CIO January 15 2009 Issue by Sreekanth Sastry

From The Editor-in-Chief

In October 2008, when we administered the State of the CIO Survey, McKinsey was

Bridge That Gap Yes! No! Maybe?

concurrently conducting its third annual global survey on IT strategy and spending. The results, which were released a short while ago, are worthy of note considering the way that the economic landscape has undergone change in the months since then. Nearly two-thirds of CIOs and CXOs responding to the McKinsey study believed that their organizations were at risk from information and technology-based disruption. In fact, ranking highest among disruptive forces were potential shifts in customer expectations for better products or differentiated services enabled by information- and technology-based capabilities. The use of technology by competitors to cut the cost of manufacturing or the delivery of products and services was also a worry. So organizations seem to have got a bead on what are likely to be causes for concern. Yet the study reveals that less than half of the respondents consider that their organizations are resilient enough to handle these to meet McKinsey’s study reveals these risks! Curiously, CIOs were less that IT departments have confident than their non-IT counterparts a long way to go to deliver in the abilities of their companies to on their potential as respond to these threats. change agents. What they did agree on was that there existed a large chasm between their IT department’s current priorities and what IT could contribute. Both CIOs and other senior executives were in sync that IT must focus on growth opportunities (like helping create new products) apart from improving the effectiveness of business processes. Keeping in mind the economic flux we’re witnessing and the ensuing cost cutting, it’s remarkable that the survey reveals that non-IT executives would like IT staff to spend less effort on trimming IT costs and ensuring compliance with regulations; though they expect them to maintain the same levels of service and delivery. The survey suggests that few organizations have been able to go too much further with IT apart from the effective delivery of basic services. Non-IT executives cited deficiencies in how their IT departments supported key activities like working with business to develop technologyenabled competencies, or in targeting areas where IT could create higher value. CIOs echoed these concerns, pointing to the issues they face in partnering with business units on high-impact activities (only a tad over a third of CIOs rated themselves as ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ effective). I’d be very keen to know what you feel about the issues raised by this study and whether you vibe with it.

Vijay Ramachandran Editor-in-Chief vijay_r@cio.in 2

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Content,Editorial,Colophone.indd 2

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 5:46:11 PM

content JANUARY 15 2009‑ | ‑Vol/4‑ | ‑iss ‑issUe/05

Dhiren Savla, CIO, Kuoni Travel Group, India, put the world in business’ hands by consolidating and standardizing the travel giant’s IT infrastructure.

Enterprise Infrastructure

Executive Expectations

COVER STORy hOW ThE WORLD WAS WON| 20

VIEW FROm ThE TOp | 28 Nirmal Jain, chairman, India Infoline, says IT radicalized his business and helped him prepare for the current slowdown.

I P hoto bY b Y ka kaPI PIl l S hro ff

When Kuoni India’s BPO arm, which handles paperwork for diplomatic missions, bagged an assignment that would take it to 40 countries, it knew only IT could create a platform that could withstand such sudden expansion.

CoVE Co VEr: r: dESI d ESI g N b bY Y b INES h S r EE EEdhara dharaN N

Feature by Gunjan Trivedi

Interview by Kanika Goswami

Mobile Apps ARmED FOR SAFETy | 46 How armored car company Loomis is tackling the risks of enterprise wireless apps to reduce its exposure to robbery.

pLuS:

Feature by Kim S. Nash

hOW TO ImpROVE AppLICATION INTEGRATION | 26

Peer-to-Peer

Using service-oriented architecture, Qualcomm supercharged its customer provisioning. In doing so, it also improved the software development team’s agility and saved half a million dollars in the IT annual budget. Feature by Daniel Dern 4

2 0

j a n u a R y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

ThE IT-BuSINESS STRATEGy CONNECTION | 18 Galderma’s CIO has been planting the seeds of IT as a strategic resource for eight years; the crop is about to bloom in a single-instance ERP. Column by Sean Burke

more » Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

content

Essential Technology | 52 Hardware | BYO…Laptop?

Feature by Stephanie Overby Pundit | Left, Left, Right

Column by Michael Hugos

From the Editor-in-Chief | 2 Bridge That Gap

By Vijay Ramachandran

NOW ONLINE

3 4

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 File Open to collaboration | 34 In tough economic times, a CRM system can make a significant difference. With its expanding business and growing customer base, YES Bank knew it was time to join hands with an in-house collaborative CRM solution to service its customers better.

1 6

Feature by Snigdha Karjatkar

Strategic CIO Innovate Today for Tomorrow | 16 Jeff Hutchinson, Groupe Danone’s CIO for North America, created an innovation team to explore technologies that are key to the future of the business. Column by Jeff Hutchinson

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Content,Editorial,Colophone.indd 6

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 5:46:36 PM

ADVISORY BOARD

Advertiser Index

Abnash Singh Publisher Louis D’Mello Associate Publisher Alok Anand

Editor ia l Editor-IN-CHIEF Vijay Ramachandran

Resident Editor Rahul Neel Mani assistant editors Gunjan Trivedi,

Kanika Goswami

Correspondents Snigdha Karjatkar, Sneha Jha,

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 Arun Gupta

Creative Director Jayan K Narayanan

VP & CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra

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 DY. Production Manager T K Jayadeep Ma rketi ng and Sal es VP Sales (Events) Sudhir Kamath GENERAL Manager Nitin Walia Senior Mananger Siddharth Singh, Rohan Chandhok Assistant Manager Sukanya Saikia Marketing Priyanka, Patrao, Disha Gaur Bangalore Kumarjeet Bhattacharjee, Arun Kumar, Ranabir Das Delhi Saurabh Jain, Rajesh Kandari Gagandeep Kaiser Mumbai Parul Singh, Hafeez Shaikh, Kaizad Patel Japan Tomoko Fujikawa

USA Larry Arthur; Jo Ben-Atar

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

Airtel

52,53 & 54

Cisco

Dell

Emerson

Microsoft

IFC

Oracle

IBC

Ashish K. Chauhan President & CIO — IT Applications, Reliance Industries

Vinoj K N, Suresh Nair Girish A V (Multimedia)

Customer Care Associate & CTO, Shoppers Stop Arvind Tawde

Lead Designers Vikas Kapoor, Anil V K

ADC Krone

Alaganandan Balaraman

D esign & Productio n Lead Visualizer Binesh Sreedharan

President, IT Operations & Center of Excellence, UCB Pharma

Tata

Tata Teleservices

C.N. Ram Rural Shores Chinar S. Deshpande CEO, Creative IT India Dr. Jai Menon Group CIO Bharti Enterprise & Director (Customer Service & IT), Bharti Airtel Manish Choksi Chief-Corporate Strategy & CIO, Asian Paints M.D. Agrawal 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 & Director ERM, Cognizant Technology Solutions Sivarama Krishnan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission from the publisher. Address requests for customized reprints to IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India. IDG Media Private Limited is an IDG (International Data Group) company.

Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027. Editor: Louis D’Mello Printed at Manipal Press Ltd., Press Corner, Tile Factory Road, Manipal, Udupi, Karnataka - 576 104.

Executive Director, PricewaterhouseCoopers Dr. Sridhar Mitta MD & CTO, e4e S.S. Mathur GM–IT, Centre for Railway Information Systems Sunil Mehta Sr. VP & Area Systems Director (Central Asia), JWT V.V.R. Babu

This index is provided as an additional service. The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions.

Group CIO, ITC

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Content,Editorial,Colophone.indd 8

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 5:46:37 PM

new

hot

unexpected

IllUStratIon by U nnIkrIShnan aV

Mobility: Goal of Future Call Centers Wireless Innovations in presence, service-oriented architecture and mobility are what the most aggressive users of IP contact centers are looking for, according to a Gartner report. With these tools, cutting-edge businesses hope to improve call routing through their centers so they are handled quickly by agents who are equipped with comprehensive data about the caller, Gartner says in its Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure report. The goal: faster call resolution times. For example, SIP-based call center platforms could tap into presence information to find the most appropriate available call agent and integrate that data with customer relationship management (CRM) apps to provide the agent with comprehensive caller data. The system could use mobility clients as well to tap nontraditional agents such as workers at home or traveling to handle calls that require particular expertise. Or the CRM data could be used to determine if callers should be placed in a faster queue or moved up in line based on the level of service they've contracted for and their and calling history. "But SIP-based solutions have yet to fulfill their promise of allowing organizations to use, at low cost, contact center solutions from one vendor within another vendor's SIP-based telephony infrastructure," Gartner cautions. So customers might be constrained from using some of this functionality or forced to

use gear made by a single vendor to avoid compatibility issues. As contact centers move towards multimedia installations based in software, traditional telephony vendors are losing their hold on the market, Gartner says. "Incumbent telephony vendors often form the 'path of least resistance' for companies planning to acquire new or refresh existing contact center infrastructure, particularly in single-site deployments or where there is a consistent telephony provider across multiple sites," the report says. "However, decision-makers are finding that alternative providers can offer cost, capability and architectural strengths that their incumbents cannot match." The reports thrust is to evaluate and categorize top contact center vendors, with vendors hoping to be classified as leaders — companies that are strong on what Gartner labels vision and execution. —By Tim Greene

Quick take

V. Narayanan on Storage Resource Management Data begets more data. Like tackling the Medusa, the answer to today’s overwhelming data problem is not to attack it piecemeal for that will only create new monsters. Sunil Shah asked V. Narayanan, AGM-IT for Tube Investments, if he thought SRM was the key and this is what he had to say:

q u i c k ta k e

Do you think enterprises will invest in storage resource management? I think it depends on the mindset of the CEOs of these organizations. That said, I also think it is the job of the CIO to impress on the management what is important to business.

Do you think storage resource management is important? Very much. With data growing every single day, proper storage and the ability to retrieve data in the shortest possible period has become of utmost importance. Everything depends on how fast you are able to retrieve data for customers and stakeholders. And, by everything I mean business. IT is an enabler to the business. Do you see any other benefits to SRM beyond the quick retrieval of data? Safeguarding data would be one of the benefits. By this, I mean to safely retrieve data after a crash. Business continuity is very important. Data cannot be re-created. We, for instance, are currently planning our DR site.

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

How would you sell SRM to your CEO? I would show him the pros and cons of SRM and also point to the direction in which the world is moving. I would tell him where our contemporaries and our competition are moving to. I would talk about what we could offer that is cutting-edge vis-à-vis our competitors. Nowadays, information is money. I would ask him to look at the money aspect. I would explain that the faster you can pull out information, the better. For example, every morning, I get an SMS update of what has happened in my company the previous day. This includes production and dispatch data. It is also shot out to other important decision makers. This helps us keep in touch with the business. V. Narayanan REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

Are CIO’s Ready to be Chief Strategy Officers? With their perspective, tools and knowledge of a company’s internal health, CIOs seem to be in the best position to take on the responsibility for business strategy. But do they think that they are prime candidates for the position of chief strategy officer? Kanika Goswami asked your peers what they thought and here’s what they said.

career

“Yes, they can. In any case, I think CIOs have always been involved in strategy decisions, so I think they are ready to take on the responsibility of being a chief strategy officer.” trendlines

e.M. SoanS associate Director, head-It & Services, Colgate Palmolive

Yes, but I think it is just an extension of the CIO’s role. Strategy is no longer only a boardroom decision. CIOs are already doing the job in an undefined role, the logical extension will define it. RajeSh Saboo Chief It t & business Solutions, home Solutions retail India

“Yes, certainly. And I think so because the perspective of how

technology can help a business’ strategy is most likely to be found in a CIO. So, yes, the CIO is certainly ready to be a chief strategy officer.”

p. Shobhana Ravi p aVP, It and learning, taFE

Lend YouR

voice

Write to editor@cio.in 10

Trendlines.indd 10

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Virtualization Security:

Yes or No?

Does transitioning to virtualization increase security risks within a company? IT managers appear to be at loggerheads with IT security professionals over that question, even while sharing similar opinions on where risks might lie, according to a new survey from the Ponemon Institute. Two-thirds of IT operations staff said they felt virtualization of computer resources did not increase informationsecurity risks. But about two-thirds of information security professionals surveyed felt the opposite way. A full three-quarters of the survey's 1,402 respondents, all active in US-based private sector firms or government agencies, said their organizations had already implemented virtualization of their computer resources. About 90 percent in both the IT and security camps said they were familiar or very familiar with virtualization. "The security for virtualization itself is way, way behind," says Nelson Martinez, systems support manager for the City of Miami Beach, who is responsible for IT security in systems used by the city's 2,000 employees. Martinez says the city does make use of VMware for some Web servers, but "I would never host any kind of database or my e-mail server in that environment." There are performance and maintenance issues in running traditional security applications for each VM host application on each physical machine, he says. Jim Waggoner, director of product management at Symantec, says the three primary virtual-machine software providers, VMware, Citrix Xen and Microsoft, are each still working on new approaches to security in a virtual-machine environment that aren't yet out and available. While he hasn't seen huge skepticism about security in virtualization, Waggoner says he has encountered IT staff at companies who believe that once servers or desktops are virtualized, they "don't need any malware protection at all," a stance he would argue against. In the Ponemon survey, the 825 individuals in IT operations and 577 information security professionals who answered questions about virtualization were in general agreement that the most significant security risk associated with virtualization was the inability to properly identify and authenticate users to multiple systems. The 2009 Security Mega Trends Survey from research firm Ponemon Institute also looked at attitudes on other topics, such as outsourcing and Web 2.0 technologies. —By Ellen Messmer

risk ManageMent

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Stages of Soa evolution through improved business processes, Fricke said proper governance of the architecture â&#x20AC;&#x201D; ensuring control over the services that render value to the business â&#x20AC;&#x201D; becomes an opportunity to further improve ROI and reduce risk. "One of the beauties of SOA is it's not a static deployment. It can be expanded to solve other business problems," said Fricke, while stressing that as SOA deployment expands across an organization, governance becomes increasingly important. Ed Horst, vice president of product strategy with Oakland, a SOA consultancy and Red Hat partner AmberPoint, agreed that proper governance of SOA benefits several parties across the organization. The business units get improved visibility into business processes; operations get real-time management of systems so to lessen risk of running applications in a composite fashion; and system architects get feedback on system performance. Fricke described a six-stage evolution that occurs in enterprises deploying SOA:

The Old Glass CeilinG

1. First, business process owners demand improved processes. 2. The organization then must look at how the IT assets support the execution of those business processes. 3. Once done, IT must be scrutinized for bottlenecks and other issues, like determining which services should be used. 4. The organization should then identify where and how SOA services can best be deployed. 5. When multiple services have been deployed, the organization must manage this using an enterprise service bus, thereby reaping agility. 6. Look at composing processes, composite applications and automating business processes. There's been ample activity with deployment of enterprise service buses in the past several years, said Fricke. And, while much of this still tends to be project-driven at this stage of the game, he said increasingly more business processes are taking top-down holistic views.

trendlines

i n f r a st ruc t u r e As the economic downturn causes IT budgets tighten, Open Source can bring value to a service-oriented architecture deployment, and in fact, Open Source is thriving in these current times of increased budget scrutiny, according to a Red Hat executive. During a recent Webinar, Pierre Fricke, director of product line management for JBoss, said once an organization gets past the "initial shockwave of layoffs and budget cuts," they realize spending money on heavy, expensive SOA technology from proprietary vendors is not an option. In fact, Fricke said he observed some trends in 2008 around SOA: organizations have moved past small deployments and proof-of-concepts, components are increasingly being re-used as the library of services builds up, and the architecture has become easier to scale as workloads rise. While those positive trends exist, Fricke said that cost remains an inhibitor to SOA deployment and that more can be done to drive down those costs. But as enterprises deploy Open Source SOA with the goal of reaping agility

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;By Kathleen Lau

% of midlevel women plan to leave high-tech companies in the next year.

