CIO October 15 2010 Issue by Sreekanth Sastry

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11/18/2011 7:11:53 PM

From The Editor-in-Chief

To do two things at once is to do neither. — Publilius Syrus, Roman slave, first century B.C.

Going over my two decades as a journalist I notice that maybe, just maybe, I’ve

More Can Also be Less When efficiency is not productive.

gushed a tad too much about the wonders of technology; about how much it improves efficiency, about how it’s ensured that we’re accessible, always productive and capable of doing more. Admittedly, attending to several things at a time is not a new ‘information age’ trait. Humans have been doing it for thousands of years. What has changed in the Internet era is the quantum of tasks and the haste with which we’re called upon to deal with them. When else in history could you conduct four IM conversations, flip through 14 browser tabs, scan though three spreadsheets, view the corporate dashboard, be on a conference call and send out mail, concurrently? An extreme case? Maybe. An efficient use of technology? Definitely. Productive? Unlikely. Research over the past few years reveals that multitasking costs us and our organizations dearly in productivity losses and bad decision making. And, this does not even take into account the stress caused by toggling between multiple tasks simultaneously. A study, conducted by the Institute of Multitasking costs us and Psychiatry at the University of London, the organizations we work found that “workers distracted by e-mail for dearly in productivity and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ”. losses and bad decisions. Another study found that continual use of e-mail and SMS lowered IQ by as much as ten points, while smoking marijuana regularly, caused only a four point drop in intelligence! Pointing to the ‘infomania’ in today’s work environment another study has discovered that organizations employing knowledge workers are greatly impacted by information overload. Infomania, the study’s authors observe, is the mental state of continuous stress and distraction caused by the combination of queued messaging overload and incessant interruptions. In one organization, the authors found that staff “averaged 11 minutes on any one ‘working sphere’ before switching to another altogether.” This extreme fragmentation of work resulted in a severe cumulative time loss, with some estimates as high as 25 percent of the work day. Their research found employees in a chronic state of mental overload in practically every company and organization in the industrialized world. Is multi-tasking then worth the effort? Not sure. Just not sure anymore.

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

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content october 15 2010‑ | ‑Vol/5‑ | ‑issue/12

22 Social Media

Case Study

COVER STORY WELCOmE TO WALL mART | 26

Forget Wall St. or Walmart. All the action is taking place on social media sites like Facebook’s wall. It’s an opportunity some of India’s most innovative companies are grabbing with both hands. Here’s how. Feature by Varsha Chidambaram

TAkIng ThE LOng ShOT | 54 How the CIO of Euronet Worldwide took the risk of fixing the company’s IT infrastructure with Open Source virtualization. Feature by Sneha Jha

CIO Role

CoVEr: dESI gn by Unn IkrIS hn an

WhAT CEOs ExpECT FROm CIOs | 44 CEOs want CIOs who know their industries, think like customers and can envision new business opportunities. Feature by Richard pastore

Deep Dive

more » 4

o C t o b E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 0 | REAL CIO WORLD

STORAgE| 69 As your storage needs continue to amplify and real estate continues to shrink, you need new tools to tackle information overload. Here’s how you can protect your company from today’s data onslaught. more » Vol/5 | ISSUE/12

content

Thrive | 92 Career | Not Ready to Hang Up Your Boots?

Feature by Debarati Roy

Mentor | 94 Staff Management |Building the Right Squad

Column by Shreekant Mokashi, Tata Steel

From the Editor-in-Chief | 2 More Can Also be Less

By Vijay Ramachandran

NOW ONLINE â&#x20AC;&#x153;Technology enables us to maintain uniformity. You can go to any NIIT center and you will get the same quality of learning. Technology also enables us enhance scalability. We can set up 100 centers in 100 days,â&#x20AC;? says Vijay K. Thadani, CEO, NIIT & Founder, NIIT University.

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

Executive Expectations View From The Top | 38 Vijay K. Thadani, CEO, NIIT & Founder, NIIT University, explains how IT is helping NIIT meet its rural goals.

Interview by Sneha Jha

Strategic CIO Parameters for Play | 22 Social networking sites can be a treasure trove of intelligence, but until you have rules relegating its use it can also be a minefield of threats. Column by Mike Hrabik

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Governing BOARD

Alok Kumar Global Head - Internal IT, TCS

Publisher Louis D’Mello

Anil Khopkar GM (MIS) & CIO, Bajaj Auto

Editoria l Editor-IN-CHIEF Vijay Ramachandran EXECUTIVE EDITOR Gunjan Trivedi Features Editor Sunil Shah Senior Copy Editor Shardha Subramanian Senior correspondent Sneha Jha CorrespondentS Anup Varier, Varsha Chidambaram trainee Journalists Debarati Roy Product manager Online Sreekant Sastry

Anjan Choudhury CTO, BSE Ashish Chauhan Deputy CEO, BSE Atul Jayawant President Corporate IT & Group CIO, Aditya Birla Group Donald Patra CIO, HSBC India

Custom Pub l ishing

Dr. Jai Menon Vodafone U.K.

Assistant Editor Kailas Shastry Senior Correspondent Gopal Kishore Correspondent Deepti Balani

Gopal Shukla VP - Business Systems, Hindustan Coca Cola

Des ign & Production

Manish Choksi Chief Corporate Strategy & CIO, Asian Paints

Lead Designers Jinan K V, Jithesh C.C, Vikas kapoor Designer Amrita C Roy, M.M Shanith, Unnikrishnan trainee designer Visaka Vardhan, Sabrina Naresh Photography Srivatsa Shandilya Production Manager T K Karunakaran

Manish Gupta Director-IT, Pepsi Foods Murali krishna K. Head - CCD, Infosys Technologies Navin Chadha CIO, Vodafone

Events & Audience Deve lop ment

Pravir Vohra Group CTO, ICICI Bank

VP Rupesh Sreedharan Senior program Managers Chetan Acharya Pooja Chhabra program Managers Ajay Adhikari Sachin Arora Management trainee Ramya Menon

Rajesh Uppal Chief General Manager IT & Distribution, Maruti Udyog Sanjay Jain CIO, WNS Global Services

Marketing & Sa l es (Nation a l)

Shreekant Mokashi Chief-IT, Tata Steel

President Sales and Marketing Sudhir Kamath VP Sales Sudhir Argula General manager Sales Parul Singh Asst. GM BRAND Siddharth Singh ASSt. Manager Brand Disha Gaur ASSOCIATE MARKETING Dinesh P SR. Manager Client Marketing Rohan Chandhok Ad Sales Co-ordinators Nadira Hyder

Sunil Mehta Sr. VP & Area Systems Director (Central Asia), JWT T.K. Subramanian Div. VP-IS, UB Group V. K Magapu Director, Larsen & Toubro

Advertiser Index

ADC India Communications Ltd

Alcatel Lucent - EMG

Amercian Power Conversion (I)

Avaya

Brocade

Canon Singapore Pte Ltd

IBC

Ctrl S Datacenters Ltd

Dell India Pvt. Ltd

Digilink & Digisol

EMC Data Storage Systems (I) Extreme Networks Hitachi Data Systems

1 25

49, 50, 51 & 52

HP storage

iCreat Software Pvt Ltd

LG Electronics India Pvt. Ltd

Microsoft Corporation (I) Pvt Ltd NetApp India Pvt. Ltd

3 47

Oracle

Quest Software India Pvt Ltd. Rittal India Pvt Ltd.

37 80 & 81

SAS Institute (India) Pvt Ltd

Tata Communications Ltd.

False Cover

Tata Consultancy Services

61 to 68

Tata Teleservices Ltd

Tulip Telecom Ltd BC Verizon Communications India

IFC

V.V.R Babu Group CIO, ITC

Regiona l sa l es Bangalore Kumarjeet Bhattacharjee, Varun Dev, Pooja Nayak Delhi Aveek Bhose, Prachi Gupta, Punit Mishra, Swati Agnihotri, Kalyan Basu Mumbai Ajay S. Chakravarthy, Dipti Mahendra Modi, Hafeez Shaikh

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hoT

unexpecTed

Cyber Crime Victims LOST I n t e r n e t We tweet, we re-tweet, we update status messages, share videos with friends, make purchases and payments and download entertainment. Most of us spend considerable time online making the virtual world a bigger platform than our real lives. And though we realize that this burgeoning world has potential threats, we hardly know what to do if we get attacked. A cyber crime report released by Symantec seconds this fact. The report revealed that 76 percent of internet users in India have experienced some form of cyber crime versus 65 percent globally. Fifty-seven percent of people in India believe that cyber criminals would never be brought to justice and 58 percent feel angry, 51 percent feel cheated and 88 percent feel guilty. According to the report, people are aware of online threats

that they could be susceptible to but only a handful know what action to take. “We accept cyber crime because of a ‘learned helplessness’. It’s like getting ripped off at a garage. If you don’t know enough about cars, you don’t argue with the mechanic. People just accept a situation even if it feels bad,” says Joseph LaBrie, associate professor of psychology at Loyola Marymount University. That’s why most cyber crimes go unreported or unnoticed as people don’t know where to turn for help. That explains these figures: Only 44 percent of cyber crime victims call up the police. On an average, around 50 percent of such victims will confront the banks or the websites and after a wild goose chase resort to restrict online behavior. Another reason for staying mum about cyber crime is the fact that it’s

harder to get yourself heard in India and even if you are, it doesn’t account for much. Globally, it would cost a victim $ 334 (about Rs 15,030) to resolve an issue and procedures could stretch to 28 days. In India, resolving a similar issue would take almost Rs 5,262 and about 44 days. The truth is that almost 45 percent of the crimes reported in India never get resolved versus 31 percent globally. Unless people and the law take it more seriously. — Debarati Roy

Quick Take

K. Suresh on Fieldforce Mobility As more businesses look for new revenue opportunities, many organizations are exploring mobile solutions to increase touch-points in rural areas. Organizations whose workforce is constantly on the move are keen to expand their rural footprints. K.Suresh, head-IT, Tata AIG General Insurance, shared his views with Debarati Roy.

illustrat io n by Visaka Vardhan

technology

Why do you use mobile solutions? To empower our investigation officers when they reach the scene of a mishap. As soon as a mishap is reported on our toll free number, the system detects the closest investigative officer and sends him a message on his PDA. Using their PDAs, officers take pictures which are instantly sent back to the main office for verification. What’s the most overlooked challenge in adopting mobility solutions? The standard issues are an application failing to work

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or technical snags with a device. But these are a part of the game. A bit of planning and a strong back up plan can take care of such concerns. Should there be a standard platform for applications and devices? I don’t see this as an issue as there are a lot of vendors in the market today who can develop applications which can run easily on any device or platform. The idea is to determine one’s business need and requirement, evaluate the kind of work and conditions one’s workforce faces before deciding on anything.

K.Suresh

What’s a more feasible medium: netbooks or smartphones? In my opinion, smartphones work better for computing on the move.Practically, every third person nowadays has a phone that is 3G or GPRS-enabled and they are easier to use and carry. Netbooks still have to attain a certain level of popularity to be included in the mainstream. REAL CIO WORLD | o c t o b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 0

The Bottomline: Industry Consolidation I T M a n a g e m e n t With the upturn, deep-pocketed technology firms are snapping up mid-tier IT vendors in order to enhance their service offerings. Intel bought McAfee, HP gobbled up 3PAR and now, VMware is vying to acquire Novell. Sneha Jha spoke to your peers to find out how this could affect CIOs and here’s what they had to say:

trendlines

“I think it will have a positive impact. It will ease operations, ensure better technology, product and service offerings, and increase customer support. And It will also be cost effective. ” Falgun Shukla Sr. General Manager-IT, Hikal

“It’ll have a positive and negative impact. The larger companies will address product and integration needs more effectively. But the cost of offerings may change suddenly due to overheads. Yogesh Zope VP-IT, Bharat Forge & Kalyani Group

“Adversely. There’ll be uncertainty during the transition period. Customers may lose the flexibility that they were enjoying with one of the partners in the consolidation exercise. And it will definitely stifle competition.”

Lend Your

C.V.G. Prasad CIO, ING Vysya Bank 10

Voice

Write to editor@cio.in

o c t o b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 0 | REAL CIO WORLD

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Net the Pirates S e c u r i t y Reducing software piracy by 10 percent in Singapore would create close to 2,000 new high-tech jobs, US$520 million (about Rs 2,340 crore) in new economic activity, and US$128 million (about Rs 576 crore) in new taxes by 2013, according to a study by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and IDC. The report, The Economic Benefits of Reducing Software Piracy, also revealed that the same action would inject almost US$41 billion (about Rs 184,500 crore) into the Asia Pacific economy, create 350,000 new jobs and generate close to US$9 billion (about Rs 40,500 crore) in new tax revenues for governments. "The main message is that through a slight reduction, there would be huge improvements. We hope this study can encourage governments to do even more in their anti-software piracy efforts," said Roland Chan, senior director-marketing, Asia-Pacific, BSA. Currently, nearly six out of ten software programs installed on personal computers in Asia Pacific are pirated. Most of this unauthorized software use occurs in otherwise legal businesses that buy too few software licenses for their employees' computers. In other cases, criminal enterprises sell counterfeit copies of software Reducing software programs at cut-rate prices. Cutting down on software piracy by 10 percent piracy sends ripples of in Singapore would stimulus through the economy by generating new spending create about Rs on related IT services and 2,340 crore in new distribution. That spending, in economic activity, turn, creates jobs and delivers and about Rs 576 new tax revenues. In addition, the study crore in new taxes finds that the benefits are by 2013. compounded by reducing software theft at a faster rate. If Singapore were to reduce piracy by 10 points over the next two years instead of four, it would boost the economic activity and tax gains by a further 35 percent. "In Singapore, the IT sector is a major contributor to the economy. In 2009, the IT industry supported 77,142 highly skilled, high-paying jobs. The IDC study found that 75 percent of the added GDP from a four-year, 10 point drop in piracy would remain in the market," said Chan.

— Jack Loo

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APAC: The Victim and the Crook

trendlInes

d a t a B r e a c h The APAC region is often known as an emerging market for all the right reasons. Here’s what has reversed that: According to the 2010 Data Breach Investigations Report, the region accounts for nearly 30 percent of electronic crime in the world. The report states that there are several countries in APAC that are the fastest-growing sources of data breach. “As compared to last year, we had more investigations in Japan than we had in US and Canada combined,” says Bryan Sartin, director, Investigative Response, Verizon. Interestingly, APAC is also becoming the number one target for crimes. This study was conducted by the Verizon Business RISK team along with the United States Secret Service where more than 65 percent of participants came from outside North America. The study suggests that the crime trends in APAC are quite different from those in the other parts of the world. “We are seeing website and online store type breaches in APAC which is in stark contrast to the West where such attacks have dried up. In India, insider threats are more prevalant than anything else and there are a lot of cases of third-party crimes. And I think a lot of that has to do with the level of IT services that are provided to the world from India,” says Sartin. And that’s evident from the percentage of insider theft that has more than doubled from last year. In India, one of the major hurdles for curbing crime is that Indian companies are reluctant to approach law enforcement agencies. They are more inclined to keeping mum about security breaches. “In India and APAC, the number of embezzlement, forgery, spoofing and pre-texting have increased. Misuse of social engineering was also part of insider threat and third-party partner breaches,” says Sartin. According to the study, investigators saw little or almost no evidence of social engineering on external breaches with the exception of

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Security professionals do not realize that they are looking for the needle in the haystack when they should be looking for the haystack itself. phishing, farming and spearing which again are not the most intelligent of ways to extract information. And while all of this is true, the study showed that data breach crimes are devolving. If one were to look at the initial points of entry, the study makes clear that there are only seven different and major types of cyber crime. And these are really basic in nature where 85 percent of the attacks did not use any advanced methods, extensive resources or elite skills. The study shows that breaches like SQL injections have been on the list of top three crimes for 10 years now, despite the fact that it is one of the easiest to detect

and identify. Similarly, the use of stolen login credentials is more prevalent in companies that allow their employees to log on to company systems remotely. Likewise, almost every one of the seven most common breaches has a very definitive signature which makes them very easy to detect. But “Security professionals do not realize that they are looking for a needle in the haystack when they should be looking for the haystack itself!” says Sartin. But there’s one thing that CIOs can do to protect themselves from data breach: Prevent it. Companies need to ensure that all sensitive data resides on one particular part of the network system. This way, only that particular system would be in the scope of compliance and monitoring. So anyone who gets access to this data whether its an employee or a hacker from another part of the world would have to get in and out of this little network which makes it that much easier to monitor and achieve greater data control. “If you know what crimes affect people the most and get security professionals to do an assessment for you then that makes for more effective monitoring,” says Sartin. —By Anup Varier

Why Do You Use

Social Media? This global social media survey shows that employees use the platform for both recreation and collaboration to help them work better.

To stay up to date with

news

research information for work

To get new

ideas

help

To ith their others llwenges cha

n tay i To s h with touc ds

frien

To promote my

To collaborate

externally

company To P

m yrsomeol f

To collaborate

internally

84% 78% 77% 75% 50% 49% 49% 46% 43% sourCE : Forr ForrEst Er rEsE E arC h

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Spending

illust ratio n by Visaka Vardhan

trendlines

Spree

IT Management Without waiting for any categorical confirmation if the global financial crisis has finally ended, global CIOs continue to upgrade their organization’s IT infrastructure. According to a global survey of CIOs conducted by Gartner, IT spending trends in the first half of the year reveal that on an average, spending this year would be at 1.1 percent than last year's. This is close to the 1.3-percent average that 1,600 CIOs surveyed last year said they would spend this year. CIOs revealed that they are going to increase their 2010 capital expenditures on IT by three percent with a 1.3-percent cut in operating budgets. Both spending projections, however, follow a weighted global average reduction in IT budgets of 8.1 percent for 2009, a Gartner press statement stated. Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research at Gartner Executive Programs, said these survey results indicate that the global economic crisis has prompted CIOs to change their spending priorities. While most organizations did not expand their IT budgets as the world reacts to the global financial crisis, CIOs had to come up with ways to fund the upgrade. "The need to upgrade infrastructure is being appropriated from reduced operating budgets," said McDonald. "CIOs felt they could no longer delay infrastructure upgrades and other capital investments and they funded them at the expense of operating budgets." Even as the survey pointed to a recovery of industries hardest struck by the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, CIOs of retail, financial services and manufacturing only felt modest growth in IT budgets in the first half of 2010. Forty-nine percent of CIOs reported their budgets followed this trend but a significant number did not. In the first quarter of 2010, 26 percent were able to finalize their budgets. "Size certainly matters in terms of IT budget outlook," said McDonald. "Smaller firms report significantly stronger IT budget growth percentages than their larger counterparts." McDonald further explained that the larger the firm, the tighter it is at managing its IT budget in general, particularly IT operating expenses. —By Veronica C. Silva

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Your Workplace in 2020 T e c h How will people work 10 years from now? "Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, 'swarming' and more," says Tom Austin, a Gartner fellow. In just five years, a Gartner report notes, 40 percent or more of an organization's work will be "non-routine," which is up from 25 percent in 2010. Here are five of the most interesting trends that Gartner has predicted. De-routinization of Work. The core value that people add is not in the processes that can be automated, but in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning, states the report. Non-routine skills are those we cannot automate. Work Swarms. Gartner says that swarming is a work style characterized by a flurry of collective activity by anyone and everyone conceivably available and able to add value. Swarms form quickly, attacking a problem or opportunity and then quickly dissipating, the report notes. Swarming is an agile response to an observed increase in ad hoc action requirements, as ad hoc activities continue to displace structured, bureaucratic situations. Attention to Patterns. Gartner predicts growth in the number of organizations that create groups specifically charged with detecting divergent emerging patterns, evaluating those patterns, developing various scenarios for how the disruption might play out and proposing to senior executives new ways of exploiting (or protecting the organization from) the changes to which they are now more sensitive. Hyperconnectedness. It may sound buzz-worthy, but hyperconnectedness is a property of most organizations, existing within networks of networks, unable to completely control any of them, notes the report. Hyperconnectedness will lead to a push for more work to occur in both formal and informal relationships across enterprise boundaries, the report states, and that has implications for how people work and how IT supports or augments that work. My Place. It's no surprise to learn that the workplace is becoming more virtual. The report states that many people will have neither a company-provided physical office nor a desk, and their work will increasingly happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In this work environment, the lines between personal, professional, social and family matters, along with organization subjects, will disappear. —By Thomas Wailgum Future

