what I talk about is how we ensure that our projects meet business needs, how IT provides better capabilities to the end customer and how our technology is perceived in the marketplace. For example, we have customer comments and studies that show the deals we've been winning because of the clinical trials management system. I also focus on world-class benchmarks, comparing ourselves to what the best companies are doing with IT, the actions we're taking to get to their level. I'm fortunate in that we have a board member who was a senior executive at a leading technology provider and outsourcer. But board members want to understand business impact of IT. Avoid the technology talk and explain how you are enabling the organization or creating business opportunities. —T.G.

take my job. In fact, that's my number-one interview question for any IT leadership role. If the candidate doesn't say he wants my job, then he’s the wrong person. CIO

Tom Gernon is CIO of MDS and is a member of the CIO Executive Council. He was COO of D2Hawkeye, a healthcare software company, and has held CIO positions at both PerkinElmer and J.P. Morgan Invest. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Cover Story | Staff Management

righT on Trac k Bound by complex labor laws, the largest employer in the world was desparate to automate the process of monitoring and assigning duties to millions of staffers.

Photos by DR Lo hI A IMAGI NG by AN IL t

By Rahul Neel MaNi aNd SauRaBh Gupta

In the darkest hours of August 1, 1999, the Avadh-Assam Express collided with the Brahmaputra Mail in one of the worst rail disasters in India. It killed about 300 people and forced the then railway minister to resign. Inquiries into the accident pinned the blame on human error. In a whitepaper, the Indian Railways holds human failure accountable for twothirds of railway accidents. â&#x20AC;&#x153;When an accident occurs, the probability is in 65 percent of such cases, it is on account of staff failures. This ratio has not changed with time, training or technological input,â&#x20AC;? says the paper. In 1999, the number of railway accidents totaled about 400.

Reader ROI:

The benefits of streamlining a duty assignment process How to improve staff efficiency by e-enablement How a crew management system can increase safety

Deepak Ganju, GM, Project III, CRIS, made the Railways a safer and more profitable place by creating a system that employed railway crews optimally and spread out work evenly.

Cover Story | Staff Management Fatigue among railway staff is never a reason given for the human error, though it is hard to discount. In its record of what the railways is doing to bring down staff failures, the whitepaper says the organization must reduce ‘overwork hours’ for train drivers. That, however, is easier said than done. But, it was exactly what was needed. Only a crew management system could track the hours crew-members logged, ensure that their duties were handed out evenly and that the entire workforce was employed optimally. As the second-largest rail network in the world, the Indian Railways runs over 18,000 trains carrying about 18 million passengers (more than the population of Mozambique) — every single day. To keep this enormous operation chugging, the railways employs 1.4 million employees. Reportedly, the organization is the largest employer in the world. Its size makes it an easy target for inefficiency. Keeping track of such a large workforce and ensuring that it is being used optimally is hard. In 2003-04, for example, the Indian Railways had an operating ratio of 93 percent (Operating ratio is a measure of a company’s efficiency. It compares operating expense to net sales. The smaller the ratio, the better an

organization's ability to generate profits.). In railroading, an operating ratio of 80 or below is considered good. “We were not using our crew optimally. There was a lot of wastage or over-usage of the crew. The first affects performance and the other safety,” says R.B. Das, Group GM, FOIS, Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS). This state of affairs was due mainly to the fact that Indian Railways worked with chalk and a blackboard, figuratively speaking. Scheduling and assigning duties to a railway staffer everyday and for every single train was done manually by sending messengers or telephone messages to crew-members asking them to report to work. “After the delivery of the message, they would come and report. This was a painfully long process,” says Deepak Ganju, GM, Project III, CRIS. It was also inefficient. In addition, the odds of doing things like they have always been done were not in their favor. As the network added more trains, the time between each train shortened, exposing the drawbacks — and dangers — of a manual system. It was only a matter of time before the increased tempo climaxed in a terrible disaster.

againsT The rails Though initial plans for a railway system were made in 1832, it was only in 1844 that any track was laid. That slow start belied the speed of things to come. Just six years later, the rail network covered 14,500 kilometers. Today, the Indian Railways has over 623,000 km of track linking about 7,000 stations. Driving this growth is the number of passengers and freight that want to use the railway’s services. As more trains rode the rails and new systems evolved, newer and faster trains like the Shatabdi, for example, needed drivers with different grades of skills. Hierarchies became common. Assistant drivers, assistant shunters, assistant everything were born. Positions on trains also became more specialized as brakemen, guards, and other positions etcetera were introduced. And that’s only staff on a train. An entire ecosystem was required to maintain tracks, work the signals, man stations, inspect locos, etcetera. To keep crew fatigue at bay, the Indian Railways introduced rules to ensure that crew members got rest — complicating the process of assigning duties. Even today, those in-charge of making staff timetables need to guarantee that a driver’s mileage is limited to 8,000 kilometers a month. Loco drivers are not permitted to work longer than a six-hour stretch,

“The CMS is not about reducing the number of crew-members, it’s about using them better to meet the needs of a growing market.” — Vikram Chopra, Director operations, CRIs.

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Cover Story | Staff Management

“We were not using our crew optimally. There was a lot of wastage or over-use of the crew. ” — R.B. Das, Group GM, FOIS, Center , CRIS.

allowing them to do ‘doubles’. Over a fortnight, crews cannot work more than 104 hours. At the same time, each crewmember needs an average of 18 hours of rest at headquarters or eight hours if they are out-station. The railways also state that ‘periodic rest each month must include four 30-hour rest periods, or five 22-hour rest periods.’ The assignment of duties also has to account for drivers who are being promoted and require 33 weeks of on-hands or ‘road training’ or drivers who need to re-familiarize themselves to routes they worked before (they ride shotgun during the re-familiarization process). Railway managers also need to ensure that certain categories of drivers got rotated every 30 days or so to drive the more ‘prestigious’ trains and remember that drivers for goods trains could double as drivers for passengers trains (only in special cases). Complexity became the order of the day. And the situation wasn’t getting any better. Not with the railways adding more trains, more routes and more passengers every year. In 2006, CRIS, the IT arm of the railways, decided to fix the problem. Their brief was to create a Crew Management System (CMS) to automate the workflow for over 14 lakh railway employees. The crew management system also needed to cover the staff for freight services, the cash cow of the railways. “We had a very rough and ruddy method of calculating how many crew-members we would need for meeting a target of say ‘x’ million tons of goods. Under the manual system, the

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expenditure incurred on such a process was abnormally high. When we examined our crew utilization, we found that it was very inefficient,” says group GM Das. “The CMS [was envisioned] to provide information about crew-members at all times, facilitate the booking of staff on freight trains and passenger trains, both for long journeys and short movements within terminals and yards,” says Ganju who heads the mammoth project. The railways, he adds, wanted a “system to manage and control crew movement that also assists managers to optimize crew utilization.”

Manning their Stations Pegged between Rs 14 crore and Rs 16 crore, the CMS is a huge project by any standards. Despite this, it’s a pretty straightforward concept. At its heart, is a database that holds information of all the crew-members. After, say, a train guard is selected for a journey or ‘link’, the system sends him an SMS, which he acknowledges. The guard then reports to the lobby (in railway parlance the lobby is where crew-members gather. It is a control center for the crew). At the railway lobby, the CMS is present in the form of kiosks or thin clients that the guard logs into with the help of a biometric scanner. The CMS authenticates him, tells him which train he’s working that day and informs him at which point on the route he needs to disembark. (See Crews Control) When he gets off his shift, the guard stops by a kiosk, logs himself in, tells the CMS that he has ended his shift and REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8

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Infographics BY ANIL T

Cover Story | Staff Management reports any abnormalities he has observed like a patch of bad track or an unscheduled stop. The abnormality-reporting feature has an in-built dictionary, much like the one built into mobile phones, that helps crew-members file their reports by suggesting common words. With the CMS, much of the brainwork that was done by divisional heads in tracking crew-members and assigning them duties is now done by algorithms. The focus is on freeing staff from the drudgery of calculating everything manually. More importantly, the system can assure that railway staff are employed optimally. “Crew optimization is enabled by CMS as the system keeps track of a crew’s duty hours. It ensures that those who have served the requisite hours are given rest while those who haven’t are called to report to duty,” says Das. In a few areas, the CMS can summon railway staff via SMS. The Indian Railways is trying to provide mobile phones to all of its train facing staff. In the meanwhile, crew-members are allowed to use their personal mobile phones. To ensure its success, the CMS was mapped to the processes used by the railways. The kiosks, for example, were only placed at 144 (out of 306) crew booking stations. These are stations that offer railway men accommodation or ‘running rooms’ between working sets (the only places it make sense to have kiosks since crewmen getting off a train need to rest.) These stations can normally be found at busy junctions or where a new division starts or there is a large loco shed.

Crews control

Deciding where a crew-member disembarks a train for rest has to take into account where the next running room is — complicating the CMS’ job. Sometimes however, like on the Nagpur-Bilaspur route, crewmen work 7.5 hours — 90 minutes more than the six-hour rule — before they can access a running room. These delays have to be accounted for. “The CMS handles these. Overtime details are now recorded by the CMS,” says Das. The CMS also has to monitor training, medical and competency check-ups. Crew-staff cannot be scheduled on a ‘link’ if they are supposed to be in training or at an internal exam. The CMS will also block employees from going on duty if they are not medically fit or not properly trained. “Earlier there was a mechanism to find out whether a crew-member’s training and medical reports were up-to-date but it was not a foolproof system. Since it was manual there was always scope for error,” recalls Ganju. Introducing this level of automation, however, did not come easy.

Railroading Is Not an Option Given the heterogeneous environment of the Indian Railways, even the thought of attempting a project on this scale can give the most experienced project manager the jitters. The CMS concept demanded that over 350 kiosks be connected and over 1,000 data-entry nodes be provided. In its first phase, the project is linking 144 crew-booking points spread across nine zones and 30 divisions in central, western, and

By creating a crew management system (CMS), the Indian Railways has found a way to iron out the complexities of dealing with a 1.4 million employees. With so many variables a play, creating a time-table that uses its staff optimally is hard to do manually.

1.4

Using kiosks at railway stations, the CMS tracks crew-members and assigns duties.

18,000

million employees

trains

types of drivers

8,000 km:

monthly mileage limit for a train driver

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104 Hours:

how much a crewmember is permitted to work every fortnight

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Step 1

The CMS sends an SMS to crewmembers asking them to report to duty.

Step 2

Crew-members log-in using biometric-enabled kiosks. The CMS informs them which train to board and where to disembark.

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north India. “Before we decided to roll out the CMS in its full strength, we thought it was necessary to conduct a few pilots with zonal divisions. The rules for the CMS were consolidated from what cannot really be called a pilot project but more a proof-of-concept (POC) exercise,” says Ganju. While designing the software, the team consulted with railway staff from all over India. They found huge differences in practices and a lack of common standards. During the development stage, the team at CRIS ensured that the software could accommodate these variations, including language. “In the future, we will have more languages added to the system so that the crew belonging to different regions can use the system easily,” says Ganju. The outlines of the pilot were defined based on the feedback from the POC. Members of CRIS acknowledge that the POC exercise was not very successful, but the experience and the issues it brought to light would take phase one a long way. “Based on this experience, we designed and conceived the pilot project, which started with the Ratlam and Baroda divisions,” says G.K. Maishi, group GM/OAEW, CRIS. But when you’re among the largest employers in the world, even pilots are sizeable. In its first phase, the project targeted 35,000 railway workers. Although this forms a small percentage of the total number of railway employees, the buy-in of this group was essential if the project was to take off. But they had been weaned on the manual system and in some cases the manual system went back to the days of their fathers. They had learnt to work the system and were not ready to adopt systemic changes. The

“the essence of our success was proper planning and timely contribution by each team. It is teamwork which made the most difference.” — Deepak Ganju, GM, Project III, CRIs

Step 3

After disembarking, crew-members log-in again (signaling the end of their shift) and report abnormalities like a broken signal.