A new study of 1,800 technical employees suggests gender barriers may be prohibiting some midlevel women from seeking high-level tech positions:

Workplace

34% have deliberately In FoGraPhICS by MM Sh an It h

delayed having children to achieve career goals.

% have limited their sleep to achieve career goals. Source: anita borg Institute & Michelle r. Clayman Institute for Gender research

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Trendlines.indd 11

REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

Outsourcing

Won't save you Enterprise IT executives looking to cut expenses this year will consider outsourcing, but industry watchers argue moving from fixed to variable costs could also result in unreliable services, unpredictable outcomes and financial woes. "Throughout the history of outsourcing, we've seen during the tough times that a lot of these decisions are extremely tactical, short-term oriented and present consequences downstream," says Ben Pring, research VP at Gartner. "An uncertain economy is not a slam dunk for outsourcers, but some very bad deals can be put in place. It's the ugly truth of outsourcing." Outsourcing in a tight economy can represent a classic case of 'you-get-what-you-pay-for' to enterprise IT executives, analysts say. Passing responsibility for infrastructure, applications or staffing to a third-party — regardless of the economy — leaves the customer vulnerable to the whims of the provider and can make outsourcing a risky proposition in tough financial times. "Often, you are going to be disappointed with the level of cost reduction you can achieve in an outsourcing deal, and if that is all you are focused on, inevitably, it will produce a bad deal," Pring says. "Historically customers get lousy quality of service when trying to squeeze an outsourcer. The service provider has no incentive to invest in better services or staff for a smaller contract." The trend toward shorter-term contracts and smaller deals will continue in 2009, according to global sourcing advisory firm TPI, and despite the rush to reduce expenses, contract negotiation cycles have lengthened — which could benefit both customer and provider. Because economic uncertainty for 2009 has reached a fever pitch, enterprise IT executives need to be smarter than ever about signing services contracts. By no means should companies abandon outsourcing as an attractive option, but when looking to strike a deal with a service provider, enterprise IT executives need to take a step back from the need to reduce expenses immediately and think about IT needs a year or more from now, analysts say. "It's so tumultuous that there is no clear line of sight in terms of when the end of the upset will come. There is still too much we don't know," says Christine Ferrusi Ross, vice president and research director at Forrester Research. "A lot of clients coming up on renewals are being extremely cautious and taking their time to weigh risks and get the right deal for them." —By Denise Dubie

Trendlines.indd 12

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

In for More Déjà Vu Security managers are all plagued by one thing: the unknown. So predictions from several security forecasts will probably be somewhat of a relief. Basically, security folk are up up for a year thar looks largely like the last one — except that it will have more of everything. Here are some forecasts: Over 80 percent of all malicious content will be hosted on sites with 'good' reputations, says Websense. Attackers will continue to move to a distributed model for controlling botnets and hosting malicious code. Such 'fast flux' networks allow malicious Web sites to be moved around quickly, making it harder to locate and shut them down. Phishing attacks on users of social networking sites will become more sophisticated, predicts MessageLabs. Expect also to see an increase in attacks targeting smart phones, MessageLabs says. Attacks, delivered via free app downloads and games, will also become more malicious. Online criminals will take on more blended approaches that combine e-mail, Web-based attacks and system intrusions, says Cisco Systems. Botnets will become more versatile and will be used to send spam, host malware or in direct attacks against specific targets. With an increase in remote workers and the related use of Web-based tools, mobile devices and virtualization technologies will also cause more security worries. DDoS attacks will continue to grow, says arbor Networks. The largest bandwidth flood attacks in 2008 generated peaks of about 40 gigabits of traffic. Next year, expect to see that number approach 100 gigabits, making them harder to mitigate. There will be an increase in attacks on SCADA systems, Verisign says. The global financial crisis and resulting institutional mergers, consolidations and collapses will provide "unprecedented opportunities" for cyber-crooks to seek to exploit in 2009, the company warns. Among the newer threats for 2009 are those targeted against so-called Rich Internet Application and cloud computing environment, says Websense. As the popularity of RIA grows there will be a growth in attacks that take advantage of vulnerabilities found with core RIA components and within user-created components to take remote-control of end user systems. Similarly, cloud computing environments will be used for sending spam or hosting malicious code, says Websense. —By Jaikumar Vijayan Security

Illustration by MM Sh an it h

trendlines

IT M a n a g e m e n t

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 6:03:44 PM

More Spam to Work Their Scam and more phishers began asking victims to install browser plug-ins or other types of software. To pull this off, they'd send e-mail that comes with malicious software that's supposed to be a security update from a bank. Attacks that install malicious software are easier to launch than they've ever been and are clearly on the rise, said Mickey Boodaei, CEO of Trusteer, a security company, "We're seeing a clear shift from phishing attacks." Attack numbers are still steadily climbing, but e-mail that includes phishing scams has tripled in the past year as phishers have become more technically sophisticated with their attacks, said Dave Jevans, chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group. "These are not things that just steal your passwords," he said. "These add you to botnets." Some of this

malware is pretty nasty. The phishers take advantage of their knowledge of banking Websites to build custom code that runs inside the browser, silently stealing your online credentials, Boodaei said. "They're trying to inject HTML pages into sessions with these banks to steal information," he said. Phishers aren't stopping at malware. They are constantly looking for new areas to hit. The profits are good, and because phishers can hit victims in faraway countries, many of them operate as if they are outside of the law. And with phishing toolkits and buyers for the stolen credentials easy to find, phishing continues to draw a new generation of criminals. For them, phishing is easier than ever before. trendlines

The scammers began to see serious problems with their phishing scams sometime around April. That's when they started realizing that more and more of their phoney phishing e-mails were being blocked. Security researchers had spent the previous year closely studying botnet networks of infected computers and they were getting pretty good at blocking many of the fraudulent e-mail messages that were being sent from these systems. This was creating a problem for phishers — online fraudsters who set up fake Web sites and try to trick victims into visiting them and giving up their user names and passwords. By August, phishing gangs homed in on a new way to make a buck. Instead of asking people to visit a fake Website, more

internet

—By Robert McMillan

BI Tools from all sIdes

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Trendlines.indd 13

appliances from Greenplum and netezza for internal analysis of trade execution performance. hirsch hopes to choose a bI tool to standardize on in 2009. the survey also found bI becoming ubiquitous, with almost 60 percent of respondents saying they were deploying bI, data warehousing or data integration tools across their enterprises. bI is also evolving beyond reporting only, says Forrester, though only 27 percent of respondents said they were using it to try to gain a major competitive advantage. Despite the trend toward selfservice bI, three-quarters of respondents say most reports and dashboards are still created by It t departments. and two-thirds say their users felt the bI tools were somewhat or very difficult to learn. over half of It t managers say their users often reverted to individual tools, such as desktop spreadsheets, to get data or reports they couldn't from bI applications.

IllUSt ratIon by anIl t

over ver 40 percent of enterprise It t decision makers say their companies use three to five different business intelligence (bI) analysis and reporting tools, according to a survey by Forrester research. More than one out of five of the 82 CIos and It managers polled by Forrester in august say they are running six or more bI tools. that's despite bI consolidation efforts that many It managers have been engaging in for the past several years. the results probably wouldn't surprise Steve hirsch, chief data officer at nySE Euronext. "From SaS to business objects to brio, we've got pretty much everything that's been released in the last five to 10 years." one reason is the stock market operator's recent merger and acquisition history. nySE Euronext was created out of the 216-year-old new y york Stock Exchange's merger with electronictrading pioneer, archipelago holdings, in 2005 and amsterdambased Euronext in 2006. "We are still in a long process of consolidating," he said. nySE Euronext adopted analytics-capable data warehousing survey

—by Eric lai REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

alternative views B Y S n i g d h a K a r j at k a r

Green IT Benefits Long-term VS Short-term

To create an alternate structure for human lives and the environment, long termplanning is necessary and, of course, long-term benefits. Suresh A. Shanmugam National Head-Business Information Technology Solutions (BITS), Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Service

P hotos by Srivatsa Shan di lya

trendlines

At Mahindra Finance, we have been practicing alternative thinking across various disciplines and it has been our active endeavor to integrate these into our ethos. As a tradition, we delve deeply into any suggestions to alternate energy use, which can support us in the long run. Alternative fuels that generate alternative savings, alternative ideas in development, alternative growth measures that help us think differently, all provide ways to create an alternate structure to human lives and the environment. This gives us the clarity and ability to fix resources so that they are safe for future generations. For that long termplanning is necessary and, of course, long-term benefits. In accordance with this tradition, we use solar plus wind energy at our locations, which we believe will create the infrastructure needed for the next wave of best technology infrastructure in rural India. Every five locations has one system for support (which runs on solar and wind energy) and the efficiency and 99.99 percent uptime for this system is what motivates our team. Solar and wind power generated at these locations can support us in a long run. They will become a major source of energy in remote rural areas and provide a way to depend on nature without disturbing it. Initiatives such as ours work for the long term. Mahindra Finance will empower our green vision for both the environment and human lives and ensure their survival in the long-term prospective.

Trendlines.indd 14

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Sometimes the short-term

benefits of green IT are so significant they drive a long-term action plan and its accompanying investment. Ajay Meher VP-IT, Sony Entertainment Television India

Yes, like any strategic business plan, green IT also has a short-term action plan and related benefits. In fact, sometimes the short-terms benefits are so significant that they drive a long-term action plan and its accompanying investment. Take for example earning money from reduced power and paper consumption. These are large enough to sustain larger green IT initiatives. At Sony Entertainment, we have done quite a bit to save power. At the user level we have desktop power optimization. And, although we have outsourced most of our datacenters to VSNL, the few we have in-house use a chilling mechanism which provides alternate way of cooling. We have already virtualized our servers, which is a good short-term green IT initiative. We converted a decentralized printing procedure to centralized one so that we have a controlled printing environment. We also save paper by outsourcing our printing. Just in the last week, we have reached a high-level mark: we used 50 percent less paper than we did earlier. Any money we make out from these initiatives, we pump back into our long-term activities like a possible unified communications initiative, which requires a large investment. Then there are short-term initiatives that have long-term benefits. We have a disposal process for our electronic waste. By not creating additional waste we ensuring a greener tomorrow. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what planet conservation is about: if we can save something today, we can provide a greener environment tomorrow â&#x20AC;&#x201D; while helping ourselves.

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 6:03:55 PM

Jeff Hutchinson

Strategic CIO

Innovate Today for Tomorrow Jeff Hutchinson, Groupe Danone's CIO for North America, created an innovation team to explore technologies that are key to the future of the business.

Illustration by MM Shanit h

e all have a tendency to only look at what we're doing today, instead of stepping back and asking, ‘what do we need to focus on for the future?’ Taking that step back is actually a step toward innovation and away from stagnation. Maybe you don't need to be on the bleeding edge, and maybe you don't have the resources to invest in multiple areas of technology. Still, you need to ask yourself the question: what do we need to focus on to ensure the future readiness of our own IS or IT organization and to enable the businesses we support to go forward? Within DAN'IS North America, (Groupe Danone's North America IS and IT team), we have business solution and infrastructure technology teams that focus on maintaining, enhancing and running solutions. They handle the daily block and tackling that makes IT and the business successful — and make sure that we have the right balance of investment. But those of us in technology leadership positions also have a responsibility to consider how business resources will use technology in the future. I'm part of the generation that remembers life before the Internet that chooses not to go back from e-mail to written correspondence. Yet, the generation coming out of school and into the workforce today is moving beyond e-mail in favor of online presence (for example, IM and text messaging, chat rooms and wiki's). They don't believe in being held captive by e-mail; instead they operate by utilizing social networking tools. They will change the way we do business and we have to be ready. To do this, we will need new skills and tools to help us innovate and remain relevant in the global community. 16

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Coloumn - 01 -Plan for Innovation Today.indd 16

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 2:51:00 PM

Jeff Hutchinson

Strategic CIO

Innovation is looking at and understanding what capabilities exist in the marketplace that we're not taking full advantage of, moving on them, and then using them to improve the way we do business today. To prepare for this change, DAN'IS North America has brought together a separate team called I&I, which stands for ‘informing and innovation’. It's a small team, and its charter is to look at emerging tools and technology and find ways to mainstream them into the way the business operates. I&I not only evaluates the ideas emerging in academia, or the technologies coming out of the research labs, they also look at what is starting to come into the business workplace, at technologies that we haven't thought of as tools, such as Facebook and Second Life. They examine leading technologies and tools for their ability to enhance market share, create sales, and increase internal operational and employee efficiency.

Planning Today for Tomorrow's Changes It's hardly rocket science. Improving these areas are goals for every company. Yet more often than not, the solutions are focused on the present. We created the I&I team to look past that. One area in which my team has had a major impact is in improving Groupe Danone's North American video conferencing solutions to a point where people want to use it. Most people don't like traditional video conferencing because it's hard to set up and the need to go through outside carriers makes it expensive. However, earlier this year, the business came to us wondering how it could cut down on travel within the Americas and international (Groupe headquarters in France). So we started with the question ‘can we reintroduce the concept of video conferencing?’ What we came up with was a video solution that uses the dedicated networks we already have in our facilities, that costs thousands instead of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and pays for itself after just a couple of four-person meetings. Plus, it supports our sustainability and social responsibility goals. We also looked at how we could use Web cams, so video conferencing can be done from one workstation to another, and even from multiple workstations to each other in what we call ‘The Brady Bunch’ effect. The success of that led to employees asking for the capability when they're remote, whether in a hotel room or while out in the field. What we see on the horizon is the whole idea of mobile Web and mobile vision. The next generation of handheld devices and phones now available in Asia already have the capability to support this. Unified communications also figures into this future, so that calls and video conferences can transfer seamlessly from a business phone to a cell phone or to a home landline. It is I&I's responsibility, enabled by our infrastructure technology team, to keep that eye on the future. They must also

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Coloumn - 01 -Plan for Innovation Today.indd 17

partner with the business solutions team, which has the best understanding of business requirements and can help ensure that whatever I&I does, it supports both current investments and Groupe Danone's North America (and global) initiatives.

How far to look ahead? It is a question that every CIO must address. Clearly, it depends on the role of IS or IT in your business. In the consumer foods industry, you can be at a competitive disadvantage if IS or IT doesn't stay at the leading edge. However, IS or IT is not going to change the way the company does business overnight. From our point of view, innovation is looking at and understanding what capabilities exist in the marketplace that we're not taking full advantage of, moving on them, and then using them to improve the way we do business today. It's also important to realize that not everything you try will be successful. That's the hard part. People assume that if they're investing money, then everything will work out. When I started at Groupe Danone, we spent a lot of time getting the leadership to understand the change we were going to go through. Now everything from I&I goes through incremental pilots before being expanded out, and we're trying to take a more agile approach. We try to provide some quick wins, solving some of the initial needs and problems that made us look at a new technology while keeping an end state in mind. But we don't know what that end state totally looks like until we work our way through. The realization you must have, and that you must convey to your company's executives and your IS or IT staff, is that investing with new technologies is not enough. The key to innovation is solving business problems. We like technology, and it's real cool when you get to play with the newest, latest videocam, but your goal is to make the business more efficient. So, start small and convince your executives that starting innovation somewhere can benefit everywhere. Specific initiatives for one business unit can expand to others. Once we delivered practical solutions, the business offered additional funding because they saw the benefits. They realized what our focus on innovation brings to the table and how it will enable them to continue to grow. CIO

Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

1/13/2009 2:51:00 PM

Sean Burke

Peer-to-Peer

The IT-Business Strategy Connection Galderma's CIO has been planting the seeds of IT as a strategic resource for eight years; the crop is about to bloom in a single-instance ERP.