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trendlines

Green Vampire Slayers G r e e n I T A team at London's City University has been granted a patent on a new 'green' technology that stops phone, laptop and MP3 chargers eating electricity even when nothing is connected to them. Most consumers are aware of the issue of connected devices continuing to eat power even when batteries have fully charged, but few realize that this also applies to a small but measurable extent even if the device is then removed while the charger is left plugged into the mains. Called ‘vampire’ power loss, the phenomenon has largely been ignored by consumers and device makers until recently, because the amounts of energy consumed—around 0.1 watts per adaptor per day on average use cycles—were seen as being small. With the patent now granted, the City University engineers, headed by Professor Sanowar Khan, have released full details of their solution in the form of a tiny microswitch. This would be integrated with the phone or laptop interface cable, cutting power drain from the mains completely once the charging device has been physically removed from the other end. According to Khan, a number of rival technologies

have been trying to achieve the same aim but the team's microswitch is the first to do so without itself drawing any power. "Sixty-five percent of UK mobile phone owners leave their chargers plugged in once a week, but the redundant adapters continue to use power," said Khan. "With around 70 million handsets in the country [2006 figures], conservative estimates suggest that six gigawatt-hours of energy—equivalent to six large power stations working for one hour each—is wasted in this way every year." He hopes that the energy-saving regulation will require such a technology to be built into the next generation of device chargers as standard. "I hope that a large mobile telephone company will embrace the technology," said Khan. The issue could be how far the industry and its regulators want to go to eliminate energy wastage when bigger targets remain to be tackled. But as long as adaptors are used to charge devices from main power, the day could arrive when even tiny savings from Khan's micro-switch start to add up into a necessary economy. —By John E. Dunn

Mobile Apps Boost Social Media S u r v e y There's mounting evidence that smartphones and mobile devices are increasing the use of social networks and microblogging sites. Twitter CEO Evan Williams earlier this month blogged that 46 percent of active Twitter users regularly use a mobile device to tweet. In the post, Williams said that the number of users accessing Twitter on mobile devices had jumped 62 percent since mid-April. Overall during that period, the number of people using Twitter rose 27 percent, from 106 million to 145 million. Even with the mobile growth, Williams noted that 78 percent of Twitter activity originated on desktop systems during August. Meanwhile 14 percent of users accessing Twitter

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For years, marketers of all types have during the month did so via the mobile been interested in using location data Twitter Web site. on smartphones to give mobile users Meanwhile a survey conducted by marketing and other pertinent information PRWeek and MS&L Group found that when they are close to a retail US-based marketers also outlet. The connection between believe mobile social networks Mobile tweeting social networks and mobile will be important to their had jumped devices seems secure. businesses in the coming year. 62 percent since For example, ComScore When asked which social mid-April. During reported in June that social media efforts would have that period, the networking apps are the fastest the biggest effect on their number of people growing mobile apps in the US. companies and brands, 17 using Twitter rose From April 2009 to April 2010, percent of 262 respondents 27 percent. the number of unique users in said the greatest effect would the social networking category be through the use of social grew 240 percent, reaching 14.5 million, media on mobile platforms. placing it third behind only weather and Further, 12 percent of the 262 map applications, ComScore said. surveyed said the biggest impact would come from greater use of mobile, —By Matt Hamblen location-based social networks.

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alternative views B Y A n u p Va r i e r

The SLA Management Dilemma In-house vs Third-party provider

“Without a single vendor managing the rest, interdependencies between vendors could force you to spend

time managing conflicts.” Amit Khan AGM-Technology, mJunction Services

trendlines

It is advantageous to have one vendor manage all your SLAs with other service providers. This way you will have only one vendor to deal with; any other way you choose will see issues crop up. This approach is based on knowing how vendors work. Take for example, the fact that there are interdependencies between vendors. Often, one vendor’s SLAs depend on the deliverables of another, which becomes an excuse for the former to not meet their SLAs. This can lead to a lot of conflict and, soon, instead of working on your projects, you could find that all your time is taken up in conflict management. Now, if you have one vendor monitoring and managing all of the rest for you, a lot of these unwanted issues could be avoided, which makes it easier for the enterprise to focus on core IT issues. This is why in a project involving multiple vendors, we try to find an SI who has a track record of delivering projects from end to end. And we take this approach even if it means paying a premium because I feel that it helps the organization avoid hassles. Also, with multiple vendors, we run the risk of having our projects delayed if one of our vendors slips up. That said, when things go wrong, the first level of accountability lies with the internal IT team. At the end of the day, it is still IT’s responsibility to have a clear understanding with the vendor and ensure they fall in line.

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“By investing a little more you can manage in house. This is much better than going for the

costlier option of outsourcing just for the sake of peace of mind.” Rajnish Kumar Co-founder & CTO, Ixigo.com

Unless you operate in a B2B environment where SLAs are not as critical as in a B2C (imagine the losses an hour of downtime could lead to), then SLAs can be managed internally quite well. Unless you have the resources to handle SLAs yourself, having a single point of contact makes sense. But it makes sense only at a certain scale and a certain level of criticality of the business. I wouldn’t however recommend this for smaller companies and personally I wouldn’t opt for such an arrangement. When you are small, you usually have proprietary technology and you tend to be more protective of those. If it falls into the wrong hands it could hurt you. Also if you try to outsource SLA management of multiple service providers, it has a cost implication. That wouldn’t be necessary if you plan and chalk out everything right from the beginning, like we have done, because then it ensures that there is sufficient information available to allow you to react in time. We have the necessary skill sets in-house. And applying the 80:20 rule, we can get 80 percent of our work done by investing a marginal extra. This is much better than going for the costlier option just for the sake of peace of mind. The best approach would be to ensure that you do not have too many vendors to deal with in the first place. And even when you’re forced to have multiple vendors, it’s smart to try and avoid inter-dependencies.

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Bernard Golden

Applied insight

The Better of Two Agilities Cloud computing offers enterprises two very different types of agility. While both are good, only one will ultimately, be seen as offering the greatest impact.

Illustrat io n by MM Shan ith

key benefit often discussed about cloud computing is how it enables agility. This benefit is real and powerful. However, the term agility is used to describe two different kinds of benefits; both are real, but one of them will, ultimately, be seen as offering the greatest impact. What does cloud agility mean? It's tied to the rapid provisioning of computer resources. Cloud environments can usually provide new compute instances or storage in minutes, a far cry from the very common weeks (or months, in some organizations) the same provisioning process can take in typical IT shops. As one could imagine, the dramatic shortening of the provisioning timeframe enables work to commence much more quickly. No more submitting a request for computing resources and then anxiously watching e-mail for a fulfillment response. As agility may be defined as "the power of moving quickly and easily or nimbleness" it's easy to see how this rapid provisioning is referred to advancing agility. But here is where the definition gets a bit muddled. People conflate two different things under the term agility: engineering resource availability, and business response to changing conditions or opportunity. Both types of agility are useful, but the latter type will ultimately prove to be the more compelling and will come to be seen as the real agility associated with cloud computing.

The First Kind of Agility The problem with delivering compute resources to engineers more quickly is it is a local optimizationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it makes a portion of internal IT processes more agile, but doesn't necessarily shorten 20

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Bernard Golden

Applied insight

the overall application supply chain, which stretches from initial prototype to production rollout. In fact, it's all too common for cloud agility to enable developers and QA to get started on their work more quickly, but for the overall delivery time to remain completely unchanged, stretched by slow handover to operations, extended shakedown time in the new production environment, and poor coordination with release to the business units. Moreover, if cloud computing comes to be seen as an internal IT optimization with little effect on how quickly compute capability rolls out into mainline business processes, the potential exists for IT to never receive the business unit support it requires to fund the shift to cloud computing. It may be that cloud computing will end up like virtualization, which in many organizations is stuck at 20 percent or 30 percent penetration, unable to garner the funding necessary to support wider implementation. If the move to cloud computing is presented as "helps our programmers program faster," necessary funding will probably never materialize. The second type of agility—that which affects how quickly business units can roll out new offerings—suffers no such problems. If business units can see a direct correlation between cloud computing and stealing a march on the competition, funding will not be an issue. It never is when the business benefit is clear. How about some examples of the kind of business agility fostered by cloud computing? Glad you asked. Here are three from the world of journalism:

With regard to the agility cloud computing offers, Simon Willison of the Guardian noted that, "I am working at the Guardian because I am interested in the opportunity to build rapid prototypes that go live: apps that live for two or three days." In other words, the agility of cloud computing enables quick rollout of short-lived applications to support the Guardian's core business: delivery of news and insight. Finally, turning to the United States, the Washington Post took static PDF files of former First Lady Hillary Clinton's schedule and used Amazon Web Services to transform them into a searchable document format. Furthermore, it then placed the documents into a database and put a simple graphic interface in place to allow members of the public to search through them as well—again, crowdsourcing the analysis of documents to accelerate analysis. One might argue that these examples don't prove the overall point of how cloud computing improves business agility; after all, these are media businesses that deal with immaterial bytes, not ‘real’" businesses that deal with physical objects and can't be satisfied with a centralized publication site. That misses the mark, though. Modern economies are shifting to become more IT-infused (a.k.a. moving to ubiquitous

Doing It for the Enterprise

computing) and digital data is become a key part of every business offering. And the ability to turn out applications associated with the foundation business offering will be a critical differentiator in tomorrow's economy. The ability to surround a physical product or service with supporting apps offers more value to customers and provides competitive advantage to vendors. And knowing how to take advantage of cloud computing to speed delivery of complementary apps into the marketplace is crucial to win in the future. Failing to optimize the application delivery supply chain will hamper companies as they battle it out in the marketplace. It is a huge mistake to view cloud computing as a technology that helps IT do its job faster. Internal IT agility is necessary but not sufficient for the future. More important will be to tie the application of cloud computing to business agility, speeding business innovation to the marketplace. Both kinds of agility are good, but the latter is profound and should be the aim of your cloud computing efforts. CIO

It’s a mistake to view cloud computing as a technology that helps IT do its job faster. More important is to tie it to speeding business innovation to the marketplace.

The Daily Telegraph broke the story of major scandal regarding Members of Parliament expenses. The story was a huge cause celebre, complete with vastly entertaining examples of MPs putting in for reimbursement of their moat cleaning expenses and for building a duck house. The number of expense forms was, as might be imagined, huge, and overtaxed the resources of the Telegraph available to review and analyze them. So the Telegraph loaded the documents up in Google Docs and allowed readers to sort through them on their own. Toby Wright, CIO of the Telegraph Media Group, mentioned this example in his presentation at the Cloud Computing World Forum, and noted that it was fascinating to see several hundred people clicking through the spreadsheets simultaneously. Not to be outdone, the Guardian had its own response to the expenses scandal. It quickly wrote an application to let people examine individual claims and identify ones that should be looked at more closely. This crowdsourcing allowed more questionable claims to be turned up more quickly and kept the heat on the situation.

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Bernard Golden is CEO of HyperStratus and the author of Virtualization for

Dummies. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Mike Hrabik

Strategic CIO

Parameters for Play Social networking sites can be a treasure trove of intelligence, but until you have rules relegating its use it can also be a minefield of threats.

Illustration by MM Shanith

ny company with a computer in the office needs to adopt a social media policy. It is just common sense, and, frankly, a smart edict to deploy and follow. The main purpose of implementing a social networking policy is to identify the proper usage and behavior for social networking applications. Remember, the overall goal is to protect the rights and privacy of all employeesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and the integrity and reputation of the company. The CIO should be responsible for ensuring the effective implementation of enterprisewide IT policies, standards, and procedures within each department. They should be posted in a place where they are easily visible, like an intranet site, and reiterated on at least an annual basis. Before any company delves into social media, it is important to be familiar with what it should look like and what elements the plan should include to be most effective. Communication is dynamically changing, so it's important to establish new or further enhance existing policies to accommodate these changesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and to revise when new forms of social media are being adoptedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;preferably earlier rather than later. Because social media is unchartered territory for most companies, many people don't have an instinctive sense of the right and wrong ways to use it. Social networking users can easily introduce and spread malware. A social media policy educates employees about your expectations for their behavior. It also gives an indication of your company culture and work environment. Here are a few guidelines to being good stewards: Figure out what's the business value. It's important to 22

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Strategic CIO

consider whether utilizing these tools will add any real value to your organization. At the same time, the phrase "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" comes into play. If there aren't any social media activities/technologies sponsored at the corporate level, your folks will likely put something out there anyway and without your control. When this happens, the repercussions could rapidly spin out of control. Social media sites are exploding with new features and functions, with new sites popping up all over the Internet on an almost daily basis. You need to continuously identify and evaluate social media sites to determine business relevance and the unique risks associated with sites used by employees (on the personal or business level). A company contemplating starting a blog or utilizing social network sites should: Produce policies, standards, and procedures. Train employees on business strategy for use of such sites. Update and refresh materials as necessary to be sure the messages are always accurate. Measure success and quality distribution channels. Continue to review risk associated with the media's evolution. The policy should define what ‘public’ information is—for example, press releases, social media sites, marketing materials—and firmly state that only information labeled or considered public can be used on social media sites. Evaluate the security and risk. The most effective way to illustrate security risk is to educate by example. For example, it sounds great if you have a sales person who uses LinkedIn to create a network of business connections. But consider the fact that anyone can easily view any given user's connections and see current and past clients and co-workers. Here's another example. Technical people may use support blogs and forums to post questions about challenges and problems. Again, while this certainly has value to the individual, these posts often provide huge insight into an organization's IT infrastructure. I think we can all agree attackers would love to get their hands on this type of information. Here are some security-related items to consider: Updated information use guidelines and policies. Dictate what content can/should be published. Comply with company confidentiality guidelines. Keep in-line with company image and vision. Respect all copyrights and trademarks. Train employees on publishing materials and document the results of this training. Don't forget to assess and review. How do you know if these sites are effective? How do you know what information

is being put out there if you don't check for it? How do you know what risk is associated with evolving sites? What new sites are out there and being used? This is a key part to understanding effectiveness and examples of policy breach to utilize for training purposes. This final step should include: Identify authorized persons or agencies to access social media websites. Monitor for information leakage. Remember automating tools are your friend. Evaluate the risk of existing sites on an ongoing basis. Even if a company has social media policies in place (with rules about what can and can't be posted), there's no guarantee everyone will represent the company exactly as intended. It's not enough that employees read the policy. They should sign off on the fact they have read it or even be given an oral or written test. Without written sign-off, it's far too easy for an employee to claim "I never got the policy" or "Nobody ever told me I couldn't do that." Should the matter go to court (over whether you had the right to terminate an employee for tweeting about a client's pre-launch strategies), you'll want a paper trail or e-trail.

Hackers live for social media. You'd be surprised at the sensitive data that's available to the public, such as log data, network diagrams, configuration files, and yes, even names and passwords.

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The Security and Compliance Risks Social media sites are also havens for the hacker community— often times, they are based overseas where your country has little or no jurisdiction. This is why emphasis is important. Sites, which are utilizing Web 2.0, are particularly vulnerable to: Web application security threats; data aggregation threats; re-targeted threats and threats to reputation. Employees must be aware of what they can and cannot post and/or discuss on public blogs, forums, collaboration, and help and technical forms. Such posts should also be monitored. Hackers live for social media. You'd be surprised to know what sensitive information is available to the public, such as dump files, log data, network diagrams, configuration files, and yes, even user names and passwords. Security and compliance is not just about blocking web sites, it requires understanding the business and customizing a security solution, which ensures regulatory compliance. It is always smart to have an outside service provider perform an initial assessment of your regulatory

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Mike Hrabik

Strategic ciO

requirements. Also, assess the extent to which an organization's users utilize social networking services and the sort of data leaving the organization. This will give you an understanding of the risks and the effectiveness of existing controls.

The Upside

executives view social media in a ‘quantifiable business’ sense. So show them the cost of paying market researchers for data that is freely available on social media.

With all of that said, how can social media advocates convince CEOs and other executives that social media is worth pursuing? Many executives do not consider social networking to be an investment that delivers sufficient value to warrant pursuit. Companies must have a champion to articulate the value proposition in real terms. The first step is convincing executives that social media is valuable to the organization. Sit down with the executives, one-on-one and walk them through a social media session. You cannot be sure what their views are, so try to show them it is possible to utilize social media in a secure and userfriendly manner. Leave them with an understanding of what useful business information you can get from the social network sites. Show them the useful marketing and competitive intelligence information you can access about your business. Executives view social media in a ‘quantifiable business’ sense. It is all about generating revenue! Put a figure to it—show the amount of money you would have to pay market researchers to provide the information that is freely and publicly offered on a social networking site. Let them know how their competitors are using various social media channels and generating revenue. Try to get support from stakeholder departments, such as information security, auditors and marketing folks. If you have their support, it will make selling social media easier. It always helps to go in with support from a key ally—investor relations, information security and products. If you have the support of other key players it makes selling it to the top easier. Bottom line, executive decisions are driven by fiscal requirements. Have a plan, which includes current benchmarks, expected improvements, and a timeline for measurement. Include traffic, customer lifetime value, response rates, and sales in your metrics. This provides a method for monitoring the effect of your social media efforts and reduces resistance. Make sure the timeline is long enough to see the benefits. CIO

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With more than 20 years in the information security field, Kenneth van Wyk has worked at Carnegie Mellon University's CERT/CC, the US Department of Defense, Para-Protect and others. He has published two books on information security and is working on a third. He is the president and

extremenetworks.com

principal consultant at KRvW Associates LLC. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Cover Story | Security

Welcome to

Wall Mart

By Varsha Chidambaram

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The writing is on the wall. Rarely has a cliché rung more true. In the 10 seconds it took to type that, over 10,000 photos were uploaded to Facebook’s walls as millions of consumers sought to make themselves heard. In their frenzy to make a mark on the world, to be heard, to share, consumers are leaving behind data trail that’s unparalleled in history. And social media is where it’s all happening. Piecing together these clues could create a digital portrait of individual customers that is every marketers dream. Reader ROI: Unfortunately, it’s still all pie in the sky. Where marketing is headed Why? Because few enterprises have enough and why CIOs need to follow maturity—or leadership—to leverage this wealth Rules of the social media game of data. But there are a few Indian companies, What some pioneering sometimes led by their CIOs, who are changing companies are trying that. Here’s what they are doing.

Illustration by visha ka va r dha n

Cover Story | Social Media

! help

Page

The New Wall St. What India’s most innovative companies and CIOs are attempting.

Page

The Great Leadership Opportunity Few CIOs today, in India or elsewhere, have embraced social media. Why that can’t continue.

Page

The Responsibility That Comes With Social Media Fastrack’s marketing head tells you how and where one of India’s most successful brands in social media is headed.

28 32

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Cover Story | Social Media

The New Wall Street

Today it’s only a wall full of posts, but these conversations on social media sites are where tomorrow’s money is going to be made. Are CIOs listening? By Varsha Chidambaram Like there weren’t enough numbers for you to watch, here’s another one: How many Facebook fans does India’s most popular social media brand have? Wait. What is India’s most popular social media brand? If you don’t have an answer to these questions, you are not alone. Despite social media emerging as tomorrow’s most important marketplace, few IT leaders have made it a priority. Yet, according to a brand engagement study on social media, by Altimeter and Wet Paint, companies that are both deeply and widely engaged in social media surpass their peers significantly in terms of revenue. Companies with the greatest breadth and depth of social media engagement saw revenues grow by 18 percent over the last 12 months, as opposed to those that were least engaged: Their revenues sank an average of 6 percent over the same period. Fortunately, there are some CIOs who have embraced social media and are providing their businesses with deeper customer engagement and new revenue channels. Here’s what they have learnt along the way.