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biometric readers, for example, made it impossible for them to sign in by proxy. “Change management is a challenge we have faced in every project that we have done for the Indian Railways. We have overcome this by designing applications properly so that everyone who interacts with a system benefits from it. There are IT implementations in which the people who interact with a system do not benefit at all. Not so with the CMS,” says Vikram Chopra, Director Operations, CRIS. Employee resistance created a parallel system. Currently the profiles of 51,000 crew-members have been entered into the CMS database and over 15,000 actively access it everyday. It helps that the CMS is a browser-based, user-friendly, 24/7 application that is run on the railways’ internal WAN. The thin clients and kiosks used by crew-members are linked to a central location, where edge servers have been installed for load balancing. Using thin clients not only lowered the project’s cost but were also the right choice because of their REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8

Cover Story | Staff Management

longer lifespan (they do not have moving parts). And the centralized architecture simplifies software updates, for example. “If anything goes wrong, it can be corrected from the central command center,” points out Ganju. Since Indian Railways trusts Open Source, yet another challenge was to create user-friendly thin-clients that ran on Linux. “We overcame this problem by training end users,” says Ganju. Creating the software and managing the project in-house was a huge task. The team had an 18-month deadline to launch in December of 2007 and with the amount of work that needed to be done on different fronts, the project team grew from three to 35. “The essence of our success was proper planning and timely contribution by each team. It is teamwork which made the most difference,” says Ganju. Their teamwork paid off. Today, the CMS provides global tracking of the railway’s crew in real time, immaterial of whether they are on a train, resting at HQ, resting outstation, on leave or in training. “With the CMS there is a ready account of available crew,” says Das. Armed with that data, supervisors can plan and allocate crew-members for trains. And, if the number of crewmen available for the day falls below a critical level, a message is sent to authorities to do the needful.

likely to see payback within one year by way of overtime control alone. The other benefits like a reduction in crew, reduction in cost because of faster decisions and greater railway safety cannot be evaluated at this point." With the CMS, the Indian Railways’ operational efficiency has increased. “It has ensured that crew is put to optimum use. With the CMS taking care of crew allocation, there is no scope for under utilization of any crew-member and the opposite is also avoided,” says Ganju. It’s effect is already beginning to show. In his 2008-2009 Railway Budget speech, Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav announced that the organization's operating ratio improved to 76 percent. CRIS is eager to spread the goodness. Phase two is already underway and Ganju says that by September 2008, 140 more locations will come up in the eastern, southern and north frontier regions of the Indian Railways. In the coming days, CRIS plans to integrate the CMS with other systems like the Freight Operating Information System (FOIS) and the Coach Management System. They also plan to integrate a breath analyzer with the system. These are already placed in the driver cabins of many trains but work on a standalone basis. “We also have plans to develop flexi-reporting systems. This will enable management to design their own reports, according to convenient formats, which will further enable the improvement of services and performance,” informs Ganju. And importantly, the CMS will help streamline the organization, making it more able to take on its biggest competitor, the low cost airlines. “The purpose of the CMS is not to cut down the number of crew-members," says Chopra. "It’s to use crew members on our rolls to run more trains efficiently. Every year we increase the number of trains. This is not about saving man-power, it’s about using manpower better because we are in a growing market.” The Indian Railways isn’t the only one that sees benefit in the CMS. Transnet (South African Railways) has shown interest in using the CMS. Transnet Freight Rail, a division of Transnet, is the largest mover of freight in Africa. But perhaps most importantly railway safety has improved. In his 2008-2009 Railway Budget speech, Lalu Prasad announced that railway mishaps have reduced. “The number of train accidents has come down from 234 in 2005-06 to an all time minimum of 195 in 2006-07.” There’s no price on that. CIO

Months:

estimated payback period for the CMS — just by eliminating overtime payments.

profit express The CMS has brought other benefits. For one it has made the railways a safer place. By reporting an abnormality like a defective signal as soon as he gets off his shift, a crew-member can save lives. The CMS passes on his observations quickly ensuring that the problem is fixed. “Earlier this was done manually. A crew-member would record an abnormality on a register, which a supervisor checked later. In the CMS, once an abnormality is reported, an SMS is immediately sent to the concerned authorities,” says Ganju. The CMS has also made life easier for railway staff. Now they can check their PME (Periodical Medical Examination) and training dates on their mobiles. The CMS is also environment friendly. By using thin clients instead of regular PCs, the Indian Railway saves between 50 percent to 85 percent in power. The kiosks use TFT instead of CRT monitors and that saves between 40 percent to 65 in power. In addition, the kiosks have led to reduced paper consumption at the lobbies. “Economy is one of the reasons for implementing the CMS. The other is improving efficiency. In fact, it is operational efficiency that is more important than economics,” say Chopra, director, CRIS. Still, the CMS is a CFO’s dream. CRIS has invested between Rs 8 crore and Rs 9 crore in phase one and Ganju says, “we’re 30

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Rahul Neel Mani is resident editor. Saurabh Gupta is correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to rahul_mani@idgindia.com and saurabh_gupta@ idgindia.com

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VIEW

from the TOP

Vinay Nadkarni, CEO of Globus Stores, saysIT helps his company manage its supply chain more efficiently, resulting in lower operating costs and faster timeto-market.

Setting a Trend

By gunjan trivedi

From the tiny kirana store to the swanky malls, India's retail sector is mushrooming. With more than 12 million retail outlets, the fifth largest retail destination in the world promises a lot more. And everyone wants a piece of that pie. Investor interest has created such a buzz that the industry now, reportedly, accounts for over 10 percent of India's GDP — making it hard for serious players to create a place for themselves. But there are some from the old guard who stand out. Like Vinay Nadkarni of Globus Stores. Established in 1998, Globus Stores has 24 stores across the country today. Nadkarni wants to take that number to 100 by the end of 2012 — by betting on technology. With competition at its peak, Nadkarni feels that only innovation and supply-chain automation can ensure customer satisfaction. And set a trend for the rest to follow.

CIO: In India's huge and fiercely-competitive retail market, where is the scope for differentiation? Vinay Nadkarni:

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

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View from the Top -.indd 32

Considering that the market for organized retail is still evolving, I think clear differentiation — whether of market or customer segments — is yet to be formed. In such a scenario, I strongly believe that there is plenty of scope to bring in considerable differentiation. We can make a distinction on the basis of pricing and the unique attributes of a

product. Plus, packaging and always being the first one to identify and present newer trends can also enable an organization to create substantial competitive differentiation, at least in our vertical. More holistically, key differentiation can be brought in — irrespective of verticals — by ascertaining distinct markets that organizations play in. The differentiation can be underlined by looking at whether one is operating in an urban market visà-vis semi-urban or whether the urban market is being pitted against rural one or it is simply a case of regional versus a national market.

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Vinay Nadkarni expects I.T. to: Help the company remain competitive Manage supply chain efficiently Play a strategic role in business

Imaging by BINESH SREEDHARAN

How do you ensure that Globus maintains a competitive edge? At Globus, we have always catered to the needs of the youth. It is our mission to create an iconic and leading 'youth fashion' brand in both the apparels and accessories space, and gain a competitive edge in the market. This is why we invest substantially in our designers and encourage them to innovatively try out new ideas. We set up the Globus Design

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Hub last year in Mumbai. It is like our fashion laboratory and design talent floor where we experiment continuously with new designs and trends. This way we can innovate constantly and adapt to achieve customer satisfaction by offering them quality products and services, and ensuring that we stay ahead of others in the market.

What do you think about bold leadership? How

can that help bring about newer opportunities? In the fashion apparel and lifestyle retailing industry, where we play in, being bold matters the most. I believe, bold leaders in our trend-setting industry are those who define fashion and carve a niche for themselves in the market. This is of paramount importance considering that each selling season is usually shortlived. Quite naturally, such bold leaders â&#x20AC;&#x201D; those who think out-of-the-box â&#x20AC;&#x201D; are

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View from the Top

able to automatically create entry barriers for their competition by their sheer ability to take risks and raise the bar. Nevertheless, at the current stage of evolution in our country, to create such entry barriers at a national level is still a milestone that needs to be crossed. This will definitely take some more time to happen, as there is still no homogeneity of consumers developed across the country today.

What role does information technology play at Globus? Quite obviously, IT plays the pivotal role of an enabler at Globus. Looking at the short shelf-life of fashion trends, Globus creates more than a lakh of SKUs each year, and refreshes up to 90 percent of its merchandize each season. To do this, we extensively ride on technology to compress our time-tomarket. Moreover, with our outsourced manufacturing model, we rely on IT to help us manage our supply chain, automate our processes to reduce our costs, enable quicker decision-making and improve our productivity to stay competitive. Continuous improvement of our product lines through regular and timely observations and feedback is also quite critical for us at Globus. IT has helped us develop a streamlined, collaborative environment, which efficiently captures feedback. This feedback helps our designers and merchandisers effectively improve our product lines. I can confidently say that IT provides a very sound and robust foundation on which the complete business of Globus is effectively structured.

What is your advice to CIOs who want to ensure tighter alignment between technology and business? I am of the strong opinion that IT leaders or CIOs should always strive hard to understand and comprehend the business 34

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“We rely on IT to enable quicker decisionmaking and improve productivity to stay competitive. ” — Vinay Nadkarni in which they perform and appreciate the market in which their organizations operate. Since technology plays the key role of enabler in almost every organization, the role of a CIO becomes more complex as he has to recognize business needs and figure out a way of addressing those needs with IT — all at the same time. By gaining the unique advantage of deciphering business needs and understanding how to apply technology, IT leaders can play an important role in strengthening and improving business processes. This, I am sure, will definitely help CIOs achieve healthier bottom lines for their organizations.

with varying levels of complexity. This is compounded more so in our case, as our stores are usually set up in vastly different consumer catchments. By having the right team and the right technology, we are able to successfully and efficiently manage the complexities of our business. By leveraging technology, we have been able to round up tried-and-tested processes and procedures such as research and design, production and merchandising, marketing and brand development, service, human resources and administration, to alleviate the pains we face in managing the problems that come with our business.

What role can e-commerce play in the retail business? How does Globus plan to leverage e-commerce? Going by global trends, I am sure that e-commerce will definitely play a very strategic role in the retail segment. We have been closely monitoring the worldwide trends of buying fashion apparel and accessories on the Internet. Looking at the rapid growth of online retailing globally, I think, it will gain considerable ground in India as well. And very soon. Hence, going forward, offering the acclaimed Globus Fashion shopping experience on the Internet will be our core priority. We want to rapidly expand our business on the ground, which is evident by our endeavors to have an additional set of 100 stores by the year 2012. At the same time, we also have a vision of building a successful online brand by being able to provide our best fashion products equipped with the ease of shopping online from anywhere across the globe. CIO

With so many stores and multiple brands, how do you manage complexity? Naturally, different product ranges have their own set of challenges and each come

Gunjan Trivedi is assistant editor. Send feedback on this interview to gunjan_t@cio.in

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Case File

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Case File

As Sankara Nethralaya took on more applications to meet patient needs, its network went on a blink, leaving the hospital blind for hours. When the problem moved from being an irritant to life-threatening, it knew only a network management system could save it. By Kanika Goswami

Il lustrat io n by unn ikrishn an AV

It was 1978

when the country saw the birth of what was to become one of India’s best-known medical institutions. It was the year when an eye hospital took upon itself to deliver free treatment to its patients. Sankara Nethralaya, is all that and more. The charitable hospital that was conceived by Sankaracharya of Kanchi, has many awards and accolades against its name — including the best managed charitable hospital in the country. Today, in its 30th year, equipped with the latest technology, this super specialty hospital treats more than half a million patients annually. But long before it started to see this many patients, the hospital realized that it was imperative to have an IT-enabled infrastructure. And, today, it uses technology extensively for all its operations. But, beneath this success story and the awards lay a sorry picture of a tired network infrastructure. In November 2007, the hospital installed a comprehensive EMR system (an electronic medical records system maintains patient records in a digital format). “The EMR is life critical,” says M.K. Manavalan, Head-IT, Sankara Nethralaya. “If a doctor in an operation theatre needs to verify something, he or she turns to the tablet PC or laptop” that runs on the EMR system. The EMR system also offered analytical data. Critical surgeries have separate modules, which, over a period of time, has been able to prescribe evidence-based medication. That’s not all, even the drug

