CIO December 2011 Issue

leadership

VOL/07 | ISSUE/02

Business

technology

p parakh dave, cIO & cTO, Future Group, says credibility is at the bedrock of buy-in.

GET YOUR

IDEAS

SOLD Seven new ways that will surprise you you. Page 36

p Lus :

cEOs and cFOs tell you how their cIOs won them over. Page 48

View from the top S. Ramadorai on TcS’ growth story.

Page 58

DEcEmbER 15, 2011 | `100.00 ww w.CIO.IN

that’s a sugar rush mawana Sugar steps up production.

Page 74

From The Editor-in-Chief

Publisher, President & CEO Louis D’Mello E d i to r i a l Editor-IN-CHIEF Vijay Ramachandran EXECUTIVE EDITOR Gunjan Trivedi

Features Editor Sunil Shah Senior Copy Editor Shardha Subramanian Senior correspondents Anup Varier, Sneha Jha, Varsha Chidambaram

Correspondent Debarati Roy

Trainee Journalists Shweta Rao, Shubhra Rishi Product manager Online Sreekant Sastry

Downpour Ahead

The cloud, far from representing a radical shift, is just a way of sourcing and delivering IT to the business.

Over the past eleven months, I’ve written two editorials on issues relating to cloud computing.

So, what leads me to pen another, since I only wrote the one edit on this subject the previous year? Simple, it’s the momentum that I’ve seen in the private and hybrid cloud space these past few months.

Our research points to a staggering shift in the priorities of mid-to-large size Indian enterprises as well. While a mere 4.2 percent of enterprises were implementing cloud projects in November 2009, that figure jumped to 29.2 percent in January 2011, and rocketed to 63.6 percent last month.

Enterprises who tell us that the cloud doesn’t find place on their technology roadmap has commensurately shrunk in the same period from 19.7 percent to 13.2 percent to the statistically insignificant 1.3 percent.

While a few CIOs tell us that the cloud is still a work in progress, close to 79 percent are convinced that it will hugely transform business innovation. Of course, few enterprises would place their bets only on the public cloud. A little over 70 percent of the votes are for the hybrid model, with just 37 percent of organizations preferring private clouds.

I believe a few factors are clearly responsible for this rapid acceleration. For one, the flux in the Indian economy means that through the year there’s been relentless pressure on IT departments to deliver new IT services, rapidly and at short notice (many of these have been short-term projects with a life of a few months or seasonal analytics requiring high compute horsepower).

Then there’s the consistent churn at the mid-tier (representing the tactical nuts-andbolts IT managers), leaving you short on competencies and delivery bandwidth.

And, finally, I sense the growing realization that the cloud, far from representing a radical shift in the way IT operates, is actually about just another method of sourcing and delivering IT to the business. And, since governance models already exist to oversee outsourcing, it becomes easier to extend them towards cloud relationships.

Something tells me that the next year, as enterprises deal with budgetary pressures and a high-risk appetite, the cloud will really rain business in India.

Custo m Pu b l i s h i n g Principal Correspondents Aditya Kelekar, Gopal Kishore

Trainee Journalist Vinay Kumaar

Design & Production Lead Designers Jinan K.V., Jithesh C.C, Vikas Kapoor

Senior Designers Pradeep Gulur, Unnikrishnan A.V.

Designers Amrita C. Roy, Sabrina Naresh, Lalita Ramakrishna

Production Manager T. K. Karunakaran Ev e n t s & A u d i e n c e D e v e l op m e n t

Vice President Events Rupesh Sreedharan

Sr. Managers projects Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya, Pooja Chhabra Asst. manager Tharuna Paul Senior executive Shwetha M.

Management Trainees Archana Ganapathy, Saurabh Pradeep Patil

Sales & Marketing

President Sales

& Marketing Sudhir Kamath

VP Sales Sudhir Argula

Asst. VP Sales Parul Singh AGM Marketing Siddharth Singh

Manager Key Accounts Kalyan Basu, Minaz Adenwala, Sakshee Bagri

Manager Sales Varun Dev Asst. Manager Marketing Ajay S. Chakravarthy

Associate Marketing Dinesh P. Asst. Manager Sales Support Nadira Hyder

Management Trainees Anuradha Hariharan Iyer, Benjamin Anthony Jeevan Raj, Rima Biswas Finance & Admin

Financial Controller Sivaramakrishnan T. P.