Technology Adaptation Life Cycle for Social Computing Pervasive & embedded capabilities

Business impact

Transformational

Integrated with enterprise applications & processes

High

Enterprise-class platforms

Moderate

Low

Off-the-shelf & point solutions Phase I 2000+

Phase II 2005+

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Phase III 2010+

Phase IV 2013+

The Zoozoo Effect The answer to the second question is Vodafone. According to Brands Going Social, India’s first and only website that monitors and ranks the performance of Indian brands on Facebook and Twitter, Vodafone has the highest number of fans across any Indian enterprise on Facebook. Zoozoo, the official fan page of the company, has a staggering 921,065 fans (at press time. It grew by over 30,000 in the last 10 days of writing). “Social media is not just about posting a feed. On the Web, people are commenting about my brand all over the place. Customer service has now extended from dialing 111 on a phone to engaging with us over online platforms,” says Manoj Nigam, VP-IT, Vodafone. “It is a paradigm shift. If you make a customer unhappy, he could influence five people in the real world. But on the Internet he could influence 10,000. That’s why the need to address this media is vital.” Nigam is one among a small group who has found a way to integrate intelligence gathered from social media into his backend systems and help his business segment and target its audiences better. But he didn’t always play a pivotal role. Like many Indian businesses, when Vodafone started with social media, it engaged third-party digital marketers to fulfill its needs. But as data volumes exploded, IT was asked to step in and integrate Vodafone’s social media conversations into the company’s internal systems. Today, Nigam’s work has improved Vodafone’s customer communication and experience. The carrier is able to handle complaints, which would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Nigam and his team are currently devising social media tools that can, for instance, capture and use psychographic data. They’re also in the process of creating knowledge-driven chatbot, designed to simulate human conversation. For Nigam, these are just the initial steps in a long-term commitment to technology-enabled business solutions. “The focus of customer segmentation will shift from person to persona and online channels will play a big role in that.” Nigam’s example illustrates how CIOs can drive their businesses into tomorrow’s Wall Street. (For more, read The Great Leadership Opportunity Page 32) But, first, they’re going to have to figure how to best leverage social media for their companies. Connecting to the money. Creating a sales channel: It’s the ultimate promise of social media. But very few have succeeded

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Cover Story | Social Media

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“Social media is a paradigm shift. Customer service has now extended from dialing 111 on a phone to engaging with us over online platforms.”—Manoj Nigam, VP-IT, Vodafone a spa treatment or a meal at a restaurant. Key to the business model is attracting the right amount of people to sign up for a deal and create volume. Since these deals have an expiry date, it’s imperative that a group buying site reaches out to as many customers as possible. Has group buying existed before? Sure it has. But the number of new Indian players in the space is a testament to how social media is fuelling this trend. In the last year alone, over seven Indian group buying sites have been launched. “India has seen phenomenal success in group buying because we are essentially a deal-oriented society. While group buying has existed for sometime, it didn’t take off because there weren’t the Facebooks or Twitters of the world,” says Anisha Singh, founder and CEO of Mydala.com. Following the Mydala example, Guneeth Singh started DealsandYou.com in January 2010. “The number of friends that a typical Indian has is one of the highest in the world. On an average, Indians have 140 friends, second only to Brazil. Social media has been a key enabler for group buying.” Today, Singh gets 25 percent of his traffic from social media sites. In the meanwhile, Mydala’s Singh is aligning her company more closely with the rules of social media: One of which is the importance of word-of-mouth or viral marketing. She is REAL CIO WORLD | o c t o b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 0

Photo by FOTOCORP

at it. Dell is one of them. Dell’s consumer division has been an early adopter of social media and has seen phenomenal returns. In June 2009, Dell’s outlet on Twitter made twice the sales its own portal Dell.com did. And as of December 2009, Dell’s global Twitter revenues touched $6.5 million (about Rs 30 crore). “Not only have we been able to connect with over 3.5 million customers using social media, we have also successfully monetized our presence on Twitter,” says Manish Mehta, VP, Global Online, Dell Online. Closer home, Bookmyshow.com has also found an innovative way to leverage the strength of social media to increase sales with the creation of Ticket Buddy, a movie-ticket booking application on Facebook. Bookmyshow is the only Indian ticketing company that offers customers the facility to book their tickets two weeks prior to the release of a movie. When Viraj Patel, VP-IT, Bigtree Entertainment, the company that owns Bookmyshow, took this facility to Facebook, he tweaked it to allow customers to invite their friends, using an application called Ticket Buddy. The application could have worked on the website, but it really took off on Facebook. Why? Because it allows people to invite friends, which is easy to do on a social media site, and because it ensures that each person can pay separately for their tickets—a facility not available on Bookmyshow.com. Going Dutch was never this easy. “The power of social media is phenomenal. We’ve been offering a pre-booking facility for two years. But it’s only since Ticket Buddy that the facility’s popularity has soared,” says Patel. New medium, new business. Bookmyshow is not the only one changing its tactics to fit in better with the new world of social media. Sulekha.com is another example. In the pre-social media world, Sulekha.com operated as the yellow pages of the Internet. If a customer wanted to buy or sell something she posted an ad on the website. But when Sulekha moved to Facebook, it developed an application called Local Genie, which is turning it’s business in a new direction. The app invites users with this message: “Hi folks! I can save you time and money. Whisper to me what you need done and whoosh I’ll get it for you!” A bit silly, but it’s getting customers to key in what they are looking for. And in return for their contact information, Local Genie crawls through Sulekha’s database searching for people at the other end of the buy-sell continuum. It then alerts business owners so that they can follow up a solid lead. Another business that’s found a way to leverage social media is group buying websites. These sites offer customers deep discounts—up to 90 percent—on services and products like

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Cover Story | Social Media converting her customers into brand evangelists by introducing a system of referrals. Each existing customer is offered Rs 100 worth of services for free for every referral they bring in. That approach is based on another golden social media rule: Be subtle. Rajesh Lalwani, founder and principal, Blogworks, which offers social media solutions, says, “People who exploit social media for a long-term engagement are gaining more traction, as opposed to people who are approaching this as a sales pitch.” I like this. The third, and possibly the most popular, activity companies use social media for is to create better products and deeper engagements. Today, social media is being used increasingly to crowdsource ideas. User feedback could be used to fine-hone a beta version of a product (Starbucks’ feedbackcum-idea site has collected over 80,000 customer generated ideas, for example) or customize a product. Meet Myntra.com, one of India’s first customized product delivery services. Myntra customizes everything from mugs and key chains to t-shirts in whichever way its consumers want. “People have an increased need to express their individuality. Social media has allowed people to create an online persona; they can express themselves through their feeds, the communities they join, their blogs, etcetera,” says Mukesh Bansal, CEO and co-founder, Myntra.com. Businesses that are willing to go further to meet their customers and customize their products are tuned into the social media world. Although Myntra started three years ago,

“Group buying has existed for sometime, it didn’t take off because there weren’t the Facebooks or Twitters of the world.” —Anisha Singh, founder and CEO of Mydala.com

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it has grown five times in the last year. Contributing to this success are the 2 million referrals from Facebook, making it Myntra’s single largest source of traffic. Similarly, Dell’s Ideastorm.com is turning its consumers into producers by allowing them to participate in product development. Customers can contribute an idea and a global community ranks it. To date, the Dell community has contributed 14, 558 ideas, from which over 420 ideas have been implemented—including a very successful initiative of selling laptops pre-loaded with Ubuntu.

Popularity Syndrome The flipside to customer feedback is that it can lead to negative publicity, if an enterprise doesn’t take customer complaints seriously. “Social media presents a huge opportunity but there is also a responsibility that comes with it. You cannot respond to a complaint made on Friday on Monday because you have the weekend off,” says Simeran Bhasin, marketing head, Fastrack and New Brands at Titan Industries. (For more, read Real-time Feedback Requires Real-time Response, That’s a Responsibility Page 34). This can be a huge dilemma especially for companies not aligned enough to react quickly. “Once we open up for conversation, we have to respond to every query and comment—be it good or bad,” says Ramandeep Singh Virdi, director IT, Interglobe Aviation, more popularly known for IndiGo Airlines. “Before we get ready to enter this new realm of communication, I think we need to develop the skills to deal with constructive criticism.” This is not the only challenge for CIOs who have taken the lead into social media. Here are three others: Sifting through the static. According to Daksh Sharma, director and co-founder of Iffort, a web-strategy and digital marketing consulting firm, “There are conversations happening about your brand whether you like it or not. You can use social media channels to churn out data, discover trends and align these with your business strategy. But first you need to clear out the noise.” Vodafone, driven by a CIO who is a voracious supporter of social networking, has found a way to separate the noise from the intelligence. Nigam engaged an IT partner to develop a workflow-based tool that listens, analyses, strategizes, performs CRM and then engages with customers. Placing listening boards, alerts, and reader feeds at various sites was the first step to understand the complexity involved for data analysis and BI, he says. His team prepared a meta-data dictionary to meaningfully filter the junk from the information. This data is then segregated into various buckets for different departments. And after an initial cleansing, some of the data is matched to an existing database to fill in gaps. Nigam says that when they chance upon a new customer (without enough details to be used in the database), they engage her by sending a link in which she can input her details so that she can be contacted and her issues are resolved.

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Cover Story | Social Media

“Once we open up for conversation, we have to respond to every comment— good or bad. Before we start, I think we need to develop the skills to deal with constructive criticism.” — R.S. Virdi, Director IT, Interglobe Aviation

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That’s an approach that Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero Honda, would approve of. “Traditional CRM is about capturing contact and demographic information. But, social media gives you an insight into a user’s personality, the communities he follows, his likes and interests. This will help us create a much richer profile of our customers,” says Vijay Sethi, CIO, Hero Honda. The advent of new listening tools. As social media mushrooms, it will be unviable to track conversations. So, as more businesses build out their strategies, listening platforms—technology and analytical solutions that mine and analyze social media to deliver insight—are becoming essential tools for the enterprise. However, Forrester’s Q3 2010 Listening Platforms report finds that the listening platform market remains in relative infancy. “Vendors come in all shapes and sizes, rolling out new features and tools that enable customers to turn social media data into actionable insight. But all the players face one significant challenge: They sit trapped in a constant stage of reactive development, due to the ever-moving target of social media, pervasive spammers, and buyers with constantly growing demands for their varied use cases. As a result, vendors bring

a variety of products and firms remain confused over tools to power their social intelligence strategies,” states the report. Another problem, which CIOs are increasingly facing, is verifying the authenticity of information. The question that’s before them is: When integrating customer information collected through social media, am I contaminating the authenticity of my database? For T.S. Purushottaman, CIO, Reliance Big Entertainment, the challenge is slightly different. CRM data out there, he says, is scanty at best. “There is not much you can capture through social media. In most cases, you may, at best, get their e-mail ids. Very few are willing to share other information on their profile.” Lalwani from Blogworks offers a piece of advice. “Offer your customers interesting pieces of information or content that they will want to download. If it’s interesting, customers will part with personal data or give you permission to contact them. Till the time there is gratification, lead generation is possible.” Yesterday’s solutions. Today’s enterprises have spent millions setting up touch points for their customers. This sunk cost in terms of money, belief, and expertise, is holding them back from embracing social media. “The interaction channels that customers are using are rapidly changing. Unfortunately, having made significant investments in traditional channels such as the call center, most companies are disconnected. Today, customers are increasingly turning to online communities such as Facebook and Twitter to get issues resolved,” says Jeremy Cooper, VP marketing, Asia Pacific, Salesforce.com. If businesses are going to get serious about social media, that mindset has to change. And companies in India need to catch on quickly: India is already the seventh-largest social media market worldwide. Indian enterprises are upping the ante by increasing their social media initiatives. Almost every brand in the market has at least one social media identity. Social media marketing is not the new kid on the block; it’s a dragon on your porch, waiting for you to tame it. Your enterprise could be a fan or it could be a star. That decision might very well rest in your hands. CIO Varsha Chidambaram is correspondent. Send feedback on this interview to varsha_chidambaram@idgindia.com

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Cover Story | Social Media

The Great Leadership Opportunity When only 19 percent of marketers say that their company’s digital agendas are shaped by IT executives, CIOs have reason to worry. Here’s why IT leaders should get on board. By Varsha Chidambaram Indian CIOs are a cynical lot. Harsh, but true. They inspect every new technology with suspicion. Which is why despite the buzz-you-can’t-miss around social media, only a handful of CIOs are taking it head on. In his report, The CIO’s Guide to Social Computing Leadership, Nigel Fenwick, a VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research who covers social computing and Web 2.0, finds that the thrust for social media is being driven by marketing teams. “To date, most externally facing communities are initiated by the marketing teams, either in collaboration with IT or without IT’s involvement,” he writes. A recent survey by the CMO Council and Accenture points to the same conclusion: only 19 percent of marketers say that their company’s digital agendas are shaped by IT executives. This is a reality that’s especially true in India, the seventh-largest market worldwide for social

Where’s

IT?

networking. “With Indian organizations I’ve seen that social media activity is typically handled by the marketing team or HR depending on whether the goal is employment branding or products and services,” says Hari V. Krishnan, country manager, LinkedIn India. For the most part, these departments typically outsource their social media agenda to third-party digital marketing agencies like Blogworks, Quasar Media and Pinstorm. The reports of activity are shared with respective marketing teams—leaving IT in the backseat. That’s a missed opportunity for CIOs, says Fenwick. He says that the paradigm-shifting advent of social media is something CIOs must leverage. “Social computing is already on its way to transforming the organization as much as the Internet did in the 1990s. CIOs must embrace this evolution and become effective social media evangelists or risk being left behind.” CIOs need to accept that the long-term success of social media marketing for their businesses depends singularly on the maturity of technology. As Rajesh Lalwani, founder and principal, Blogworks, puts it, “The true value of social media is not when you engage with a few, but when you engage with many. Technology has an increasingly important role to play in helping social media scale up. It’s not humanly possible to keep pace with the volumes with the way the space is growing. ” Take this metric, for example: any form of social collaboration requires a large user base—more than 1,000—to be effective. Why? Because not every participant is destined to be a contributor to the community. In fact, only 30 percent to 40 percent of most social networkers actively contribute. Here are two reasons why CIOs need to get into the social media game.

“A social media strategy has to be rooted in technology. Only IT can fully explore the vast potential of the media.” —Viraj Patel, VP-IT, Bigtree Entertainment

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Cover Story | Social Media

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CIO in a Social Media Soup Like everything new, social media has its surprises. As CIOs take on the mantle of social media evangelists, they are going to come face-to-face with challenges that are hard to anticipate. Fortunately, some of today’s pioneers have lessons to share. Outsourcing is a no-no and customization will be heavy. While there are a host of digital marketing agencies out there, their solutions tend to be standardized, and fall short of most organizations’ needs. “Automated solutions can’t cater to the advanced needs of your business,” says Manoj Nigam, VP-IT, Vodafone. “Only the CIO will be able to articulate the exact business need that technology can hope to solve.” Staffing could be a problem. Social media sites run largely on Open Source platforms. It is therefore important to have a staff with expertise in Open platforms, and that is well-versed in social computing community building and the technology. At the same time, a CIO’s social computing staff needs to be aligned with the business. Bigtree Entertainment, the company that owns Bookmyshow, which created an innovative way to leverage social media, realized this when it started down the social media path. “Getting on the social media platform was on our original wish list right from when we launched in 2007,” says Viraj Patel, VP-IT at Bigtree Entertainment. However, back then, he says, Bigtree was operating on Microsoft and wasn’t compatible with the PHP platform that Facebook operates on. “Technically, we did not have the core strength,” he remembers. Consequently, Patel had to build a new team and with their skills he needed to create Ticket Buddy. —V.C helping to broker the changes needed across the organization and garner executive support to leverage social computing. This move is in line with how the role of CIOs has been evolving over recent years to focus increasingly on top-of-line business concerns. CIOs are more responsible for proactively taking advantage of new technology-related trends to drive business outcomes. The rise of social media has opened the gates to a hitherto unexplored valley of opportunities. “It’s dangerous to assume that social media marketing is done in a disconnected fashion by sales and marketing departments through the use of shadow IT. The CIO needs to be a voice in enabling current and future strategies,” says Jeremy Cooper, VP marketing, SalesForce.com. Also, effective sales prospecting on social media demands that companies use more sophisticated tools to analyze the treasure of information that social media represents. And that’s where IT can show leadership: it understands the organizational dynamics of the medium and can figure out how information captured within a community can be integrated into other applications like CRM and BI. Marketing 2.0 can generate information; but IT 2.0 will help companies use that for direct business impact. CIO

Photos by fotocorp

You’re going to get dragged into it sooner or later. It’s only a matter of time before the sheer numbers of people flocking to social media sites and the wealth of information they represent, ensures that social media becomes central to many enterprises’ strategies—and possibly a de facto way for consumers to interact with sellers. That’s true at Vodafone. Like most Indian companies, Vodafone’s approach to social media began by engaging with third-party digital agencies who communicated directly with the marketing team. Driven by the company’s new and extremely popular mascots, the Zoozoos, Vodafone’s fan following went through the roof. Today, according to Brands Going Social, (India’s first and only resource that monitors and ranks the performance of Indian brands on Facebook and Twitter), Vodafone’s Facebook Zoozoo page has 921,050 fans. This makes it the most popular page on India’s most popular social media site. In the meanwhile, as volumes escalated, Vodafone’s marketing teams found themselves struggling to make sense of all the information being thrown at them. So, about 18 months ago, Manoj Nigam, VP-IT, Vodafone, was given the mammoth task of integrating Vodafone’s social media conversations into the company’s internal systems. Today, his in-house BI solution helps Vodafone capture user data from the public platform and analyze it. “Being so diverse a medium, the collected data is quite voluminous and unstructured. Our homegrown solution converts this ‘noise’ into ‘information’ in various categories, which is then subscribed to by different back office groups and acted upon,” says Nigam. Nigam’s situation will almost certainly be replicated across an increasing number of Indian businesses. According to comScore, India’s social networking audience grew 43 percent in the past year—more than triple India’s total Internet audience growth rate. CIOs can either lead the way on their own volition or wait for the business’ call. It’s an opportunity to be in a leadership position. Social media is more than just a technology shift enabling people and organizations to interact more closely than ever before; it’s also an opportunity for CIOs to lead their organizations strategically. “Social media presents a great opportunity to enhance the CIO role,” says Manish Mehta, VP, Global Online, Dell Online, which was probably the first, and certainly among the most popular examples, of how a business can use social media as a sales channel. Viraj Patel, VP-IT at Bigtree Entertainment, the company behind Bookmyshow.com, agrees. “A social media strategy has to be rooted in technology. Only technology can fully explore the vast potential of the media.” In his report, Fenwick suggests that social media offers CIOs “a prime perception-changing opportunity to rethink core business processes and examine how they might leverage social computing to create advantages for the business.” He believes CIOs should take a leadership role in this transition,

Send feedback on this feature to varsha_chidambaram@idgindia.com

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Cover Story | Social Media

“Real-time Feedback Requires Real-time Response, That’s a Responsibility” The marketing head of Fastrack—one of India’s most successful brands in social media—talks about navigating the changing dynamics in marketing. By Varsha Chidambaram According to an August 2010 report from digital marketing intelligence researcher comScore, over 33 million Indian Internet users visited social networking sites in July 2010, representing 84 percent of India’s total Internet audience. With these numbers, India now ranks as the seventh-largest market worldwide for social networking. More importantly, the total Indian social networking audience grew 43 percent in the past year—more than tripling the growth rate of India’s Internet audience. Many sceptics dismiss these figures with a wave of their hand and the argument that these numbers only represent 3.3 percent of India’s total population. But here’s another perspective: those 33 million probably constitute about half of the country’s tax payers (Only 4 percent of the Indian population pays tax.) So if your customers belong to the great Indian middle class, you can be pretty sure that a bulk of them are on one or more social networking sites. These channels of communication allow marketers to connect with consumers like never before. But, it’s vital to remember that social media operates differently from

Sceptics who dismiss social media arguing that it represents only 3 percent of India’s population should remember that those 33 million people constitute about half of the country’s tax-payers. traditional ATL (above the line) marketing. Ad magnate Piyush Pandey describes social media as “a private medium”. He says, “Marketers need to be cautious not to intrude into the privacy of individuals. Rather than push their own agenda they must learn to participate in conversations around their brands.” Today, these conversations are being monitored and managed by marketing departments with little or no involvement of IT. But as the volume of conversations grows, it’s likely that 34

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marketing will turn to CIOs to look for more efficient solutions to manage this rich source of customer information. CIOs who want to be ahead of the curve need to grasp the dynamics of the medium. And this starts with developing a thorough knowledge of what it means to be a marketer in the world of social media. Simeran Bhasin, marketing head Fastrack and New Brands at Titan Industries, has deep experience in this field. Fastrack is arguably the most popular Indian brand on social networks today. When the brand started its Facebook page in April 2009 it had about 300 fans. Less than a year later, that figure touched one lakh. And today Fastrack has over 5 lakh fans on Facebook and has been voted as the third most popular brand by Brands Going Social, India’s first and only resource that monitors and ranks the performance of Indian brands on Facebook.