Illustration by pc an oop

very mid-size company eventually recognizes that it has outgrown the ad-hoc, local processes that allowed it to function from the start-up stage. Whether a company stays within a single country or expands globally, there comes a point when each function is too focused on location rather than on corporate direction, and an IT leader with a central guiding strategy becomes necessary. At Galderma, that realization came eight years ago, when the dermatology products company, aware that it had a problem with IT management, brought me in to solve it. Galderma, based in Paris, is a relatively young company. Formed in 1981 as a joint venture between Nestlé and L'Oréal, Galderma is on a fast growth path, operating in more than 30 different countries. But when I arrived, the only corporate-wide technology system we had was e-mail. There were 28 ERP packages; we probably had a system from every vendor you can think of. Virtually every location had a different one, and that made it nearly impossible to centrally manage data and use it effectively. My primary role has been to develop a central IT strategy and bring some coherence to the mess. It's taken me until now to change the company culture to one that values technology and information as strategic assets. The knowledge of how to do that — my strategic orientation — wasn't something that I came into through chance.

Origins of an Outlook I started in IT 20 years ago in the UK as a systems support controller at what was then E.R. Squibb & Sons (it became BristolMyers Squibb after merging with Bristol-Myers in 1989). I was lucky enough to work with people who valued IT and information 18

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Coloumn - 02 -The IT-Business Strategy Connection.indd 18

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 2:52:04 PM

Sean Burke

Peer-to-Peer

asset management, and who could see their long-term strategic value. My conversations with them about my role and the role of IT in business initiatives helped more than anything to instill in me an understanding of business strategy. When you become a CIO, one of the best things you can do to improve your abilities and enhance your position is to actively seek out business partners like these, especially if they have decision-making authority, and to build relationships with them. My view of my role and that of technology really changed when I became involved in a project to develop customer relationship systems for the whole company. I had become associate director for sales, marketing and medical systems, and I was working closely with the leader of the project, our global director of sales force effectiveness. I sat down and thought about how IT could make a strategic difference. In the pharmaceutical industry, we tend to look at sales force activity as the primary tool for measuring our investment with the customer, and sales or sales audits as the key measure of return. However, the relationship between a company and its customers is far more complex than that; we use multiple tools to change purchasing habits and measure success. The problem has always been to collect this data and then present it in a meaningful way. The hurdles are not just technical but also political. Persuading each country manager that there was value in consolidating shampoo sales data with infant nutritional sales data was a challenge. That experience changed my focus and my role from being operational or tactical â&#x20AC;&#x201D; where I was thinking only about the next project and the delivery of services â&#x20AC;&#x201D; to a strategic role where I was looking at the value of data in the customer relationship and the value of the information asset to the enterprise.

to local economies, cultures, and people was more likely to lead to good products and high sales than a system used by everyone around the world. I had to show them the value of a single ERP system and get them to want to fund such a project. Therefore, we did not start with the single ERP solution; rather we focused on constructing what would be the foundation of our future application architecture at the corporate center. Data is an asset that must be managed properly; otherwise, it becomes a millstone rather than something of value. I had to make it clear to people in the business units that when you have

When people know how a project affects their corner of the company, they develop a personal stake. But they also have to see how an IT project affects the bottom line, so that they fully grasp how the IT strategy plays into the health of the business.

Painting the Strategic Picture When I joined Galderma, we were still a young entrepreneurial company run more as a commonwealth than a corporation. Financial consolidation was a black art, with information flowing from local systems to the corporate center at the end of each reporting period. We had to change how data was managed in a way that both satisfied our strategic need for consistency and respected the de-centralized culture of the company. I knew from that we needed to avoid doing too much too quickly. We needed a massive ERP replacement, but we couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t afford to invest in such a project without approval from the business leaders who owned the country-specific systems. Getting that approval became the initial thrust of the IT strategy. I could tell Galderma's employees that a single system is important to the business, but it took years to get people throughout the company to understand why. They believed that having systems specific

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Coloumn - 02 -The IT-Business Strategy Connection.indd 19

unmanaged data everyone has to spend all their time translating and managing it. And then, there isn't time to use it to deliver shareholder value. When people know how a project affects their corner of the company, they develop a personal stake. But they also have to see how an IT project affects the bottom line, so that they fully grasp how the IT strategy plays into the health of the business. In the case of our ERP revamp, the message was that putting in place a single ERP was not just about having something as amorphous as "better technology" it was about the central leaders having transparency of information across units, enabling them to be flexible in using resources across the enterprise. When our new CEO and CFO were appointed in 2004, they emphasized this message. They were not willing to work with the ingrained processes. They wanted and needed to have accurate, consistent and timely information at their fingertips to allow them to pilot the company, and they pushed that vision throughout the company. Once you've started executing a strategic vision, you cannot become complacent. Sometimes you will have disagreements with business leaders about balancing the roles of business and IT personnel within a project, and you have to be willing to compromise to get the job done. Instilling a strategic, corporate-centered view of IT at Galderma is a work in progress. It doesn't matter whether the ERP project itself is ever associated with me. The fact that this project is going forward is, for me, the final tick in the box to say that our strategy is right, and that people now understand the value of data, the value of consistent information, and how the IT strategy enables a business vision. CIO Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

1/13/2009 2:52:04 PM

cover story | enterprise infrastructure

How THe When Kuoni India’s BPO arm, which handles paperwork for diplomatic missions, bagged an assignment that would take it to 40 countries, it knew only IT could create a platform that could withstand such sudden expansion. By Gunjan Trivedi Reader ROI:

Why standardization is crucial for business expansion How to build redundancy in your infrastructure IT's importance in scaling up operations

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

P hotoS by kaPIl Shrof f Imag In g by Un nIkrIShn an aV

fliTTing across

countries isn’t something you would generally associate with the suave Dhiren Savla. But a look at his bloated passport makes it hard to miss the fact that he’s a globe-trotter’s globe-trotter. As the CIO of the Kuoni Travel Group, India, Savla’s passport is peppered with the visas of numerous countries; he practically lives out of his suitcase. He works for a travel company, so he gets to travel, nothing extraordinary there. But the thing is Dhiren isn’t traveling for the heck of it. Kuoni India’s IT function supports one of the company’s business functions, VFS, which caters to the needs of 22 diplomatic missions (read governments) across 42 countries. The extensive amount of time he spends on planes and new locales is a side-effect of the remedy Savla and his team have been administering to the company over the last five years. It’s a treatment that’s working if the phenomenal business benefits Kuoni is reaping is any indicator. Over the last four years, Savla and his team have been making concentrated

Sangita Reddy, executive directoroperations of Apollo Hospitals Group, says the company is 100 percent HIPAAcompliant in everything it does in India.

Cover Story | Enterprise Infrastructure efforts to move away from an easier-to-setup, decentralized IT ecosystem they had and introduce a far more centralized — and, yes, harder-to-do — enterprise IT infrastructure. Their work has not only helped make Kuoni the largest player in the country’s travel and tourism space, it has also given the firm the ability to conquer the world by expanding its reach astronomically. Growth in business revenues naturally followed. But none of this would have been possible with the old decentralized IT set up. “Had we remained decentralized and not taken steps to advance our technology use, we would not have grown. It is that simple,” says Savla.

Complexities En Route The Kuoni Travel Group launched in India about 12 years ago when it acquired SOTC,

then the largest outbound travel player in the country. The Kuoni Travel Group is a hundred percent subsidiary of the 102-yearold Swiss travel giant, Kuoni Travel Holding Switzerland, which forayed into Asian geographies with unprecedented aggression about a decade ago. Soon, Kuoni India took over the inbound travel market leader, SITA and BTI, which catered to the travel needs of corporate India. Those were heady days and its numerous acquisitions fuelled Kuoni India’s growth phenomenally. But all the mergers also left it with an unbelievable mix of IT ecosystems and infrastructure. “Our application portfolio was as diversified as one can imagine,” says Savla. Business began to push out in new directions. About six years ago, Kuoni India

started a business division called VFS. It is a BPO function that caters to the visarelated front-end and back-end processes of diplomatic missions, which are in charge of ensuring visas are given only to bonafide travelers. As a partner, VFS handles a number of services including accepting visa applications, ensuring that these documents are in order, submitting them to the appropriate Embassy and collecting them. For example, VFS offers 'a-trackyour-passport' service. Kuoni India started its BPO operations for the US government in Western India (Pune, Ahmedabad and Mumbai). Soon, the UK and UAE missions also came on board and outsourced their visa-related functions for various locations within India. But this only added to the company’s IT infrastructure woes. The success of Kuoni’s BPO division began attracting business from other parts of the world. Until this point, the division handled missions and consulates situated within India. But then Kuoni India began to bag international business for its BPO division. The UK mission awarded VFS a contract to setup its visa-process management functions in an office in Singapore, stretching the company’s IT infrastructure even more. Then the Australian, French and Canadian missions asked for VFS’s services as well. “Where we were managing two clients in India, we were now handling a lot of clients across various geographically-spread locations on the globe,” says Savla. The diversified and heterogeneous IT systems could have become a bottleneck as

“Technology can be a key differentiator between a successful company and an unsuccessful one.” — Zubin Karkaria

CEO and MD, Kuoni Travel Group, India

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

cover story | enterprise infrastructure

because its pact with the uk government specified high penalties for project overruns, kuoni india developed its universal application wiTH Two differenT

parTners — in parallel.

the business grew phenomenally. “We felt a strong need to standardize and consolidate our infrastructure to be able to support and fuel business growth. When VFS was setup in 2004, business wasn’t expected to grow at this rate. In less than a year, we realized that the unexpected rate of business growth would soon outpace our decentralized infrastructure. We knew it was high time for us to bring about radical changes in Kuoni India’s IT infrastructure,” Savla recalls. Kuoni India’s management also feels the same way. “IT has always been an integral part of our success. This is especially so for the VFS business, where IT truly enables and powers international growth. We could not have had such a large international foot-print without investing in robust IT infrastructure, information security and sophisticated systems,” says Zubin Karkaria, CEO and MD, Kuoni Travel Group, India. Savla and his team got down to it almost immediately. In 2004, they embarked on the difficult journey of centralizing the organization’s IT infrastructure, consolidating its application portfolio and setting up a standardized working environment all of which would make Kuoni more agile and expand its business beyond India’s geographic boundaries. On the networking front, Kuoni India progressed from running a mesh of all kinds of networks to Sify’s centralized, carrier-neutral MPLS-based VPN network. “Back office functions like accounting and controlling were de-linked from all line-ofbusiness applications and a common backend platform was set up. We rolled out SAP to take care of most of the back-end functions of the business on a captive platform called Shared Services Center (SSC). We undertook the enormous task of setting up premises,

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

training users, moving workforce from business functions, rolling out SAP and migrating multiple systems to a common platform,” remembers Savla. On the application portfolio front, Kuoni India adopted a three-tier distribution network. Various travel products are sold by Kuoni branches, its franchisees and agents across the country. Only application consolidation would enable the organization to manage its travel inventory across the distribution network. “Standardization and consolidation of applications helped us manage live inventory and allowed us to customize our offerings to a client’s requirement. A client could now walk in to any of our distribution points and get the right information and the right price for his travel needs. We realized that there was an untapped market in the smaller and more remote cities in India. Such IT consolidation ensured that we expanded beyond the metros and reached out to class B or C cities right here in India,” he says. Savla’s standardization efforts appealed to parts of the larger Kuoni group. About three years ago, Kuoni India’s IT function became part of Kuoni’s global initiative to introduce a common working environment across all its locations. The project called Future Business in IT Architecture (FITA), started with three key focus areas: trimming application portfolios; standardizing IT infrastructure and setting up a homogenous functional organization. “FITA in Asia will be complete by the second quarter of 2009. Various applications such as CRM and CMS are being rolled out in India and global locations at the same time. The rollout of these global applications would give us operational efficiency as well as competitive advantage,” says Savla.

It would also prepare them for their biggest deal yet.

mulTipliciTy While Kuoni India was busy revamping its IT infrastructure, its BPO division’s sales team was firing on all cylinders. Its visamanagement services found more and more takers around the world culminating in the largest deal Kuoni India has seen. “Around 2007, VFS witnessed a turning point. We bagged the UK mission’s contract to handle its visa-processing functions for seven regions out of the 10 regions UK missions are present in. This translated to new business in 40 countries. We were now asked to operate out of 42 countries and cater to about 22 different governments. Growth was stupendous,” recalls Savla. The UK government contract involved setting up office infrastructure in 40 countries and creating a highly available and secure global network and datacenter. “The biggest challenge was to build a robust centralized infrastructure and network across multiple countries in Asia, Europe and Africa, and running a scalable global application. We also had to create a highly reliable security framework in remote locations and find vendors and suppliers in unknown territories,” says Savla. To address business needs as they grew, Kuoni’s BPO felt the need for a dynamic application that had modules which could be customized to suit specific requirements. This was essential for the business because visa-related processes of respective diplomatic missions in different countries differ from one another. The quick-fix solution could have been found by throwing more people at the problem. “About three years back, we REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

Photo by Srivatsa Shandilya IMAGING BY ANIL T

engaged a third party to develop such an application. Once the application was rolled out, we developed in-house expertise to manage it round the clock across different time-zones. But soon this approach bloated our IT team to about 60 people. Had we continued like that, we would have reached an unmanageable figure today. Economically-speaking, this would have been a catastrophic situation,” he says. His CEO couldn’t agree more. “I strongly feel that the optimum use of technology is important for survival and success in this extremely competitive market. Today, we are able to launch operations in new markets by deploying technology. Automation is also the key to achieving higher customer service levels in a cost-effective manner. Technology should play a strong strategic role in all organizations; it can be a key differentiator between a successful organization and an unsuccessful one,” adds Karkaria. To ride wave of business growth, Savla’s team decided to re-look at how they supported and managed their company’s core applications and infrastructure. Kuoni India’s IT team decided to focus on three key areas: the optimization of the core application supporting client’s processes irrespective of their geography; a highly-available global network infrastructure; and an enhanced security framework. Savla began with the consolidation of application portfolios that catered specifically to the UK government’s visaprocesses across multiple locations. “We were looking at an optimal but substantial consolidation. We wanted the components of the application to be modular and parameter-based. This would help us with manageability, costs and turnaround time. The aim was to reduce the quantum of work required to manage the application substantially,” says Savla. Kuoni India assembled a team of business-IT project managers who not only analyzed business processes and data but also performed gap analysis to identify areas that needed reengineering. Savla is taking what he learned from this project to develop a common, modular application to take care of the processes of other missions. The analysis of the UK project took about four months and the infrastructure and 24

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

“If we had remained decentralized and not advanced our technology deployments, we would not have grown. It is that simple.” — Dhiren Savla

CIO, Kuoni Travel Group, India

application were deployed in another six months, he says, adding that the second part of the project would start in the near future. With an overall blueprint in place, the assignment was broken down into smaller projects and farmed out. The development of a universal application was outsourced to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). In October 2006, the development of the application on a .Net platform began and was ready for rollout in June 2007. The rollout was done across locations in phases and ended in December 2007. While TCS forged on with their piece, Savla and his team began to develop the same application with another partner in parallel as a fallback option. “We had go-live SLAs for specific dates. If those

were breached, the penalties would be so high that they would have hit revenues. So, we built redundancy against project overruns by getting a partner to work simultaneously on the development,” he says. The outsourcing strategy also helped Savla trim his IT team to about 40 from 60.