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Removing the Blur

inventory used the EMR system. “The store prescribes and disburses medicines according to expiry dates, so even inventory Sankara Nethralaya maintains almost management is on the network,” he says. 18 lakh records including those from the The EMR like most other apps in the the day it started functioning. Scanning hospital runs off a network. As the hospital these was a huge task. With almost half a banked more and more on its network, it million patients added every year, this pile began to show signs of strain and over of records was only getting bigger. time, network performance became a And as it grew, the hospital was also life-threatening issue. To make matters aiming at acquiring international standard worse, the network did not have a proper processes. One of these came in the form monitoring system. Soon, the hospital of the EMR system. These 21st century began to be plagued by long hours of applications, however, put strain on the downtime, often because of network network. It was then that the organization problems. This resulted in functional started looking for an network management delays of the system, which had a direct system (NMS). impact on patient services. Manavalan evaluated a number of “The last time it happened, we had a products and applications to find one that downtime of seven to eight hours, when fit the hospital. He says that to be chosen there was no billing either. There was a the solution had to be more than a NMS lot of traffic that got stuck, it was a total tool. “Apart from its main role of displaying collapse,” remembers Manavalan. the network, we needed something more, in Ironically, locating some of the problems terms of sending information to other teams took about sereval hours while fixing by SMS,” he says. them took a few minutes. “Identifying the IBM’s NOC Inside, an automated trouble used to take so long because we had subscription-based solution with IT a very large network of at least 40 to 50 infrastructure as an integrated application, components,” points out Manavalan. was just what the doctor ordered. With But when you run a NOC Inside, the hospital Reader ROI: hospital, a few minutes could automate IT Why a network-monitoring of downtime can be fatal. monitoring, IT inventory tool is important Sankara Nethralaya needed management and IT service How effective data records 100 percent uptime service desk operations. can help better business from its IT infrastructure It was important for processes and every day it waited for the solution to multi-task How NMS can take care that, it put the lives of its because IT at the hopital of software licenses and patients in danger. multi-tasked. During compliance issues REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8

9/30/2008 5:39:34 PM

Case File any of its network monitoring a critical operation, for areas. “For example, a switch example, IT stands in because in one of the ports may be anesthesia monitoring is also down. So, before the user IT enabled. A patient’s vital SNAPSHOT comes to us, there will be a functions and other reports Sankara call from the NMS and we can need to be immediately Nethralaya take care of it immediately,” accessible on the network, Employees: says Manavalan. so that steps can be taken to <1,000 The system never stopped administer anesthesia and Headquarters: surprising the hospital with post-operative care — both Chennai what it could deliver. It also advised by the EMR system. Branches: identifies and allocates the Manavalan explains why 9 bandwidth required for he chose NOC Inside, “We Head-IT: a Sankara Nethralaya’s had evaluated a few other M.K. Manavalan branch that is being set up network management tools, in a remote location. “Before this NMS both in terms of hardware and software, tool was implemented, we had to rely on but none of them provided an integrated calculated guesses to figure out how much solution like NOC Inside. It provides bandwidth we needed for a new branch. software and hardware inventory as After the implementation, we are able to well as helpdesk management with SLA clearly monitor IT requirements. In our measurement, and comes along with core Calcutta branch, for example, we wanted network monitoring requirement.” to go for 800 Bytes per second (Bps), but The application generates daily reports thanks to NOC Inside we found out that we that keep track of the hospital’s entire required only 200 Bps,” says Manavalan. hardware and software inventory and This was important because the hospital ensure software license compliance. wanted to open more branches to add Dashboards facilitate real-time to those it had already opened Chennai measurement of IT service performance Kolkata Rameshwaram and Bangalore. and generate alerts whenever there are Currently, the hospital’s management is problems. This helps nip network errors planning to open a branch in Mauritius. in the bud. The solution also came bundled with an The system automatically calls the IT advisory service capability that employs helpdesk if it finds a network problem in

“Though there are huge savings with the NMS, we look at the investment more as a life-critical activity.” — M.K. Manavalan Head-IT, Sankara Nethralaya

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a specialized analytics engine. This studies the network, acts as a consultant and recommends action plans for the network. But as convenient as the solution sounds (it took only 12 days to implement), it was not devoid of challenges.

From a Coma to OPD While the system would assure the hospital of 100 percent uptime, persuading the management was quite a task. “Our management wanted to know why we couldn’t settle for just a network management system. Our point was that this application would add so much more value,” says Manavalan. In the end, they came around. In retrospect convincing the management was worth it. Says Dr. Lingam Gopal, chairman, Sankara Nethralaya, “Our operations are not just business critical, but more than that, they are ‘life critical’; therefore we need sophisticated tools like NOC Inside, which make a big difference to our network uptime.” Every process that NOC Inside has eased is a business benefit. Apart from providing the hospital with a 360-degree view of its infrastructure, Manavalan’s biggest benefit was the elimination of downtime. “With NOC Inside even potential problems are identified, so within a minute we know which machine’s application is giving away,” he says. He also realized that NOC Inside would make running other applications easier. “With this tool I can monitor the performance and activities of other applications. Take the EMR system, for instance. The NMS tool has a database in which it collects a lot of data on traffic monitoring> Based on that it can generate various reports,” he says. In addition to the expected benefits that the system provides, Manavalan is happy with the customized package that IBM provided. “We need to verify our IT assets every month or every quarter to classify them and calculate our current asset list. Every year, we need to verify our software licenses, and we also need to confirm whether we are compliant. With NOC Inside, this has been totally automated”

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Case File

Eye on the Network With NOC Inside, Sankara Nethralaya is assured of 100 percent network uptime. Dashboards facilitate real-time flexibility of IT service performance.In case of a network glitch, the system will automatically call the helpdesk.

Network helpline calls have gone down from 75-80 to just 32 — 60 percent decrease.

Network

solutions

Dashboards

NMS

removing many manual hours of inventory taking. At any point of time, the hospital now knows the number of licenses it has and if it is meeting compliance standards for various applications. Considering the fact that these areas required many man-hours, this is a huge business advantage too. “We could say that we save almost two man-months every year, thanks to NOC Inside’s asset management capabilities,” says Manavalan. Quantitatively, the system has reduced manual intervention by almost 60 percent, he says. This solution also generates a daily report that keeps track of the entire hardware and software inventory and ensures software license compliance. The NOC Inside tool also has a service desk component, which allows the user to log on automatically into the system and the helpdesk will allocate the right service engineers to the place. It acts as a centralized call center database management system (CMDP). “There were around 75 to 80 network calls booked in our helpdesk per month,”

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says Manavalan, “which needed manual intervention to identify the issue and resolve it. After the implementation of NOC Inside, our network calls per month has gone down to 32, which is around 40 percent of the original number — a whopping decrease in network calls.” Introducing the ROI concept to investment decisions at a hospital is not very prudent, since often, the returns are in terms of added services. So just cost was not a consideration. “I was focusing on the value-added points,” Manavalan says, “and also, the vendor’s cost was an advantage. This is a subscription-based model, so it worked both ways.” In addition to not being exorbitantly priced, NOC Inside also saves manpower costs. This was a substantial saving and proved useful, especially for Manavalan, who had to use it as an ROI tool to convince management. As Lingam points out, what is critical to business could also be critical to saving a life. So inversely, what the business can save (by being more efficient) is not looked at in terms of money — but in terms of

The software also helps the hospital check its software licenses and compliance issues — this saves it two man-months of manual effort every year.

lives. “We normally quantify the area of investment on life-based criticality, not only with money saved. Earlier, the downtime we suffered was bad. Over an eight-hour period, we could say we lost at least Rs 1 lakh. Though, there is a huge saving, we look at the investment more as a life-critical activity,” Manavalan says. At peace with its NMS, Sankara Nethralaya’s IT team is now looking at the next level of IT implementation. “We will be investing in developing Ophthalmology PACS and a data mining application which will help in clinical decision support system, preferred practice pattern and evidencebased medicine,” he says. And today, with NOC Inside, the hospital, which had a myopic view of its network infrastructure, has broadened its vision and has gone beyond just a corrective surgery. With a system that delivered more than it promised, Sankara Nethralaya can now afford to rest on its laurels. CIO

Infographics BY ANIL T

The NMS provides the hospital with a 360degree view of its entire infrastructure.

Kanika Goswami is assistant editor. Send feedback on this feature to kanika_g@cio.in

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peUUp TO pening

OpEn SOURCE As a solution, the open source is winning converts among IT and business leaders, but barriers to enterprise adoption still remain, according to an exclusive CIO survey. By EsthEr schindlEr Sorry, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve missed your chance to be an iconoclast. Reader ROI:

How IT and business leaders view open source Which applications types are most popular Barriers to enterprise adoption

Open-source solutions used to be adopted quietly by company workers who snuck in an Apache Web server or an Open-source development tool suite under the philosophy "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission" (not to mention that "It's easier to get your work done with Open-source tools than to get an IT budget"). That's no longer the case, according to a survey of IT and business executives and managers, conducted by CIO. The survey, collecting data from 328 respondents, shows that more than half the respondents (53 percent) are using Open-source applications in their organization today, and an additional 10 percent plan to do so in the next year. For nearly half, 44 percent, Open-source applications are considered equally with proprietary solutions during the acquisition process.

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Software

Making Inroads

More than 60 percent of IT and business professionals use or plan to use Open Source. Planning to use in the next 12 months Among those currently employing Open-source solutions, the primary uses are operating systems such as Linux (78 percent), infrastructure applications, such as back-end databases and Web servers (74 percent), and software development tools like Eclipse (61 percent). Those may sound fairly geeky, but business application use isn't far behind. Nearly half of the survey respondents, 45 percent, are using desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org, and 29 percent use Open-source enterprise applications. The most popular of those enterprise applications are collaboration tools, customer relationship management (CRM) tools and ERP applications. Moreover, Open-source solutions are generating confidence. Close to three in five respondents, 58 percent, strongly agree or agree with the statement that Linux is reliable enough to depend upon for mission-critical applications. Remarkably, that confidence is highest among IT executives and managers: 62 percent say Linux is ready for prime time. Respondents to the survey ranged from IT executive or manager (59 percent) and business executive or manager (13 percent) to IT professionals (20 percent) and business professionals (8 percent). For contrast: three-quarters (77 percent) of software developers responding to the last Evans Data Open Source Software/Linux Development Survey absolutely or probably have enough confidence in Linux to use it for mission-critical applications. Take that with a grain of salt: by their qualifications for participation in that market research study, those developers are tipped in favor of using or writing Open Source (if not Linux), so a higher ranking is not surprising.

What Makes Open Source Appealing — and Not The primary reasons enterprise IT departments adopt Open Source are financial. Money talks. Lower total cost of ownership (59 percent) and acquisition costs (56 percent) lead the pack. But money isn't everything. Greater flexibility was cited as a primary reason by 32 percent of respondents, and access to source code is a motivation for one in three (30 percent). Attributes of the source code itself aren't key drivers; better-quality code is a primary reason for adoption by just 12 percent, and product functionality by 22 percent. While it's good news (at least to its proponents) that nearly two-thirds of companies are using Open Source today or plan to use it soon, there are still barriers to adoption. The primary reason is product support concerns (45 percent); enterprises clearly want assurance that someone will answer tech support

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10%

37%

Currently Using

53%

No plans to use OS apps Source: CIO Research

Evaluating OpenSource Solutions Many companies are perfectly willing to adopt an Open-source solution, but aren’t sure how to measure its sustainability for enterprise use. Opensource software should be evaluated along similar lines to propriety software, such as on functionality and capability, says Brian Gentile, CEO of JasperSoft, which provides a commercial Open-source business intelligence platform. To determine whether Opensource product or vendor is appropriate on other criteria, he offers the following checklist:

Ensure that a product is available from a commercial Open-source company with the licensing mechanism and resources to ensure your success, such as customer support. Check the size and vibrancy of a vendor community. This helps to determine the success possible with its products better than its annual revenue. learn how many productions deployments are in use by other commercial enterprises. That’s a string indicator of the product’s (and the vendor’s) ability to really deliver. Apply standard evaluation techniques use with propriety vendors, such as quality of the product road map, strength of the company’s personnel and availability of training and professional consulting services. —E.S.