CIO: Fastrack is one of India’s earliest adopters of social media marketing. How did you get started?

Simeran Bhasin: We started looking at social media seriously four years ago when we noticed that our consumers had created communities on Orkut, which was big then. We tried to create our own communities but realised we’d be competing with our own consumers. So, we wrote to the moderators of the communities and told them we could help if they needed any information directly from the brand. All we did was observe. A couple of years later, we got the opportunity to lead the way with Facebook. Today, whatever we are doing with the brand is reflected on our social networking channels. And soon, we are going to start exclusive social media campaigns, that’s how big the market is for us today.

With the rise of social media, what’s the one thing that’s changed for marketing?

Social media marketing is a lot more dynamic than traditional marketing. Today, marketers have the added responsibility of being a lot more responsive. This is not an age where you can put an advertisement on television or a newspaper and wait

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Cover Story | Security

“Be careful of what you capture verbatim, it could lead to a wrong decision,” says Simeran Bhasin, Marketing Head, Fastrack and New Brands, Titan Industries

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Cover Story | Social Media for a response. Club this with the fact that social media is the only platform where you have a real opportunity for two-way engagement. The moment you have real-time feedback, you have no option but to respond in real time. If you don’t respond to a consumer complaint you’re going to end up agitating the customer even more. This will eventually lead to negative PR because the customer’s going to go out and blog about it. Social media presents a huge opportunity to engage and form close relationships with customers. But there’s also a responsibility that comes with it: dealing dynamically with the noise that social media initiatives create. You cannot respond to a complaint made on Friday on Monday because you had the weekend off. Two days is a very long time on the Internet.

sharing level. For the most part, we refrain from advertising our products. We’ve organized contests in the past, but it is never a real push. Tonality is very important. Also, marketers must remember that what works for one campaign doesn’t necessarily work for another. Consumers are easily bored so it’s important to keep experimenting.

What are the benchmarks to measure the success of a social media campaign?

How do you deal with negative feedback?

It puts a mirror in front of us. We take it positively and take a hard look at ourselves and look for learnings. If it is a consumer complaint we respond immediately. We try and help consumers as much as possible, whether it’s about locating a product or a service centre. Very often, depending on feedback we just thank them and let them know that we are listening.

Buzz value is the best metric to measure the success of any digital media campaign. You can measure this through the number of people who have participated, commented, liked, tagged friends and shared on their walls. However, at Fastrack, we focus not on the quantity but on the quality of engagement. A mix of positive and negative feedback reflects a healthy engagement. And if people are just clicking a button and liking a page but not really commenting then you know that the level of engagement is low. When a user takes out the time to write something you know that there is a greater level of engagement. If he goes and clicks a picture of himself wearing a Fastrack watch and posts it, that’s an even better.

Give us one do and one don’t while engaging with customers on social media platforms.

What’s a common trap marketers fall into when interpreting social media conversations?

There’s a notion among some CIOs that social media marketing is only for youth brands...

What’s the role of IT in social media here?

We try not to behave like Fastrack ‘the brand’. Rather we try to behave like Fastrack ‘the personality’. We are careful not to indulge in hardcore sales pitches online. The tone and the manner in which we interact online is more at a peer-to-peer,

Conversations, that is direct noise you’re listening to. If you want to capture what people are saying verbatim, make sure you’re listening to a focus group or else that noise could lead you to a wrong decision. You need to carefully examine finer things: the tone and the demographic profile of the people talking; it is these things that actually make a difference.

“Soon, we are going to start exclusive social media campaigns, that’s how big the market is for us today.” 36

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I remember when we had this contest on Facebook in which we uploaded videos and asked viewers to reply. We got such a huge response that our server shut down. It is going to get much noisier in the near future. And from an IT infrastructure point of view, the basic fundamentals of a highspeed connection, high bandwidth and not shying away from providing handhelds, all go without saying. I also think CIOs need to embrace the openness of social media. This must start with allowing social media access to relevant departments. They should not view it as something that employees waste their time on. CIO

Photos by srivATSA SHANDILYA

While youth brands have seen the most amount of success with social media, it is important for every business to start embracing it. The fact is, when today’s 18 year-old grows into tomorrow’s 38 year-old, he will be a lot savvier than today’s 38 year-old. And he will also change as a person and will need to be talked to differently. Each brand has to identify their target group and speak to them like they speak to each other.

Send feedback on this interview to varsha_chidambaram@idgindia.com

Vol/5 | ISSUE/12

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VIEW

from the TOP

Vijay K. Thadani, CEO, NIIT & Founder, NIIT University shares how IT is helping NIIT meet its rural goals.

IT’s Rural Reach

By Sneha Jha

1981 was a mixed year. It saw the birth of the IBM PC and it was also when India witnessed rampant unemployment. The country had six lakh unemployed graduates and newspapers were filled with stories of how men with master’s degrees worked as bus conductors for a lack of choice. India’s nascent IT industry promised to change that if only it could find the skills it needed. That demand led to the birth of NIIT. It soon established itself as a pioneer in the global talent development industry. Not only has the organization enhanced the employability of millions across the world, it has brought the marginal into the mainstream. In this interview, Vijay K. Thadani, CEO, NIIT, talks about that journey and NIIT’s rural push.

CIO: NIIT’s mission is to bring people and computers together successfully. What’s the last 29 years been like?

How have you done that?

‘successfully’ to our mission statement was one of the best decisions we ever took because it gave us a new lens to look at the larger picture. It made us realize that our mission was not bringing people and computers together just for the sake of bringing them together, but to make sure that people benefit from the use of computers. We wanted to make every Indian computer-literate. Then in the 90’s

I can give you a couple of instances of NIIT’s experiments with our minimally invasive education approach and our involvement in rural India. By design our approach is very inclusive, which means that we deliver value at every level of affordability and every point of infrastructure availability—or lack of it. Our Hole in the Wall initiative was a great experiment of reaching the ‘unreached’, all those children who do not make it to schools. They live below the poverty line and do

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.

O c t ob e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 0 | REAL CIO WORLD

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photos by MM Anindita Ghosh

Vijay K. Thadani: Adding the word

we sat down and asked ourselves: “Why only make every Indian literate? Why not the whole world?”

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Vijay K. Thadani expects I.T. to: Build scale seamlessly and cost effectively Deliver learning uniformly and innovatively Help open newer geographies Vol/5 | ISSUE/07

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View from the Top

not have access to technology. We’ve tried to overcome this divide by bringing technology to them in an un-interfering and un-fearing manner. With the experiment of a playground computer, we saw astonishing results of the Hole in the Wall experiment. We set up a training center in Chindwara, Madhya Pradesh and measured the effectiveness of the initiative. Our research showed us that these children needed to be given three times the inputs than their urban contemporaries. In addition to IT, we would have to teach them many other things that they missed out on because they didn’t grow up in an urban system. At the same time, their affordability level was only one-third of their urban counterparts. This meant that we had to provide thrice the input at one-third the costs. That’s a viability gap in the order of 1:9. To solve the issue, we used technology to deliver education in a cost effective way. I took a course for the first batch of 45 children myself. I was delighted when the top seven students were placed at Infosys. But we faced many challenges in setting up these learning centers. In one of the villages in Leh, there was no electricity and we had to generate our own from solar energy to run our centers. In another part of the country, our teachers had to travel to our center on elephants to avoid a river’s high tide. They also had to use elephants to carry computers to the center.

What role has technology played in your rural push? Technology enables us to maintain uniformity. You can go to any NIIT center and you will get the same quality of learning. Technology also gives us scalability. We can set up 100 centers in 100 days. Technology helps us build that kind of scale. Uniformity, consistency, and scalability, these are the areas I would say in which IT generates business value. It also helps us deliver excellence. If we have an expert teacher in a particular region, technology helps us transfer that expertise to other geographies. Basically IT helps us deliver excellence on a vast scale. 40

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Looking back, what would you have done differently?

SNAPSHOT

NIIT

Revenue:

we came to terms with reality. In many ways that was the first test of the organization. It tested how deep our roots were and how strong our foundation was.

` 1,199 crore We recently took stock of the employees: situation. We found that over 4,000 the last 29 years, we’ve trained 33 million people worldwide. Established: 1981 While that number looks big, What about the when I juxtapose it with the recent downturn? VP-IT: magnitude of our dream—to The recessionary phase Sunil Sirohi make an IT literate world— it’s was definitely a challenge a small number. to the Indian IT industry If I were to go back in time, one of the things and obviously NIIT did not go unscathed. I would do differently is move faster. I would However, we had already faced the slowdown like to figure out ways of moving much faster, in 2000 so this time we were better prepared. touching more people, altering more lives with We adopted a four-pronged strategy. One our trainings and services. One of the ways is was to ensure that we built market share to use technology for delivering our courses. aggressively by launching new products. This happens to be our core competence. But, Even when people were buying less, we maybe, we could have been more innovative made sure that they bought more of what we in delivering learning through technology in wanted to sell. order to move at a faster pace. What could we do to create a demand I would have also liked to leverage our for our products? We launched a slew of alumni more effectively. If we had made sure products which met the needs of customers that every person we train was responsible of in a recessionary period. We began to offer 10 or 100 more people then we would have services in areas which we didn’t cater altered more lives. We could have touched 3.3 to earlier. We started training for ERP, billion lives instead of 33 million. infrastructure management solutions, and the retail sector. One very successful product was a 99-day diploma targeted at engineering What’s NIIT’s growth driver? graduates who were finding it hard to get Training for employability is the fastest campus placements. growing category. It is followed by the The second thing we did was ensure that training of school children. Employability our capex was tightly controlled. We tried training for 18 to 25 year-olds is critical. At to increase the utilization of existing centers present, their employability is as low as 10-25 rather than setting up new ones. IT is a crucial percent. Companies in the IT/ITES, BFSI, part of NIIT. So the third part of our strategy BPO, hospitality, customer support, and retail was to leverage IT for cost containment. We are the ones that are driving our growth. used videoconferencing to cut travel costs and implemented collaborative work solutions. What’s been your biggest The fourth piece of the plan was to get business challenge? all NIITians to contribute by making a part One of our biggest challenge—and a great of their salary from fixed into variable. learning—was the slowdown of 2000. At that It was a very kind gesture. They rose to stage, we were a 20 year-old organization. the occasion. CIO Think of us as a trophy child who excels at everything. We ruled the market, dwarfed competition, and garnered market share. The slowdown of 2000 was a reality check. Sneha Jha is senior correspondent. Send feedback on this It was like a slap on the face. That was when interview to sneha_jha@idgindia.com

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Survey | BI

BI: Is thIs tIme for real? After years of putting BI at the top of their priority lists, Indian CIOs are finally saying that the next six months will see significant BI uptake.We look at whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s driving this newfound determination.

58%

What sort of BI? Can the Data in Your Operational Systems Be Used for Competitive Advantage? 70%

Strongly agree

Of Indian CIOs say they plan to employ business intelligence in the next six months for competitive Manufacturing differentiation.

24%

Agree

Agree and the reports provided by operational systems already meet user requirements

Disagree

(Only respondents who said they didn't already use BI for competitive differentiation were asked this question.)

54%

Of CIOs do not use BI for competitive differentiation.

How Do You Manage Your BI or Reporting Requirements?

39%

22%

Reports from core systems (like ERPor CRM)

90% 61%

68% 26%

Reporting Dashboards Data mining Analytics Business performance management

Business intelligence solution BI solution and spread sheet

28%

What BI Technologies Do You Use?

32%

12%

CIOs Lead the WAY

Spread-sheet based reporting

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73% of CIOs say BI would provide competitive advantage by enabling faster decision making. Vol/5 | ISSUE/12

Survey | BI

What's BehInd the current BI push? What's Driving Better Data Management? 62%

Where Would BI Have Maximum ROI? 4%

Customer intelligence

Operational standardization reducing differentiation

(including cross sell and up sell recommendations)

58%

Increased competition

25%

Financial and profitability reporting Operational reporting

56%

Increased product offerings for customers

45%

26%

Risk and compliance

51% Increased need for data integrity from various source systems

40%

Compliance, security from regulatory authorities

39% Increased choice for customers (in terms of switching)

BarrIers to BI

Business sponsorship

10%

Technology issues

Competing initiatives Funding

68%

Clarity in the project's ability to extract data from core systems

15%

Total cost of the project

11%

Time to implement

41%

17%

13%

Data quality

Clarity in business functionality to be delivered

Top Technical Challenges in Consolidating 3-4 Major Data Systems for BI

The Top Six Management Obstacles Showing a business case and value

Key Considerations When Planning BI

59% of CIOs say they their BI vendor's knowledge of their core systems is critical and that they can't do without it.

Designing of the data model which is logically correct but not rigid.

2 Managing consistency in data definitions from the source data systems through to the reports. 3 Data mapping from the source data systems into the target data model. 4 Data quality in the extracted data. 5 Report and dashboard development.

Challenges in Completing a BI Solution Integrating data from disparate systems Lack of understanding of the business requirements by your BI vendor due to the lack of domain knowledge Lack of trained human resources Lack of a good BI/reporting tool

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31% 31% 5% 3%

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CEOs want CIOs who know their industries, think like customers and can envision new business opportunities.

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CIO Role

WHAT CEOs EXPECT FROM CIOs By Richard Pastore

it’s become more important to find how to make the in age but experience much better for the end customer,” says Sam in perspective—has embraced the notion of CIOs as Ghosh, group CEO of Reliance Capital, a $1.6 billion strategic business peers. These CEOs compete in a world (about Rs 7,200 crore) financial services conglomerate of massive complexity and global interdependency. Their with $4.5 billion (about Rs 20,200 crore) in assets. Calling companies engage with customers using technology, on distributors and retail customers is part of Reliance and social media is becoming pervasive. In this world, CTO Sandeep Phanasgaonkar’s job. Meanwhile, Ghosh back-office-focused, tactical IT order-takers won’t cut employs key performance indicators based on surveys of it. “It has become critically important that the CIO be at Reliance’s retail customers to make sure his CTO knows the executive table, acting as a business person who can whether those constituents are happy with his efforts. advise me and be trusted to help us come to the right Of course, CIOs have long argued that they could make conclusions about achieving our business strategy,” says more strategic contributions if company expectations Gregory Babe, president and CEO of Bayer. and culture allowed. Gartner says that by 2012, the top CEOs don’t need more golfing buddies; their embrace 25 percent of companies in terms of earnings growth will of a strategic role for CIOs is motivated by value. While be those with ‘entrepreneurial CIOs’ who provide new or systems effectiveness and efficiency are always required of breakaway competitive advantages that translate directly a CIO, CEOs want IT leaders who are not only accountable into revenue, financial results and market share. for technology operations, but who also drive innovation, But conventional perceptions of IT leadership as fuel growth, and create competitive advantage. They expect reactive and business-challenged prove stubborn. IT leaders to focus outside the walls of the company and Gartner’s CEO research has established every year for then to suggest, develop and execute product strategies to the past six years that more than 60 percent of CEOs take advantage of those opportunities. see their IT organizations as a key constraint on the Suzanne Woolsey is a member of the board of directors changes they need to make. Unless CIOs and their IT of Fluor, a $22 billion (about Rs 99,000 crore) engineering, organizations break out of their internally construction and project-management focused, IT-centric mold, the future of the company. “It is absolutely essential for Reader ROI: profession is at risk, according to members business competition to have somebody How market expectations of the CIO Executive Council, a global peer in the C-suite who is able to understand and the commoditization of advisory community of 500 top IT leaders and articulate new ways of looking at the technology are driving CIOs founded by CIO’s publisher. world that come from understanding to embrace new roles With so many technologies how technology is changing,” she says. Why CIOs are ready to make the leap commoditized, consumerized and “The user community is part of increasingly available as cloud services, our CTO’s focus and always was, but What CEOs can do to

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CIO Role the traditional CIO responsibilities of technology selection, procurement and management are becoming less and less relevant. “It’s imperative that we become, over time, more business strategists and transformation leaders than we are today,” says Louie Ehrlich, the president of Chevron Information Technology and CIO of Chevron who also serves as a leader of the Council and is a member of its board of advisors.

Trusted Advice For years, CIOs have asserted—mostly to each other—that they provide a unique, cross-enterprise perspective. Now, more CEOs appear to recognize the value of that perspective, and they expect IT leaders to share it with them. “The CIO is the person who has the most exposure to all the ways that we take care of our customers and the best insight over how the whole company

functions and what’s important to each individual department,” says Rodger Riney, founder and CEO of online brokerage Scottrade. Recognizing this, Riney and CEOs like him expect IT leaders to provide valuable counsel on business decisions and the impact they will have across the company. Riney says Ian Patterson, Scottrade’s CIO and executive director of information technology, “Has a monumental task in trying to educate 10 people (or a couple of dozen if you include directors), half of whom think they’re pretty good at IT because they have an iPhone they can tap on and make cool things happen. He brings us all down to earth and says that the iPhone is only the front end, and it’s what’s underneath it that counts. And that is a very, very complicated system with many interdependencies.” Leo Kiely, CEO of MillerCoors, learned to appreciate the CIO’s cross-enterprise

Why CIOs Need to Think Like CEOs The ability to think like a CEO, focusing on how a company engages with customers and its industry, makes for a better CIO-CEO partnership. CIOs who focus on business strategy are surprisingly similar to CEOs. Although most CIOs profess no interest in running a company, thinking more like the CEO can only strengthen the CEO-CIO partnership and sharpen the strategic impact of the role. “The difference between CEOs and CIOs is markets, products and sales channels,” concludes Michael Capellas, who recently became CEO of Acadia, a joint venture of Cisco and EMC (EMC) to provide private cloud solutions. The CEO looks at those three areas from the customer’s perspective, focusing on sales. CIOs typically focus internally, on following a product through the supply chain and recording expenses. CIOs should develop more of an outside-in point of view, says Capellas, who in the late 1990s was promoted from CIO to CEO of Compaq. When you compare the performance of CIOs and CEOs as leaders, they’re remarkably close, says Chris Patrick, global CIO practice leader with executive recruiter Egon Zehnder International. Egon Zehnder has compared thousands of individual executive performance assessments. The only major gaps between CIO and CEO performance appear in externally-focused skills such as knowing a company’s market, understanding customers and identifying new revenue opportunities. Those gaps are significant, however, and it can be challenging for IT leaders to close them. “When you’re so busy in your everyday role, there’s little time to hone some of these skills or take on that knowledge” says Rodger Riney, founder and CEO of Scottrade. Yet IT leaders who excel at such outward-facing skills can even make the leap to CEO. “If CIOs have the desire and ambition to do it, and are given the luxury of time to broaden themselves, it’s just a very short step up, quite frankly,” adds Riney. CIOs with no ambition to be top dog would still do well to put themselves in a CEO state of mind, advises Capellas, “Learn your CEO’s agenda and make it your agenda. Wear it on your forehead, reference it in your discussions with staff.” When the CIO’s agenda is fully in synch with the CEO’s, the CIO becomes the true partner of the CEO in moving the business forward. —R.L 46

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expertise when he was head of sales and marketing with Frito-Lay in the 1980s. Pioneering CIO Charlie Feld was running IT then. “Feld and his team actually understood how my team got work done better than I did,” Kiely recalls. Because of this enterprise knowledge, “I learned to believe back then that your IT leader sets the pace for the company’s ability to change.” The pace of change has been set to “brisk,” he says, by MillerCoors CIO Jeanine Wasielewski. She developed the plan for integrating the former Miller and Coors organizations after the companies merged. “There’s an appetite for IT across my organization that is three times what I’ve got a budget for,” notes Kiely. “Jeanine’s got to advise us on what to invest in first so that we can rebuild our whole infrastructure in an orderly way.”