Manager Accounts Sasi Kumar V. Asst. Manager

Credit Control Prachi Gupta

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

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

Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027.

Editor: Louis D’Mello Printed at Manipal Press Ltd., Press Corner, Tile Factory Road, Manipal, Udupi, Karnataka - 576 104.

IDG Offices in India are listed on the next page

dece m b er 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

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12/13/2011 4:34:42 PM

From The governing board

Gov e rn i n g BOARD Alok Kumar VP & Global Head-Internal IT& Shared Services, TCS Amrita Gangotra Director-IT (India & South Asia), Bharti Airtel

Keeping IT Real

Anil Khopkar VP-MIS, Bajaj Auto

Designing a process with too many hypothetical business scenarios creates complexity and destroys business agility.

When businesses seek the help of their IT departments to design business processes, they put forth a laundry list of requirements, conjuring up all kinds of possible scenarios. They will present 100 different scenarios before IT, each more challenging and complex than the last. But, to be honest, not all of these scenarios are realistic. In fact, a large percentage are hypothetical and presume worst-case scenarios.

At the same time, IT also likes to develop complex systems and processes and falls prey to its predilection towards complexity. Combined, these two forces often sow the seeds of complex business processes within an enterprise—which, in the long run, hamstrings efficiency and agility. Plus, enterprises incur huge IT costs to manage these complex business processes.

IT should steer clear of this approach. CIOs should keep IT simple and adopt a realistic approach while crafting and developing processes. We should not accept business requirements at face value. I suggest an alternate approach to process designing.

This approach is inspired from the Japanese word Genba meaning ‘the real place’. I interpret this as ‘going to a real workplace’. Taking a cue from this term, I would urge IT to visit all functional departments, to go to ground zero and observe various business-related activities. They should then investigate, identify, and analyze non-value adding activities and explain to business users how these can be done away with. The aim is to simplify business processes.

In doing this, IT leaders need to adopt a four-pronged approach called ECRS. E stands for eliminating non-value adding activities. C stands for ‘commonize’—or sharing processes across multiple functions. R stands for re-organize, which needs to be done to ensure there aren’t duplicates in a process. And S stands for standardizing and simplifying processes across all locations.

We have followed this approach at Bajaj Auto and accrued multifarious benefits from it. Not only has it made business processes simple to develop and implement, but it has also shrunk IT cost and delivery time. It has simplified our entire material planning and optimized our supply chain. Both manufacturers and suppliers are happy because they get paid on time. And the IT staffers are also happy because they are dealing with simple systems.

Atul Jayawant President Corporate IT & Group CIO, Aditya Birla Group C.N. Ram Group CIO, Essar Group Devesh Mathur Chief Technology & Services Officer, HSBC Gopal Shukla VP-Business Systems, Hindustan Coca-Cola Manish Choksi Chief-Corporate Strategy & CIO, Asian Paints Murali Krishna K SVP & Group Head CCD, Infosys Technologies Navin Chadha IT Director, Vodafone Essar Pravir Vohra Group Chief Technology Officer, ICICI Bank Rajeev Batra CIO, Sistema Shyam Teleservices (MTS India) Rajesh Uppal Executive Officer IT & CIO, Maruti Suzuki India S. Anantha Sayana Head-Corporate IT, L&T Sanjay Jain CIO & Head Global Transformation Practice, WNS Global Services Sunil Mehta Sr. VP & Area Systems Director (Central Asia), JWT V.V.R. Babu Group CIO, ITC

Bangalore: Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore 560 027, Phone: 080-3053 0300, Fax: 3058 6065

Anil Khopkar is VP-MIS at Bajaj Auto

Delhi: New Bridge Buisness Centers, 5th and 6th Floor, Tower-B, Technolopolis.

Golf Course Road, Sector 54 Gurgaon- 122002, Haryana Phone: 0124-4626256, Fax: 0124-4375888 Mumbai: 201, Madhava, Bandra Kurla Complex,Bandra (E), Mumbai 400 051, Phone: 022-3068 5000, Fax: 2659 2708

4

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contents DECEMBER 15, 2011 | VOL/7 | ISSUE/02

Case Files 74 | mawana Sugar mobile Every hour that Mawana Sugar couldn't get raw sugarcane to its factory hurt its bottom line heavily. But with 450 collection centers spread out over remote parts of western UP, the problem seemed insurmountable. by debarati roy

78 | meru Cabs Crm Meru Cabs constructs an IT solution that simultaneously lowers the cost of business, and enhances its reliability, a brand trait services like Meru Cabs live and die by.