2 3

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Software calls. Secondary issues are the awareness or knowledge of available solutions â&#x20AC;&#x201D; that is, the ease of learning that an Opensource application is available to scratch that particular IT itch (29 percent), security concerns (26 percent) and lack of support by management (22 percent). Again, you'll notice that the qualities of the Open-source applications themselves aren't as big a deal. Software quality issues are cited as a primary barrier to adoption by 20 percent and customization concerns by 15 percent. So if you're trying to

sell the boss on the virtues of Open Source, spend more time on reassurance about tech support availability and quality than you do on customization opportunities. Companies that use (or plan to use) Open Source generally have the same concerns as do companies that stick with proprietary solutions. The main exception is Open Source's top sticking point. Half the respondents whose companies use Open Source today (52 percent) cite product support concerns as the greatest barrier to entry. A third (33 percent) of those who don't

Spreading the Code: Why You Should Contribute to Open-Source Projects Companies can benefit by releasing their in-house customizations to the Opensource community.

Open Source is no longer a novelty, even within the largest corporations. Today, 53 percent of businesses use Open-source software, according to the CIO survey (main story). However, not enough of those businesses are contributing code back to the Open-source community, said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat. And such contributions would benefit the enterprise even more than it would the development community, he explained. According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, 75 percent of software is written for in-house use. As Whitehurst pointed out, much of that code is never used â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a true waste of resources. "Think how much software is written out there that is behind proprietary walls," Whitehurst said. Often, a company will create an innovative technology solution, using Open-source software such as the Linux operating system, that can be appreciated by other developers and users. Whitehurst sees this as an opportunity to evangelize the power of Open Source to help businesses work more efficiently. Zemlin agrees about the importance of getting sophisticated internal developers involved, which he sees as 42

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an untapped brain trust. "Getting those people to contribute to the process is critical," he says. For example, Whitehurst said, the Merge real-time messaging functionality in Linux was originally written by JP Morgan for its internal needs. But any enhancements the company would make would fork the OS, requiring the company to re-implement its customizations every time it upgraded its Linux computers. According to Whitehurst, JP Morgan's CIO realized that support costs could be reduced by contributing the source code to the Linux community. Other Linux users would benefit, which would be nice, but more important to JP Morgan, the company wouldn't have to invest its own resources in maintaining an internal application. The Merge code would now be updated and enhanced by Linux developers at large, in addition to any committers on its own staff. Similarly, Whitehurst said, a Canadian insurance company developed ESB and contributed it to the Linux community. Doing so, he said, built a large community of users. This isn't exactly uncommon. As reported in the CIO survey, half of those who use Open Source (49 percent) often or sometimes report bugs or contribute their changes back

to the Open-source community; 11 percent have Open-source committers on their staff. You may expect that companies would be concerned about competitive differentiation, and keeping ones' customizations out of the hands of their industry competitors. That's actually the opposite of what Zemlin has seen. People care about how their code is used in Linux and in other Open-source software, he says, and they notice which companies contribute the most code. They see it as individual program recognition as well as demonstrating company domain expertise. When survey results come out, Zemlin says, his phone has rung off the hook with questions like "Why isn't my company more accounted for?" The most effective ways for enterprises to contribute to Open Source projects is when their own self interest is involved, according to Zemlin. A company that has to rewrite everything for an in-house legacy application or device driver will often be held back by the reluctance to upgrade. Instead, Zemlin says, "It would be better to submit changes into the [Linux] mainline," he says, creating a sustainable system for which the enterprise no longer has to be the only source of development resources. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;E.S

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Software use Open Source identified this as a primary problem. Product support is still their top item â&#x20AC;&#x201D; just with less urgency. In other words, the folks who are using this stuff know that it's a problem; those who aren't using it simply expect it to be. One item that may quell the fears of enterprises contemplating Open-source solutions: once you have the software in-house, code quality concerns become far less important. Enterprises that aren't using Open Source cite code quality as the thirdhighest issue (after product support and security concerns), but it's number 7 (of 12) for those who have been working with the applications. Once you have your hands on the code, apparently, you discover the situation is better than you imagined. Open-source developers have somewhat different priorities than do their managers. According to the Evans Data survey, the biggest obstacles to adoption are a corporate preference for proprietary software, lack of device drivers and the need to learn a new set of skills. The quality of support was the biggest obstacle to only 15 percent of developers.

Making Open Source Work In-House About a quarter of corporations (27 percent) have a formal policy in place regarding Open-source applications, though 18 percent expect to adopt such a policy in the next 12 months. Of those with Open-source policies, 45 percent feel their policies are very effective and 46 percent somewhat so. Presumably, the 'somewhat so' respondents are thinking about the amount of Open-source software that's been installed by IT staff and developers without company approval; one in five (21 percent) admits to it (often or sometimes). While more than half of enterprises use Open source today, the degree of intimacy with the philosophy varies quite a bit.

Few Policies in Place Only one-quarter of respondents have a formal Open-source policy.

Formal policy currently in place for open-source applications

27% 18%

Planning to implement in the next 12 months

Closing the Door on Open Source What are the greatest barriers to Open-source software?

45%

Product support concerns

29%

Awareness/knowledge of available solutions

26%

Security concerns

22%

lack of support by management licensing or legal concerns

21%

20%

Investment in architecture from other vendor(s) Software quality issues

20%

15%

Customization concerns

Not relevant to our product or service

Pressure on Open-source providers by commercial vendors

Software cost allocation policies Other

Source: CIO Research (Respondents could select up to three choices)

Companies may often (43 percent) or sometimes (24 percent) treat such applications as, well, just free software; they run the application but don't even look at the source code. Although they can access the source code, it isn't common for enterprise IT departments to use Open-source modules in their own code, whether or not they make code changes. For example, 18 percent often use unchanged code modules as though the modules are a free source library, and 36 percent do so occasionally. Still, half, 49 percent, often or sometimes report bugs or contribute their changes back to the Open-source community; 11 percent have Open-source committers on their staff. Once Open Source was rejected as appropriate for enterprise use. Clearly, that's no longer the situation today. CIO

55%

Source: CIO Research

No plans for a formal opensource policy Esther Schindler is senior editor. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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How I Learned to Love

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Telecommuting

In the 10 years John Halamka has been a CIO, he has strongly believed that productivity is optimized when everyone meets and works in close physical proximity. That way teams can brainstorm in person, respond to urgent issues as a group and build trust among one another. He never thought telecommuting was right for IT departments. Until now. Today, the travel required to bring employees together in an office has become burdensome and expensive. Metropolitan areas are clogged with traffic, and gas prices cause financial hardship. On average, Halamka says he spends 1.5 hours a day in his car commuting 20 miles to and from his office. Many of his staff spend as much as four hours a day commuting. At the same time, people's awareness of the environmental impact of those long commutes is on the rise. If working flexible hours can reduce an

Reader ROI:

Why you need to re-think telecommuting How to create a flexible work policy Tools to enable collaboration and communication

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employee's commute by an hour or more each way, productivity and staff satisfaction will rise. What's more, face-to-face meetings that take weeks to schedule no longer support the pace of IT change and the level of service demands. Finding all the talented employees needed on staff within a reasonable commuting distance is also challenging. And for some jobs, the interruptions an office brings may actually reduce employee productivity. So, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (part of the CareGroup) piloted a flexible work arrangement and found that productivity for 200 staffers working from home rose 20 percent; only two participants had performance issues. Given these facts, Halamka believes IT leaders are obligated to explore the entire spectrum of flexible work arrangements including telecommuting, ‘homesourcing’ (a combination of outsourcing and telecommuting), virtual teams, and replacing travel with teleconferencing. Staffing an office from 8 AM to 5 PM doesn't make sense if it requires employees to spend hours in traffic. Telecommuting's benefits have long been proven. In the 1970s, Paul Gray, a now retired Claremont College professor of information science, studied the effectiveness of telecommuting among government workers in London. His studies showed that once co-workers have an initial in-person meeting, they're "able to work in dispersed mode with no loss of effectiveness," he wrote. In 2008, there are many technologies for communication: e-mail, instant messaging (IM), tele-conferencing, wikis, online meetings, secure file transfer, blogs and virtual private networks (VPNs). Internet connections are fast, reliable and cheap. These technologies are making flexible work arrangements possible and productive. Of course, there are issues to overcome. A home office needs infrastructure support — networks, desktops and a connection to the corporate phone system. Figuring out the best way to service hundreds of remote locations requires planning and pilots — extra work for IT departments already stretched thin. But, the technology required to support home offices and remote workers doesn't need to be complicated. Videoconferencing isn't always the answer, for example. Phone calls and Web-based presentation tools often work better. Managing employees who work remotely also presents unique challenges, like ensuring they maintain productivity and communicate effectively with management, staff and customers while offsite. REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8

Illust ration by MM Shanith

The CIO of CareGroup wasn’t a fan of telecommuting — until he and his team began experimenting with it. By John Halamka

9/30/2008 5:48:49 PM

Telecommuting Equity is another problem. Some staffers, such as those doing direct desktop service or training, need to be onsite. They may resent co-workers who can work from home. You need to find ways to offer some flexibility to staff who need to be in the office, such as letting them work four 10-hour days, says Halamka. Then there are the security and privacy questions, which loom especially large for Halamka since his IT organization is part of a large healthcare provider, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. If employees are to access sensitive health data from their homes, Halamka needs to investigate biometric devices, re-examine application time-outs, strengthen surveillance of audit logs and ensure end-to-end security from datacenter to the home. Halamka says that he has dealt with all of these issues as he piloted flexible work arrangements inside his IT organization. He studied the technologies, policies and business processes required to manage technology professionals in flexible work arrangements. He even spent a week telecommuting. Here are some of his suggestions.

Step 1: Create a Framework for Flexible Work Over the past three months, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has explored the policies needed to support remote work arrangements

for their call center employees, medical record coders and the desktop engineering team. The company determined that these three groups of employees were ideal for the pilot for a variety of reasons: JetBlue (a low-cost airline in the US) previously demonstrated that call center employees can successfully work from home. Medical record coders were chosen because they're difficult to find and because their work doesn't have to be done in a traditional office space as long as they have access to patient medical records. Finally, the IS engineers who design Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's infrastructure benefit from a quiet environment that's conducive to the concentration required for their work. The goal of the flexible work arrangement the organization is piloting is threefold: to enhance productivity and cost savings, improve employee recruitment and retention, and use existing office space more efficiently. IT chose employees for the pilot on the basis of whether letting them participate in a flexible work arrangement would advance any of those three goals. The team modeled their flexible work policy on one established by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, which has been an early leader in homesourcing. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts created a flexible work arrangement worksheet that's designed to

First-person Handbook: Working at Home Alone Telecommuting yields productivity and changes viewpoints. I tried working from home last November. I replaced my own scheduled plane flights with video teleconferencing, moved my in-person meetings to conference calls, and attempted to avoid all commuting for five days. I was almost successful. I had to go into the office for 30 minutes for an unplanned meeting with a new senior vice president of facilities. Firsttime meetings — with new employees or to kick off a project — are when faceto-face is truly important. I was more productive during my week at home because I could work when I'd otherwise be stuck in traffic. Although it's true that I have my BlackBerry with me at all times, I do not read or respond to e-mail while the car is moving, especially in bumper to bumper traffic. For a home office to work, it must be a dedicated space with a door that can isolate the remote worker from distractions. There really needs to be a sense of mental separation: as I 46

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close the door to the home office, I've commuted to work and will commute home when I exit my workspace. It is impossible to work from home while also caring for children or other members of the household, answering the door for deliveries, or competing with the family for use of the phone. A home office should have its own phone line. My time at any office, home or corporate, requires a laser-like focus on hundreds of e-mails, dozens of phone calls and numerous negotiations — all of which require my complete attention. I can't be distracted by dishes in the sink or laundry in the dryer. Achieving mental separation is one challenge. The other challenge associated with working remotely is getting used to not being on the front lines. Typically my day takes place in datacenters, hospital wards, board rooms and cubicles. Although I may be as productive working remotely as I am when I'm in the office, I feel emotionally separated from the action if I cannot

walk to a colleague's office or assess a critical situation in a hands-on fashion. This problem is more about perception than reality. With basic technology tools, I can achieve all the communication, coordination and leadership needed, but I've not yet personally adapted to virtual management. It's a bit like telesurgery. You expect to feel the heat of the OR lights and the sights and smells of cutting and sewing. Technically, telesurgery can be as good as in person surgery, but it requires the surgeon to have a mind-set that sets aside the sensory cues of the traditional operating room. I have been an effective CIO while traveling 400,000 miles a year, so I know that I can lead via BlackBerry, phone calls, Web-based collaboration and teleconferencing. I should feel as connected in my home office as I do while sitting in an airport. I'm sure that emotional comfort will come over time.