Entering New Markets With their thorough grasp of enterprise strengths and gaps, strategically focused CIOs are in a prime position to prepare their organizations for new-market ventures. The need for a new technology platform that would support market expansion sent shipping company Matson Navigation shopping for a new kind of CIO. “We certainly wanted someone who could continue to keep the lights on, but [who] also was much more strategic in his orientation,” explains Matson president Matt Cox. The challenge: “Take a 125-year-old company, running on applications that were in some cases over 30 years-old, into an era of growth.” Cox credits Vice President and CIO Peter Weis with enabling Matson’s entry into the Chinese market. The move depended on new technology, including Matson’s first major commitment to voice over IP, anticipating the communication needs of trans-Pacific shipping. IT also ensured that Matson’s strategy of growth through acquisition would be cost-effective by keeping platform proliferation to a minimum. Because he is involved in acquisitions from the start, Weis can keep platform needs and challenges visible as transactions unfold, says Cox. In 2005, when new AXA Equitable CIO Kevin Murray convinced fellow executives to rebuild the company’s annuity platform, the business goal was faster time to market. Vol/5 | I ssuE/12

CIO Role But Chairman and CEO Christopher “Kip” Condron says the insurer couldn’t have survived the recent financial crisis if not for the revamped platform, which made it easier to adapt to changing market conditions. “We had to pull products off the shelf, put new ones on the shelf, take risk out of the portfolio—all while driving at 60 miles per hour.” Using the old systems, it could take six weeks just to change the interest rate offered on an annuity, he says. “Now you can do that in a nanosecond.” The new platform simplifies the identification and application of the complex rules that govern new financial instruments, reducing the time it takes to bring new products to market from as many as nine months to two. The company wants to be able to move even faster. “Kevin promised that capability in his vision, and we got to witness it and stress test it in the crisis.” Condron also credits Murray with thinking ahead by designing the annuity platform with flexibility for local regulations and languages. Those capabilities helped AXA establish an annuity business in Western Europe. “I’ve worked with far less visionary CIOs who saw their jobs as ‘Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,’” says Condron. Those leaders hurt the company, Condron says, by not advising him to spend more on IT. “We doubled our development budget to build that annuity platform, and there’s not a single person in the company who regrets it.”

A Top-Line Focus Growth needn’t come from risky newmarket ventures; a competitive edge in an established line of business can drive up the top line as well. For universities, corporate-sponsored research is a major source of growth, but during recessions, such funding becomes more scarce. Purdue University President France A. Córdova looked to Vice President of IT and CIO Gerry McCartney to shore up its portfolio. To make Purdue more visible and attractive to sponsors, McCartney’s team created Web-based research hubs (there are 20 so far) that scientists worldwide can access to find information and expertise, and to collaborate with Purdue researchers 48

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on such topics as biofuels, earthquake engineering and nanotechnology. “The hubs have helped leverage research grants from many agencies,” Córdova notes, including funds to build and enhance the hubs. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency will be funding a new hub on environmental modeling. Student academic performance also affects a college’s growth potential by influencing its reputation: The more successful the students are, the more attractive a school is to potential enrollees. So McCartney also develops tools to help students achieve their best grades. His team adapted the familiar decisionsupport dashboard into an online system called Signals that informs students (and their professors) how well they are doing in their classes and suggests resources they can tap to do better. Another system, Hotseat, allows students to use social media tools to post questions and comments to lecturers inside and outside the classroom, generating discussions. “These were developed by our CIO, working with the professors,” says Córdova, “They’ve improved student retention and are an important differentiator.” At Reliance Capital, CTO Phanasgaonkar has developed portal-based services to boost competitive advantage with its insurance distributors and retail customers. But in

At Reliance Capital, group CEO Sam Ghosh uses key performance indicators based on surveys of Reliance’s retail customers to make sure his CTO knows whether those constituents are happy with his efforts.

India, where Reliance is based, the Internet doesn’t reach every potential customer. So IT has developed and deployed laptop applications that salespeople can use to collect data and upload it from Internet cafes. Employees can also use text messages to relay customer leads and collection data. These technology workarounds enable Reliance to do business in places where it would otherwise cost too much. Fluor CIO Ray Barnard helps his company differentiate its services in an unusually direct way—he participates in the sales process as an account executive sponsor. By working directly with his assigned clients on sales and conflict resolution, Barnard can more easily come up with ways to deliver projects faster and less expensively, says board member Woolsey. “In our business model, you negotiate the price with the client, then once you get the project, you look through every possible way to be more efficient and share that savings with the client.” The customer connection also boosts Barnard’s business credibility, which helps him when challenging engineers to change how they work, says Woolsey. “Engineers tend to think in very straightforward, linear ways,” Woolsey explains. “Ray has the ability to get outside their mental model and articulate the alternative well enough so that they listen.”

The CEO Coach Clearly, there are some CIOs who fit the mold that forward-thinking CEOs are creating for them. The problem is, there aren’t many of them—yet. “There aren’t a lot of CIOs who have that magic combination of strategic vision to see the big picture and the execution skills to deliver it,” says AXA Equitable’s Condron. Our 2010 State of the CIO survey found that only 21 percent of respondents are primarily engaged in activities that would categorize them as business strategists— leaders who are mostly focused on finding ways that technology can enable business opportunities. The remainder were focused primarily on either running the IT function (34 percent) or transforming enterprise business processes (45 percent). “The skill sets are still evolving to catch up to the need,” notes Chris Patrick, Vol/5 | I ssuE/12

CIO Role partner in charge of the global CIO practice for executive recruiter Egon Zehnder International. Particularly tough to find among CIOs are external-facing competencies: Knowing a company’s market, understanding customers, identifying new revenue opportunities and having a grasp of business, not just IT strategy. “IT leaders are learning by interacting with business peers in a much more strategic way, as opposed to being suppliers of technology.” Learning these skills takes time, however. For now, Patrick thinks, the demand for such IT leaders will outstrip the supply. Meanwhile, some CEOs are taking time to work with IT execs as coaches and confidants. Bayer’s Babe mentors senior IT managers with strong potential. He recounts that one individual he mentored had a strong intellect but a very logical worldview, so much so that any idea that wasn’t logical carried no weight with him and he would dismiss it. “I helped him to see that at the executive level, most of what you deal with is political, not logical, and you have to learn to work with that.” Several CEOs interviewed for this story stress the need to lend visible support to their CIOs in order to build up the IT leaders’ credibility and help them deal with their toughest constituents—business-unit and function heads who are narrowly focused on their own areas and might not see the bigger corporate picture. MillerCoors’ Kiely coaches his CIO Wasielewski on where the land mines are as she decides how to best blend the different business cultures of former rivals Miller and Coors into a single harmonious brew. “I give her feedback on what I’ve heard from the organization and where the squeaky wheels are,” Kiely says. “I coach her on how to effectively impact a particular player or a particular department.” Kiely also has offered to ‘fly cover’ to protect the IT team during particularly complex projects. He’ll sit in with Wasielewski’s team as they describe their implementation challenges and how they plan to overcome them, and then he will convey these themes to the business units. “I’ll show support and an understanding of the issues,” says Kiely. The CEO’s endorsement, and the

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The CEO Test for CIOs CEOs want to learn how much a potential CIO is focused on business strategy and growth. If you want the job, be ready to answer these questions. Chris Patrick, global CIO practice leader with executive recruiter Egon Zehnder International, advises CEOs to ask potential CIOs questions that elicit their knowledge of business strategy, customers and their industries. CIO candidates should be ready to answer these questions designed to gauge their strategic orientation. How many external customers have you met with in the past 12 months and in what context? If none, explain why. Can you describe how and where a company’s IT strategy supports and enables its business strategy? What’s the most significant change initiative that you have delivered? How did you justify the investment and measure the benefit to the business? What business metrics do you incorporate into your IT scorecard? Who are the top three competitors to your current company, and what are their competitive advantages or differentiations? —R.L

interpretation he offers of IT’s plan as the ultimate IT-business liaison, effectively warms up potentially frosty constituents. For Purdue’s Córdova, empowerment and inclusion are her preferred strategies for ensuring the CIO contributes strategically. Her CIO, McCartney, is a member of her ‘cabinet’, made up of 20 administrative officers; they implement the university’s strategic plan. Córdova has also placed McCartney in positions that transcend technology and the IT department. For example, as the executive in charge of the university’s research computing infrastructure, he is one of three university executives who make presentations to the board about academic

research, which means he advocates for one of Purdue’s most significant growth streams. Having the CIO represent the CEO to the public is another way to boost an IT leader’s business credibility and reputation. Bayer’s Babe asks Claudio Abreu, President and CEO of Business and Technology Services, to represent him at industry and civic events, including at a television panel during the 2009 G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, in which Abreu addressed how that city—home to Bayer’s headquarters— contributes to the global economy. “Claudio is someone I fully trust to sit in for me on most anything,” Babe says. “For an interview about our company or our role in this region, Claudio is very capable of doing that. If it were something very specific on a deep-dive industry topic, I might have to prep him a bit, but I feel he could handle it well.” These opportunities to be visible are a chance to practice and publicly demonstrate a broader grasp of business forces in front of internal and industry constituents. What all these coaching and positioning efforts have in common is that they show an effort by CEOs to embrace and ensure the success of the strategy-oriented CIO. Although the vast majority of his Fortune 500 CEO clients state a critical need for a strategic IT leader, Egon Zehnder’s Patrick knows the proof is in their actions. CEOs have to walk their talk. “Make the CIO your partner and treat him like a partner,” AXA’s Condron advises fellow CEOs. Engaging in a one-to-one working relationship builds the CIO’s confidence, and it sends a message that the CEO truly sees the role as strategically important. “Everybody then knows the CIO has the eyes and ears of the CEO,” Condron notes. “He is my partner, but he’s not just my partner. He’s the partner of his peers who sit at the table with him. He has our total respect, and that’s why it works.” CIO

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Case File

Taking the Scouting for a solution to fix its IT infrastructure, Euronet Worldwide, a third-party e-transaction processing company, turned to virtualization. If putting its mission-critical apps on a virtualized platform was a risk, its CIO wanted to take a bigger one: going Open Source. Here’s how he did both. By Sneha Jha

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You’ve got to be fast on your feet. That’s a lesson that has stood Ashish Mehta in good stead, both on the Tennis court and in business. As the director of IT & infrastructure for APAC & Middle East, Euronet Worldwide, Mehta works in an intensely volatile and dynamic environment. With a customer base spanning 46 countries, Mehta knows that the only way to stay ahead is to be agile. But that’s a lesson he learnt the hard way.

All Is Not Well Founded in 1994, Euronet is a global provider of electronic payment and transaction processing solutions for financial institutions, retailers, service

providers, and individual consumers. It serves as a critical link between its partners—financial institutions, retailers, and service providers—and their end consumers. The Rs 4,648-crore company forayed into the Indian market in 2002 with the launch of Euronet Services India. Euronet Services India pioneered the concept of Cashnet, India’s largest private shared ATM network (through which each member banks’ cardholders can perform transactions at other member banks’ ATMs). In the last eight years, Cashnet’s network has grown to 10,700 ATMs across India, covering 450 locations countrywide. Today, Euronet India operates the largest

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should have an ecosystem vulnerability assessment that can catch up with and penetration testing. business requirements. This resulted in increased The slowdown also nudged expenses on the regular independent nationwide shared ATM me to find a solution to the upkeep and security of all network in the country. problem. I wanted to spend these devices. All was well until the company’s IT money judiciously and But there was a bigger infrastructure began to pose challenges. address growth pangs at the problem. “The inflexibility Since many of Euronet’s IT systems and same time,” says Mehta. and rigidity of our applications were mission-critical, the Before he presented his case infrastructure rendered us SNAPSHOT company followed a ‘one application, one to management he wanted inept to address this (scaling Euronet server’ approach to achieve high system to create a awareness about up for growth) compelling Services India performance (uptime) and reliability. virtualized environments business need. This led our Established: 2002 Because of this, Euronet had created an among his internal IT team. regional CFO to comment, Employees: island of servers which increased its So, he asked his team to attend ‘What’s the use of investing 500 overheads like energy, space, cooling, staff, industry seminars, training in a technology if it cannot IT team: security and other utilities. workshops, and participate help us scale up?’ This forced 48 At the end of 2008, it had 95 servers in POCs on virtualization. me take a fresh look at my IT MD: and it planned to add another 20 percent. Because he wanted to put infrastructure,” says Mehta. Sunil Nair “With a sudden spurt of growth, we used mission-critical applications To prove the business to deploy new servers to build scale. This on a virtualized platform, it wrong and get his house met our short-term needs but in the long was important to get the in order, Mehta felt that run it led to a huge escalation in our TCO users and management on his side. So, the most apt solution was an elastic, and hardware costs,” says Mehta. to understand user expectations, he had flexible and scalable infrastructure. That was evident from the fact that a meeting with operational team leaders, He turned to virtualization. he was spending 55-60 percent of his IT and the application development team, budget on hardware and 15-20 percent and tried to comprehend the challenges The Big Fix on maintenance. they were facing. He wanted to cover Euronet’s IT needed consolidation not only It did not stop at that. Euronet had the existing challenges and adopt a in terms of applications but also servers. to meet very stringent server security futuristic approach to finding solutions. And the best solution for consolidation was requirements. Apart from a quarterly This would help him build a winning server virtualization. Industry research audit from its customers—mostly case before meeting the management. He strengthened his conviction. According to banks—the company had to adhere to factored in their challenges, requirements US-based research firm, InfoEdge, server the 12 security guidelines and perceived goals of the project in his virtualization can reduce set by the payment card presentation. Once this was done, he hardware acquisition costs by Reader ROI: industry data security focused on getting management nod. 40 percent and maintenance Why you can put standard (PCI DSS). In Then, in December 2008, armed with costs by 25-50 percent. mission-critical apps order to adhere to PCI DSS in-depth industry research, he built a “Such an infrastructure on open source server security standards strong case for server virtualization. “I would facilitate a faster How to get buy-in for open all the 95 servers had to be can still recall that meeting. At the end of time to market. If there source virtualization 100 percent compliant in the presentation, there were no questions. is a spurt in growth, I How it can increase agility Vol/5 | ISSUE/12

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Case File The management reposed their trust in my initiative. My regional CFO stood up, thumped my back and said: ‘Please go ahead!’” says Mehta. But that was not the end of his ordeal. Euronet is a third-party payment processor, so uptime expectations are very high. The company’s revenue heavily depends on the number of transactions it enables, so if it loses a transaction due to downtime it loses revenue. “The volume of transactions varies from 200,000 per day to two million. I was concerned that there would be downtime or availability issues with the new platform,” says Mehta. What he did next would surprise every conventional CIO.

Leap of Faith While virtualization would improve server performance, Mehta wanted to tackle downtime and enhance application availability. “My applications are global applications, so the apps I use here are the same that are running in my datacenter in Europe. My objective was to ensure that in future my infrastructure should not get locked in by any platform or vendor,” says Mehta. He knew that he would need something more than virtualization. In a business where security of the customer's money means revenue, Mehta was toying with going Open Source. Despite his reservations about the technology, Mehta let his team do a POC. “Although the results of the POC were encouraging, my initial response to Open Source was very negative. I was wary of running critical business applications on it. But at the same time, I wanted to give a fair chance to all the solutions that we came across.” And then he decided to take the plunge. He evaluated three solutions on the parameters of agility, scalability, flexibility, security and cost. “But Red Hat scored over the other solutions because it matched my requirements,” says Mehta. He decided to first move less critical applications to the environment. “Being a standalone application, the card management app was ideal to start with. But at the same time it was quite 56

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“We can now process a higher number of transactions per day, leading to more revenue for the company. I had never anticipated a business benefit in this area. " — Ashish Mehta, Director-It Infrastructure (APAc & Middle east), euronet Worldwide

a transaction-heavy application. So, the performance expectations were huge,” he says. The results were remarkable: App performance improved by 25 percent. The first phase of migration went live in January 2009. “This (migration) was one of the major areas of concern. I wanted to ensure that business did not get disrupted while migrating to the new platform. I also wanted to obviate the risk of transactions getting declined,” he says. All that Mehta wanted was achieved smoothly. And quickly. Euronet expected it to take six-eight weeks but the first phase was executed in just three weeks. Mehta believes that Open Source will save 40-50 percent of his overall IT budget.

Finally, All Is Well Once Euronet migrated its applications to the Open Source-virtualized platform, benefits came rolling in. The overall performance and agility of the infrastructure improved manifold. In the virtualized environment, application performance is 20-25 percent faster than what it was before. This has improved the rate at which transactions are handled. The rejection rate during transaction processing in the application due to technical issues has nosedived from 11.7 percent to 2.3 percent. “This clearly means that we can process a higher number of transactions per day leading to more revenue for the company. I had never anticipated a business benefit in this area,” says Mehta.

Server virtualization and Open Source have infused agility into Euronet’s IT infrastructure. “Today, our business has become more agile. We can now serve a wider customer base and enter into new areas of business. Our business has benefited from the scalability we have achieved,” says Mehta. And that was visible when Euronet won a business deal with a leading bank. The company needed to work on an application related to the reconciliation of financial transactions. This would lead to an estimated growth of 30-35 percent for Euronet. It also wanted all its resources to be available in four weeks. Management wasn’t sure if the IT infrastructure would be able to fulfill this requirement. But Mehta quickly put their apprehensions to rest and promised them that all the resources would be made available the very next day. Enthused, they went back to the customer and regenerated the project cycle. The customer was amazed because the entire timeline came down drastically. And today, thanks to Mehta, management is increasingly reposing trust in IT. “Now they are going ahead and committing lower timelines to the customers even without asking me!” says Mehta. But who’s complaining? CIO

Sneha Jha is senior correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to sneha_jha@idgindia.com

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Don’t be a

ONE HIT WONDER By Mary K. Pratt

As an IT leader you cannot leave innovation to luck. Fortunately for you, many top IT organizations have found ways to come up with bright ideas, time after time.

There were no big brainstorming sessions, rah-rah team meetings or executive committees convened to devise a plan to drive FiOS TV customers away from using call centers in favor of self-service ordering, the more cost-effective option. Instead, a junior programmer came up with the idea to build a click-to-order option that viewers could use instantly with their remotes. The programmer approached his manager and got the OK to build a prototype, which he delivered within months. The click-to-order feature, which started rolling out in 2007, boosted self-service orders from 5 percent to 55 percent in just one month, cutting costs and inspiring click-to-order uses in other areas of the FiOS lineup too. “He hit a gold mine,” says Shaygan Kheradpir, CIO at Verizon Communications. Kheradpir says the junior programmer’s ability to run with an innovative idea wasn’t a fluke; Verizon’s IT shop is designed to enable that kind of innovation to happen again and again. “The underlying mission for Verizon IT is to look for opportunities where IT can make a quantum leap in performance for the business,” Kheradpir says. IT leaders at other companies share Kheradpir’s outlook. The keys to making innovation a sustainable process, they say, include understanding the business inside and out, setting up a team dedicated to trying new ideas, and not being afraid to fail. Here are some hard-won lessons in ensuring a steady supply of innovative ideas.