COVER: P HOTO GRAPH BY K AP IL SHRO ff / COVE R DESIGN BY VIK AS K AP OOR & U N NIKRISHNAN AV

by debarati roy

3 6

more Âť

36 | Thumbs Up

5 8

Cover STorY | buy-in Selling ideas is an art and with the budget season coming on your peers and your boss tell you how to do it better. In this package we present seven little known ways to sell your ideas, what four CIOs did to impress their bosses and advice from one of the world's most celebrated authors John P. Kotter.

by Varsha Chidambaram, debarati roy and sunil shah

69 | 8 Traits of Innovation FeaTure | innovation Innovation isn’t a part of your job, it is your job. And if you call yourself an innovative CIO, ask yourself if you possess some of these eight characteristics.

Feature by bridget gray vieW From The ToP: "since it spawns transformation, indian organizations need to invest more in technology," says s. ramadorai, Vice Chairman, tCs.

6

D E C E m b E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

VOL /7 | ISSUE/02

contents

(cont.) departments 2 | From the editor-in-Chief Downpour Ahead

By Vijay Ramachandran

4 | From the Governing Board IT Management | Keeping IT Real

By Anil Khopkar, Bajaj Auto

13 | trendlines

5 8 4 2

20 | alert

82 | building bridges

|

FeaTure Cio role Its time to put an end to the IT-and-the-business phrase. But if CIOs need to be taken seriously, they need to boost IT’s reputation and form stronger relationships with other business leaders.

Feature by diane Frank

Columns 26

Innovation | Does Google Have a Secret Lab? Quick Take | Budget 2012: The Big Bargain Voices | Which Tech Will Top in 2012?

Technology | SMS: Hail Storm Ahead Robotics | Now, A Robot Waiter Research | Fake Leaf, Real Power Opinion Poll | How CEOs View IT Investments Devices | iPad Enables Disables to Vote Telecommunication | Researchers Code VoIP Invention | Move Over Silicon Chips Career | 5 Signs Your Competitors Will Poach By the Numbers | Virtual Shopping, Real Risks

52

ID Management | 10 ID Management Metrics Help-desk | Underground Calling

89 | essential technology Mobile Apps | Mobiles Take the Lead MDM |Locking Down Your Mobiles

96 | What We’re reading Book Review | How Companies Win

By Vijay Ramachandran

| hung up on Slas

STraTegiC Cio IT departments would do better spending their time planning application architectures rather than duking it out with their cloud computing providers over SLAs. Column by Bernard Golden

28

| my deputy left on a gurney

underCover oFFiCer This CSO thought he’d planned for a disaster—until he experienced an unexpected absence of a key staff member.

Column by Anonymous

31

| The Price of Saving money

Think Tank Dell’s global CIO explains how a company's reluctance to invest in agility can be costly. The agility tax, he says, is too high to pay.

Column by Robin Johnson

8

D E C E m b E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

3 4

alTernaTive vieWS: are we ready for big data?

Many say the need to analyze growing data can be met by big data solutions. But are enterprises ready for it? Two CIOs debate.

VOL /7 | ISSUE/02

The strategic bridge between your data centre and your business? You. Only StruxureWare for Data Centres enables a healthy, business-driven data centre Tap into the health of your data centre As an IT or data centre manager, you know that doing your job well means saving your company both time and money. Today, there finally is a way for you to be completely tapped into the overall health of your data centre. StruxureWare™ for Data Centres gives you visibility across your entire data centre infrastructure so you can make informed decisions — not arbitrary ones — about your infrastructure. For example, you can plan proactively for needed capacity and streamline workflow management to improve your business agility and availability. In fact, now more than ever, infrastructure decisions are business decisions.

Now, make informed decisions about your infrastructure:

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Plan proactively for needed capacity.

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Blueprint data centre expansions and consolidations.

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Streamline workflow management of your IT physical infrastructure to improve your business agility and availability.

>

Make changes knowing how they will affect your business.

>

Visualize change/capacity scenarios to improve your bottom line.

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View your current and historic PUE/DCiE and energy costs of subsystems to make intelligent energy management decisions.

An always available, efficient data centre What’s more, StruxureWare for Data Centres communicates in real time with the leading virtualization platforms: VMware vSphere™ and Microsoft® System Centre Virtual Machine Manager.