Plan B Deadlines were not the only pressure bearing down on Savla and his team. They also had to ensure secure and seamless access to the universal application from geographicallydiverse locations. In their first step towards that goal, Kuoni India’s visa services operations shifted its global network to British Telecom’s MPLS-based VPN network

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Cover Story | Enterprise Infrastructure

— wherever it was possible. “There were some locations such as Nigeria, Ukraine, Namibia, Nepal, etcetera, where setting up BT’s MPLS network was either technically impossible or just plain uneconomical,” says Savla. At these locations, Savla set up pointto-point tunneling between two firewall locations using IPSec encryption. “I can say that about 99 percent of all the locations managed by Kuoni India are on a VPN network and that they are all secure using MPLS or IPSec technologies,” he says. As a backup to the VPN network (whether global or within India), the team chose terrestrial networks or VSAT technologies. Even in countries where service providers had a monopoly, Kuoni India had to ensure alternate routes to avoid downtime. “Our clients placed stringent rules and SLAs on us. And, obviously, there’s no compromise on SLAs,” he says. Savla’s zero-tolerance for losses that could affect business makes the trust management places in him well deserved. “At Kuoni, IT is deeply involved in business processes and entrusted with carrying out

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

innovations which improve business and create new opportunities. The CIO is as business-focused as any other business head. I expect a reliable, efficient and secure IT landscape to power our growth objectives,” says Karkaria. Another area of focus for the organization was the fragmented access points to the Internet. “To secure the corporate network from threats that may be introduced through the Internet, we collected the identified access points for the Internet. No separate connectivity to the Internet from within our network was allowed. Within three months all will be pointed to specific, secure Internet distribution points,” Savla says. A parallel MPLS-VPN network from Reliance was set up to provide centralized access to the Internet. This doubles as a fallback for the Sify MPLS network within India. “This gives higher availability for the network and security for the Internet. We have plans to replicate this approach in other geographies in the near future,” Savla says. The other single point of failure, from Savla’s perspective, was the datacenter. Though the datacenter used an n+1 redundancy model, a replicated and interoperable datacenter disaster recovery (DR) ecosystem was sought. “I can’t tell people that our office in Africa cannot work because the Mumbai datacenter is not available. So we set up another datacenter in London,” he says. Mumbai is the primary site for some geographies while the London datacenter will be the primary site for others. Both are backups for each other. Savla is also planning a DR drill in the second quarter of 2009. “In phase two, we will have a near DR sites for both locations. By 2009-2010, we will have four datacenters to ensure constant availability,” he says. About two years ago, Kuoni India also started certifying VFS with ISO 27001 and today around 80 offices have been certified. Their captive platform, the SSC, has also been ISO 27001 certified. Savla is in the process of rolling out ISO certifications in other businesses as well. “We are conceptualizing a self-certifying management console, where people can certify themselves on a monthly basis and this is confirmed by a centralized team. In case of a disagreement, a third-party

audit can be undertaken. This reduces the amount of re-documenting that has to be submitted while auditing,” says Savla. The control room in Mumbai remotely controls and manages the access control and surveillance systems of various locations. It is an independent function from physical security, which is automated. “We can manage close to 300 offices across 43 countries. We manage support for multiple geographies, multiple languages and cultures. Even with the remotest of locations, we can ensure that we are compliant,” he says.

Non-Stop Flight The consolidated infrastructure and standardized modular application portfolio enables Kuoni India to not only optimize operations more efficiently, but also substantially improve turnaround time for the business processes of its consumers. “We are able to process a higher number of applications without compromising data quality or timely delivery. IT automation has helped us provide better consumer experience — whether it is for tour operating business or in VFS operations. Average wait time for consumers has reduced considerably and we are able to handle larger volumes without increasing staff. With the help of a centralized application and infrastructure, we have reduced our IT costs by about 18-20 percent and also increase business,” says Savla. In 2005, VFS handled about one million applications a year. In 2008, the division processed about seven million applications,” says Savla. The numbers haven’t escaped Savla’s management. “We have successfully demonstrated our IT capabilities and will continue to remain committed to IT investments,” says Karkaria. The journey doesn’t end here. Riding on the revamped infrastructure, Kuoni India is paving the way for further growth. “We have come a long way on this. Our focus in 2009 will be to keep consolidating and continually improve,” Savla promises. CIO

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

REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

how To improve

applicat application licat atio ion

integration Using service-oriented architecture, Qualcomm supercharged its customer provisioning. In doing so, it also improved the software development team's agility and saved half a million dollars in the IT annual budget. By Daniel Dern

Can Changing an IT architectural philosophy deliver business benefits such as improving service quality, speeding up software development and making it more flexible, enabling new products and services, and reducing IT spending? For one wireless telecom company, which has been moving from a traditional silo IT architecture to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) over the past halfdozen years, the answer is a definitive yes. Back in 2001, Qualcomm's IT architecture, like most enterprises', included multiple silos — information systems that couldn't easily communicate with each other. Connecting these systems required lots of point-to-point integration and a lot of technologies, recalls Norm Fjeldheim, CIO at Qualcomm. "And the communication was inefficiently done," he adds. Qualcomm's businesses revolve around creating and providing digital communications products for wireless networks and devices, as well as network services based on CDMA and other technologies. Headquartered in San Diego, Qualcomm is a Fortune 500 company with more than 12,800 employees and revenues of nearly $9 billion (about Rs 45,000 crore).

The LimiTs of LegaCy siLo iT Reader ROI:

Why SOA can simplify complexity How to attack an SOA project The benefits of SOA

Like all large companies today — especially companies whose products and services are, or depend heavily, on digital networks — Qualcomm's ability to satisfy its customers, increase business volume, and develop and create new products and services is highly enabled — or constrained — by IT capabilities. For example, says Steve Polaski, director of Enterprise Architecture for Qualcomm, "We had ERP systems that had the same data being extracted three times and being sent to three different systems: to a PLM (product lifecycle management) application, to a CRM (customer relationship

j A n u A r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Cover story | enterprise infrstructure management) system and also to trade export compliance applications." Also, recalls Polaski, "A lot of our IT budget was consumed handling integration. Some of our core systems had dozens, even hundreds, of integration points. It was a challenge to keep track of them all and was a big expenditure and slowed us down." One particular bugaboo was the time it took — too long — to provision customers of Qualcomm's electronic products and services, such as remote wireless devices provided by a Qualcomm business. For a customer to add or change features, the device needs to be re-provisioned, which can be done remotely via the network. "The device might already be loaded with features, but the customer hadn't yet purchased them, so we could remotely turn them on and off," says Fjeldheim. However, it took too long for changes to take effect after the change commands were given. "Our goal was to reduce this delay," says Polaski. The team wanted provisioning to happen as close as possible to real-time, as opposed to waiting several hours. In addition, says Polaski, IT wanted realtime data movement. For example, the same event and data that triggered provisioning should also be sent to billing and CRM systems, so customer service would know quickly what features are now enabled.

soa way of Doing Things To handle some of these IT challenges, Qualcomm turned to a then-relatively new concept, service-oriented architecture, which makes applications available as services that can be accessed by other applications. "SOA is a concept and a process and a way of thinking about how to move data and how to allow business functions to interoperate with each other," says Polaski. "We were thinking about the space — then known as EAI (enterprise application integration) — and services, back in 2001. We knew back then that this was the future, the way to go. We looked at various products that could help enable us expose the services and to move the data between the services. We started reviewing products very late in 2001, made decisions in March of 2002 and started implementation in June 2002. Full

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

implementation across the company was late 2002 or early 2003." After looking at products available in 2001, Qualcomm selected products from Tibco Software to create the new SOA environment. "We have other pieces in our SOA fabric today," Polaski notes. "Tibco products are a major part of this, and we use a number of tools from Oracle. Plus, we use a number of Open-source products. But Tibco was the first set of SOA products we used." By exposing systems as services, the Tibco environment lets IT make existing systems available through service calls and build new services and combine services into new applications, with little or no coding. The period between the time Qualcomm selected Tibco until the first set of services and integration were up was three to four months, says Polaski. "More than half of that time was architecting the foundation, to make sure we had a well-established infrastructure in place before doing our first integration before we attacked the actual integration itself." "We started by not attacking our existing integration, anything already in place," says Fjeldheim. "We built the SOA infrastructure around Tibco. And then as new things came up, instead of using what we had been using, we started using Tibco. So it became our new engine around growth. As we learned more about the tools and SOA, we added new components and new things from other vendors. And we went after old existing integration. The biggest pain points were then converted later on to this architecture." "It was a good approach for us," says Fjeldheim. "We had a lot we needed to get done, and this let us do it a lot quicker and it was less painful. We were pretty religious about not doing things the old way and adding to the problem. We used Tibco and our SOA infrastructure as much as possible for everything new we created." Whenever they had to touch old pieces, they asked whether it was a good time to migrate to the new infrastructure. Sometimes it was; sometimes it wasn't. Today, according to Fjeldheim, "Our SOA is deployed globally, covering all of the enterprise. To date, we've got over 150 messages being sent between different apps, 58 Web services using different kinds

of technology from Tibco, Oracle and Open Source. And we have probably exposed close to 180 other services through application APIs. It's continually growing...it's a neverending process."

serviCe-orienTeD BenefiTs One obvious benefit of applying the SOA approach was achieving the desired closeto-real-time provisioning, reports Polaski. "By changing the architecture and our integration strategy, the time to add features and functions to wireless devices went down from three hours or so to five seconds." "Customer satisfaction went way up as a result," notes Fjeldheim. "Our internal and external customers were both happy." Also, says Polaski, "We have agility and flexibility to support our changing business models that we didn't before, because the services are being orchestrated, rather than hardwired to each other." Qualcomm's IT budget has also benefited, reports Fjeldheim. "We've freed up at least half a million dollars (about Rs 2.5 crore) of annual integration costs out of the annual IT budget. A single piece of integration used to cost us anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000 (between Rs 15 lakh to Rs 75 lakh). Thanks to Tibco and other systems we've deployed, we've cut that by a factor of 5 to 10, freeing that money up to spend on other things." IT's new skill sets and capabilities have let developers handle new challenges more effectively. "We needed an IT solution for a new business problem, and instead of the week that the vendor thought it would take, we were able to get it up and running in three hours," says Fjeldheim. Qualcomm's SOA-based infrastructure also makes it much easier to make use of SaaS (software as a service), according to Fjeldheim. "Unlike some other firms we've talked to, we've been able to integrate SaaS applications into our SOA infrastructure, rather than just use them as individual applications." Plus, the engineering department has adopted what IT has developed and has used its solutions to offer services to customers. CIO Daniel P. Dern is a freelance technology writer. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

REAL CIO WORLD | j A n u A r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

IT Innovation’s

Equity

By Kanika Goswami With its funny hairdos and acid-washed jeans, the 90’s has received its share of bad press. But it's hard not to long for a time when men took great risks, when entrepreneurs really changed business and innovation had real pop. Nirmal Jain, chairman, India Infoline, was among those who defined that generation of businessmen and made the 90’s memorable. Take for instance how in 1999, Jain decided to give financial reports — that most guarded resource of the financial world and Jain’s own bread and butter — away for free. “It was like playing for double or quits. Either we would make it really big, or shut down,” he says in an interview. By letting that data loose on the Internet he hoped to increase the reach of financial intelligence and open up a new — and enormous — base of customers. It was so risky that core members of his team quit, according to his IIM alumni webpage. Today, even if Jain's wild success with India Infoline is an old story, it still has lessons for enterprises that transact in a world walking through the molasses of a slowdown. Jain shares a little bit about what it took to live a vision ahead of its time and why the current slowdown can’t hurt India for too long.

CIO: What has the Internet done for your business? 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.

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

View from the Top - Full.indd 28

Nirmal Jain: The Internet is a great leveler. In the 90’s, the world of financial research and broking boasted of big names like Bloomberg. But small investors had to be content with the advice of their neighborhood brokers. Only large banks

and large institutions could access cuttingedge information. The Internet changed that. Now everyone has equal access. Today, even in small towns and remote areas, people have access to information at no cost. The Internet has also done something else: it made volumes immaterial. Before, a broker would not entertain small customers, but with the Internet, whether a transaction

Photos by Srivatsa Shandilya Imaging by unn ikrishn an AV

Nirmal Jain, chairman, India Infoline, says IT radicalized his business and helped him prepare for the current slowdown.

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 2:56:37 PM

View from the Top

Nirmal Jain expects I.T. to: Enhance customer experience Further his companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reach Create operational efficiencies

View from the Top - Full.indd 29

1/13/2009 2:56:39 PM

View from the Top

is made up of one person investing a lakh or ten thousand people investing a hundred rupees, it can be done with the same efficiency. Volumes don’t matter anymore. That’s the magic of the Internet. I saw this huge opportunity in 1999 and that is when we went online. The whole idea was not only to cut cost but also give free access to brokering and reports.

It must have been a pretty radical idea. In 2000, when I launched 5paisa.com, brokerage rates used to be 130 basis points. We cut it down to five basis points. The logic was that the Net would allow us to cut out the costs of communications like telephones, couriering, etcetera. Today, more or less all brokers use the concept but back then nobody had thought of it. It was a paradigm shift and pretty revolutionary at that point.

What has been your strategy for India Infoline? It’s been 80 percent hindsight and 20 percent foresight. In 1995, we filled a gap in the market for research and information services. Note that even in 1997 I had absolutely no clue what the Internet was. Probity, an erstwhile equity research firm was my first venture that sold company reports for Rs 20,000 and sector research at Rs 10,000. With India Infoline.com, where research reports were distributed for free, we killed that model. In 1998, we were the first company to introduce a report on the IT sector, which was very well received. The key strategy was to think differently. I wanted to have a portal that could tell the layman everything he or she needed to know about the Indian economy. In 1999, we had 250 clients and we felt that if we put all our research on the Net, we’d increase its reach for a fraction of the price, and still make profits. Instead of only 250 people seeing my reports, now 2.5 million could buy them. So my next strategy was to keep re-inventing ourselves. 30

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

View from the Top - Full.indd 30

“Despite the slowdown, many global capital market players will have no choice but to come back to India eventually.” — Nirmal Jain We had a de-risked business model, but in our core we have always been a financial services company, and I’ve always stayed focused on that fact.

What were the risks? When we decided to launch our research product online for free, we were ready to forego a source of revenue. That was one of the major risks we took in those days. And although we were one of the few that survived the bust, we were not completely untouched. By 2000-01, we had committed a significant amount of capital to the business; hence we diversified into insurance distribution as well. In 2002, we were struggling to survive but managed to make it with all the cash on our balance sheet at just about Rs 3 crore. We faced multiple problems because under those circumstances companies have to make tough decisions. If we sacked people we’d have labor court cases, but there were also legal challenges if we pulled back from some of our commitments.