Lessons from a: Communications Company For Kheradpir, innovation in IT is all about giving workers opportunities to see and develop ideas that they think can make a difference in the company’s business, whether it’s in product offerings, customer service or cost control. But to do that, Kheradpir says, his staffers can’t be isolated from the employees working in the company’s other divisions. So he sends his teams into the field to see how their business-side colleagues do their jobs. “You’re going to dream a lot better stuff if you’re side by side with the front line—in the call center, in the stores, in the trucks, doing installations in people’s homes,” Kheradpir says. “That’s where you see the real problems and opportunities. And that’s where you can make a difference.”

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Innovation

Indeed, the junior programmer who developed the click-to-order function had been riding around with a technician doing home installations, which gave him the opportunity to ponder how to make FiOS TV installations more effective. However, Kheradpir acknowledges that an IT organization has to do more than allow inquisitive programmers insight into operations if it wants to capitalize on breakthrough ideas. To that end, Verizon has established a way to follow up on innovative proposals, he says. Workers are encouraged to take their ideas to their supervisors, who are expected to help build on them. If it looks like an idea could work, the process keeps going. Workers form partnerships with their connections on the business side, and they develop plans with milestones that allow the team to learn and correct as they go. “We ask, ‘Tomorrow, 8 am, what are we going to do different? What are you going to show me next week? So we give them a little bit of leeway and see what they can do,” Kheradpir says. “So through this process, if they keep going and we see some proof of concept and we see it’s a big idea, we start to give more resources and really blast out the thing.” Kheradpir calls it “disciplined innovation with focus and accountability.”

Lessons from a: Provider of e-Commerce Systems

IT organizations that repeatedly deliver innovations devote some resources to it and often have a

separate group.

new possibilities.“That’s how you encourage innovation,” Pattison says. “It’s in how it’s staffed, how it’s organized, how it partners with the business.” He says one of the most important steps has been the creation of a separate group of about 10 workers who are freed up from routine responsibilities. “You really need to have an R&D department, so when they have an idea, we have the bandwidth to model it out and mock it up,” he says. “Because if you don’t protect your innovators from the day-to-day stuff, you won’t be able to innovate.” But Pattison says his promotion of innovation comes with some checks. His innovators have some leeway, but they also need to focus on delivering innovations that drive business results. “You can’t innovate in a vacuum, not in our industry. So you have to look at what is the end goal,” he says. To help ensure that that happens, the IT innovators partner with others in the business to better understand where changes and improvements are needed. For example, they recently met with international shippers to evaluate what’s needed in a new electronic freight payment settlement program that’s in the works.

Jeffrey Pattison says that when he started as CIO at Inttra, a company that provides e-commerce systems to the ocean freight industry, he inherited an IT group that was “innovation-averse.” The staffers felt their main job was “to pump transactions through.” But Pattison wanted a staff that wasn’t afraid to stretch, so he established some Lessons from a: Casino new expectations and policies to support As part of her job as chief technology officer innovation. He let his staffers at Harrah’s Entertainment, know that they didn’t have to Katrina Lane oversees a have all the answers to start small team of workers who Reader ROI: working on an idea. He let make up the casino operator’s How to staff innovation them know that they could innovation group. Lane says the failure benchmark make mistakes and recover. this seven-person team the importance of a And he created a special R&D looks at the latest technology bottom line focus unit charged with mocking up to figure out whether any

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of it can further the Las Vegas company’s business goals. This innovation group, which Lane says has only a modest budget, is not expected to calculate investment paybacks or develop business requirements. Its charge is to figure out whether a technology is worth pursuing. Lane says she expects the group to fail at least 50 percent of the time. “If it doesn’t, then we figure they’re not stretching enough,” she says. She notes that failure could mean that a technology didn’t work or that it worked but didn’t deliver the expected business results. Lane says it’s important to have people dedicated to this task. “You do need to have people doing that as their day job or you’ll focus a little bit too much on ‘incrementality’,” Lane says, adding that the group works on delivering near-term business results as well as thinking about long-term objectives. Consider, she says, her innovation group’s search for technologies to help handle food and beverage orders on the casino floors. Harrah’s is already rolling out self-service programs at slot machines, where gamblers can order through a small touch screen that’s right at their fingertips. But the innovation group is looking beyond that, working with service managers to study how servers now wait on customers in other areas of the casinos, such as at the gaming tables. “They did a lot of work around figuring out the details of how it ought to work and the processes so we can think of technologies to support those processes,” Lane says. She asserts that it’s crucial to manage the innovation process; it’s not something that will happen on its own. “There have to be strong metrics, timelines and processes, such as how you get to rollout. It’s not all research and dreamy,” she says. “Innovation is a systematic process. It’s like research and development. You have to manage your pipeline.”

Lessons from an: IT Provider In order to continually deliver innovations, an organization must have its technical REAL CIO WORLD | o c t o b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 0

Innovation house in order, says Frank Modruson, CIO at Accenture. “You can’t focus on innovation if you’re not doing the basics well,” he says. “If systems aren’t working, aren’t functional, aren’t secure—all the standard stuff—talking about that gee-whiz thing over there won’t cut the mustard.” Modruson says Accenture has gotten rid of its legacy technology. The consulting and IT services firm replaced its telecommunications network between 2007 and 2009, and its oldest applications go back only about 10 years. Modruson says handling the everyday duties of IT is important because it makes rolling out innovations easier. “The last thing you want is to have a success and then say, ‘Wait a minute. We can’t do this everywhere,’” he says. For example, the company started using a telepresence solution in 2008. It now has telepresence at 60 sites. Modruson notes that without the updated network, he might not have had the capacity to introduce this technology.

“When something like this comes along, you have to be ready for it,” he adds. But you also have to know what’s coming. For that, Modruson relies in part on Accenture’s Technology Labs, an R&D unit that experiments with new technologies. He also relies on key team members who “push the whole organization to try something different.” Modruson has ‘the Beta Team’—a few techies bored with current technologies who are charged with trying out new ones. He measures their success not in conventional terms, such as ROI, but rather by the number of new technologies they try annually. He says he randomly picked 20 technologies as a goal. Modruson says he doesn’t want his innovation team getting too focused on project planning and implementation details—that’s for further down the road, after the innovative ideas have been vetted. “We’re trying to keep it small and nimble,” he explains, “because innovative ideas come from people just throwing stuff against the wall.”

5 Ways to Build Innovation Consultants say the following elements are key to building an environment that can sustain innovation: Give employees the right to fail. Create an environment that doesn’t punish workers for having tried something that ultimately didn’t work. “It’s hard to innovate when you’re afraid to be wrong or make a mistake. Part of innovation is stretching or thinking outside the box, and more often than not, you’re wrong,” says Philip Garland, leader of the CIO advisory practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Spread responsibility for innovation throughout the organization, top to bottom. “Anyone can have a good idea,” Garland says. Besides, if just a few people champion innovation, it could go away when those people move on to other companies. Develop partnerships with other departments. To sell technology-driven innovations, IT needs to understand and articulate how it will help the company reach its goals, says Ian Hayes, president of Clarity Consulting. “Ultimately, there are a lot of great things we can do, but if it doesn’t fundamentally drive something that affects the bottom line, then it’s just a nice-to-have [item],” he says. Create a central repository for ideas and experiments. Garland likes the idea of innovation labs or centers, housed within the IT department, where people can try out new gadgets or gather to hear from various sources, such as vendors or outside speakers, about bleeding-edge technologies. Establish processes and ownership. Organizations should have a process for taking a promising idea and testing it out, Garland says. Similarly, someone needs to take on the role of facilitator to prioritize and guide ideas through the development process. That person could be the CIO, an innovation officer or another key leader. —M.K.P

Innovation: Trendy Topic, Hard to Do Most IT departments have spent the past few years focused on keeping costs down, but many are beginning to talk about innovation again. “Innovation in IT is an increasingly popular topic, especially now that the economy shows some signs of life,” says Philip Garland, a partner and CIO advisory solution leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers. To some, planning for innovation might seem like a quixotic quest to capture lightning. But innovation can be less about a single successful strike and more about repeated hits that are planned for and targeted. The key is knowing how to inspire and encourage innovation. “There are millions of things right in front of our noses that we accept every day, and someone will come in and say we don’t have to do it that way, and it will be an a-ha moment. And after that it will be wave after wave of innovation,” says Ian Hayes, president of Clarity Consulting. But Hayes says many IT organizations aren’t set up to allow for innovations. Often, staffers are so mired in the daily grind that they just focus on getting through. “Most IT departments are so far away from being able to hit home runs, and this economy made it worse because of all the cutbacks. So you may occasionally get someone who has that great idea, but everything is set up for them not to,” he contends. “And then the organizational stuff—the ‘We don’t want a distraction right now’—serves to push that innovative idea aside.” Hayes says IT organizations that repeatedly deliver innovations devote at least some resources to it. They often have a separate group that can take a step back and ask whether the company could be doing something differently. “But you also need a way to bring those ideas up, to get to decision-makers who can say, ‘Yes, we can try this,’” he adds. And IT needs someone to act as a salesperson— someone who will serve as an advocate— and articulate why the innovation is worth pursuing. CIO

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everything you wanted to know and more

Filled to the Brim As your storage needs continue to amplify and real estate continues to shrink, you need new tools to tackle information overload. Here’s how you can protect your company from data onslaught. Vol/5 | ISSUE/12

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What’s Inside Deep Dive Features Finding Your Storage Zen ��70 Do Not Duplicate...........................................................................76 Shrinking Your Storage Footprint ��78 The Politics of Storage ��82 Column What’s Your Black-box Doing? �� 74

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With data expected to explode 44-fold over the next 10 years, IT leaders are looking for ways to reduce their storage complexities. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s how.

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Deep Dive | Storage As the entrance of the new decade eases in, new technologies being developed by the day are creating voluminous amounts of data that accrue in stale storage systems, gathering dust in the bin. Research firm IDC predicts in its annual Digital Universe report that data stored in various storage systems is expected to balloon 44-fold in the next ten years, considering the rate of data growth pegged at 0.8 Zettabytes (800 billion gigabytes) in 2009. The amount of data growth in recent years—fueled by cascading amounts of corporate data, bolstered by renewed preference for multimedia data, and necessitated by the need to keep and make use of digitized information—is prompting CIOs and IT leaders to acquire and deploy a host of technology solutions that answer the need to contain and manage data, all while trying to curb expenditures. “As customers become more interactive, companies need to have access to information they might have gathered from previous transactions,” says Mohammad Saif, deputy director for consulting, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan South Asia and Middle East. This information is compounded by firms’ online interactions, as well as the need to keep and have access to records as mandated by law, as in the case of the telecoms sector. “Data growth is a reality that few businesses can afford to ignore,” says Ravi Rajendran, VP and GM, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) ASEAN. Embattled IT administrators are, therefore, forced to tackle a multi-pronged problem that is inevitable for most organizations.

Illust rat ion by mm shan it h

Foresight “Because of the way storage is packaged, businesses end up buying up to 75 percent more capacity than they actually need,” Rajendran explains. For Rajendran, the problem sets in when organizations throw more capacities in an attempt to solve their storage crisis. “The result is a confusing tangle of heterogeneous storage systems and management software, which requires more IT staff expertise, and massively underutilized assets and ‘stranded storage,’ which are a waste of

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already shrinking budgets,” he points out.In this complex scenario, the age-old adage of beginning with the end in mind comes to the fore. “[An] important area is information lifecycle management (ILM), which can help companies predict storage needs and related costs,” suggests Erwin Chuaunsu, country manager for systems and technology group, IBM Philippines.

Organizing Data ILM offers reprieve from having to manage huge pools of data, but that is assuming most acquired data are structured. “Surprisingly, statistics show a rise in unstructured data (such as documents and media files) rather than structured data (databases),” Chuaunsu shares. This come-from-behind rise in unstructured data—bolstered by highbandwidth connectivity which allows for movement of huge amounts of data over the Internet—can be controlled by effectively managing the use of data. “The use of data must be viewed separately,” proposes Reco Li, research manager, storage of enterprise hardware systems, domain research group, IDC Asia Pacific. Li suggests that core business applications with mostly structured data be stored in high-performing disk systems, such as Fiber Channel SANs, in order to be retrieved very quickly. “The unstructured data, and some non-mission-critical data are secured with IP SANs, NAS systems, and DAS, which are seeing increased market demands today,” he adds. Gaining access to data conveniently may have more wisdom to it than just mere technical efficiency, according to HDS’s Rajendran. “Searching for the right information may be difficult and time-consuming and may carry a heavy re-financial impact. It’s better to have a system in place,” he says.

The Proverbial Sprawl Yet managing storage systems doesn’t only entail zooming into the granularity of data, but zooming out to handle the hardware as well. As data grows, storage systems and disks proportionally pile up, usually leading to what is called the “IT sprawl” where heterogeneous storage systems

The way storage is packaged, businesses buy up to

75 percent more capacity.

operate in separate silos, making it difficult to scale when the need arises (and, in the case of data, that need is ever-present). This is where virtualization comes in. “Technologies such as [virtualization] allow for more efficient use of raw capacity, and minimize the need for frequent capex, as in expansion and upgrades,” explains IBM’s Chuaunsu. According to Ong Swee Lye, StorageWorks regional sales manager for Asia Pacific and Japan at HP, common industries seeing increased need for scalable storage systems include financial services, telecom, media and entertainment, oil and gas, and life sciences. “By pooling together all storage assets and providing a single interface for management, virtualization can help improve storage utilization by reclaiming stranded [capacity],” Rajendran adds. Cloud storage, on the other hand, proves useful in managing the complex amount of data, at the same time liberalizing the storage portfolio to make it available to the entire spectrum of business. “Cloud storage would make the latest technologies available for all sets of businesses, starting from SOHO to large enterprises,” relates Frost & Sullivan’s Saif. IDC’s Li, meanwhile, concedes that the cloud offers the agility needed by modernday storage systems. “As a business solution-focused approach, many cloud end-users [can enjoy] IT agility and lower cost,” he says. Not all clouds come with a silver lining, however. Rajendran cautions users before REAL CIO WORLD | o c t o b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 0

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Deep Dive |Storage jumping on to cloud storage because of eventual management issues. “The problem with this ‘one size fits all’ approach is that creating another silo for the cloud somewhat defeats the purpose,” he argues. HDS’s strategy for cloud storage, he says, allows for customers to define the system based on their needs. “[Other cloud offerings do] not address the more holistic practice of running traditional IT from a single, integrated infrastructure,” he clarifies.

Mission: Uptime Virtualization and the cloud are both attractive options, but they answer only part of a multitude of storage issues enterprises face this day. In most large corporations, the remaining portions of the storage debacle are relegated to backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity, a segment of the enterprise controlled largely by compliance to government regulations. “Businesses are now challenged to interpret a slew of new mandates and protect their key data assets,” Rajendran relates. The need to answer to government rules in protection of precious customer data is likewise putting a pressure on CIOs to manage their data store efficiently. At one end, technologies such as tape libraries provide reliable methods of backup storage. “At the core of IBM’s backup and base tier disaster recovery offerings is tape storage. IBM continues to push the limits of tape in terms of speed and capacity with products such as the new LTO 5 series of tape drives and libraries, and the TS1130 enterprise tape drive,” Chuaunsu notes. On the other end, an emerging middleman technology is rising in the form of data deduplication—or dedupe—a data backup mechanism which identifies if certain files being saved have duplicates, and will only save it once in the simplest form of storage, according to Ronnie Latinazo, country manager, EMC Philippines. “In the past, companies do 1:1 backups,” Latinazo stresses. “With deduplication, they can achieve 20:1 to as much as 500:1 backup and compression ratio.” By identifying duplicate files—which, Latinazo notes, are prevalent most especially in corporate e-mails where end-users pass the same file 72

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More Isn’t Enough

one survey finds that storage systems are underutilized even as companies add more capacity. A survey of 1,165 It managers found that the average company doesn’t utilize 28 percent of storage capacity but nonetheless plans to increase storage capacity by 34 percent over the next year. the survey, performed by IDG’s b2b publications business, found that enterprise storage capacity will grow by an average of 58 percent over the next one to three years and by 93 percent over the next three to five years. the survey separated respondents into two groups: those managing It in enterprises with more than 1,000 employees; and those at Smbs with fewer than 1,000 employees. the survey found that overall, companies spend an average of 23 percent of their annual storage budget on operating costs and maintenance. Enterprise spend about 29 percent of their annual storage budgets on maintenance and operating costs, while Smbs spend 19 percent. overall, respondents indicated that their top challenges are infrastructure complexity (28 percent), security concerns (27 percent), inadequate skills or training (25 percent), difficulty proving roI (21 percent) and deciding which storage areas to virtualize (21 percent). only 14 percent of respondents said that their companies are piloting or implementing private or public cloud-based storage technologies. About 42 percent of all respondents said that public cloud-based data storage solutions are not on their roadmap at all. meanwhile, only 23 percent of enterprises and 23 percent of Smbs ruled out use of private cloud-based data storage solutions. Sixty five percent of all respondents said they plan to consolidate storage operations by using fewer, more homogeneous systems over the next year.

— lucas mearian

around over and over again, multiplying the need to store multiple files of the same kind—firms eliminate the need to have more storage disks for backup. Additionally, deduplication offers businesses the capacity to reduce risks, which are commonly attributed to doing backups using tape libraries. “There is a lot of risk about tape. Just transporting the tape to the backup site poses a lot of risks,” the EMC executive explains, adding that with dedupe technology, ease of transport is not a problem as the transfer is done entirely online. Just recently, EMC released what they claim is the largest and fastest inline dedupe system yet, the Data Domain Global Deduplication Array. It offers speed of up to 12.8TB/hour, up to 280TB usable capacity, and up to 270 concurrent wire streams.