—J.H. Vol/3 | ISSUE/22

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t telecommuting

Flexible work arrangements challenge traditional command-and-control methods of management: it's hard to manage people you can't see. Make e-mail, phone calls, IM, blogging, wikis, and WebEx the means of communication and management control.

help managers evaluate if an employee's job tasks can be performed remotely. The worksheet also establishes an agreement between an employee and manager about the employee's job performance and productivity while working remotely. The team is in the process of customizing its own flexible work arrangement worksheet based on Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts's. Creating a policy that is flexible enough to support many employee roles while specific enough to identify which employees can work remotely and which cannot is challenging. Blue Cross's policy provides employees and managers with a framework to discuss the possibility of flexible work that sets mutual expectations, identifies the employee's responsibilities and codifies criteria for success. This framework has enabled Halamka to have open discussions with pilot employees interested in flexible work arrangements and to maintain a sense of equity since everyone understands what can and cannot be done. Extending this framework to the entire population at Beth Israel Deaconess is still a work in progress. The next step is a series of focus groups scheduled for April and May 2008 with over 40 managers from throughout the medical center who will document their unique needs and the challenges facing their departments with respect to flexible work arrangements. With a pilot policy in place, Halamka says they can think about the infrastructure required to support flexible work arrangements.

Step 2: Put infrastructure in Place to Support Remote Workers Enabling an employee to work from a remote location is like extending the corporate office to hundreds of new sites. Seamless telephone transfers to the home office, desktop support, network connectivity and security support are just a few of the services IT departments will have to provide. Furnishing employees with all the technology necessary for them to work from a home office is key to implementing a successful telecommuting or flexible work policy. You can't expect employees to maintain the same level of productivity and service they have in the office while at home if they lack access to the files and apps they need to do their jobs and if they lack technologies such as IM that ease communication and collaboration. At the same time, security issues cannot be overstated, especially in healthcare. The CareGroup does not want a home computer that's infected with a keystroke logger connected to their network. So it has

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to provide computers to remote workers. The team decided to outfit users with thin clients, which provide a low-cost, self-contained computer without any moving parts â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the hard drive has been replaced with Flash RAM. The devices, which cost about $300 (about Rs 12,000) apiece, do not allow users to do any configuration or install any software. They plug into a network just as a phone plugs into a wall. If a device fails, IT issues another one. The thin clients run only a Web browser and Citrix for applications such as Outlook and those few clinical systems that are not Web-based, such as the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s transplant system, cardiology systems and medical-record coding systems, so users can access all files and financial and clinical information via the intranet. At present they have deployed a dozen of these thin client devices, but plan to deploy more. To make sure that internal and external customers can easily get in touch with employees working from home, the IT team worked with their telecom provider to forward calls from teleworkers' offices to their home phones. Being a remote employee in 2008 requires full integration with the workflow of the company and access to all those applications and files that a person onsite would have. One way to extend the office into a remote location is to extend the network. The use of secure socket layer (SSL) virtual private networks (VPNs), such as Juniper's SSLVPN, works extremely well and across platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux.) CareGroup's SSLVPN examines the remote computer, ensures the appropriate operating system patches and anti-virus software are up to date, then enables remote users to join the network via the Internet. Their SSLVPN connects inside the firewall, but they have a secondary internal firewall, says Halamka, so that SSLVPN traffic is further examined by network intrusion detection and prevention systems before it gains access to the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most secure resources. Finally, remote collaborators need to be able to share files, no matter what the size. Juniper's SSLVPN enables corporate employees to access home and shared directories remotely. To support file sharing among collaborators in different companies, a secure file transfer appliance, such as that offered by Accellion, works very well, says Halamka. This appliance supports file transfers up to 2 gigabytes using Web technologies to place the file on a secure website and then e-mailing a user name and password to the collaborators who need to access it. REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8

Telecommuting Remote desktop applications, such as the remote desktop functionality built into the Juniper SSLVPN, also enable remote users to access their office desktops and effectively use all the tools on their office computer from their home workstation. In addition to these standard remote access methods, the enterprise may need new applications to support remote workflows. For example, their medical records coders need access to paper medical records. Since shipping thousands of sheets of paper is a logistical nightmare and a security risk, CareGroup elected to digitize all in-patient paper records and make them available securely via the Web. The company uses EMC's Captiva software to scan each portion of a medical record, render it as a PDF, and upload it to a secure Web app.

One of their desktop engineers worked from home four days a week and in the office one day a week. This particular engineer is responsible for developing desktop images used on Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's 8,000 managed workstations. His work demands a quiet, controlled environment where he can concentrate on complex programming, configuration and testing activities. From a management perspective, his deliverables are deployable software images for specific configurations of PCs that are due on specific dates. During the pilot, he used e-mail, IM and teleconferencing to stay in touch with management and customers. He met all of his deadlines, and no one complained about his availability, work habits or responsiveness. For medical record coders, one employee worked from her home in California and the other three worked from their homes in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts-based coders came into the office on average twice a week for work distribution or meetings. To evaluate the implications of flexible work on productivity, employee From home, they did all the work they would otherwise do in satisfaction and IT staff providing remote infrastructure support, the the office: they reviewed and applied diagnosis and procedure IT team ran two pilots: one with the desktop engineering team and one codes on path reports, operative reports, lab reports and notes in with the medical record coding team. the ambulatory medical record. They used e-mail very frequently to communicate with their managers and to clarify with clinicians issues in the medical record. During the pilot, they coded 10 percent more records than they typically code when working in an office. Audio is the way to go; use video for building consensus. Coders are challenging to hire due to the large number of hospitals competing for a small number of qualified employees, I'm a fan of audio teleconferencing. It works well, is low cost, and the so flexible work arrangements enable technology is mature. I do not need an engineer to set up a teleconference, the company to hire without geographic and I can use any mobile or landline phone. Video conferencing is a bit more restrictions. Given the IT job market and complicated. Reserve it for situations that require face-to-face contact to build the difficulty of recruiting replacements, relationships. My first observation about video conferencing systems is that poor the benefit of such flexibility cannot be video can be tolerated, but audio must be nearly perfect for it to be useful. overstated when you have a seasoned I used the Windows-based Polycom PVX software to connect via H323 to a employee who knows your systems well. Mac running Xmeeting. It worked perfectly, offering 'good enough' video from The organization was able to retain a coder my desktop Logitech Fusion camera and headset microphone. The Mac side who moved and included her in the pilot. running Xmeeting provided barely passable audio and passable video. Although For medical record coders, the pilot program not an H323 solution â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and thus not interoperable with existing corporate was very successful. teleconferencing systems â&#x20AC;&#x201D; iChat via Bonjour using the H264 protocol provides CareGroup observed many other benefits. much higher quality audio and video on a Mac than the Xmeeting H323 The flexible work arrangements improved approach. IP-based teleconferencing (as opposed to ISDN teleconferencing) employees' quality of life. "They're not worked on these machines. stressed or tired from commuting so much," The positive aspects of H323 are that the standards are mature. The downside: says Halamka, "and they're saving money video takes a lot of bandwidth, and it can take teams of engineers to get H320 and on parking and gas." The flexible work H323 working. My experience with H320 ISDN teleconferencing, which requires a arrangements have also freed up office series of digital telephone lines, is that it can be quite finicky. I've had many ISDN space. In addition to these benefits, the teleconferencing presentations fail completely, be interrupted and have variable team learned some important lessons about quality during the course of the call. implementing flexible work arrangements My second experiment involved connecting a Mac running Xmeeting with and managing remote employees. an Ubuntu Linux laptop running Ekiga. The laptop did not perform the audio or video tasks well. My video conference choice: PolyCom has a business-quality desktop teleconferencing solution that lets me to connect with collaborators using H323 protocols. Flexible work arrangements work best for highly responsible, productive employees â&#x20AC;&#x201D;J.H.

Step 3: Identify and Evaluate the Business of Flex Work

First-person Handbook: Teleconferencing

Lessons Learned

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Telecommuting with good track records who don't mind working alone. And employees' personal preferences play a large role in the success of such arrangements. One coder who lives by herself said she felt distracted at home and missed the social interaction with co-workers. Another coder who also lives alone loved working at home since she experienced no interruptions and got more done. When you begin offering flexible work arrangements, it creates the expectation that everyone will be able to work from home. Clearly, this is not the case. Some employees' jobs may not be conducive to working outside the office. Some employees may not be trusted to work from home. The answer to these issues is to use a flexible work arrangement framework, such as the one adapted from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Employees can understand objectively how a flexible work arrangement may or may not work for them. If a flexible work arrangement, once started, does not work out, it's easy to refer to the framework document to understand how expectations were not met and to justify the suspension of the agreement. For those who cannot do their jobs remotely but who require flexibility due to long commutes or family demands, you can let them work different schedules, such as 10 AM to 6 PM or four 10-hour days. That way, more people can participate in flexible work arrangements, which eliminates much of the friction among staff in different roles. Flexible work arrangements will also be hard to extend to new employees who don't know the people, processes and policies well enough to work effectively on their own. Halamka recommends waiting at least six months to let new employees work from home. One thing Halamka learned is that those at the office are not as likely to call someone at home because they feel that they are invading a private space. If the organization can create a sense of connectedness that goes beyond a geographic location, it can create equivalence between home and office. If you need to reach a person by voice, you dial a number, not knowing or caring if they are onsite or remote. Cell phones would work, but even they have a stigma of urgency that can impede a casual conversation. In Halamkaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s case, by connecting the office PBX system to a phone in the home office, he created five-digit dialing that eliminates any hesitation to call a colleague who may be working remotely. Flexible work arrangements also challenge traditional command-and-control methods of management: it's hard to manage people you can't see. You can't walk into their office or cube to ask them a question or give them a new assignment. By changing the culture to make e-mail, phone calls, IM, blogging, wikis, and WebEx the means of communication and management control, the need to walk into a cubicle lessens. On the employee side, regular status reports to the manager ensure that there are no surprises. Of all the lessons learned, the most important is that employee and manager create a written plan for the flexible work arrangement and describe specific expectations for performance. Both employee and manager need to constantly communicate and be comfortable with the basic technologies: e-mail, IM, phone conferencing and remote presentation.

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First-person Handbook: Communications John Halamka's choice for e-mail and IM. The most basic way to communicate remotely is via text. There are many ways to do this synchronously and asynchronously. I find it challenging to speak in a meeting, listen attentively, and text at the same time, so e-mail is my preferred method of asynchronous communication. It has mature standards, crossplatform support and is interoperable across corporate networks. I live by BlackBerry, answering 700 e-mails a day using my 8320 over GSM/GPRS/EDGE and Wifi. I use Entourage 2008 on OS X Leopard, and I am quite pleased with its functionality and stability. I use Outlook Web Access 2003 in Firefox, but am frustrated by its lack of a Gmail-like search feature. As for synchronous messaging, many companies have developed an instant messaging (IM) culture for communications. When I started this pilot, I hadn't used IM much so I took a deep dive into the technology. I opened accounts with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), GoogleTalk, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Skype and even BlackBerry Messenger for real-time communication with my staff. IM is an effective communication tool for real-time, emergent situations, such as a server or application outage, for quick questions, and for brainstorming. What's frustrating: I must use the same service as the person I message. Since my collaborators have accounts on different IM platforms, I must use all of them. Though some clients enable me to log in to multiple IM services simultaneously, I still need to create and remember the credentials for the accounts on all these services. My choice for IM: Meebo.com, a free, cross-platform Web-based client for IM text exchange that supports all the major IM service providers. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;J.H.

Flex Work is Here to Stay Flexible work arrangements are not only possible for Halamka and his staff, they are necessary in 2008. Halamka plans to expand the pilots over the next few months, now that he completed the initial technology and policy evaluation. He is optimistic that they will meet all three goals for the project: increased productivity and lower costs, improved employee recruitment and retention and better use of space. CIO John Halamka is the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. He frequently contributes to CIO. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Flourishing with Green With many companies having adopted green IT, this is not an untrodden path anymore. The way is paved enough for many to follow and make remarkable presence in the industry.

he rising environment concerns and energy issues have triggered greening up efforts worldwide. With the adoption of green options many have realized that it is not only about reducing the carbon footprint but also about operating smartly in the scenario of resource crunch. It has dawned upon CIOs across the globe that IT is largely responsible in gulping these resources â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and their revenues â&#x20AC;&#x201D; adversely affecting the environment. This set the alarm for some IT leaders and brought them to the CIO Roundtable Discussion in Jaipur.