It was also a time when no one wanted to work with us because we didn’t seem to have a future. Luckily, we realized a portal would not be able to sustain us, so we moved into equity broking and also started distributing mutual funds. Things started perking up in 2003 and by 2004 we were in the green again.

Do you have advice for today’s entrepreneurs? One needs to be open to change, that’s the only way to grow. Listen, be humble, and don’t come into the industry with pre-conceived notions. My grandfather used to say the humble grass bends to the flood and survives, while the mighty tree stands upright and is uprooted. That’s what smaller companies should be like, bend with the times, till you get strong roots.

Are there lessons you learnt from then that can help your company thrive during this lean business period? We went the IPO route in 2005, after we lived through the storm. We worked towards raising capital but always stayed frugal when it came to expenditure. In December last year, we raised $320 million (about Rs 1,600 crore) but only used about $200 million (about Rs 1,000 crore). The principles I lived by, and drove the company with during that difficult phase, were directed at taking the best opportunity, trimming excess fat and valuing our best people. My co-workers place importance on retaining good customers, because I sincerely believe that even though the customer is the king, a bad customer can do a huge amount of harm to my business. I ensured that two things should get maximum attention: turnaround time, and thought-to-action, both of these have to be extremely short. In times like the one we are going through, you need to keep your operating costs very low. It is easier to survive a downturn if your overheads and fixed costs are low.

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 2:56:40 PM

View from the Top

And last but not the least, I have always believed that one should put technology to best use — it can optimize a business tremendously. Use the Internet as an indispensable tool but never lose sight of the fact that technologies will constantly change and become more useful. One must capitalize on that.

What role has IT played in your growth? IT has been at our focus right from day one. In 2002, payroll was processed just by one person, and back then we had 1,200 people. Today, we have 10,000 employees and payroll is still processed by one person. IT has also played a major role in mass customization, and has helped us get more customers. The key is to identify the right security, which is again an area technology has helped immensely. We use technology for all our functions — not only for business but also to enhance customer experience. For instance, we have trade confirmations via SMS and stockideas and tips and several other services, all non-intrusive mediums. We have integrated our website with SMS allowing twoway communication. I think technology allows you to keep your costs low, but that’s just one part of it. It also enables mass customization. Plus, all support functions like accounts, administration, HR, can run on it.

Do you think cutting-edge technology is mandatory? Yes. India Infoline has developed and deployed the Trader Terminal. It is a proprietary trading platform that is more user-friendly and has richer features than other trading platforms in the market. We have also successfully deployed a browserbased trading platform using .Net technology which is light and still provides users a rich experience. Account-related functions, research, live news updates, and customer help lines through instant chats have been 32

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

View from the Top - Full.indd 32

integrated in the software, making it extremely convenient for customers to use. Having our own proprietary trading platform provides us an edge over competition. We can make software changes in-house and we are not dependant on external vendors.

SNAPSHOT

players can make money. There is very little competition left in the UK, European and Revenue: US markets. Indian markets Rs 1,023 crore will do well just as soon as the Employees: global slowdown recedes. 14,000 Growth will surely come Business back. In about five years, I locations: 886 foresee the financial research business being bigger than CIO: Titus Gunasaleen what it is today, and structure Is India ready for and technology will have a a widespread big role to play in this change. equity business? I see a bright future for the financial research business. India is a very good market for this business. We have a very strong economy, and Indians are still hugely entrepreneurial. What role does your CIO Even the demographics are favorable. play in your company? Almost 60 percent of our population is below 35-years-old and that’s when people Our CIO is an integral part of the start thinking about investing in policies, management decision making. We meet having a home, and security. So I think it’s a number of times a month, and we keep a ripe market. scanning for new applications that could help us grow. I’ve always believed that business in the Today’s market has bigger finance markets is driven by people, and as players. How do you plan to long as you get the right people, it makes handle this? no difference to the customer whether it’s a foreign broker firm or an Indian one. It is I was asked this question five years ago, and because of these revolutionary ideas that at that point we were very small. Today, we we have been successful in establishing an have significant size; our net worth is almost online equity business in India. Rs 1,500 crore. That said, there are bigger fish I think what matters is taking people from out there. Our strengths are our customer similar cultural backgrounds. Since we are base, and a great team that understands very down-to-earth, we make it a point to them. We believe this business requires a lot hire like-minded people. You also need to be of hands-on, personal communication work. honest with your people, you need to spend We are very close to our customers, and that time and make them a part of the team — that is what drives our business. That will see us chemistry is very important. You should not in the face of any competition, and anyway, I allow any lapses in principles and values. think the price war ended in 2000. Trust that is built like that is reciprocal. We have to earn loyalty, that way it sticks. CIO What trend do you see for

India Infoline

the Indian investing market? Despite this indefinite slowdown, I think many global capital market players will have no choice but to come back to India eventually. We are not officially in a recession and there are few markets left where global market

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

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 2:56:40 PM

Open to Collaboration In tough economic times, when money is dear and customers dearer, the lack of a CRM system can play spoil sport. With its expanding business and growing customer base, YES Bank knew it was time to join hands with an in-house collaborative CRM solution so that it could service its customers better. By Snigdha KarjatKar 34

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Case File

Slowdowns bring with them a sea of changes.

Purse strings become tighter and less is just enough. Expansions take a back seat and companies play it safe. But there is something that cannot afford to succumb to this changing environment: the quality of customer service.

flexible and have the scalability to follow It is a time when the phrase ‘customer the business wherever it went. is king’ holds more water than ever before. “While conceptualizing the CRM, I Especially for an industry that is facing a was not looking at a mature and stable lot of heat: banking. Keeping their existing CRM package because our retail business customers intact and adding to that model itself was demand-based and hence customer base is an imperative for banks. very fluid. We wanted to start with a small The definition of customer relations framework-based model which changes is broadening. When every new piece of with our business needs,” says Suvanjay customer data can reveal a new facet of a Kumar Sharma, VP (corporate strategy) & customer, information becomes a business chief enterprise architect, YES Bank. opportunity. The more data, the merrier An off-the-shelf CRM solution would everyone is. have made Sharma’s job much easier but YES Bank was no exception. It managed he believed that a CRM tool should have customer relations via Excel sheets, customer feedback at every step and only something that the bank was beginning a system based on Open Source would to regret. The problem was that it was a give him the agility that he was looking one-way information sharing system that for. Neither was he willing to settle for a restricted data flow from the customer to the stopgap solution so he decided to build company. Although it was used extensively the solution in-house — a tough task by by the bank’s staff for cross-selling and any standard. up-selling, it lacked interactive features like capturing feedback from a customer. Neither was it the smartest way to run the bank’s sales force. “We had instances when A relatively new entrant in the field where we lost sales leads, or multi-interfaces to the big daddies such as nationalized the same lead and re-assignment of leads. banks have already celebrated their We just couldn’t track older leads because cetenaries, YES Bank was established there were multiple registrations and entry in 2004 with financial support from for tracking them,” says a branch manager Rabobank Netherlands. of YES Bank who prefers not Fr o m the b a n k’s to be named. perspective, it’s late Reader ROI: Having a customer entrance didn’t have to be a The advantages of a relationship management disadvantage. It could give collaborative CrM (CRM) solution was the need miss to legacy migration Why a home-brewed of the hour. But, not just any since there wasn’t any and CrM can still have CRM solution. If the bank’s it could also adopt and benefits management was going implement technology to get one, it needed to be according to the needs of a

IllUSt ratIon by an Il t

Joint Account

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

21st century bank serving the new needs of the modern customer. “We consciously wanted to avoid settling for a system and working with it just because our organization was still evolving. We wanted a flexible solution that would change in accordance to the dynamics of our business. What we wanted was a scalable CRM that could grow as we grew and not just any CRM solution,” says Sharma. And from those priorities was born the concept of the Yes Bank Collaborative CRM (YCCRM). But Sharma’s in-house YCCRM wasn’t satisfied with just fulfilling these needs. Sharma felt that customer feedback was vital, and that the bank needed to embrace its customers. “The difference was collaboration. We wanted to make it collaborative by making the customer part of the system. We were keen on empowering the customer to share his ideas and feedback. The system has two logical separation models: a pre-acquisition and a post-acquisition service cycle for customers,” explains Sharma. It took six to eight months to develop and implement the solution in the first branch. The YCCRM banks very heavily on employee collaboration. “Information lying in islands, without being shared across, is of no use at all. Internal collaboration adds a productive edge to the information we capture,” says Sharma. The customer information captured in the YCCRM is mapped to blog-like entries made by employees. These entries include ideas, suggestions, and perceptions of the REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

Photo by SrIVatSa ShandI lya

Case File sales representatives. The “We focused more on sales and product teams can capturing data from mobile then analyze this information phones into the CRM system and figure out related instead of capturing CRM business opportunities. system in the mobile phones. SNAPSHOT Such information can also We leveraged the fact that YES Bank be leveraged to customize people are more comfortable EMPLOyEES: 6,000 existing products or conceive with their cell phones than new products altogether. their computers to introduce LOCATIONS: 60 Earlier, with Excel sheets, greater comfort for the user,” sales staff culled out details says Sharma. IT STAff: 65 of customers by tabs in The new system also the form (name, company, helped sales representatives VP (CORPORATE STRATEgy) & account number, etcetera). in other ways. As a sales rep, CHIEf ENTERPRISE But with YCCRM, they were part of the job includes being ARCHITECT: provided with a template constantly on the field, which Suvanjay Kumar Sharma where they can fill details leaves them little time to fill (other than the standard in their reports. As a result, it keywords) noted during their interaction is not always possible to feed details of their with the customers. This meant they could interaction with customers on the day they personalize their dashboards. meet them. The old system marked the day Typically, sales staff interacts with they filed their report, not the day they met customers over the phone, jotting down the their customer. YCCRM has changed that. most important parts of their conversation It provides an additional tab of source date on little pieces of paper. This information (the date mentioned as the source date when was later filled on a separate form. With they meet the customer and the system date the new CRM, sales reps can now upload or when it is registered in the system). Sharma download scribbled information from their says, “Adding the source and system date phones to the main CRM system. has helped calculate the turnaround time of serving a client.” The integrated and personalized dashboard with an activities planner enables the smooth functioning of a sales rep. And it’s social value-based relationship management helps in cross-selling. Take for instance a software developer who wants to

move from an employee status to being an owner of his own firm. That piece of insight can be uself for the bank. The social valuebased relationship management component will help cater to his changed needs. On the dashboard, a small search box allows the bank staff to do an internal as well as a Web search on their customers. “We modeled the system so that it is practical. We wanted people to take part in the development of the system. The system has to be agile and ideas have to come from the users. This also allows you to add features according to your requirements,” points out Sharma.

Credit Limit

But this convenience comes at a price. It wasn’t easy to implement the CRM solution across YES Bank’s multiple branches. The foremost challenge was convincing the business about using the Open-source CRM software and customizing it for their use. But Sharma was convinced it was the way to go. He also knew that it was a decision that would introduce its own special set of challenges. One example is an initial performance issue related to JBOSS. When the number of concurrent users grew to over 80 to 100, performance started deteriorating and JBOSS shutdown. “We have done some optimization to solve the issue and also have logged the issue with Red Hat and have received some patches,” he shares. Developing a CRM solution in-house was not just about having faith and confidence in Sharma’s team but meant that he needed to get involved with even the smallest details of the project. This gave him complete visibility of how the project was shaping. Since they worked closely with business, articulation of business needs was very clear and hence, Sharma’s team was to develop features close to user requirements. Getting business users who were —Suvanjay Kumar Sharma accustomed to offVP (corporate strategy) & chief enterprise the-shelf products architect, yES bank. to use the unique

“Information lying in islands, without being shared, is of no use at all. Internal collaboration adds a productive edge to the data we capture.”

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Case File

At Your Service

YES Bank’s YCCRM solution helped the company retain its customers and improved customer service by 60 percent.

Core Banking YCCRM System This data then goes through the core banking system, YCCRM and the SAN. After the sales rep meets a customer, he feeds the details of the interaction into his personalized dashboard.

The Credit List The implementation of a key tool like CRM has already started reflecting positively. There has been a drastic improvement in customer acquisition after sales leads were passed on via discussion boards. “There is servicing of 10 lakh leads and around 5 lakh service requests per year. Customer service has improved by 60 percent and turnaround time for its processes by almost 70 percent,” says Sharma. “This helped achieve greater service excellence, capturing all customer 38

Case Study.indd 38

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

SAN

Its collaborative feature helps the sales force share customer data through discussion boards, chatting and blogging, thereby increasing business opportunities.

queries, complaints and their feedback into the common system. It has helped us understand our customers better and analyze the resolution time for each query or complain and then improve internal process accordingly. It also added lots of intangible business benefits and helped retain customers better,” says Sharma. The cross-selling of products has substantially surged after the implementation. The collaborative CRM has given a new window of social valuebased relationship which is key for future cross-selling. Further, the centralized repository for reports generated numerous benefits for the organization. “When data gets captured in a central repository there is more than one advantage to it. First, data loss is prevented. Second, data can be extracted and analyzed, which helps in understanding the business better. It allows us to observe trends and take proactive action to improve the customer experience and products,” says Sharma. The repository also enables geographywise customer segmentation to plan a

promotional campaign better. With the implementation of the YCCRM almost complete in all the metro branches, the next phase aims to cover the non-metro branches, bringing all 60 locations of the bank on board. The next logical step is to take YCCRM online, where customers can directly be part of the system. “Since this is an initiative to accommodate customers in the bank’s process, we want to get the CRM system online soon so that customers can directly send their feedback or use blogs to interact with us. This will definitely open new sources of information and at the same time it will provide us with a new set of opportunities in understanding the customer. This would surely help us serve our customers better,” says Sharma. CIO

I nfographics BY pc anoop

collaborative features of the YCCRM — which could possibly give the bank competitive advantage — was a task. “The business users needed to be convinced because people prefer to walk the conventional path and hesitate to give up their existing mode and processes of working. But once you help them understand smaller processes they gradually accept the change,” says Sharma. “The idea of making the system with self-servicing functionality is to give the business users the ability to define the fields that they want. The business division rather than the IT division should be responsible for all the contents displayed and they can manage the user interface without IT’s help,” he says.

This data can be analyzed and reports created to identify changing customer trends.