If The Price Is Right On top of all these concerns, the need to keep costs in check is likewise weighing down

on businesses, especially since storage and disk systems don’t come cheap. “First of all, reducing total cost of IT ownership is becoming crucial,” remarks IDC’s Li. Acquiring technologies that reduce data complexity is important, but ensuring sustainability of the businesses remains a top concern for most executives. “Keeping the cost of managing storage infrastructure from escalating is a major problem,” adds HDS’s Rajendran. The key, according to him, is to have a single window of management, and to promote consolidation, because “no single product can magically solve the challenges.” “A holistic approach--that seamlessly integrates virtualization, thin provisioning, and deduplication—can significantly augment an organization’s storage management strategy and accelerate savings,” he says. CIo

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by Matt Prigge

Deep Dive | Storage

What’sYour Black-box Doing? | Recently, Dell announced the newest members of its EqualLogic PeerStorage line of virtualized iSCSI arrays: The PS6000XVS and PS6010XVS. Unlike the other PeerStorage arrays (which are either entirely SATA, SAS, or SSD), the XVS models mix eight SSDs and eight 15,000-RPM SAS disks in the same enclosure, giving you tiered storage in a single box. Mixing two vastly different types of storage media in the

InfraStructure

unnecessary: The array knows best and can put your data on the storage media it deserves to be on. Or does it? I don’t know about you, but having unseen software make decisions for me about what data deserves to be where gives me the willies. Sure, I’m all for anything that can make my job easier and yield better overall performance. But giving up control to a load-balancing algorithm or automation engine requires a level of

devices, and it doesn’t take a genius to conclude this is where we’re headed. With IT budgets shrinking and our data exploding, we can’t really afford to micromanage every disk volume anymore. If you’re a crusty old captain, transitioning from a traditional “these disks in this shelf make up this LUN, (logical unit number) which gets assigned to this server” SAN to a virtualized SAN where your LUN could be virtually anywhere constitutes a huge

the future of storage is in devices that sense your performance needs and adapt to them. Is that really a good thing? same shelf isn’t that unusual. Here’s what’s out of the ordinary: The XVS arrays automatically load-balance heavily used data blocks onto SSD while leaving lessused blocks on the SAS disk. In theory, this is an excellent idea. It should allow the array to adapt very quickly to changing I/O patterns and provide the best performance possible from its mix of very fast, but small SSDs and comparatively slow, but much larger SAS disks. Take, for instance, the task of providing storage to a heavily used Microsoft SQL database. In most cases, you’d combine high-speed disk for the data volumes and, if needed, SSD space for transaction logs and tempdb. The XVS arrays attempt to make these sorts of architectural decisions 74

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trust I and many others like me struggle with. And I don’t think such discomfort is limited to storage admins, server admins, or even technologists in general. As both an aviation and technology enthusiast, I get a certain amount of glee from reading stories about airline pilots who make the transition from largely mechanical aircraft such as the Boeing 737 to the heavily automated Airbus A320. Veteran Airbus captains often sit quietly in the left seat and wait for the newly minted First Officer to ask, “What’s it doing now?” You can easily see the parallels between the challenges those pilots face and that of old-school storage administrators who must maintain “intelligent” storage

leap of faith—one that many of us still don’t want to make. The evolution from a world where careful thought and detailed design work was necessary for a successful storage implementation to one where the storage sort of figures it out on its own will be difficult for a lot of people. In addition, it’s likely that some attempts to get this automation to work properly will fail in ways that are hard to diagnose and equally hard to correct. I have yet to get my hands on Dell’s XVS line, but I’m willing to bet it comes in a black box. CIo Matt Prigge is a contributing editor for InfoWorld (cIo o’s sister publication). Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Deep Dive | Storage

Enterprise data explosion threatens to overwhelm storage systems, particularly the backup tier. Here’s how data deduplication can help.

Donot

Duplicate by InfoWorld staff

Data storage needs continue to grow unabated, straining backup and disaster recovery systems while requiring more online spindles, using more power, and generating more heat. No one expects a respite from this explosion in data growth. That leaves IT professionals to search for technology solutions that can at least lighten the load. One solution particularly well-suited to backup and disaster recovery is data deduplication, which takes advantage of the enormous amount of redundancy in business data. Eliminating duplicate data can reduce the amount of storage space necessary from a 10:1 ratio to a 50:1 ratio and beyond, depending on the technology used and the level of redundancy. With a little help from data deduplication, administrators can reduce costs, lighten backup requirements, and accelerate data restoration in the event of an emergency. 76

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Deduplication takes several different forms, each with its own approach and optimal role in backup and disaster recovery scenarios. Ultimately, few doubt that data deduplication technology will extend beyond the backup tier and apply its benefits across business storage systems. But first, let’s take a look at why data deduplication has become so attractive to so many organizations.

too much Data, too little time Duplicated data is strewn all over the enterprise. Files are saved to a file share in the datacenter, with other copies located on an FTP server facing the Internet, and yet another copy (or two) located in users’ personal folders. Sometimes copies are made as a backup version prior to exporting to another system or updating to new software. Are users good about deleting these extra copies? Not so much.

A classic example of duplicate data is the e-mail blast. It goes like this: Someone in human resources wants to send out the new Internet acceptable use policy PDF to 100 users on the network. So he or she creates an e-mail, addresses it to a mailing list, attaches the PDF, and presses send. The mail server now has 100 copies of the same attachment in its storage system. Only one copy of the attachment is really necessary, yet with no deduplication system in place, all the copies sit in the mail store taking up space. Server virtualization is another area rife with duplicate data. The whole idea of virtualization is to ‘do more with less’ and maximize hardware utilization by spinning up multiple virtual machines in one physical server. This equates to less hardware expense, lower utility costs, and (hopefully) easier management. Each virtualized server is contained in a file. For instance, VMware uses a single VMDK (virtual machine disk) file as the Vol/5 | ISSUE/12

Deep Dive | Storage

straining Backup systems How do you back up all this data? Old tape backup systems are too slow and lack the needed capacity. New high-end tape systems have the performance and capacity but are quite expensive. And no matter how good your tape drive is, Murphy’s Law has a tendency to jump all over tape when it comes to restoration. VTLs (virtual tape libraries) provide a modern alternative to tape, using hard disks in configurations that mimic standard tape drives. But at what cost? Additional spindles equal additional cost and additional power consumption. VTLs are fast and provide a reliable backup and restore destination, but if there were less data to back up, you’d have lower hardware and operating costs to begin with. Data glut compounds the difficulty of disaster recovery, making each stage of near line and offline storage more expensive. Keeping a copy of the backup in near line storage makes restoration of missing or corrupt files easy. But depending on the backup set size and the number of backup sets admins want to keep handy, your near line storage can be quite substantial. The next tier, offline storage, is composed of tapes or other media copies that get thrown in a vault or sent to some other secure location. Again,

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if the data set is large and growing, this offline media set must expand to fit. Many disaster recovery plans include sending the backup set to another geographical location over a WAN. Unless your company has deep pockets and can afford a very fast WAN link, it would be beneficial to keep the size of the backup set to a minimum. That goes double for restoring data. If the set is really large, trying to restore from an off-site backup will add downtime and frustration.

Defining Data Deduplication and Its Benefits Simply put, deduplication is the process of detecting and removing duplicate data from a storage medium or file system. Detection of duplicate data may be performed at the file, bit, or block level, depending on the type and aggressiveness of the deduplication process. The first time a deduplication system sees a file or a chunk of file, that data element is identified. Thereafter, each subsequent identical item is removed from the system but marked with a small placeholder. The placeholder points back to the first instance of the data chunk so that the deduped data can be reassembled when needed. This deduplication process reduces the amount of storage space needed to represent all of the indexed files in the system. For example, a file system that has 100 copies of the same document from HR in each employee’s personal folder can be reduced to a single copy of the original file plus 99 tiny placeholders that point back to the original file. It’s easy to see how that can vastly reduce storage requirements—as well as why it makes much more sense to back up the deduped file system instead of the original file system. Another benefit of data deduplication is the ability to keep more backup sets on near line storage. With the amount of backup disk space reduced, more ‘point in time’ backups can be kept ready on disk for faster and easier file restoration. This also allows you to maintain a longer backup history. Instead of having three versions

solution olution

Ability to scale without expensive hardware upgrades. more recovery points and with shorter recovery times. point-and-click deduplication management. built-in reporting of deduplication across vendors, data types, sources and platforms. tight integration with all necessary applications to minimize end-user downtime. Single solution simplicity for ease of deployment and administration. Ability to rapidly and securely recover business-critical data across all locations, applications, storage media and points-in-time. D2D2t-optimized t-optimized for backup performance t and reliable data recovery. Fast, comprehensive search to aid in recovery. Data integrity and security features. built-in Dr capabilities. Data classification. Cost-effective and timely eDiscovery. Use of a common technology platform. Single point of management.

of the file to restore, users can have many more, enabling a very granular approach to file backups and accommodating loads of backup history. Disaster recovery is another process that greatly benefits from data deduplication. For years, data compression was the only way to reduce the overall size of the offsite data set. Add in deduplication and the backup set can be reduced even more. Why transfer the same data set each night when only a small portion of it changed that day? Deduplication in disaster recovery makes perfect sense: Not only is the transfer time reduced, but the WAN is used more efficiently with less overall traffic. CIo Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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IllUStrAtIon by VIk AS kAp oor

virtual hard disk for the virtual machine. As you would expect, VMDK files tend to be rather large—at least 2GB in size, and usually much larger. One of the great features of virtual machines is that admins can stop the VM, copy the VMDK file, and back it up. Simply restart the machine and you’re back online. Now what happens with all of these backup copies? That’s right—a lot of duplicated files stored on a file server. Admins keep “golden images” of working virtual servers to spawn new virtual machines—not to mention the backup copies. Virtualization is a fantastic way to get the most out of CPU and memory, but without deduplication, virtual hard disks can actually increase network storage requirements.

Features to look for in a Dedupe

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Deep Dive | Storage

Shrink Your

Storage Footprint

ith the economy still shaky and the need for storage exploding, almost every storage vendor claims it can reduce the amount of data you must store. Trimming your data footprint not only cuts costs for hardware, software, power and datacenter space, but also eases the strain on networks and backup windows. But how do you know which technique to use? First you have to understand how your business uses data and determine when the cost savings of data reduction are worth the resulting drop in performance. Here are four techniques to help reduce your stored-data volume.

Deduplication

the upsides—and the downsides— of four of the most popular ways to reduce your enterprise’s storage bloat. By Robert L. Scheier

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Deduplication—the process of finding and eliminating duplicate pieces of data stored in different data sets—can reduce storage needs up to 90 percent. For example, through deduplication, you could ensure that you store only one copy of an attachment that was sent to hundreds of employees. Deduplication has become almost a requirement for backup, archiving and just about any form of secondary storage where speed of access is less important than reducing the data footprint. Chris Watkis, IT director at healthcare advertising and marketing firm Grey Healthcare Group, is seeing reduction ratios as high as 72:1 for backup data, thanks to a deduplication process that uses FalconStor Software’s Virtual Tape Library storage appliance. Data can be deduped at the file or block level, with different products able to examine blocks of varying sizes. In most cases, the more fine-grained assessment a system can do, the greater the space savings. But fine-grained deduplication might take longer and therefore slow data access speeds. Deduplication can be done preprocessing, or inline, as the data is being written to its target; or post-processing, after the data has been stored on its target. Vol/5 | ISSUE/12

Deep Dive | Storage Post-processing is best if it’s critical to meet backup windows with fast data movement, says Greg Schulz, senior analyst at The Server and StorageIO Group. But consider pre-processing if you have “time to burn” and need to reduce costs, he says. While inline deduplication can cut the amount of data stored by a ratio of about 20:1, it isn’t scalable, and it can hurt performance and force users to buy more servers to perform the deduplication, critics say. On the other hand, Schulz says that post-processing deduplication requires more storage as a buffer, making that space unavailable for other uses. For customers with multiple servers or storage platforms, enterprisewide deduplication saves money by eliminating duplicate copies of data stored on the various platforms. This is critical because most organizations create as many as 15 copies of the same data for use by different applications, says Randy Chalfant, vice president of strategy at disk-based storage vendor Nexsan. Schulz says primary deduplication products could perform in pre-processing mode until a certain performance threshold is hit, then switch to post-processing.

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According to Forrester Research, data storage needs are growing at least 30 percent a year while budgets stay flat. Another option, policy-based deduplication, allows storage managers to choose which files should undergo deduplication, based on their size, importance or other criteria. SFL Data, which gathers, stores, indexes, searches and provides data for companies and law firms involved in litigation, has found a balance between performance and data reduction. It’s deploying Ocarina Networks’ 2400 Storage Optimizer for “near-online” storage of compressed and deduplicated files on a BlueArc Mercury 50 cluster that scales up to 2 petabytes of usable capacity, rehydrating those files as users require them. “Rehydrating the files slows access time a bit, but it’s far better than telling customers they have to wait two days” to access those files, says SFL’s technical director, Ruth Townsend, noting that

the company gets as much as 50 percent space savings through deduplication and file compression.

Compression Probably the most well-known data reduction technology, compression is the process of finding and eliminating repeated patterns of bytes. It works well with databases, e-mail and files, but it’s less effective for images. It’s included in some storage systems, but you can also find standalone compression applications or appliances. Real-time compression that doesn’t delay access or slow performance by requiring data to be decompressed before it’s modified or read is suitable for online applications like databases and online transaction processing, says Schulz. Allen of i365 says the benefits of compression vary. It can reduce data by ratios of 6:1 or more for SQL databases, but for file servers the ratios are closer to 2:1. According to Fadi Albatal, vice president of marketing at FalconStor, compression is most effective on backup, secondary or tertiary storage, where it can reduce storage needs by ratios of 2:1 to 4:1 for “highly active” database or

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Deep Dive | Storage e-mail applications. When information management services firm Iron Mountain archives applications, compression and deduplication reduce storage by as much as 80 percent, says T.M. Ravi, Iron Mountain’s chief marketing officer. IBM focused attention on compression of primary storage with its acquisition of Storwize, whose appliance writes compressed files back to the NAS device. Files compressed by Microsoft Office applications or popular image formats such as JPEG can’t be reduced with many common compression techniques or may even increase in size. Neuxpower Solutions claims that its software can shrink Office and JPEG files by as much as 95 percent without loss of image quality by removing unnecessary information such as metadata or details that can’t be seen unless the image is enlarged. Ocarina, which is being acquired by Dell, says its products offer similar capabilities because they use multiple optimization algorithms tuned for different types of content, and they have the ability to test and choose among various compression methods for the best runtime efficiency. Deduplication and compression are complementary. “Use compression when the primary focus is on speed,

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performance, transfer rates. Use deduplication where there is a high degree of redundant data and you want higher space savings,” says Schulz.

Policy-Based Tiering Policy-based tiering is the process of moving data to different classes of storage based on criteria such as its age, how often it is accessed or the speed at which it must be available. Unless the policy calls for the outright deletion of unneeded data, this technique won’t reduce your overall storage needs, but it can trim costs by moving some data to less expensive, but slower, media. Vendors in this market include HP, which offers built-in policy management and automated file migration in its StorageWorks X9000, and DataGlobal, which says that its unified storage and information management software enables customers to analyze and manage unstructured files and other information and thereby reduce their storage needs by 60 percent to 70 percent for e-mail and about 20 percent for file servers. Other products with tiering capabilities include Storage Center 5 from Compellent Technologies, HotZone and SafeCache

from FalconStor, Policy Advisor from 3Par, EMC’s FAST and F5 Networks’ ARX series of file virtualization appliances.

Storage Virtualization As is the case with server virtualization, storage virtualization involves abstracting multiple storage devices into a single pool of storage, allowing administrators to move data among tiers as needed. Many experts view it as an enabling technology rather than a data reducer, per se, but others see a more direct connection to data reduction. Actifio’s data management systems use virtualization to eliminate the need for multiple applications for functions such as backups and disaster recovery. Its appliances let customers choose service-level agreements governing the management of various data sets from a series of templates. With this method, the proper management policies are then applied to a single copy of the data, defining where, for example, it is stored and how it is deduplicated during functions such as backup and replication. Company co-founder and CEO Ash Ashutosh claims that Actifio can cut storage needs 75 percent to 90 percent. CIO Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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10/8/2010 6:57:00 PM

by beth Schultz

ike Facebook for employee use and iPhones in business, data storage policy is a topic that can be a political hot potato within corporate walls. Implementing policy-based storage management can be so contentious, in fact, that at many companies, it quickly turns into a non-starter. Rather than haggling with the business about where data gets stored and for how long, IT simply places all data in a single tier—that which is most satisfactory for the most critical applications. The result is the stereotypical high-cost, over-provisioned storage-area network. Andrew Reichman, an analyst at Forrester Research, calls this the “highest common denominator” approach to policybased storage management. “Companies really struggle with how to do policy-based storage management right, so in some cases they do nothing. They just don’t tier at all,” he says. “Everybody’s app is performancesensitive and important, or you wouldn’t be deploying or supporting it. What’s

The Politics of Storage When everyone’s data is important, storage management can be a political tug of war. needed is the relativity—how much performance capability is truly needed for this important application to work effectively?” Reichman adds. “The challenge isn’t with the cost of the hardware or the software or in the tools for moving the data,” agrees Greg Schulz, an analyst at The Server and StorageIO Group. “It’s in getting somebody to define and sign off on what to move, when to move

Storage By the numbers A survey of 97 IT professionals conducted in August this year shows that a majority of organizations are taking steps to reduce storage bloat� reducing our organization’s stored data volume over the next two years is:

A low priority for our It t shop

47%

53%

A high priority for our It t shop

to what extent is your organization moving toward reducing its storeddata volume? Already implemented technologies on the radar not considering

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27% 25% 48%

it, how long to keep it, how many copies to keep, when to delete it, and how to handle the deletion. This takes someone who has a business-value understanding of the applications and who can interface with technologists to bring all this together, and who also can get approval from the business that this is what can be done, this is what needs to be done, and also, by the way, will indemnify it.” And when dealing with data files, storage policies are only as good as the level of user compliance, adds Kerry Sylvester, IT director at WaterFurnace International a manufacturer of heat pumps. At Fort Wayne, Sylvester uses FalconStor Software’s virtualization technology to move data across its storage tiers, but users don’t always store the data as directed, he says. “Some people like to hang on to stuff, and habits are hard to break. To make policy-based storage work, you need your users storing their documents in the right places,” says Sylvester. If politics and culture aren’t distracting enough, a lack of knowledge often stands in the way of good policy-based storage management, Reichman adds. Vol/5 | ISSUE/12

Deep Dive | Storage

“Performance analytics in storage is pretty binary and often trial-and-error-based,” he explains. “So there’s often no way to make a confident decision and say, ‘This will perform completely effectively on a lower class of performance system.’ So a lot of it is guesswork—and that means there’ll be mistakes sometimes, and as a result IT alienates the user community.” But the politics of storage is starting to change with advanced automated data tiering. Available from companies like 3PAR (acquired by Hewlett-Packard), Compellent Technologies and EMC, this technology monitors how data is being used at the block level, determines which data should be on which type of storage, and then moves it there.

Reducing Complexity With automated tiering, enterprises still set policies for applications or groups of applications. They can stipulate, for example, that the Oracle production database should run on Tier 1 solid-state and Tier 2 Serial ATA drives. But then they can step back and let the system do its thing, rather than manually moving the data between those tiers as needed. “Before we went to Compellent-based policy management in the SAN, policybased storage meant a laundry list of highly technical configurations that needed monitoring daily, if not hourly, and constant planning,” says Jack Rahner, vice president of IT operations at AlphaStaff Group, employer of record for thousands of clients’ professional workers around the globe. “Policy-based storage meant being in touch with the business and knowing what kinds of activities were coming up. It all revolved around tailoring the current storage and the amount of storage we’d be expecting in read/write fashion for each customer,” he explains. “It was very complex, and we never seemed to get it quite right, and so what we ended up with was a senior engineer working

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Tips for Getting It right Experts suggest the following best practices for creating policies�

Conduct a performance study, then use the results to populate storage groups based on the level of performance required for an application, says rick Hoffman,

enterprise storage management specialist for the state of michigan. Further, preserve your fastest storage only for your highest-performing data, Hoffman adds. “Some applications don’t ever need to run on solid-state drives, for example.”

Consider automated data tiering from companies such as 3pAr, Compellent and EmC, says mark peters, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

“I don’t see much downside to this. It’s a more efficient way to do policy-based storage management.”

If policy-based storage is a trouble spot, consider other issues to help make the cost justification for automated tiering. “Is performance an issue? price?

Capacity? Support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet?” asks Jack rahner, vice president of It operations at AlphaStaff.

Don’t attempt to boil the ocean, advises Greg Schulz, founder of the Server and StorageIo Group It t consultancy. “t take a bite-size chunk—a division, a particular

application or function—and build a policy-based storage management success story for that one operation. then do it again, and again.”

keep your overall directive in mind. “When I think of policy-based storage, I think of tiering, and the purpose of tiering is to reduce the overall cost of the storage

environment by moving data to the most appropriate tier,” says Andrew reichman, a senior analyst at Forrester research. “If you’re not reducing the overall costs by doing tiering, then don’t do it.” —b.S.

full time to manage and monitor a card game of storage.” Since deploying Compellent’s Fluid Data tiering technology a year ago, the rules have changed and the complexity has disappeared, Rahner says. At AlphaStaff, which currently has hundreds of terabytes of stored data on its Compellent SAN, the business owners still give IT a heads-up about impending activity, such as open enrollment or tax filing periods, Rahner says. “But that’s really more because that’s what they’ve always done,” he adds. “So my interaction with the business is still the same, but then we don’t have to scramble and whiteboard for three days trying to figure where we’re going to put the data.”