The software’s built-in automated response capabilities ensure that virtual loads always have healthy host environments. With your VMs on healthy hosts, you can focus on running your data centre more efficiently. The software also gives insight into PUE/DCiE trending over time, enabling you to make intelligent energy management decisions. With StruxureWare for Data Centres planning and reporting capabilities, who’s the company hero now? You are!

APC by Schneider Electric™ is the pioneer of modular data centre infrastructure and innovative cooling technology.

Its products and solutions, including InfraStruxure™, are an integral part of the Schneider Electric™ IT portfolio.

How Data Center Infrastructure Management Software Improves Planning and Cuts Operational Costs White Paper 107

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Tap the business value of your data centre!

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©2011 Schneider Electric. All Rights Reserved. Schneider Electric, InfraStruxure, StruxureWare, and APC are trademarks owned by Schneider Electric Industries SAS or its affiliated companies. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. • 998-4108_IN-GB • Schneider Electric India Pvt Ltd, 9th Floor, DLF Building No. 10, Tower C, DLF Cyber City, Phase II, Gurgaon - 122 002, Haryana, India, Phone: +91 124 3940 400, Fax: +91 124 4222 036

Cio online

.in CIO adverTiSer index

Canon India

7 & 53

[ CI O ZONES ]

Dell India

3 & 95

Ibm India

IFC & 1

your information hunt stops here

Lenovo India

If you're like most people, your interests lie in a few specific areas. That is why we've created interest zones on cio. in. We have six zones including virtualization, BI, cloud, security, datacenter, communications.

19

Oracle India

5

Ricoh India

15

Riverbed Technology India

IbC

SAS Institute (India) Schneider Electric India

87 9, 23 & 25

Tata Consultancy Services

61 to 68

Toshiba India

11 & 12

Trend micro

21

Tulip Telecom

bC

Tyco Electronics Corporation India

33

[ BO O K CLUB ]

[ DEBATE ]

are enterprises ready for big data solutions?

We invited two CIOs to kick-start a debate on the maturity of big data solutions. Read all about it in Alternate Views (page 34). Which side are you on? We also have more debates for you on www.cio.in Who Should Lead Social Initiatives: CIOs or CMOs? Ayes Vs Nays Are Users Ready for Self-Service IT? Ayes Vs Nays >> www.cio.in/cio-debates

Conversation onversation starter Books have been known to spark conversations and on page 98 you can find the genesis of one. Learn what your peers think of a book and then visit the all new CIO Book Club section online and join the conversation with your peers.

>> www.cio.in/bookclub

[ Ca se File ] that sugar rush

Every hour that Mawana Sugar couldn't get raw sugarcane to its factory hurt its bottom line heavily. But with 450 collection centers spread out over remote parts of western UP, the problem seemed insurmountable.

>> www.cio100.cio.in must read @ cio.in 10

>> Alert: Underworld Call Centers >> Column: Hung Up on SLAs >> Feature: Eight Traits of an Innovator

D E C E m b E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

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

VOL /7 | ISSUE/02

EDITED BY sharDha suBramanIan

new

*

hot

*

unexpected

Does Google Have a Secret Lab?

QUICK TAKE:

—By Sharon Gaudin

Budget 2012: the Big Bargain

I t B u d g e t A Gartner report has recently stated that global economic uncertainty will impact IT budgets in 2012. Shubhra Rishi spoke to T.M. Shyam Sundar, CIO, Royal Sundaram Alliance Insurance, to find out his strategy for his IT budget in 2012.

Do you think this year’s budgeting process will be easier than last year or even 2008?

Although a lot of insurance companies plan to increase their IT budgets slightly in 2012, for us, it will be more complicated than 2008. Thanks to the sluggish economy, our transformational budget will go down in the next three quarters. Also, our ability to generate investment income and demand for products will decrease.

On a scale of 1-10, is the budgeting process among the most stressful activities of the year?

I would rate the budgeting process 7. As a CIO, I look at how technology can become more of a transformer than

Vol/7 | issue /02

According to the New York Times report, Google's selfdriving car that was introduced to the world last year was developed in the Google X labs. The car has since driven hundreds of miles across California.

A robotic self-driving car seemed fairly far-afield for Google researchers, which are best known for creating the company's ubiquitous search engine, along with services like Google Maps, the Google+ social network and Android.

"We've always been optimistic about technology's ability to advance society, which is why we have pushed so hard to improve the capabilities of self-driving cars," said Sebastian Thrun, a software engineer at Google.