Snigdha Karjatkar is correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to snigdha_karjatkar@idgindia.com

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/15/2009 9:59:29 AM

Telecommuting

Maintaining office space is expensive. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s how one company made telecommuting work for everyone. By Meridith Levinson

ick Boyd used to spend $500 (about Rs 25,000) a month on gas and tolls commuting 48 miles a day between his home in Westchester County, New York, and his office in Hasbrouck Heights, New York. Now Boyd doesn't commute any more because his company, Chorus, which provides clinical, practice management and financial software for healthcare providers, has gone virtual. Chorus closed its Hasbrouck Heights headquarters in early June and its other office, in Stafford, Texas (outside of Houston), in early July. Now all of the company's 35 employees and full-time consultants work at home, and for the most part, they love it. Boyd, who is Chorus's CIO, says the company decided to close its offices to save money and spare employees the hassle and rising cost of commuting and because it had the necessary technology to support such a move. 40

Feature -03.indd 40

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 6:19:57 PM

Telecommuting

also works at home, also figured out efficient President and CEO A.J. Schreiber says ways to provide remote tech support. Boyd Chorus can continue to serve customers and other Chorus employees share the while simultaneously saving $400,000 challenges they've experienced and the (about Rs 2 crore)a year simply by closing lessons they've learned thus far in the its 15,000 square feet of office space. Sure, course of their company's transformation. breaking leases and telecom contracts is costing the company money, but the longterm savings far outweigh those short-term costs, says Schreiber. "We wouldn't have done this if it would have had a negative arvin Luz had serious concerns about impact on our ability to serve customers," Chorus becoming a virtual company. he adds. The vice president of client services thought Chorus CEO A.J. Schreiber made the the transition was going to be a lot of work, decision to go virtual. and he wondered how the company would In making the bold move to close its get through it. offices and go virtual, Chorus demonstrates "I was a little apprehensive," says Luz. the positive bottom-line results that stem "There's something to be said for being in from applying workplace flexibility as a an office and the security blanket of having business strategy, says Cali Williams Yost, your co-workers right next to you if you president and founder of consultancy have questions." Work+Life Fit. "Flexibility is a strategy for Foremost on the client services managing your business," she says. "It helps exec's mind was Chorus's ability to you recruit and retain talent and manage meet its customers' needs with a staff of resources like real estate. There are more telecommuters. The company had to figure and more companies realizing you don't out how customer support calls would be need to be in the same place every minute routed to agents at their homes and in such of every day." a way that clients wouldn't know that the Chorus's transformation into a virtual agent to whom they were speaking was company staffed with telecommuters hasn't working from home. been flawless, but none of the hurdles the Chorus already had in place much of company has encountered at this point have the telecommunications infrastructure proven insurmountable. Through research, it would need to support telecommuters, planning and some trial-and-error, the including a firewall and VPN. In 2007, company addressed many of the cultural CIO Boyd deployed a voice over IP (VoIP) challenges associated with telecommuting solution from Cisco that included Cisco's IP and managing virtual workforces. Communicator and a high-end router in the Chorus established work policies company's New Jersey datacenter, which designed to maintain employee productivity remains in operation, with staff visiting as and customer service levels. The company needed. He also added a Windows Active is using technology to make Directory server (Chorus Reader ROI: workloads more transparent already had two in its office Why telecommuting for managers, to transfer outside Houston) and two saves money and knowledge among staff, improves productivity T1 lines to the New Jersey provide training and to enable datacenter. Boyd says all of this Ways to ensure that them to collaborate. The IT technology made it easier for remote employees communicate well department, whose members Chorus to go virtual.

In preparation for the company's transformation, Boyd and his seven-person staff deployed the IP Communicators on every employee's laptop. Employees use the IP Communicators to make and receive phone calls. The IT department ran into trouble when it first began deploying the IP Communicators on everyone's laptops. Because it was new technology for the company, Boyd and his staff weren't sure how to set it up at first. They were also just coming up to speed on the voice over IP system. Boyd says the first few deployments of the IP Communicators were very difficult, but once he and his staff got more comfortable with the technology, it went more smoothly. (They had help from Dynamic Strategies, a New Jersey-based VoIP services provider.) It took Chorus about three weeks to get all the IP Communicators on everyone's computers, he says. To ensure the quality of the phone connections, Boyd and his staff had to give some employees higher-end routers than typical home routers that dedicate a certain amount of bandwidth to employees' Internet phones, says Boyd. Most employees already had cell phones, but Chorus put together a policy and expense guidelines for all employees so that they could get BlackBerrys or Windows Mobile-compatible devices to use as a back up in the event their IP Communicator goes down. (Chorus also supports the new 3G iPhone.) In addition, Boyd and team created â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;huntâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; groups for each of the support groups: customer support, infrastructure support, application development and business analysts. So if customer support needs an infrastructure employee to help with a major client issue, the customer support employee dials the extension for the infrastructure team's hunt group and that number rings out

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

Deploy the Right Technology

Feature -03.indd 41

1/13/2009 6:19:57 PM

Telecommuting to the entire group and whoever is available can answer the call. Before employees began working from home, Chorus tested the telecommuting set-up with Customer Support Account Manager Jairis Galvez. She worked at home two Fridays in a row, and all of the vice presidents called into her queue to make sure they could hear her, that she could hear them and that there wasn't static on the line. Another technical issue Chorus's IT department had to address was how farflung employees would make internal phone calls now that they're distributed. When Chorus maintained two offices, employees in Texas and New Jersey could dial four-digit phone numbers to reach each other across the country. The company found that the four-digit dialing didn't work when each party was logged into the VPN from their home offices. The firewall (PIX 506) was not capable of allowing a VPN to VPN data transfer so the call would connect but neither party could hear the other. They had to dial 10-digit numbers to reach each other. Boyd discovered that the company's firewall needed to be upgraded to enable the fourdigit dialing so he installed a new Cisco 515 firewall in late June. Now every employee is just a four-digit dial away.

Develop New Work Policies

horus developed work-at-home policies for telecommuters designed to maintain their productivity and the quality of service they provide to internal and external customers. One aspect of the policy pertains to employees' work at home environment. Every employee needs to have a separate space in their home that they can use for work â&#x20AC;&#x201D; ideally a separate room in their house or apartment with a door that they can close to separate themselves from their kids, pets, spouses or roommates. Employees also need to have a desk where they can work, even if it's just a folding table. The company doesn't want people working in front of the TV in their living rooms with their notebook computers on their laps or coffee tables. 42

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

How Chorus Keeps Everyone in the Loop Daily meeting and reports set the business agenda.

ince Chorus employees began telecommuting in June 2008, the provider of practice management systems for community health centers has established a series of meetings and communications designed to align employees around top business priorities and keep everyone on the same page. Here's a list of what Chorus does:

Daily morning executive team meetings. The vice presidents and CEo have a conference call every day to discuss high priority items, issues and projects such as technical work, systems implementations, customer support, client implementations, development and quality assurance. As a team, they affirm what needs to be done that day, the following day, the next week and longer term.

Daily morning reports. This report goes out to the entire company every day and compiles all of the internal and client projects that each team inside the company is working on. The daily morning report gives non-executive staff visibility into high and lower-priority activity inside the company and let's each group see how their work fits into each project.

Daily infrastructure team call. CIo Rick Boyd and his DBAs, application support team and IT infrastructure support team review the items that came up during the morning executive team meeting to ensure that everyone in IT has what they need to meet the daily and weekly objectives.

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;M.l.

Another aspect of the policy outlines the work equipment Chorus will provide to employees. In short, the company provides employees with all the computing and telecommunications equipment they need to do their jobs, such as laptops, monitors, keyboards, headsets and Internet service. Client services reps get paper shredders since they have to destroy certain documents to comply with HIPAA regulations. In one case where an employee needed a chair, the company gave the employee a chair from one of its about-to-be-closed offices. Employees pay for basic office supplies like paper, ink and toner cartridges, pens and Post-It notes out-of-pocket and submit expense reports for those items for reimbursement. Chorus also set up a policy on work hours. Employees have to be at their desks in their home offices during normal business hours. They can't opt to work odd hours. All employees have to use instant messaging (IM) applications, and they have to put their phone numbers and their IM handle in the global address list on company's Microsoft Exchange Server. In addition to the general work policies at Chorus, Marvin Luz, vice president of client services, says his group had specific, common-sense rules it had to follow. For example, they can't have TVs or stereos on in the background. Nor can they eat while on the phone with customers. These rules are meant to send the message that even though employees work from the casual confines of their homes, they must maintain a certain level of professional decorum while on the clock. Every employee had to agree to and sign off on all of these policies. Existing policies, such as those pertaining to computer and internet usage, remained in place.

Plan for Remote Tech Support

ne question that lingered in Chorus employees' minds through this transition was how the company was going to provide tech support. What if a virus infected someone's computer or an application crashed? After all, even though the company maintains a datacenter in New Jersey, its IT staff also works from home and

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Telecommuting visits it on an as-needed basis. It's not like a help desk staffer can walk over to someone's desk to troubleshoot and fix problems. The processes the IT group put in place to resolve technical support issues remotely aren't much different from the measures they took when an employee was working at a client's office and needed help from an IT staffer in New Jersey or Texas. For example, if an employee is having a software problem â&#x20AC;&#x201D; if they get an error message or they can't connect to a particular drive â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Aron Schneider, who works in Boyd's IT department, says IT simply takes control of their computer using remote desktop software like iTivity or by setting up a WebEx meeting. Boyd says Chorus uses WebEx extensively to shadow clients and remote workers when troubleshooting and as a teaching and collaboration tool. "If there is something we are trying to resolve or accomplish (loading Citrix at a client site, for example), the team will get on the WebEx and we will talk through the activity. This is a good way of keeping contact and providing training and knowledge transfer," he says. If an employee's hard drive crashes, the IT staff replaces it with a loaner laptop it has preconfigured with all the basic software apps the employee needs to function. "If they're close enough where I can drive it out to them, I can make a swap," says Schneider. "If they're on site with a client or in New Jersey, we FedEx it to them, and they send their laptop to us." Schneider couldn't say how having to wait to get a replacement laptop would impact employees' productivity because at that point he said no one had needed a replacement computer. Boyd said most employees would still be able to check e-mail on their home computers and use their cell phones to make calls, but he is aware that having to wait for a replacement laptop could temporarily impair the customer support team. To speed software downloads in the event IT needs to get a fully configured replacement computer to an employee, Boyd is looking for a software-based WAN accelerator.

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Boyd says that he hasn't received any complaints from managers about poor tech support now that everyone in IT is working from home. "I gauge most of what I do by the number of complaints I get as head of IT, and I haven't had a lot of issues other than, 'It's really tough for me as a developer to move a big file.'" The CIO adds that all of the development, testing and quality assurance is done through a corporate Citrix farm using a Microsoft SQL backend. Chorus's experience shows that providing remote desktop support is not impossible. It just involves some planning and workarounds.

Maintain Camaraderie

lthough most employees were delighted to start telecommuting, adjusting to the new lifestyle took more time for employees in Marvin Luz's client services department. The vice president of client services says his staff began e-mailing him to ask if they were ever going to go back into the office two weeks after they all began telecommuting. They missed the social contact, he says. "You have to understand the dynamics of a person who is in customer service,"

says Luz. "They're very social creatures, and being in an office fills that social need we have." Luz decided to bring his staff back into the Houston office two days week. "We did that for three weeks," he says. Then his group went down to one day in the office a week for a few weeks. Now they're all back to working from home five days a week, and they all feel much more comfortable with the arrangement having gone through that transition period, says Luz. Luz believes his staff had trouble adjusting to the new lifestyle because they couldn't get into a routine at home. Once they settled into a rhythm, the change became much easier. Luz plans to organize get-togethers for his group every quarter so that they can meet socially. CEO A.J. Schreiber is also planning quarterly, in-person outings for New Jersey and Texas staffers so that employees can maintain personal connections. Luz notes that if he were given a choice to go through this transition again, he wouldn't have his staff go cold turkey from cubicle life at first. He would d have started with a transition period. Some employees outside of client services were also wary of telecommuting.

Chorus CIO Rick Byod holds a daily conference call with his team and uses instant messaging to keep tabs on his staff throughout the day.

REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

Telecommuting As much as Aron Schneider was excited to work from home, the IT staffer was concerned he'd be distracted by his TV and the contents of his fridge, and that he'd be bored without any co-workers around. Schneider quickly realized he didn't have to worry. His home office is far enough away from both the TV and refrigerator. Some days he doesn't eat lunch until two or three in the afternoon because he's so busy, he says. As for the social contact, he communicates regularly with his team. The IT department has a conference call every day, and Schneider keeps in touch with individual co-workers over the phone and via e-mail. "If I need to get in touch with any of the DBAs, they are readily available," he says. "I really don't see that anything has changed working from home other than proximity."

Change the Way You Manage

any companies resist flexible work arrangements that involve telecommuting because their managers don't know how to manage staff who work remotely and because they don't like the idea of not being able to see the people they manage.

Chorus CEO A.J. Schreiber's decision to close two offices— and have employees work from home — is saving his company about Rs 2 crore a year.

Feature -03.indd 44

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Indeed, the adjustment to telecommuting may be hardest on managers since they're the ones who need to fundamentally change the way they do their work of managing. But those companies that don't allow telecommuting because they believe it's harder to measure employees' productivity when they telecommute are making a weak excuse, says Luz. "In today's companies where you are so wired and connected, giving the excuse that you can't measure someone's productivity doesn't fly with me," he says. "In a call center environment like my group, there are so many tools to measure productivity." Specifically, the dashboard that's part of Chorus's Cisco call center system shows Luz when his call center workers are logged in, when they're on a call, when they're on break, the duration of their calls, whether they answered calls that went to their extension, the number of calls they took each hour and whether calls were abandoned. The VP can even listen in on calls, interrupt calls and record them. Luz also uses Salesforce.com as the client services group's case management system for tracking customers' problems. Through the dashboard on Salesforce. com, Luz can see every account manager's queue and the number of cases they've

opened and closed. He says his staff has been "more productive from home than we ever dreamed they would be." CEO Schreiber concurs. He says the client services group's key performance indicators have been "stellar" and that the company as a whole is more productive. The IT group uses Salesforce.com, too. (In fact, the entire company uses the system). Boyd says Salesforce.com gives him a ‘right now’ view of what is happening in his department, but since the software isn't geared toward an IT shop, he can't see what his team has done two days ago, a week ago or last month. To get visibility into his staff's workloads, the CIO holds a daily, hour-long meeting to review and coordinate everyone's activities. Boyd also uses an instant messaging (IM) system to keep tabs on his IT staff. "Since you don't see someone walk in the door every day, when you see them become active on IM, you know they're up and ready for business," he says. Boyd realizes that employees can log into IM, or any system for that matter, and then walk away from their computer, so he pings members of his staff every once in a while to keep them honest. Not that he needs to keep his employees on their toes. Boyd says his staff's productivity — as measured by the number of cases they close — has increased dramatically since they began working at home. Everyone is working longer hours because they don't have to commute. "I'll start answering e-mail at six in the morning, and I don't get up from my desk, with the exception of getting something to eat, until six in the evening," says Boyd, who adds that he often gets work-related instant messages from his staff even at 8 P.M. IM goes a long way toward helping the entire company stay connected. Employees and managers alike use it to discuss work issues and to chat informally. Sometimes IM can be a pain, says Boyd, such as when he gets four simultaneous pings when he's on the phone or trying to concentrate, but overall, he thinks it’s an excellent replacement for the water cooler and for yelling over the cubicle wall. Clearly, productivity and its measurement is not the problem for Chorus. The soft side

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 6:20:07 PM

Telecommuting of management, however, is more difficult and requires more effort. Luz says he has to make a concerted effort to reach out to employees and see how they're faring. "I call them each individually throughout the week to chat with them about how things are going, how their families are doing. You need that type of social interaction with employees," he says, adding that this type of interaction was easier in the office. "I also need to make sure that I have them reach out to each other. I have been calling them and saying, 'Have you talked with the senior account manager?'" In addition to the informal phone calls, Luz conducts formal group WebEx meetings twice a week to make sure everyone has everything they need. Both Luz and Boyd say the experiences of working from home and managing a staff of telecommuters have improved their management and communication skills. "I'm not sure I'd say it made me a better manager per se, but it has made me a better communicator," says Boyd.