A Green Initiative Speaking about the efforts put in by his company in going green, Rajesh Uppal, chief general manager, Maruti Suzuki, said that the company chose to go green as a result of the need for cost control at organizational level. Greening up IT was not the driving force

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“Preparing a metrics for performance power and energy consumed, should help us monitor and utilize our resources in the most optimum manner” Jyothi Satyanathan VP - platform systems, IBM India South Asia for them as manufacturing unit consumes much larger part of energy. Starting from manufacturing, it built in to all processes including IT. Being green and light was the need of the time and it's now built in the DNA of the company, not in a single department or process alone. Discussing about the approach towards green IT, Dr. Jai Menon, director customer services and IT, Bharti Airtel, said, “The point of consumption of energy is of two kinds in our company, central (IT datacenter oriented) and the other is highly distributed (network based stations throughout the country). The total energy we consume in digital electronics in both areas is humongous. So, our main focus is on energy consumption, and we have a strong mandate to save energy. This stands out above all other focus areas in our company.”

He added, “What we are doing in our company to bring the costs down is, we are breaking the usage in to smaller parts to monitor it closely. For this it’s been divided in to three parts — network, IT and human resources. Our indirect employee force is huge because we are outsourcing a lot of operations." He went on to add, "We have a special HR program 'etizing' where we are eliminating the use of paper and keep a tab of the number of trees saved through this. In case of network and IT, which is a huge guzzler of energy, we need to see what we can do to build an updated physical infrastructure and second what we can do to change the architecture to make it more efficient. All these energy concerns are at the board level in our company and we have just begun our journey through some measures.”

Turning Red to Green Referring to the problems initially faced by his company in arranging the source of electricity, P.A. Kalyanasundar, GM IT, Bank of India, said that computerizing the rural branches and connecting them through the network was at first a challenge. This was because, most of their branches are in Sholapur, where they face about 14 hours of power cuts. He said that getting a UPS could have been one solution for them but there is not enough power to charge these as well, in that region. He further said that they found solar power as a feasible source of energy in such circumstances. To supplement to the solar power in monsoon months, they had access to raw power. He believes that this is an environment friendly initiative. He said, "Other efforts involved centralizing the system and setting up a datacenter, with this the cooling requirements were also brought down, as the most of it gets concentrated to the datacenter with branches having mostly thin clients to work on. He said, “The ROI figures on using solar power, were very encouraging with the payback period of four to five years, nil maintenance cost and the solar system's guaranteed life is 20 years.”

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From top: Amit Gupta, VP, Fidelity Business Services; Arun Gupta, Group CTO, Shopper's Stop; Arvind Saksena, Group CIO and CTO, Consilium Software CUSTOM PUBLISHING | O C T O B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8

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From top: H. Krishnan, AVP - IT, Indian Rayon; Dr. Jai Menon, Director Customer Services and IT, Bharti Airtel; Manish Choksi, Chief - Corporate Strategy and CIO, Asian Paints (India)

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With regard to solar power being used as commercially viable resource of energy, Manish Choksi, Chief - Corporate Strategy and CIO, Asian Paints (India), said that banking on solar energy may be a bit of challenge because its storage options include lead batteries whose improper disposal may pose risk to the enviroment, so it becomes difficult to use it on a large scale. Having initiated a program where the development team of his company is working from home, Arvind Saksena, group CIO and CTO, Consilium Software, updated on its progress. Familiarizing on the challenges faced during piloting it he said, “There are a number of challenges in practicing telecommuting, the first is in area of HR, where it becomes difficult to track an employee’s performance and accordingly the appraisals. It is difficult to counter an employee’s work and decide about the appraisals, when he is away from office." He further said, "Second challenge is the availability of all required applications in a secure manner everywhere, in order to perform work related tasks.” Arun Gupta, group CTO, Shopper's Stop, said, “It is a reality that IT does not consume a very significant part of energy as compared to the whole organization's footprint. In our organization the energy consumption accounts to three percent of the gross revenue and even this hurts us with the energy costs going up drastically." He further added, "Despite our reducing the carbon footprint by 10 percent our bill is still more than three percent, which concerns us. I feel, we should have a dedicated person who is responsible to control energy consumption and helps formulate plans to reduce carbon footprint of the organization.” He went on to add, “A lot of regulations attached to generation of electricity from natural resources, pose a challenge in going forward with them. Right now, what we can do is to force the company to use resources in an intelligent way so as to save as much possible resources. For instance, turning off your desktops while away, or printing on both the sides of paper would help. We encourage our

customers to shop online to avoid travel. Many people come up with ideas of saving resources and we need to see that these do not get lost.” Provided that changing infrastructure in datacenters might help in reducing the OPEX, Vijay Sethi, head - IT, Hero Honda, shared his ideas regarding refreshing the infrastructure. He said, “We can’t just rip and replace, but it's also not wise to wait for the end of the infrastructure’s life cycle. So, we choose to go for a middle approach. To compensate to the damage the vehicles do to the environment after going out of our facility, we approach IT in helping us reduce our carbon footprint to some level, which can be through fine tuning the engines etc. This kind of contribution gives us a good feeling.” Discussing about the organizational efforts in documentation reduction, H. Krishnan, AVP - IT, Indian Rayon - unit Aditya Birla Nuvo, said, “The whole initiative came in to being with the deployment of SAP. It made a lot of information go online that resulted in saving paper. First, we developed all the ledgers online; second, we standardized the printing formats and eliminated multiple copy printing. We are also in the process of reducing the number of printers in every department as it is not required everywhere; employees can access some network printers for this.” He is troubled about the fact that there are some people in the organization who do not need computers round the clock; they just need the systems to check their mails once in a while. He said that the problem can be solved by giving these employees access to a central machine — something like an ATM kiosk, to which they can walk and check their mails from time to time. This would help in reducing the number of idle workstations in the organization, thus saving on power and infrastructure requirements.

Telecommuting = Green Commuting Telecommuting being another approach to Green IT, Dr. Menon of Bharti Airtel, brought to light the efforts put in by his company in this regard. He said, ”We

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From left: P.A. Kalyanasundar, GM - IT, Bank of India; Rajesh Uppal, Chief GM, Maruti Suzuki India; Suresh Shanmugam National Head - Business IT Solutions, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services; Vijay Sethi, Head - IT, Hero Honda have a lot of employees working from home through secure VPN. We are such a heavily outsourced organization that a large number of agents are engaged on our processes. We are now working with the BPO partners that encourage their agents to work from home. This cuts down so much of travel. He said, "This is also being practiced in India and we are beginning to see a lot of motion here. This kind of practice will have direct impact on green, second we will have better quality workers, dynamic resource pool, it will avail more logistics to allocate those resources on, on-demand basis. It’s an important move. But, IT security would pose a challenge here.” Adding to this Saksena of Consilium Software said, “To make it more convenient for the employees coming from far off places and to cut down on travel, we are planning to have small offices in different parts of the city, which are connected to each other through network. Provided the constraints attached to arranging a big facility, it’s better to have many small offices spread all over the city. It eradicates the problem of having to pay large amounts for a massive facility, with the rates already going up due to the hike in real estate prices, and helps the employees conveniently access office facilities.” Sharing his concerns on telecommuting, Krishnan of Indian Rayon,

said, “One challenge in telecommuting is that the employees might not have a proper infrastructure needed for them to work seamlessly from home. So this should be taken care of before taking up the work-from-home approach.”

Role of IT in Greening up Amit Gupta, VP, Fidelity Business Services India, said that going green by the means of IT started with the need for data security, which led to consolidation in datacenters and gradually adopting virtualization. With the deployment of these technologies, we saw the expenditure coming down and hence, we started considering green options.” Talking about the way green IT is being practiced in his company, Leaders of various companies said that they have started green blogs for their employees. The ideas they get through these blogs, sometimes help them conceptualize further. Discussing on the modus operandi for going green, Jyothi Satyanathan, VP - platform systems, IBM India South Asia, said, “Preparing a metrics for performance and energy consumed, should help us utilize our resources in the most optimum manner. I have seen that many companies hold performance power much higher than what is required. What they really miss on is the standardization of performance power and consumption that allows them to

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utilize this abundant power. You should first start standardizing and then push vendors to build applications on top of that standard, rather than going for disparate systems.” Adding to this, Dr. Menon of Bharti Airtel, said, “To properly estimate the resource consumption in your organization, IT should be divided in to three parts — enterprise computing world, cloud computing world and mass computing world, then you need to look at the overall power consumed, green IT concerns, challenges and opportunities in these three sectors of IT. It is then that we can look at the problem in its totality. Originally, we are zooming on one or the other problem, but never pay attention to the macro picture of IT. He said that we should strive to reach for the point where these three areas get consumed, taking into consideration their riders and all their clause, it is then we should shake all the concepts to figure out an approach going forward. There is a huge gap in this regard that needs to be filled up. A lot of innovation is yet to happen here.

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Greening up with Smart IT Indian CIOs are attempting to build a business case around Going Green, helping their enterprises embrace ecofriendly IT systems and technologies more effectively.

sustainable IT infrastructure is not as big an investment or a task as it seems. But in the Indian scenario, most organizations tend to focus on the business aspects of new concepts. If it makes or saves money, how effectively it works, etcetera. The next issue usually is the dichotomy between the IT team and the facilities interests, the question being raised would be, why should the IT save, while the facilities benefit? Under the circumstances, wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it be a better idea to have some sort of a marriage between IT infrastructure and facilities management? Indian corporate diasporas need to wake up to this need if energy efficiency is to become a part of their infrastructure planning. In addition, taking into account the often ignored aspect of green IT, to do with waste disposal and recycling also needs to be pushed into foreground, and a decision needs to be taken on what happens first, energy efficiency management or waste managementâ&#x20AC;Śor maybe both should be targeted at the same time? There may be other solutions to the situation, maybe alternate energy sources. How well do CIOs understand the need for energy efficiency, in context of not only higher goals but something as integral to their jobs, as ROI. What does it take to weigh green IT initiatives on the business scales? What do Green IT decisions do for smart business decision making? CIOs across various cities gather at CIO Roundtable to discuss how these issues can be challenged in light of their ultimate goals, processes, higher ROI and of course, profitability.

From left: Bhaskar S., CTO, Sify Technology; H.R. Mohan, AVP Systems, The Hindu; V. Balakrishnan, CIO Polaris Software Lab; R. Rajagopal, GM, Repco Bank; Vinod Kumar Gopinath, CTO, Novatium Solutions

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A Headstart to Green IT Talking about the rising consciousness towards the greening up initiative, Muralikrishna K., head-computers and communication division, Infosys Technology, said, “There's fair amount of pressure across the globe to go green, companies are really flexing their muscles to put their green steps in place. They want to work with partners who ensure to offer sustainable solutions. In this race, no one wants to be left behind the curve.” Discussing about how they plan to introduce green options in their IT system, Bhaskar S., CTO, Sify Technology, said that he believes in moving ahead with one step retirement at a time. For instance, nowadays we all want to have thin clients at the user end, but before implementing it in the system, the mindset of the users needs to be looked at and changed. So, its a must to take up one problem at a time and move ahead swiftly.” In the age of energy crisis, there is a need for a coordinated effort towards conserving and sharing resources, and this was explained by H.R. Mohan, AVP Systems, The Hindu. He said, “CIOs of different publishing houses had a meeting where they decided to share datacenter. Competition is one aspect, but when it comes to conserving money and resources, people should come together and share their resources. We understand that everyone wants to have their own devices in their workplace, but we need to convince them to share these.”