Thrun reportedly is a top executive at Google X. The New York Times also noted that Google may manufacturer the autonomous cars themselves instead of turning to automobile manufacturers.

illustration by pradeep gulur

I n n o v a t I o n Google is running a secret research lab in the San Francisco area where they're building robots and re-imagining the future, the New York Times reported recently.

The lab, dubbed Google X, gives researchers an opportunity to work on developing technologies that might lead to people riding elevators into space some day or have a dinner plate report one's dinner menu to Google+.

Google co-founder Larry Page, reportedly worked on Google X before he took over as the company's top executive.

Citing unnamed sources, the report said scientists are working on some 100 projects at the lab.

Many of those projects are focused on robotics, such as developing robots that could go to work while their owners stay home, or ones that care for humans.

The lab also is reportedly working on light bulbs and coffee makers that could be turned on and off remotely with an Android phone.

an enabler. We need to manage information better than our peers. But several large organizations are more likely to look at IT when they need to cut down their overall expenses. So, this directly triggers stress.

What will get you more funds: The cost cutting or revenue generating argument?

Cost is a key driver. Revenue generation comes a close second. For example, investing Rs 10 crore for a project and generating Rs 50 crore over five years will have a lower impact on business rather than investing Rs 1 crore and generating Rs 1.2 crore in the same year.

T.M. Shyam Sundar

Do you think setting aside funds for experimentation is a good idea?

Yes, it’s a great idea. But, it’s hard to convince management. I think enterprises should invest a part of the savings they procure after a project is imlemented on experimentation.

REAL CIO WORLD | D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

13

I t M a n a g e M e n t If the forces of nature abide

by Nostradamus’ disastrous prophecy, there’ll be no 2012. But if fate decides otherwise—for better or for worse—IT has a world of work to do. It has to keep pace with business-as-usual—battling changing business requirements, increase customer base etcetera—and it has to prep for lesser known devils like BYOD and social media. Shweta Rao asked some of your peers what they think would be the top technology for 2012. Here’s what they picked:

VIjAy SETHI, CIO & VP-IS, Hero MotoCorp trendlInes

“This year, apart from maintaining their customer bases with CRM, organizations will have to look at innovative ways to penetrate the market deeper.

So, I believe companies will invest heavily in enterprise social media. Analytics-based social media will help them understand the sentiments of their customers in 2012.”

SUnEEL ARADHyE, CIO, Essar Steel “As business is looking at stagnation for the next 12-18 months, developing insights from market scenarios and simulations is an urgent need. My customers want analytics of dynamic scenarios on their fingertips in near real-time. Hence a BI solution will be top priority in 2012.”

nAVIn CHADHA, IT-Director, Vodafone Essar “I have reasons to believe that mobile computing and mobile enabling of applications will be quite predominant in 2012. Enterprises have already adopted tablets and smartphones, and this trend will grow in the next year. Even business users are demanding that applications be made available on handheld devices.”

14

D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

SMS: Hail Storm Ahead t e c h n o l o g y Automotive insurer Budget Direct has launched a hail automated notification system (HANS) which will alert its customers via SMS of impending hail storms in their area.

The system, which was put to the test recently to push out 70,000 messages during hail storms in Melbourne, is designed to encourage customers to move their cars into shelter in advance of major hail storms.

According to A&G Insurance Services—the parent company of Budget Direct— director of IT, Paul Malt, said the system, started out by taking weather feeds from the Bureau of Meterology with a vision to warn customers about impending storms.

"What we found was the volume of warnings about storms from the Bureau—as they are so broad—was to a point where we were almost the 'boy who cried wolf'; we'd be telling you too often that there is a severe storm coming your way," he said.

To better refine the system and enable it to more accurately pinpoint spots of potential hail, the company brought in a weather expert to assess the finer points of storm cells.

"The system tracks storms cells, measures ice at various levels, determines if the hail will be damaging when it hits the ground, and then generates areas to warn—the probability hail will fall in that spot based on the way the storm is tracking," Malt said.

"That is adjusted every few minutes based on the direction of the storm to say this is the area it believes which should now be warned of impending hail."

HANS can calculate a window of time before hail will begin hitting the ground and will warn customers up to five minutes before hail begins to fall.

Malt said the system is constantly on the look-out for storms and is capable of tracking multiple storms across the country.

Only when a certain hail probability threshold is reached, the system would begin warning customers.