Telecommuting Can Work

n spite of the few challenges Chorus has encountered, its transformation into a virtual company has proceeded so smoothly that its customers don't even know the company has closed its offices and all employees are working from home. (Of course, that cat's out of the bag now.) "As someone from customer service, I measure success based on whether our clients have noticed anything," says Luz. "Our clients haven't felt any interruption or noticed something is different in the way we're handling things. That tells me this process is working extremely well." Even if your company is not planning to close all of its offices, it can still learn a great deal from Chorus's experience about how to support and manage telecommuters — the number one lesson being that it isn't all that difficult. The keys to success, as Chorus's experience shows, are proper equipment and technology, careful planning as to how employees will provide tech support and customer support, workload transparency, trial runs in telecommuting, help establishing a routine for working

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Afraid of Telecommuters?

That’s only because you don’t know the business case.

ompanies that don’t embrace telecommuting and other flexible work arrangements are making a strategic mistake, says Karol Rose, an author and CMo of FlexPaths, which provides a portal for managing workplace flexibility. We asked Rose why so many employers remain resistant and how to change their minds. Cio: there's a lot of talk about workplace flexibility these days, but is there an equal amount of action from employers? Karol rose: It's often bubbled up because a great employee says “I've had it. I can't work this way anymore.” These companies aren't using flexibility as a strategic tool, to achieve business results. They've generally approached flexibility as a one-off situation to accommodate individual employees. They've put in place formal arrangements that require some kind of written agreement between manager and employee. What's wrong with that? They may have created a way to manage flexibility that is inflexible. It's an oxymoron. It's also not working as well as it could because it's reactive. Why aren't employers offering their employees more? one reason is that companies don't really understand the value. [It] should meet personal needs, but if employees don't speak about flexibility in a way that makes sense for the business, they're not going to get it. if a Cio wants to lead the discussion about workplace flexibility at her company, how can she get started? Find out what your company already does. Check out the competition. look for the business. Next, develop an RoI. A mid-cap company with 14,000 employees would eliminate $3.5 million (about Rs 17.5 crore) in facilities costs and gain 17,000 carbon credits if five percent of its employees telecommuted. And that doesn't even factor in the increase in discretionary work time. Third, make a plan. look for possible influencers in the organization who might join in planning and presenting your plan to key decision makers. Next, pilot the plan. You can even pilot in your own organization. It's a great way to work out the kinks and learn what will work best. Finally, communicate. Share best practices, challenges, and ask everyone for input. Don't forget to go back to key influencers and decision-makers not just with quantitative data, but also qualitative data (stories) which are often even more compelling for leaders to hear. — M.l.

from home, and the occasional in-person meeting to keep everyone together and their spirits up. All of that effort at Chorus has led to productivity and service improvements — not to mention the annual cost savings. "We've been able to quantify that we are more productive now than when we had

physical offices," says Boyd. "Our number of open cases has reduced dramatically and the time it takes to resolve them has been reduced dramatically. It truly has been a byproduct of going 100 percent virtual." CIO Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

How armored car company Loomis is tackling the risks of enterprise wireless apps to reduce its exposure to robbery. By Kim S. Nash

Feature -02.indd 46

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 4:06:17 PM

Mobile Apps

Since 9,000 B.C., when cattle served as the world's first money, people have plotted to steal it. Herders knew that taking too long to get cows across Mesopotamia meant leaving yourself open to a deadly arrow in the heart. Now, as then, time makes money handlers vulnerable.

Last October in Philadelphia, two Loomis guards were killed as they collected cash and checks from a Wachovia ATM on their route. Surveillance tapes from that morning show a man sat in a car nearby, watching the armored truck arrive. One guard went to the bank machine, while the other remained with the truck. The killer put on gloves, walked over and shot them both with a 9-mm handgun, police said in published reports, getting away with a bag of deposits from the ATM. A man arrested in the case is charged with murder and robbery and awaits trial. Companies in other industries may not face such dire threats, but analyzing and mitigating corporate risk, in whatever form, is a growing part of the CIO's job. Of 316 IT leaders surveyed by CIO in June, 62 percent say they are very or extremely interested in risk management, up from 58 percent last year. And more CIOs are applying IT to help manage corporate risk — 38 percent, according to our State of the CIO 2008 survey, up from 30 percent a year earlier. Wayne Sadin, CIO at Loomis, knows that no amount of technology will eradicate crime. But he's counting on a new enterprise wireless application to shrink Loomis's exposure to it. Guards will use a smartphone system to replace the tedious, error-prone paperwork they normally fill out by hand, making each stop on a route faster. The new application is rolling out across the country this year and next but hasn't yet made it to Loomis's Philadelphia region. It's hard to know what effect it might have had on the robberymurder there. But computerizing the fieldwork of guards cuts the amount of time — and thus the level of vulnerability — at each stop, Sadin says. Plus, the real-time system produces more accurate information sooner about inventory — customers' money — in transit each day. Loomis can then offer the data to those customers, such as banks, retailers and restaurant chains. This helps Loomis achieve another goal familiar to many CIOs: reduce the risk of customer flight. "Information about money is sometimes as valuable as money itself," Sadin says. "If we can give people that, it makes it harder to switch away from us." The project itself involves risk: building core business applications for wireless capable phones is still a relatively new concept for midsize companies like Loomis, says Leonard Simmons, global products manager of mobility at CSC. Fortune 500-caliber companies are further along in wireless experimentation and adoption, Simmons says; they've often given employees wireless devices for personal productivity applications, such as e-mail, and added more complicated applications after that. (CSC is not working with Loomis on its project.) No matter the size of the company, though, going wireless means jumping hurdles, Simmons says. For example, security is usually a top

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Feature -02.indd 47

Reader ROI:

How IT can reduce business risk Challenges in integrating wireless apps with enterprise systems Considerations for a mobile user interface

REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

1/13/2009 4:06:22 PM

Moving Fast to Reduce Risk Loomis’ first enterprise wireless project took six months to develop and was killed after another six. With insight from that first attempt, Loomis built and tested a second application in just a few months.

New wireless project approved

2007

septeMbeR Motorola phones with built-in scanners selected Developers begin writing software for Windows Mobile connected back-end Oracle ERP system

deceMbeR

InsIgHt: The separate cell phones and scanners chosen the first time were too slow and difficult to connect to each other. For the second version, Loomis chooses a model built-in scanner.

InsIgHt: The first project used a heavy middleware layer to process data. This time middleware is as simple and light as possible, so processing isn’t too slow.

Pilot begins in Houston

2008

JAnuARy

Software completed

InsIgHt: The first time, developers were still working out system bugs and training took place mainly indoors. This time, guards are being trained in the field as they drive their daily routes. Most employees are proficient within 2.5 hours.

MARch Application goes into production in Houston

June Signature capture capability added. Customers can sign for pick up and delivery. InsIgHt: The first project never got this far. Loomis waited to roll out this capability because it had to make sure it complied with regulations in each state where it does business.

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

June-septeMbeR Training and roll out continues. The system is deployed in 13 branches in the southern and southwestern United States. Deployment throughout the United States is planned to be completed this year.

concern and sometimes delays wireless projects. Small screens and buttons on a smartphone automatically limit what developers can do with the user interface. Perhaps most critical is integrating new front-end technologies with whatever back end software applications the company runs. In Loomis's case, that's Oracle's E-Business Suite. Loomis is also dealing with an issue of its own making: Sadin and his team had to convince the rest of the company that this wouldn't be a repeat of a similar system tried two years ago but abandoned after six months. This time there's different software, hardware, interface and architecture, says Derek Pickett, director of enterprise systems at Loomis. "We learned a heck of a lot from that project," says Pickett. And as the new application moves from pilot to deployment, Loomis is still learning.

Moving Money Sadin, who has spent his 30-year career mainly at various banks, says Loomis' approach to IT, which traditionally slanted toward logistics, must incorporate approaches familiar to manufacturing and financial services. "Just like screws, paper clips or French fries, we manage inventory, and our inventory is cash," Sadin says. "We're a factory." Consumers made $34 trillion (about Rs 17,00,00,000 crore) worth of credit- and debit-card swipes and other electronic payments in 2006, according to a Federal Reserve System study released in March, but cash remains king. About $829 billion (about Rs 4,145,000 crore) in US currency circulates worldwide, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That's partly because most of the world lacks the technology to do meaningful digital commerce, reports the World Economic Forum (WEF), which ranks countries by the degree to which they use information technology. Indeed, $12 billion (about Rs 60,000 crore) in cash from the New York Fed — that's 363 tons of paper money — was flown to Baghdad in 2003 and 2004 to grease the wartime economy in Iraq. Much of it arrived stacked on pallets in bricks of $100 bills.

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Mobile Apps Banks reposition money all the time, says Mark Clark, senior vice president of strategic growth at Loomis. Major sporting events, such as the Indianapolis 500 or the Super Bowl, draw tens of thousands of fans. In anticipation of crowds giddy to spend, banks contact armored car companies such as Loomis to order delivery of extra volumes of crisp, dispensable twenties brought to regional distribution centers. It's easier that way to keep customer ATMs stocked, Clark says. Loomis also serves retailers, convenience stores and casinos, among other customers. Big-time money handlers often describe their business in manufacturing terms. Literature explaining how one part of the New York Fed works, for example, discusses coordinating shipment of inventory with five global banks and storing currency in cash depots until an order comes in. The Fed, like other entities that need to move money, uses various armored car companies for the job. And there are many. Three players dominate the $2.8 billion (about Rs 14,00,000 crore) cash management industry in the US: Brink's and Loomis, which are private; and Garda, which is public in Canada. But many small regional companies constantly nip at the bigger guys' business. Loomis posted $550 million (about Rs 275,00 crore) in sales last year, Clark says. Pivotal in reaching that goal is Loomis' regional cash management facility about 45 miles west of Boston (the company does not want to reveal exactly where). The center is one of the company's busiest. Mark Geib, area general manager for southern New England, won't say how much money flows through the low brick building. But as he strolls the noisy coin and bill processing rooms, he notes that the volume is enough to warrant two shifts of workers, five days a week, sorting, counting and packaging, and driving trucks. The Boston-area facility doesn't yet have the new wireless system. For now, things run the old-fashioned way, Geib says. Drivers arrive each morning and grab their route manifests — printouts

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Feature -02.indd 49

that tell them where to stop and what to unload or pick up. Trucks are loaded with that day's deliveries. That may include cases of quarters, rolled and boxed, headed to a store or restaurant. Perhaps clear plastic bags are stuffed with bundles of $20, $50 and $100 bills destined for another of Loomis' regional facilities. Departures are staggered every 20 or so minutes. A team of two or three guards might make more than 10 stops on a route. Trucks start coming back mid-afternoon to unload. There's only one door open at a time at the loading docks. "They come in one door and drive

Loomis' first attempt at a wireless system died on the vine. This time, the company spent more money on the hardware and more time perfecting the software. out the next door," he explains, "for efficiency and risk [management]."

Wireless Apps means Less Risk The business has always been risky. Loomis, formerly known as Loomis Fargo, is the oldest cash management company in the US, tracing its roots to the Gold Rush out West. The Fargo side began in California in the 1850s with stagecoaches. The Loomis side started with Alaskan dogsleds in 1905. They merged in 1997. When the Boston-area facility gets the wireless application later this year, guards will be trained in how to use ruggedized Motorola devices. A combination cell phone and scanner, the MC70 models are

about six inches long, three inches wide and weigh about a pound. Each unit also has a Velcro strap by which to hold it in either hand. "You have to keep your gun hand free," Sadin notes. The devices run Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system and a homegrown application in which guards can record details about their progress during a route, such as arrival and departure times at each stop, along with other details about the cargo they pick up and deliver. The interface allows keypad typing and tapping on menus. A built-in scanner lets guards check in and out bar-coded packages filled with cash, coins, checks, food stamps or postage stamps. Depending on where the package originates, either Loomis or the customer places the bar codes. Then in real-time over AT&T's cellular network, all the data is sent to Loomis' Oracle E-Business ERP system in Houston. Before now, that work was done on paper by guards and keyed into Oracle later by clerks in each branch who ‘de-brief’ the guards after each shift. Early results from a pilot in Houston in January and a subsequent rollout there in March show guards spend less time recording route information than they did before on paper. This lets them finish stops more quickly, which decreases their physical risk, says Chris Squier, an operations manager in Houston. The new system also eliminates 30 to 40 pieces of paper on each route, including delivery sheets, manifests and customer signature forms, Squier says. All that information now resides on the smartphone, which also captures customer signatures required for pickups and deliveries, like similar applications used by UPS and FedEx. Because the data is digitized from the start, there's no need for anyone to type it in later. The Houston branch has eliminated three de-brief positions, Squier says. Loomis, as a whole, meanwhile, can make decisions that decrease its corporate risk. For example, it sets limits on the amount of money a single truck can contain. (Company officials won't specify how much.) You don't want to send an overloaded truck REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

1/13/2009 4:06:31 PM

Mobile Apps through some violent neighborhoods, and if a truck is too full, guards can't complete all the pickups on their route because there's no room for more money on the truck. Sometimes, however, a guard may expect to pick up packages valued at a certain amount at a convenience store, based on past history, and finds bags up to four times as much instead because the store had a good weekend. Such discrepancies are common, Sadin says. Now they can be relayed immediately, via the wireless system, to branch managers. Loomis guards must follow a specific protocol to handle exceptions during their daily routes. When something unexpected happens, they either follow their training procedures or phone a branch manager for instructions. "Now we can recognize what's happening and use the handheld to advise proactively," adds Sadin. That's another time-saver and risk-mitigator.

The Second Time Around Loomis' first attempt at a wireless system died on the vine. In 2006, Loomis contracted with a software-on-demand company for a similar application, paying a monthly fee, says Pickett, the enterprise architecture director. The hardware, a Nextel cell phone, didn't have a fullfledged OS, such as Windows Mobile. It

was the size of a candy bar and delicate, meaning it couldn't stand up to drops and jostles in a truck day after day. A separate scanner had to be brought along to record bar codes. Going with a plain cell phone, and a small one at that, limited the functionality of the application, Pickett says. The user interface relied on many layers of menus. The size of the screen and the lack of a robust operating system meant it wasn't possible to use many icons to simplify navigation. The on-demand service came to be viewed as needlessly expensive, Pickett says. He declines to name the vendor. "We realized [that with] the money we were planning to pay them over two or three years, we could build our own system," he says. "The calculation was something like, within two years we would re-coup our costs, versus paying them endlessly." This time around, Loomis spent more money on the hardware and more time perfecting the software, he says. Where the first phone and scanner pair cost about $350 (about Rs 17,500) together, the Motorola MC70s, with built-in scanner, are $1,200 (about Rs 60,000) each. "It looks like a piece of equipment, rather than a phone," Pickett says. "We haven't broken one yet," Nick Olivas, an operations supervisor in Houston, adds.

Wayne Sadin, CIO, Loomis, says wirelessenabled logistics services can help the company retain customers, providing a competitive advantage.