Conserving Energy The increasing amount of energy consumption at the datacenters has been causing a peril for the need in the IT industry to monitor the concern and get hold of the situation. In this regard, Edgar Dias, Leader Data Networks-Asia,

Nortel, said that until recently, people didn’t have a clear understanding of how power would affect the profitability of their organizations. It happened only when they realized that server compute power at the datacenters was going up, but the energy efficiency could not keep up pace with this. Murugan Kuppuswamy, AVP-IT, GE Money, said, “It’s necessary to know which part of datacenter is using how much electricity. How much of it is being consumed in storage, network and computing. Then only will we be able to keep check on the energy consumption levels. We need such infrastructures where we get a dashboard for power consumption in datacenters.” Addressing the concern, Dias of Nortel, said that there is a device available in the market i.e. Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor — it gives tangible numbers of power consumption by a specific device. One can do an onsite evaluation of technology through this. Continuing the discussion, Mohan of The Hindu, said, “We must make employees realize how much electricity or power they are using in each process. It’s necessary to create this awareness. That is how we can go about changing people's attitude towards power consumption. We need to change this attitude that if we have resources, so we can spend as much of them and become negligent towards environment. Companies should include environment consciousness as a part of their balance sheet.”

Saving Through Smart Networking The organizations are still warming up to get in the mode of accepting green IT as a social responsibility. At enterprise level most of the strategies still revolve around

From TOP: Murugan Kuppuswamy, AVP-IT, GE Money; S. Sridharan, VP-IT Orchid Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals Company; T. Rathinam, Director IT, Medical Research Foundation; N. Chandrasekeran, Special Director IT, Ashok Leyland; Prof. Anand Sivasubramaniam VP Head Infrastructure-R&D ,TCS CIO

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Events hard ROI numbers. The organizations want to save as much money as possible through different means. In the age of hyperconnectivity, the amount of power savings you can make from just smart distribution of power across networking devices is significant. It's about how to have sustainable computing through networking devices. Addressing the issue of hyperconnectivity, Dias of Nortel said that with the proliferation of servers, networks and networking devices, the datacenters have started expanding and power requirements have automatically gone up. The Moore's law fits well in this condition, which describes that the amount of IT hardware and silicon is increasing exponentially; this implies that the temperatures are also rising, thus sending a message to seriously consider the issue. Talking about the roadmap to build an energy efficient system including an energy efficient network, Abnash Singh, President-IT Operations, UCB Pharma, said, “When the management is looking at a typical payback time for adopting a particular technology, it poses to be a challenge in buying the idea for them. The payback time is usually not the theoretical three year time, but can be more. The approach should be that when you set up a new facility, there you should take a holistic approach of the system and force your solution architect or equipment vendor to look at energy efficiency as a part of the whole solution. That can be an approach to build an energy efficient system or datacenter.” Speaking about the challenge of convincing the management to adopt a new networking technology or device, K.T. Rajan, Director Operations-IS and Projects, Allergan India, said, “If you are able to bring that financial justification

on which is the better proposition between adopting a new energy efficient technology and living with the old outdated technology; you will eventually change the mindset of the management.”

To Fit Green in RFPs When asked, if they have included the concept of greening up in their RFPs, Muralikrishna of Infosys, said that green hasn’t yet gone to the RFP level in the organization, but they have been doing an ozone initiate for the last five to seven

Pramod Kumar, AVP-ICT, Applabs Technologies years. The idea was very much driven around, how to consume least possible energy which ultimately turned in to a green initiative. He said, “We have declared this initiative on our annual report. We talk about sustainability as one of our key initiatives in our organization.” Continuing on the topic, Anil Punjwani, Head-IT, Philips Electronics India, said, “Sustainability is an integral part of our business, but it’s still not the part of our RFP, and this is exactly where we need some help.” R.K. Upadhyay, DGM-IT,

From TOP: B.L.V. Rao, VP-Networks and Systems, CISO, Infotech Enterprises; Binod Samal, VP-IT of Apollo Hospitals Enterprise; C.S.R. Prabhu, Dy. Director General-SAN, NIC; G.S. Ravi Kumar, CIO, Gati; Gopi Thangvel, DGM-IT, Agility Logistics; K Chandrasekhar, Director-IT, Kemotheraptik Drugs

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Events

From left: V. Srinivas, CIO, Nagarjuna Fertilizers and Chemicals; Abnash Singh, President-IT Operations, UCB Pharma; Sireesh Chandra, Manager-IT, Vimta Labs; Srinivas Kishan Anapu, Head-Internal IS, Satyam Computer Services; Ratnakar Nemani, CIO and SAP Practice, VST Industries BSNL, said, “When we buy a server, we add up power consumption prices to the quoted prices we get, then we calculate the current requirement of the UPS, cooling requirement and we add this as well to the quoted prices. Sometimes when quoted prices of a particular server are low and through our calculations, we find that the power consumption is high, the product value automatically goes up. This directly affects our RFPs. Still we have not formally adopted the Kyoto protocol, but the pressure from the US is on. They want us to reduce carbon footprint and earn carbon credits. By making our systems more efficient we are earning some carbon points and saving on energy. So going green helps a lot on all fronts. It’s not only important for the environment, but also for the company.”

depending on the role they play in the system. The high-end machines could be reused in a datacenter, whereas the lowend machines that cannot take much load can be used in the front-end. This way the users get simple machines to operate on. So managing the front-end and back-end resources skillfully along with reusing whatever is possible, is the key to being energy efficient. The user would not even come to know about this shuffling, as it doesn’t hinder his work.” V. Balakrishnan, CIO, Polaris Software Lab, said that if you can justify the use of a particular technology or equipment and its need in the system then it becomes

Sajan Paul, Leader-enterprise core sales engineeringAsia, Nortel CIO

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Heaping up IT Waste With the growing numbers of servers every year and the new equipment replacing number of other machines, IT waste is now contributing largely to the world-wide waste production. Managing the disposal of equipment has become an equally important factor of sustainable IT and getting the carbon credits. S. Sridharan, VP-IT, Orchid Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals Company, said, “Our company is equally conscious towards the waste reduction, as it is sensitive to the energy consumption. Waste reduction is a big concern for us because, even a bit of impurity found in the final product or solvents for manufacturing any pharmaceutical product, would require going through the whole process again otherwise it would be wasted in masses.

Rip & Replace? Given a chance to adopt environment friendly, energy-efficient technology and equipment, which is a step towards sustainable IT; would the CIOs go far enough to rip and replace it or would they wait for the infrastructure’s life cycle to end? Vinod Kumar Gopinath, CTO, Novatium Solutions, said, “We consider consolidation as one solution to this kind of a situation. We consolidate our machines according to their usage thus, optimizing their capability. Machines can be consolidated at datacenters

quite easy to convince the management to have one in your organization. Whereas, N.Chandrasekeran, Special Director IT, Ashok Leyland, said that it is not very easy to rip and replace the system. He said, “Replacing the equipment would also not help as you have new technologies coming up every now and then, so the best way is to start with a new facility and embed energy efficiency in this facility from it’s core. It’s good to appoint a quality officer who can keep account of how energy efficient a particular process or technology is. This is how we plan to produce the culture change.”

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Events Plus a lot of energy would be consumed to prepare it again. Safety and energy efficiency are two key parameters to greening up the system other than ROI. We should be proactive in terms that we need to act before a problem turns up, only then can we save ourselves from wasting our efforts. One should start noting down the requirements right from the stage of creating, this would make the process of greening much more easier.” Chandrasekeran of Ashok Leyland, said that we must select a suitable vendor to dispose equipment like servers because first we are responsible towards environment, and second there are some regulations in this regard that we need to stick to while greening up. A vendor with a suitable solution for disposal should be sought carefully. Sridharan of Orchid Chemicals added, “We usually outsource the work of disposing our IT equipment to some vendors who promise to dispose it in a manner that would not harm the environment. We usually don not put any extra efforts to find out if he is doing so or not. But in the light of statutory pressures and under the weight of environmental responsibility we need to make sure that this waste is disposed properly. Revenue being of prime importance to the businesses only energy efficiency takes the front stage in going green, whereas disposal of waste takes the rear position.”

Edgar Dias, Leader Data Networks-Asia, Nortel

Telecommuting Technology offers an array of options to enable employees to work from the convenience of their homes. Various IT leaders are looking forward to adopt this strategy in order to cut down the costs and inconvenience of traveling thus, reducing the carbon footprint of their organization. Telecommuting has come up as one ultimate solution to go green. After having adopted the strategy of telecommuting, partially in his organization, Col. Arvind Saksena, group CIO and CTO, Consilium Software, shared his experiences on this. He said, “We encourage people to work from home and

use the office space to the minimum. Our real estate requirement was that of 3000 sq ft of space in Bangalore. We pushed the idea of having people to work from home and the space requirement instantly fell down to 800 sq ft. The difference in savings and the energy spent was large and motivating. Second advantage was that the availability of employees was extended beyond the regular work hours. Now they were available 24X7. Work-fromhome concept also makes the employees more comfortable in their home environ, plus it saves resources. It helps us in reducing our carbon footprint as well.” Continuing the discussion on telecommuting, Alaganandan Balaraman, VP-HR and process architect, Britannia, said, “As this reduces the amount of travel people are doing to get to the office, so it would require large investment on the equipment required to provide the kind of networking that we will have to provide in such a case. The cost may even outweigh the amount they will spend on resources that they will consume in traveling to a particular place. The challenge in this situation is not erecting those highly networked facilities but making sure that employees actually use these properly. So, identifying and mandating it would be the way to ensure the resources are being utilized optimally.” Prof. Anand Sivasubramaniam, VP head infrastructure-R&D, TCS, said, “We

From left: Anil Punjwani, Head-IT, Philips Electronics India; Charles Padmakumar G., Director-IT, Aricent Technologies India; Col. Arvind Saksena, Group CIO/CTO, Consilium Software; Alaganandan Balaraman, VP-HR &Process Architect, Britannia; K.T. Rajan, Director Operations, IS & Projects, Allergan India 58

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come across some problems that are not created by IT, but only IT has a solution for these. For instance, telepresence is an answer to travel issues being faced by the organizations. So, there should be a process in place to apply such ideas.” T. Rathinam, Director IT, Medical Research Foundation, said, “The awareness really needs to catch up in different fields that how the greening up concept will help the organization. Strategies like telecommuting and telemedicine have helped cut down the travel and have brought a revolution in their respective industries. The advantages of such technologies should be brought to light if these are to be adopted at a large scale. This would also lead to their easier acceptance in organizations.” Balakrishnan of Polaris Software Lab, said that they are looking at teleworking as one alternative of serving round-theclock business requirements, which is not possible from office. This is combined with the fact that employees are spending larger portion of their productive time on roads and the rising fuel costs are some of the factors that encourage us to adopt these technologies. He added, “The only concern attached with telecommuting and telework is data security and the answer to this is virtualization. Thin clients on the user’s end allow them to access limited data. The crucial data is stored in secure datacenters. So, this combination of teleworking and virtualization seems to give extraordinary results and promising ROI.” Singh of UCB Pharma, added that apart from the power being consumed in the office campus, the employees also burn a lot of fuel in commuting to and fro and let out a lot of heat in the environment. He said, “We must know that we can save so much by changing the business style. And its significance cannot be underrated.”

Reducing Carbon Footprint Many organizations have understood that it’s high time when they start putting their ideas into action. To show their reduced carbon footprint companies have devised to earn carbon credits. These efforts show tangible sincerity of corporates towards environment concerns. A small effort at the IT level has a huge impact on the company's carbon footprint and in turn makes it entitled to carbon credits, which can be traded globally. In India, unlike the US, because the electricity is based on coal, you get more bank for the buck. Punjwani of Philips Electronics, said, “We need to know how large the carbon footprint of the entire IT industry is. We also need to know the total cost in terms of generation of power and how much difference can it really make if some sort of greening up effort is driven hard. We should have a rough idea on all this, so that we can develop a blueprint to go forward with the idea. If we are looking forward at such initiatives, the time for us is to act now.” Talking about the influence of greening up in different industries Prof. Sivasubramaniam of TCS, said, “Whether it's through software services or environment management system, we can see the start of such a green trend. In IT industry we can already see lot of green spaces and buildings. The concept has become very catchy in itself. Soon the laws relating to carbon footprint and carbon credit of the organizations would be set. Whether it’s made a mandate or not, people will indulge themselves with this because they might find it trendy, apart from being conscious for environment. People now understand that merging IT with green options can prove to be a great business opportunity.”