Of course, you do have to convince the top executives that automated tiering is the way to go. For Rahner, selling the idea to the CFO and CEO was no biggie, but telling the CTO that he wanted to move all the company’s production storage to a new vendor—”now that’s a tough sell for anybody,” he says. So in what some may consider overkill, Rahner essentially brought his SAN and ERP data to Compellent’s facilities and tested the setup for two months. Tons of metrics later, he was able to make his case easily, he says, noting, “You just can’t argue with cheaper, better, faster.” CIo

Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Talking Right

Snapshots from the second season of CIO's Leadership Summit. "It's not what you say, but what you don't that matters." You talk. And you talk some more. On the phone, via an SMS, on facebook, over IM, videoconfrencing, telepresence and the list continues. There's no dearth of technology to make communication possible, anytime, anywhere. But is that enough? Not if your team can't understand your requirements, and certainly not if the business doesn't respect your initiatives. Technology can only do so much. It can only provide a medium, it can't teach you the art of communication. It can't tell you that silence is the strongest form of communication. It can't tell you that to be a good communicator, you first need to be a good listener. But if you were at the CIO Leadership Summit, you would have learnt all this and much more. And if you were not, here's what you missed. 84

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In Plain Language Bringi Dev, Mentor Square

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Road to Innovation Bert Cherian, Meta Results

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Apps for Agility Enterprise Apps

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Unwired to Grow Mobility

Page 89

Perfect Connect? Infrastructure

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Leadership LeadershipSummit SummitI ICXO CXOVision Vision

In Plain Language

Ph otos by SRIVATSA SHAN DILYA

Bringi Dev, executive mentor, Mentor Square, and adjunct Prof. at IIM, Bangalore, tells you what it takes to be an effective communicator. If you don’t go after what you want you will never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward you are always in the same place. — Norah Roberts That's something that applies to business as much as it does to life. And that’s how important it is to communicate effectively. When Warren Buffet was addressing students at Columbia Business School, he said, “An MBA graduate can experience a 50 percent increase in his market value by improving his communication skills.” You know you are a lot more than an MBA grad, so you can imagine what communicating effectively could mean to you. And most of your peers are acknowledging that themselves: Communicating IT value effectively is on the list of top five priorities for CIOs according to the State of the CIO 2009. And as your role changes, the need to communicate effectively only amplifies. Here's how to do it better. Conscious Communication: Communication is something that you need to be aware of. This may sound like a motherhood statement but I assure you that 95 percent of people are not conscious communicators. And to be conscious communicators you first need to understand what kind of a communicator you are. It’s joined at the hips with your personality. The Meaning of Silence: Silence is one of the most informative forms of communication. It could be cultural or situational but it always means something. If your staff sends you an e-mail asking for leave and you take a week to reply, it could send one of the two messages: a) You don’t like him, b) The answer is no. Non-verbal communication speaks louder than verbal communication. Sixty-five percent of communication is based on non-verbal cues. Remember that whatever you say is always backed up by the non-verbal.

According to the State of the CIO 2009, communicating IT effectively is on the priority list of CIOs. 86

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Communication Styles: There are millions of models of communication styles. Like I said before, your communication style depends on your personality. There are four types of communicators: The analyzer is the thinker. He has a problem-solving approach to life. He believes in facts and figures and explains everything in a rational or logical manner. He would ask questions like: How does this project fit in our business plan? The affiliator is concerned about people. He feels with them and relates to them. He is concerned about customer satisfaction, customer experience, employee morale, etcetera. Affiliators would likely say: How would this impact user experience? Conceptualizers are the R&D guys. They are deductive in nature. They look for a relation to a model that already exists. They would likely say: Give me an analogous situation. Activators are the doers. They are the drivers. They believe in slicing and dicing a situation. They are concerned about the agenda of the next meeting, the company’s market share etcetera. Activators would say: What’s my deadline for this project? Understanding these styles will help you carry out what is called a ‘style flex’: Molding yourself to a certain situation. And that ability will help you become an effective communicator.

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10/8/2010 7:24:09 PM

Leadership Summit I CXO Vision

Road to Innovation Bert Cherian, CEO, Meta Results, tells you how to deal with systemic problems that don’t have a readymade solution and how that could lead to innovation. In order to be an innovative leader you need to learn to deal with wicked problems. Wicked problems are those that are difficult or impossible to solve because they are incomplete, contradictory, and have changing requirements which are often difficult to recognize. Quick fixes don't seem to work and one can’t even be sure when it’s overcome. This is different from a business-as-usual scenario where when you encounter a problem you can run a heuristic or an algorithm and scale the existing systems to meet requirements. But in the case of a wicked problem, you need to get fresh insights. In order to have any hope of tackling these, you need to budget a minimum of 15 percent of your time into it. You might even have to invest in prototypes and convince management about the need to do this. That’s where innovation comes from. And that determines what your future will look like. There are basically only three routes to innovation: Pain, drift and choice. The pain of having learnt something the hard way would force you to change the way you work, or you could drift into unfamiliar grounds, or you could make a personal choice to change things. All three can lead to innovation. But when you are ready to make your own choices and avoid having to learn by pain, you will be confronted by myths on how to bring about innovation. Myth 1: Innovation is Expensive. You may be lead to believe that innovation is expensive when it is generally not. The availability of inexpensive and fast prototypes means innovation doesn’t need too much money. Myth 2: It’s Time Consuming. With the help of a proper methodology, or what they call ‘method to the madness,’ the process of innovation keeps getting quicker.

You don’t need to be brilliant to innovate. You just need the ability to model and modify what is already available. Vol/5 | ISSUE/12

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Myth 3: It Requires Brilliance. You don’t need to be brilliant to innovate. You just need the ability to model and modify what is already available. Myth 4: It Needs to Look Good. Your innovation needs to serve a purpose and therefore, there’s no need for it to look good. It needs to work and that itself will make it look good. Innovative Approach: The innovation process, therefore, can be broken down into four areas: Frame, game, play and score. The value of any innovation lies in the eyes of the stakeholder; you need to frame or capture that value and create ideas around it. You can’t be a game changer without breakthrough insight. So, when you are on the brink of change—like introducing a new format of T-20 cricket when test matches were considered ‘real cricket’—you have to ask yourself: What truths am I inverting? The process of innovation only gets better when you consider involving more players. It opens more doors for untapped opportunities. And after you have done all of the above, you need to visualize the innovation process map. You have to determine how your innovative solution can be fast, inexpensive, simple and tiny. And then you are sure to have a winner. REAL CIO WORLD | o c t o b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 0

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Leadership Summit I CIO Discussions

Apps for Agility With tremendous growth expected in all industry sectors, agility could be a competitive differentiator. the smart use of enterprise apps can get you there.

here is a reason why the most important applications in your eco-system are called ‘mission critical.’ They are the backbone of your organization’s operations and business. The impact of application quality has often been equated with availability and its dreaded antonym, downtime. And that’s where a CIO’s worst nightmare lies. The loss that business incurs due to application malfunctions, the competitive need for business agility, the dependence on suppliers, and the exorbitant cost of application ownership are some concerns that are on the problem palate. The accelerating need for businesses to adjust to new opportunities, calls for rapidly modifying applications to support the changes in business processes. “Post the economic downturn, most organizations are looking for applications that are scalable and merge well with their rapidly-growing businesses,” says Praveen Shrikhande, senior VP-IT, WNS Global Services. But new technologies do not necessarily fit with older platforms, and vice versa. And all this coupled with moderate

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budgets and an ever-growing infrastructure only makes a CIO's life tougher. And if that isn’t enough, there are low bandwidth issues. Increasing bandwidth is a common solution but that comes with a price tag. On top of that, application ownership and licensing costs are certainly unavoidable. Without constant attention to application software quality, today's state-of-the-art applications can quickly devolve into tomorrow's legacy mess. One way to solve these issues is migrating to the cloud. “One can keep all mission-critical applications running on the network which will prioritize the most important applications. For other applications, one can turn to the cloud. This way, one can differentiate and move the not-so-important applications off the network. Pay-per-use also cuts down on licensing and ownership costs,” says Annie John Mathew, head-IT, Mother Dairy. While the cloud maybe one option, an application's quality must be defined according to the attributes that provide the most effective service to the business. And those characteristics are agility, security, performance, accuracy, and availability. But despite all this, if the users aren’t comfortable with the application, organizations will never be able to derive business value from it. “Communication between IT and end-users should be transparent, which will ensure that end users don’t have unrealistic expectations. End-user adaptability and visibility into the applications is extremely essential,” says Durga Das Mishra, head-IT outsourcing and governance, Vodafone.

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Leadership Summit I CIO Discussions

Unwired to Grow

there’s more to enterprise mobility than security concerns. And Indian enterprises are waking up to that fact.

verything on the click of a button, is the mantra of the times. The mobile revolution has fostered this trend: More and more smartphones are turning into powerhouses overnight, able to handle anything from information flow, to entertainment and socializing. And it’s not just consumers but also enterprises that are reaping benefits. As Satish Das, CSO, Cognizant Technology Solutions put it, “Mobility has changed the dimensions and the idea of a workplace.” Enterprise mobility has enabled various business verticals from BFSI to manufacturing to increase their rural footprint and provide a seamless workflow between the mobile workforce and the organization. The availability of real-time data and information from the field is an important factor for organizations to stay ahead of the competition. But adopting mobility has its own set of concerns. Security issues still top the list and the cost of securing a mobile device can sometimes be more expensive than the device itself. That’s

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why many CIOs back the BYOD (Bring your own device) model. That way, employees will be more careful with their devices. But that approach could lead to more roadblocks. “Security standards are different across platforms and the huge number of devices and apps that need to be compatible is a cause of concern,” says Arun Gupta, CCA & group CTO, Shoppers Stop. Also, the ruggedness of a device is an often overlooked issue. “The field force is continuously on the move and exposed to the vagaries of the weather, extreme work conditions, grease, dust, etcetera. Finding a resilient, yet strong device which is also cost effective is a challenge,” says Anish Kalucha, AVP-IT, Reliance Energy. But despite these roadblocks, most enterprises have adopted mobility as a part of their business strategy. “Mobility has made our operations less complex and enhanced services for the customers. Customers can book movie tickets online and today my salesforce at BigFlix can manage a 200-plus active catalogue,” says T. S. Purushothaman, VP- IT, Reliance Big Entertainment. So, in order to adapt to the changing mobility environment, and increasing competition due to the upturn, CIOs need to find ways to embrace mobility as a strategic platform to better business.

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Leadership Summit I CIO Discussions

Perfect Connect? Competitive pressures are pushing enterprises to integrate their manufacturing and enterprise systems. Is that a good idea?

n today's competitive environment, manufacturing companies are seeking new and innovative ways to reduce operational costs and improve their manufacturing processes in order to stay ahead of the pack. But the inability to leverage information for effective collaboration and decisionmaking is a matter of concern. A seamless and real-time availability of data and analytics could make the lives of the CIOs in these organizations much easier. That's where Manufacturing 2.0 can help. It is a solution set which claims to be capable of enabling CIOs to integrate their ERP, MES (manufacturing execution systems) and other plant systems into a single source of data. This in turn has the capability to optimize performance and maximize ROI. Also, as competitive pressures drive enterprises to lower manufacturing costs, it is critical to integrate supply chains and ensure minimal inefficiencies. “Integrating engineering systems with enterprise systems is a major challenge. Manufacturing 2.0 should help organizations overcome these issues,” says N. Chandrasekaran, senior special director-IT, Ashok Leyland. That’s why manufacturing enterprises need a value chain that can streamline processes, manage multiple locations, share information easily, and reduce time-to-market. Such a system also integrates the entire supply chain and brings in lean manufacturing. By adopting strategies that support these objectives, organizations can enable quick decision-

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making, enhance customer experience, lower operational cost, and increase productivity. But according to some CIOs age-old problems would plague this system as well. “More than the technical bit, I think change management would be a major aspect in such a move,” says Suneel Aradhye, CIO, Essar Steel. There were more apprehensions with respect to the complexities of such a system. “Complexity will increase not just because of legacy systems but also because of the need to create differentiation. This might just end up being another set of bureaucratic measures,” feels Chandrasekaran.

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y o u r l i f e & C a r e e r pa t h

Not Hanging Up Your Boots? by Debarati roy Fifty-eight is a significant number in an executive’s life. For the Indian CIO— whose average age is 51—it means you’ve spent a significant amount of time as the IT head of an organization. But 58 is also when you’re going to be asked to retire and tuck away years of experience with the office’s memorabilia. At least that’s how it used to be. Today, many CIOs see 58 as an opportunity to begin a more satisfying lifestyle, combining new career options with leisure, education, or community service. Take Abnash Singh, the former group CIO at Mphasis, for example. “I am 64 and I’ve just chosen an alternative work option which gives me the freedom to work independently. I am currently living on the stock market. I work for six to seven hours a day, which leaves me with enough time for other leisure activities,” he says. If you are too full of life to hang up your boots, consider some of these post-retirement plans. Be a Consultant: For years, you have juggled business strategies with tech expertise and ushered in cutting-edge solutions to your organization. Not many can do what you do: deal with IT budgets, oversee project deployments, and negotiate with vendors. Why not sell that expertise? Rohinton Dumasia decided he would. With over 32 years of experience in the IT industry, Dumasia—the former CIO of Great Eastern Shipping Company and chairman of the Mumbai Chapter of CSI—has been working

Career

IllUSt ratI o n by M M Shan Ith

thrive

Turning 58 doesn't mean you're done. Here are four postretirement options from Indian IT leaders who have been there.

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Not many understand the business of IT like you do. And writing columns is a great way to keep in touch with old colleagues.

Send feedback on this feature to debarati_roy@idgindia.com

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threeminute coach Help ! I will soon be leading a video conference. What can I do to ensure that the experience goes smoothly? Peter Handal President, Chairman and CEO of Dale Carnegie Training.

Always be prepared. It may sound obvious, but doing your homework is absolutely essential before you step in front of the cameras. Unlike an audio conference call, participants in a video conference don't have the option to hide by hitting mute and only chiming into the discussion when it is necessary. In addition, people have shown to be even more selfconscious and self-aware of their behavior when participating in video conferences as opposed to face-to-face meetings. It behooves everyone involved to come to the virtual table looking professional, alert and 100 percent prepared. Sometimes employ a colleague to stay off the camera and take notes. Because participants in a video conference are visible, they need to stay more focused and engaged than if they were on an audio conference call, during which it's common for participants to multitask.If the video conference isn't recorded, it is often helpful to have a colleague sit in for the sole purpose of documenting the meeting. Never rely upon video conferences for those important meetings for which only in-person contact and interaction will do. While video conferencing is a tremendous step forward in modern technology and a great tool for staying in contact with overseas clients and colleagues, the inherent loss of eye contact can be a major detriment to a conversation and it can impede even the most compelling ideas from being relayed. Additionally, never coordinate a video conference without first testing the equipment, as all machines are subject to errors. It is extremely frustrating (and not to mention unprofessional) if a planned conference is postponed due to an unforeseen technological hiccup. CIO

thrive

as an independent consultant and trainer since 2006. “I reached the peak of my career as a CIO at 56 and I was looking for avenues which would take me beyond retirement. I had an association with professional bodies like CSI and this helped me network with people. And that translated into opportunities. I have always enjoyed training and felt I could contribute with my experience,” he says. Start Your Own Business: Being your own boss is definitely something after years of listening to other people. Ask Chida Shivanna, the founder of a software firm in Seattle who returned to India to start a branch of his company in Mysore. The idea of giving something back to his country provoked him to take up the challenge of running Oxygen Acres, an organic farm on the outskirts of Mysore that provides high-quality organic milk. “My dream was to start a healthy project, something that would create awareness, and provide rural employment. My knowledge of technology helped me start a business that is agricultural in nature but is technology-driven. I use IT to collect data on my farm like cattle health, and our website tracks and manages customer accounts, from distribution of products to online payments. My experience helps exercise leadership skills and motivate a team,” says Shivanna. Become an Academic: Classrooms can teach the young about technology but it’s life that teaches experience. Leadership qualities, problem-solving skills, industry knowledge, and people management are lessons no books can impart. Your knowledge is priceless. Share it. That’s what Ashok Kumar Wahi, today a distinguished professor of information systems at the Jaypee Business School in Delhi, did. Wahi is the former CIO of Spice and ICI India. Prior to that, he was senior VP HR & IS for Apollo Tyres, among other C-level profiles he has held. Why did he choose academics? “I was done with the rat-race. I was done with my share of running for position and money. Teaching gives me the opportunity to touch many more lives. Understanding how to integrate ICT with business helps these future executives leverage IT in business decisions,” says Wahi. Become a Tech Columnist: Not many understand the business of IT like you do. And writing is a great way to share and keep in touch with colleagues and peers still at their desks. Take for example, Andy Mulholland, CTO at Capgemini and Nick Earle, VP at Cisco, who co-authored the Mesh Collaboration. Others like Ade McCormack put a ton of practical knowledge—from a career within technology at Logica CMG—to good use when he penned books like The IT Value Stack, IT Demystified and his Financial Times column. There aren’t any retired Indian CIOs writing columns—maybe you could spark it off. CIO

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Insights from Members of the CIO Governing Council

Shreekant mokashi

The Chief of Group Information Services, Tata Steel, Mokashi is responsible for all IT services of the group. He takes care of delivery of services, projects, infrastructure, security and applications across the Tata Steel. He is actively engaged in driving th use of IT in business process improvement. He has been developing IT solutions for Tata Steel for over 25 years.

Building the Right Squad

Photos by Srivatsa Shandilya

Keeping your IT team relevant in an outsourced environment is a tough task. Shreekant Mokashi, group chief-IS, Tata Steel, tells you how to ace it. Staff management There are always two extremes to a sourcing strategy. Some organizations outsource completely and run a very lean IT organization while others run everything in-house leading to a rather large and unmanageable team. But a smart team is one, we figured, that is neither too lean nor too heavy. At our operations here in India, we have taken a balanced approach. We have outsourced our infrastructure services while the application development and maintenance is handled by the in-house IT team. As a principle, we outsource routine work or technology that we have already mastered. We take the help of consultants wherever there are opportunities to improve and this helps us develop our in-house skills. The internal team, then, is in overall command of technology. The IT team works with the users to develop new solutions for business processes. In doing so, the it develops domain knowledge, learns about the best practices and this helps the IT team to communicate in business language. This approach helps build an IT team that acts as a vital link between users and technology. It is extremely important for the IT team to build trust with users which gives the users confidence that their requirements will get appropriately translated into technical solutions. 94

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IT services play a vital role in keeping the organization abreast of the latest technology and helps the business take appropriate decisions. In this process, IT also plays a crucial role in keeping the organization and the technology providers in sync. Also, there is an inherent understanding in the team that IT needs to create business value at moderate or low cost. In order to do this effectively, we have teams with different skills within IT. We have adapted the SFIA (skills framework for the information age) framework for IT skills assessment and the APQC's (an organization that provides process and performance improvement) framework for mapping domain knowledge. These frameworks also help us in determining the demand for technical and domain knowledge based on projects in hand. Against these frameworks, we identify skill gaps at the organization level. These gaps along with individual aspirations become the basis for individual development plans.

CIOs must partner with their HR departments to sytematically and effectively develop their team's skills. To do the above systematically and effectively, the active involvement of the HR team is essential. CIOs must partner with their HR departments to execute such initiatives successfully. A team thus developed is capable of providing thought leadership to the business and motivate itself to provide an orchestrated performance. This, in turn, builds an IT strategy which is aligned with the business strategy. CIO

As told to Anup Varier Anup Varier is a correspondent. Send feedback on this column to anup_varier@idgindia. com

Vol/5 | ISSUE/12

10/8/2010 7:43:11 PM