Feature -02.indd 50

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

As for the software, Pickett foresaw two main challenges: linking the wireless application to Loomis' existing Oracle systems and improving the user interface on the phone itself. The first time around, Loomis used middleware between the phone and Oracle. That turned out to be pretty slow because it handled a lot of the transaction processing. Also, the separate scanner had to be connected to the Nextel phone at each stop, so that bar-coded data could be sent to the back end Oracle systems. "That could take two to five minutes," says Squier, the Houston operations manager, "and it could take 15 or 20 minutes to get data into the phone," he says. That's a big deal when a single stop is supposed to last, on average, no more than 15 minutes. This time, Loomis used integrated phone-scanner hardware to avoid connection issues. Loomis also developed the software with a very light middleware layer to be faster. As Pickett explains, rather than having the middleware translate data from Windows Mobile formats to Oracle, then send it, data is sent as is, then translated after it reaches the Oracle system in Houston. "We didn't get into any middle-tier processing. That's been a big win," he says. Decisions about how to design and deploy the middleware architecture can make or break a wireless application, says CSC's Simmons. Presumably, Loomis doesn't have a lot of different back end systems to contend with — Oracle is it — so the company could rely on doing data translation on the back end, he says. But for larger companies that need to deal with several different enterprise systems, a more strategic and multivendor approach is required. "Middleware might have to do a lot of the work in that case." As for the interface, most important for Loomis on the second try was creating the ability to move quickly between functions using graphical buttons on screen — mimicking existing processes and minimizing manual data entry by accessing data from central servers. The first project showed that forcing big hands to manipulate many tiny buttons isn't viable.

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 4:06:45 PM

Olivas was one of the first at Loomis to use the new application and says the touch screen is "simple," requiring about 90 minutes to master, top to bottom. "Once you get used to it, you just start rockin'. Everything's more accurate." Despite those improvements, the IT group at first anticipated resistance when it came time to start testing the new system last January. It wasn't unwarranted, says Squier. "Our employees suffered" through the first project, he says, "and they had a sour taste in their mouths." But rather than turn them off, the experience made them eager to try the new iteration, he says. "I wanted the opportunity to roll out the new version because of everything we went through before," he says, laughing.

toWARd betteR custoMeR seRvice Because Loomis, like others in the armored business, views itself as more than a group of gun-toting couriers, Sadin wants to use technology to open the door to more sophisticated cash management services. For example, doing business on paper meant customer accounts weren't updated right away. But keeping electronic estimates of the value of cargo collected and dropped off as drivers move from stop to stop, lets Loomis post the information quickly to customer accounts. When companies get accurate credit faster, they can make decisions faster on what to do with their money: invest it, move it, hold it, he says. "When it's sitting in our trucks or on our shelves, it's a non-performing asset. That's good for no one." One of the most common queries to Loomis's customer service line is, "Who signed for such-and-such package?" Handling those requests was a matter of finding the right papers and faxing them to the customer to compare disputed signatures. It could take days. But electronic signatures can be sent over in minutes, even minutes after a truck leaves a stop. If Loomis can provide logistics services rivals don't offer, Sadin reasons, the company can attract more business. Meanwhile, Sadin says, once you collect more digital data, you can analyze it for customers and charge them for the

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

Mobile Phones

tAlk business Gartner says businesses should plan for broad expansion of mobile devices and more users as mobiles will overtake landlines by 2011. pointing to a trend expected to profoundly affect how businesses plan and pay for telecommunications services, Gartner says mobile phones will outnumber wired lines and desktop phones in the office by 2011. In a forecast for business phone usage, Gartner said that 23 percent of workers will use only a mobile phone in 2012, up from about 4 percent today. With that growth, the number of workers with only a desktop phone will remain slightly above 10 percent between now and 2012, Gartner said. The first year that the number of users with only a mobile phone surpasses those with only a desktop phone is 2011. The forecast also predicts that business users with both a mobile phone and a desktop phone will make up the overwhelming majority but will decrease from more than 80 percent today to less than 70 percent in 2012. Gartner analyst Phillip Redman attributes the growth in mobile phones in businesses to a strong trend toward corporate support of cellular services. While companies used to have individuals put cellular service charges on expense reports, companies are starting to pay upfront, he says. Wireless e-mail and the emergence of smart phones that can be integrated with IP telephone systems have helped the wireless adoption trend, he adds. Redman says IT managers should start planning an investment timeline for wireless. He says that planning for internal cellular coverage will also be necessary, since some signals can be weak inside large buildings. Another preparation would be to consolidate telecommunications services with one provider to get the best deal. Gartner has begun seeing carriers offer large business users 25 percent discounts off list prices for bundled, unlimited flat-rate calling for voice and data services, Redman says. In addition, Redman urges IT shops to support fewer device platforms to lower application development and support costs. Help desks also need to be staffed with personnel familiar in device platforms and wireless operations. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Matt Hamblen

insights. In the future, Loomis sales people could let a bank know, for example, if one particular branch consistently fails to have packages ready for pick-up, which keeps Loomis guards waiting and ends up costing the bank extra. "Just like every other supply chain, we and our customers are trying to find efficiencies," Sadin says. Providing these technology-enabled services makes it harder for customers to switch cash-handling companies, he says. That kind of competitive advantage will

become more crucial when Swedish parent company Securitas spins out Loomis as a standalone public company in Sweden. But first Loomis has to finish rolling out the system to all of its 180 branches, which Sadin expects to finish by the end of this year. Meanwhile, Loomis still must plan for the certain risk that criminals will steal some of the thousands of pounds of money the company moves, Sadin says. "We pick it up, deliver it and guard it with our lives." CIO Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

REAL CIO WORLD | j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9

Essential

technology Employee provisioning of laptops and PDAs is the next logical step in the consumerization of IT. But figuring out the right parameters can be tricky.

Essentisl Tec.indd 52

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

From Inception to Implementation — I.T. That Matters

BYO…Laptop? By Stephanie Overby

| A few years ago, when Leslie Fiering began talking to IT executives about the potential benefits of employee-owned notebooks in the enterprise, the idea caused "fear, loathing and extreme distress in the hearts of CIOs," she recalls. But over the past two years, Fiering, a research VP for Gartner, has seen the idea pick up steam as more IT organizations test out employee-provisioned and owned hardware programs, "sometimes by choice, but often by necessity." "Employee-owned notebook programs are gaining popularity and are already run by over 10 percent of organizations," says Brian Gammage, Gartner VP and fellow. It's the next logical step in the consumerization of IT, say analysts. When people see the new notebook they really want has become affordable, they're going to get it and find a way to bring it to work. "We get calls from CIOs all the time saying, ‘Help, one of my executives got a MacBook Air. What am I going to do?'" A program for employee provisioning is one way to gain some control over these issues. It can lead to greater user satisfaction and reduce TCO anywhere from 9 percent to 44 percent, says Gartner. But figuring out the right parameters for a successful employee-owned laptop program can be tricky.

Hardware

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 3:42:09 PM

essential technology

Testing theWaters At Sunoco, IT leaders were eager "to evaluate the risks and benefits of consumerization in laptops," says Mark Quarles, manager of infrastructure services for the $36 billion (about Rs 180,000 crore) energy company: "Specifically, what are the total cost of ownership and manageability impacts of this paradigm shift?" Although the company didn't expect material savings on the hardware, the hope was that ongoing support costs could be reduced. The infrastructure services group had always provisioned and supported all hardware for the company's 14,000 employees. So, its IT leaders had real concerns about its impacts or risks on the reliability and security in moving to an employee-owned model. But Sunoco took some baby steps toward examining the pros and cons of putting that purchasing power in user hands. Sunoco's proof of concept for an employee-provisioning program involved

only way to ensure that users will provide a notebook that meets the enterprise performance and security requirements. And Sunoco had more than a few. It issued minimum workstation guidelines, including requirements for Microsoft Vista Business, OSX or Linux distribution, video and USB ports, 100GB hard drive, 2GB of RAM, and LAN connectivity. The program also required that laptops be configured for anti-virus software, Microsoft Office 2007 (excluding the Linux laptops), Citrix ICA Client, Windows Update and VPN. The Sunoco pilot made it the users' responsibility to acquire, configure and maintain their laptop without IS staff support. Participants documented the processes they followed to configure their laptop as well as the specific applications and access modes (connected to the corporate network or not) they used to do their work. Results were mixed. "Some participants â&#x20AC;&#x201D; around two-thirds â&#x20AC;&#x201D; decided they were spending too much time managing

Areasonable stipend is critical to an user-provisioning program because it ensures notebooks that meet performance and security needs. six workers over three months. The infrastructure group told them they could purchase any laptop they liked with a company stipend of $1,400 (about Rs 70,000). A reasonable stipend is a critical aspect of any employee-provisioning program, says Fiering, because it is the

Essentisl Tec.indd 53

their own desktop," says Quarles. Some were unable to resolve certain issues, like the lack of a full Microsoft Exchange client for Linux systems. Others were completely satisfied. The employee-owned laptop model increased complexity for users but didn't

16% of companies

already run an employeeowned notebook program but serve only 2% of their users. Source: Gartner

reduce TCO for Sunoco, Quarles says. Ultimately, the infrastructure services group determined there was not a business case for the employee-ownership model, at least not as Sunoco initially envisioned it. "It was clear that we would be unable to eliminate the entire desktop-support environment," Quarles says. "Even if you had a complete transition to this model, staff will, at the end of the day, expect that they can turn to internal resources to resolve their [IT] issues." Leaders at Sunoco remain open to employee provisioning in the future. "As technologies change potential issues change or disappear," says Quarles. "If, over time, the majority of applications can present themselves through a standard Web browser, then you have eliminated

1/13/2009 3:42:09 PM

essential technology

the need to install any software on the end-user platform, which should greatly reduce the need for support."

AQuiet Revolution Fiering notes that numerous unsanctioned, employee-owned notebooks and desktop PCs are accessing enterprise networks. Recent surveys have shown the number is considerably higher than anyone, let alone IT, ever imagined. A Gartner survey found that 30 percent of workers brought unsanctioned devices to the office. So, CIOs should at least explore official bring-yourown laptop programs. IT leaders are reluctant to publicize these efforts. "A lot of them are unsure about it and unsure of the backlash they may face

"It's still early days," says Fiering. Selfprovisioning tends to work well in smallcompany environments. Kearns & West is a public relations and dispute resolution consulting firm with 35 employees and a principal who also oversees information technology. It started a buy-your-own hardware program five years ago, although leaders admit it took a leap of faith to move away from the company-owned model. "We decided to get rid of our depressing laptop graveyard," says Sharif Ebrahim, a Kearns & West principal. "The program is a success because it lets everyone pick the packages and bundles that best suit their work. The road warriors go with the light laptops, the graphic designers go with the Macs."

Employee provisioning isn't likely to go away and will pick up steam.In fact, cell phones are already IT-sanctioned bring-your-own program. from auditors and others," says Fiering. Some of the uncertainty is unfounded; IT organizations have dealt with similar issues in giving non-enterprise devices from contractors or partners secure access to their networks. One IT leader at a Fortune 500 company says he cannot talk openly about his forays into employee-provisioned hardware but notes that "when it comes to buying a commodity item, a motivated consumer will invariably get a better deal than an enterprise."

Essentisl Tec.indd 54

Instead of one IT director making decisions, "50 percent of which are likely to be wrong," says Ebrahim, the firm's employees now have newer hardware and software than they would receive by waiting for the next refresh. Kearns & West maintains a few corporate-owned laptops that employees can check out as necessary. Ultimately, the trend will continue to pick up steam, says Fiering, but it won't happen overnight. "There are tools for PC virtualization that will allow companies

to reach out to non-company-owned devices with full security. That market is still maturing," she says. "And frankly, IT organizations need to do more work on the back-end with their own networks, policies and decisions about what kinds of users to involve, what kind of equipment they need to buy." And that will take time.

The Future of Provisioning Still, employee provisioning of laptops is not for every company. "It can open up large companies to a whole host of issues that keep CIOs up at night," says Fiering. "I don't think it will ever be universal. You're going to have high-security or military-type situations where it just doesn't make sense." That said, employee provisioning isn't likely to go away. In fact, cell phones are already the latest IT-sanctioned bring-yourown program. User-owned smartphones and PDAs are often tolerated because they are small and easier to turn a blind eye to, say Fiering and Gammage. But employees use them to access and store company data, so CIOs should consider putting policies in place around such mobile devices. Motorola says it has deployed a successful mobile self-provisioning process used globally. Employees have provisioned more than 14,000 smartphones in 33 countries, saving the company an estimated $400,000 (about Rs 2 crore) in annual support costs and eliminating long wait times for employees eager to sync their new device with corporate e-mail. CIO

Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

1/13/2009 3:42:09 PM

Pundit

essential technology

Left, Left, Right A three-punch combination of standards that can beat the slowdown back to its corner. By michael hugos IT Delivery | So the CEO and the CFO are telling you to cut IT expenses — tell them that for the good of the company you can’t do that. Tell them you already run a lean operation and saving another 10 percent on the IT budget is small potatoes compared to using IT to save 10 percent on the operating expenses of the whole company or using IT to grow revenue by 10 percent. As all eyes around the table turn your way to see how you are going to recover from that jaw-dropping bit of unexpected impertinence, drive home your point. Propose that instead of cutting IT, you’ll work with the CEO and the COO and the VP of sales to create strategies to deliver those savings operating expenses and attain those increases in revenue. Seal your

might result in investing in technology that becomes obsolete a lot faster than expected. Smart IT execs learn to get systems in place without a lot of up front cost. That means using SOA and SaaS and mashups and cloud computing to deliver new systems. Committing to the standard of a variable cost operating model is smart because it’s a great way to protect company cash flow. Payas-you-go operating models (like what SaaS and cloud computing offers) mean operating expenses will rise if business volumes rise, but just as important, operating expenses will drop or stay small if business volumes contract or don’t grow as big or as fast as expected. In this economy, where it is so hard to predict what will happen next, and where

they justify further investment. Start with targeted 80 percent solutions to the most important needs and then build further features and add more capacity as business needs dictate. Companies don’t outgrow scalable systems; they don’t have to rip out and replace scalable systems. Making such an offer to your CEO might sound pretty bold and risky but then consider this: if your plan is just to cut your IT budget and try to keep your head down, chances are excellent you won’t survive anyway. That's because if you dumb down your IT operations and IT is seen as a cost center instead of part of your company’s value proposition, then your CEO and CFO are going to quickly see that a great way to

When the going gets tough, the tough get agile.Your company’s business agility will determine whether it’s a victim of tough times or it rises to the challenge. offer by publicly committing to power the resulting business strategies with systems infrastructure that meets three unequivocal standards of IT agility: no capital expense, variable cost and scalability. Commit to the standard of no cap ex because it’s the order of the day. Revenue and profits are under pressure and credit is harder to get, so there is less money for capital investments. Also, because we’re in a period of rapid technological change, making big investments in technology is risky because it 56

ET-Pundit.indd 56

j a n u a r y 1 5 , 2 0 0 9 | REAL CIO WORLD

companies need to keep trying new things to find out where new opportunities lie, variable cost business models are best for managing financial risk. Committing to scalable systems infrastructure enables companies to enjoy the benefits of the first two standards. A scalable systems infrastructure enables a company to think big, start small, and deliver quickly. The CEO, COO and VP of sales can create strategies with big potential and try them out quickly on a small scale to see if

save an additional six figure sum will be to fire you. Who needs a highly paid person to run a bare-bones IT operation? When the going gets tough, the tough get agile. Your company’s business agility (and the IT agility that drives it) will determine whether it becomes a victim of tough times or whether it rises to the challenge and reinvents itself to fit new circumstances. What do you have to lose? CIO Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

Vol/4 | ISSUE/05

1/13/2009 3:12:55 PM