From TOP: Muralikrishna K., Head-Computers and Communication Division, Infosys Technology, R.K. Upadhyay, DGM-IT, BSNL; Shankar Rao, CIO, Sasken Communication Technologies; Sudhir Kumar Reddy, GM-Corporate IS, Mindtree Consulting; Vijay Kumar, Head-IT, The Himalaya Drug Company CIO

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Essential

technology Are we nearing the moment when enterprises can make a widespread switch from PC to Mac? Apple’s still got some work to do, IT leaders say.

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From Inception to Implementation — I.T. That Matters

ATangled Path for Macs in the Enterprise By C.G. Lynch and Robert Lemos

| When Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone was ready for enterprise use, the announcement caused a stir that few of the world's iconic businessmen could match. It seemed that everyone from rank-and-file worker-bees to CEOs wanted to get their corporate applications served up on the hot new device. Why? This was Apple — a synonym for awe-inspiring design and coolness — the anti-thesis to stodgy old corporate technology that burns the eyes red and freezes computers blue. But some Apple-watchers and evangelist IT practitioners who use Macs for business think the announcement runs deeper than the iPhone in its importance. Some believe it could usher in the era of a more enterprise-friendly Apple. Such a paradigm shift, they argue, could serve as the final ingredient in the boiling cauldron being stirred by employees at the edge of organizations who have become dissatisfied with corporate technology, and who have turned to innovative options in the consumer space to meet their needs. Some tall hurdles related to converting an enterprise from PCs to Macs, of course, have been around for years. Many corporate IT departments find themselves beholden

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to decisions made by predecessors during the 1990's, when PCs and the Microsoft Windows operating system seized a chokehold on corporate markets everywhere. Companies planned everything from back-end servers to client software based on a Microsoft framework, notes Roger Kay, an analyst with EndPoint Technologies. Integrating Mac equipment and other Apple products into such an environment requires time and money. "Despite the hairiness of Microsoft software, most companies crave compatibility with it," Kay says. "They have these existing investments that they want to get use of." But a move to Web-based software, where users need nothing but a browser to access their applications, could alleviate the IT hang-up on integration. Employees have been leading this movement. Instead of using the corporatesanctioned software on their workstations, many have gravitated to technologies such as wikis, blogs and social networks to collaborate on projects horizontally, without IT's help or blessing. In the CIO Consumer Technology survey, the 311 IT decision makers surveyed conceded that

perhaps, in part, due to this being a low priority for Apple. While Apple of course deals with businesses, and has a business team at some of its stores, it undoubtedly remains a consumer-oriented company. Its iPod claims around 70 percent of the market share for MP3 players. Apple sold 22.1 million iPods in the first quarter of 2008. On average, the company says, an iPod has been sold every 1.7 seconds in the five-andhalf-year life span of the product. And evangelists who run Mac shops in small and midsize businesses say their experiences, not as dissimilar to those of large enterprises as you might believe, still demonstrate a mixed bag of results for those using Apple in the corporate setting.

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in Mac sales in the first quarter of 2008 in comparison to the year before. Source: CIO Research

TheWholesale Switch Shani Magosky, chief operating officer (with IT responsibilities) of Jaffe Associates, a 25-person marketing and public relations firm, didn't need the iPhone to embrace Apple. Magosky started looking into Macs for her traditionally PC and Windows-based company back in the fall of 2006, she says. She wasn't necessarily wooed by Bono singing in

From a hardware perspective,Macs have increasingly become the people's brand of choice.Apple shipped 2.3 million Macs in the first quarter of 2008. nearly 25 percent of their employees use social networks for work purposes, while 21 percent utilize wikis and another 17 percent use blogs. From a hardware perspective, Macs have increasingly become more the people's brand of choice. Apple shipped 2.3 million Macs in the first quarter of 2008, which represented a 44 percent unit growth for the product and helped Apple realize 47 percent revenue growth, compared to the same quarter the year before. But businesses' adoption of Macs and Apple software has still been sluggish,

44% The increase

an iPod commercial. She was sick of PCs breaking all the time, she says. Then there was the sticker shock of learning what it would cost her to upgrade to Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software (and the accompanying server technology.) Specifically, she'd been running an outdated version of Microsoft's terminal server, which allowed her employees (all of whom work remotely, as Jaffe has no central office) to connect to the network and share files. "It was unnecessarily slow and unreliable," she says. "We ended up spending a fortune on IT trouble-shooting."

With her terminal server being outdated, she was told the best option would be to upgrade to SharePoint, which, after purchasing and installing the server, buying the software licenses and all the support surrounding it, would have cost $100,000 (about Rs 40 lakhs), Magosky says. "They nickel and dime you," she says. Meanwhile, PCs became a costly problem. Between what Magosky views as poor manufacturing and tons of malware permeating the layer Windows leaves between the Web and the network, the PCs began to break with great frequency, she says. "There is just so much that can go wrong with them. All these viruses happen to PCs that don't happen to Macs. And then it costs you more to fix it than just buying a new one. So I said I wasn't going to waste anymore, and went out and bought a MacBook Pro." Perhaps serendipitously, right around this time, her boss, President and CEO Jay Jaffe, was on vacation with his daughter in San Francisco and visited Apple's flagship store on Stockton Street. "He bought an iPod touch that he was infatuated with," says Magosky. "When he was there, he talked to the business team. They convinced him REAL CIO WORLD | O C TO B E R 1 , 2 0 0 8

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there was nothing we needed to do now that we couldn't do with them [Apple]." Before long, Magosky set about switching her entire shop over to Macs, and Applefriendly software. Since Jaffe Associates serves the legal industry, which makes wide use of Microsoft software, Jaffe began using Office 2008 for Macs. The company chose Kerio MailServer for e-mail , Entourage for archiving and Apple's Xserve server for back-end storage of data. Magosky predicts that Jaffe will realize a savings of 50 percent in maintenance costs due to the Apple switch, which will pay for the hardware and implementation of Apple products in the first year, she says. While she pays the same hourly rate for Mac support now as she did for Windows, she realized this savings by cutting the amount of hours substantially. The Macs, in other words, required less upkeep. "It's going to increase the efficiency of our

Rob Israel, manager of desktop support at Digitas, a New Yorkâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;based ad agency, says that 30 percent of his company runs Macs. Israel, who manages some 600 Macs across the enterprise, says that a hybrid environment of Macs and Windows can have its pitfalls, technologically and culturally. "We barely deploy Apple servers here even though the culture has become Macintosh friendly," he says. "There is still a sense in the IT department that we are a Windows shop, and why bother complicating things by introducing more platforms." The IT shop runs four Apple Xserves, one of which is used to host Filemaker Pro. While Israel describes the company's relationship with Apple in terms of contracts as great, the arrangement leaves some things to be desired, he says. "Apple does not provide technology roadmaps,

Have we reached a time when many large enterprises can consider swapping PCs for Macs? Not likely. Enterprises who've managed mixed environments for years say that Apple still has some work to do. staff tremendously," she says. "On top of the hard dollar savings, it's going to free me up to do other, more value-added things." What about those cool iPhones? While Jaffe's users primarily use RIM BlackBerry devices for mobile needs, Magosky says that she might consider iPhones down the road, if enough users call for them.

Hurdles Remain Ditching PCs at a 25-person company is one thing. But introducing Apple to a large enterprise with legacy systems is quite another. Even some enterprises who've been managing mixed Mac and PC environments for years say that Apple still has some work to do. 62

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which enterprise IT departments obviously need," he says. "What's worse, they make their hardware incompatible with the previous version of the operating system, and their schedule is impossible to keep up with." For instance, Israel says Digitas can't deploy new versions of Leopard, Mac's operating system, as quickly as Apple demands. Every time Apple moves to the next version of an OS, Israel says, Digitas ends up having six months where they're forced to buy out-of-date equipment to stay compatible with the old OS. "We have complained about this for the last four years," he explains. "They [Apple] do not have any motivation to design their

new hardware to support an old OS, so they won't."

Not Quite a Tipping Point Apple's buzz could hardly be louder. But have we now reached a time when many large enterprises can consider doing a rip and replace, swapping PCs for Macs? Not likely, says Kay. Even if a progressive CIO, who felt his or her company had sunk too much money into Windows, wanted to switch wholesale, gaining the initial capital to get the job done, especially as the economy tightens, it could be difficult, he says. "It's hard to see a time when you can change the paradigm that much for computing," Kay says. For now, the iPhone might just be the starting point, where businesses dip their toes in the Apple pool to see if the enterprise experience improves. At New York Media (publishers of New York magazine and NYMag.com), Albert C. Lee, director of IT, says he has used Macs for some employees in the organization but has run into problems with servicelevel agreements. But that's not going to stop him from potentially adding iPhones to the enterprise when it the capability to access e-mail from a Microsoft Exchange server becomes possible. "A good majority of our enterprise users already have an iPhone for a personal communications device," he says. "The idea of empowering a large population of your corporate users with enterprise push e-mail and remote calendar management, especially when they had none before, is pretty attractive." CIO

Robert Lemos is a freelance writer. C.G. Lynch is a staff writer for CIO. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in.

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Pundit

essential technology

Agility and the Future of IT Users hate technology projects because they take too long to deliver results.They could hate IT into oblivion unless changes are made. By Michael Hugos

| The IT profession is at a turning point. One group of IT practitioners already knows what needs to be done — but the traditionalists call it radical. And the traditionalists continue to apply the same old ways of doing things that result in the same old horrendously expensive multiyear projects that produce systems barely better than what was there before, when they work at all. What differentiates these two groups is the manner in which they perceive and respond to complexity. A good example of this is the multi-year, multi-million dollar system infrastructure upgrade projects that so many companies are forever battling their way through. How many companies have spent themselves into a hole on those projects and now don’t have money to respond to the unexpected developments in their markets? The reputation of the entire IT profession is dragged down by the traditionalists. People not skilled in using techniques to deal with complexity look at these massive projects and are totally overwhelmed. They fall back on the use of clumsy, slow-moving, bureaucratic ways of doing things. They mumble about project management and adopt cumbersome analysis and development procedures that attempt to address all needs all at once. Analysts analyze, programmers program, documents pile up, and years go by. Progress is slow and made at great expense. Another approach would be to respond to complexity by making rigorous use of what I believe are the six core techniques in the IT

Project management

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profession: joint application design; process mapping; data modeling; system prototyping; object-oriented design and programming; and system testing and rollout. We can use these techniques to break up big problems and reduce complexity into manageable, self-contained pieces. We can use these techniques to deliver value fast by making progress right away on the simpler pieces and building solutions to the more complex pieces iteratively over time. A friend, Carl, contacted me recently with a story about the hard times the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) has gone through trying to upgrade their systems infrastructure. Developing a suite of systems to process the tax returns of individuals and corporations has to be one of the most complex jobs I can imagine. How could anyone ever make headway on a project like this? Carl had this to say, “Here’s how I believe the IRS systems should have been done and the same is true of most large multi-business case applications.” He laid out an approach that displays elegant simplicity in the face of apparently overwhelming complexity. It uses just a handful of techniques to manage this complexity. He said, “Process each [tax payer’s] account in its own thread — not whole files — it greatly reduces complexity and latency and increases scalability. Use pipeand-filter with no intervening files instead of [the traditional approach involving] fileprocess-file-process. This architecture was described by Mary Shaw at Carnegie Mellon years ago.”

We can become professionals respected for our ability to deal with complexity. “Design and write a separate thread for each business case beginning with the most common or simplest. The IRS could have been processing all the simple returns in just months on the new system instead of taking years trying to develop monolithic, all-case, highly-complex systems. In my scenario, there might be 10 or 30 or more separately designed and written processes handling business case threads.” In other words, quickly deliver a “robust 80 percent solution” and then keep expanding on it over time. A Web search on 'pipe-and-filter' and shows that it uses combinations of four core techniques: joint application design; process mapping; object-oriented design/ programming; and system testing/rollout. Any IT practitioner skilled in the use of these techniques will quickly grasp the main concepts of the pipe-and-filter approach. Every successful profession has to develop and learn to use a set of core techniques that enable its practitioners to succeed most of the time. We in the IT profession can allow ourselves to be intimidated by complexity and cling to ineffectual, bureaucratic approaches that give us a reputation as a bunch of not-so-lovable screw-ups; or we can get agile and re-invent ourselves. We can become practitioners of a profession respected for its ability to deal with complexity and apply technology effectively in demanding situations. CIO

Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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