Currently, the system bases customer location on the home address on file with the company. However, in an effort to improve accuracy, it is examining allowing customers to provide a work address and time information as well as potentially location-based data from mobile devices.

—By Tim Lohman

Vol/7 | issue /02

illustrat ion by p radeep gulur

WhICh TeCh WIll TOp In 2012?

VOICES:

now, ow, A Robot Waiter everyday veryday we get a little closer to finally having our own personal robotic servants. Honda's robotics division unveiled an all-new asiM Mo that's lighter, more dexterous, and smart enough to be autonomous. asiMo was one of the first bipedal robots developed by the Honda Motor Company that went on to serve tea and conduct a symphony. Honda's latest iteration allows asiMo to gather information about its surroundings and choose what it does next—and it does this without any commands from a human operator.

Honda developed a new system to accommodate for asiMo's "advanced intelligence." the robot is equipped with sensors that provide the machine visual, auditory, and tactile senses. it compiles this data to create, examine, and predict its surroundings as well as situations around it. With the new sensor suite, asiMo can play along with a party, recognize faces and voices, follow a conversation with multiple people who are speaking simultaneously, or just avoid a collision when it's moving on its own. on top of being more intelligent, the new asiMo is even more nimble now that it's slimmed off 6 kilograms—it now weighs in at 48 kg—and has increased its range of movement by 23 degrees of freedom. Honda redesigned its walking motion so that it can walk on uneven surfaces, run at a 9 km per hour, run backwards, skip, or even hop on one leg. asiMo also had a brand new pair of multi-finger hands that allow it perform tasks like opening a bottle and pouring you a drink, or make sign language.

—by Kevin lee

How CEOs View IT Investments PwC asked 1,200 CEOs to describe their capital investments in strategic IT over the next three years.

Here’s what they said.

cIo role

Our IT investments are…

Agree and strongly agree

Made primarily to reduce costs and become more efficient operationally

69%

Made primarily to reduce costs and become more efficient operationally

54%

Frequently the focus of boardroom discussions

39%

No longer necessary now that innovative software is available as a service on the Internet

10%

source: pwC 14th annual global Ceo survey

16

D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 1 | REAL CIO WORLD

Fake Leaf, Real Power A research team from MIT led by Dr. Daniel Nocera, claims to have made a drastic discovery in the world of sustainable energy by developing the first "practical" artificial leaf. These leaves are actually advanced solar cells that mimic photosynthesis, the process by which their real-life counterparts convert sunlight and water into energy. According to Nocera, the leaves, although small in size, "could produce enough electricity to supply a house in a developing country with electricity for a day."

The team introduced their creation this past weekend at the 241st National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in California, but the concept of an artificial leaf is not entirely new. In fact, John Turner of the US Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado created the first artificial leaf about a decade ago. However, the biggest drawback of Turner’s leaf was that it required rare, expensive metals. Moreover, it was highly unstable, with a lifespan of about one day.

Nocera’s leaf, on the other hand, is about the size of a poker playing card and fashioned from “inexpensive materials that are widely available”, such as silicon, nickel, cobalt, and some electronics. It’ll also require about a gallon of water in the process. Nocera says that the leaf is able to work under “simple conditions” and is highly stable. In laboratory research, he showed that his team’s leaf worked continuously for “at least 45 hours” without a drop in activity.

"Nature is powered by photosynthesis, and I think that the future world will be powered by photosynthesis as well in the form of this artificial leaf," said Nocera.

Similar to how green plants convert sunlight and water into energy by way of photosynthesis, the artificial leaves would take sunlight to split water into its two components (hydrogen and oxygen) in order to create gases that are stored in a fuel cell.

The fuel cell then converts these gases into useable electricity.

It’s said that the artificial leaf is about ten times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a natural one.

"A practical artificial leaf has been one of the Holy Grails of science for decades," said Nocera. "We believe we have done it.

The artificial leaf shows particular promise as an inexpensive source of electricity for poor homes in developing countries.

Our goal is to make each home its own power station," he said.

"One can envision villages in India and Africa purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology."

—By David Saetang

research

Vol/7 | issue /02

iM aging by ViKas Kapoor

trendlInes

roBotIcs

Swiss Researchers: Move Over Silicon Chips sheets of chips. these could one day be used to manufacture computers that roll up or devices that could be affixed to the skin, the researchers said.

Molybdenite is being compared to graphene, another flexible semiconductor that many regard as the natural successor to silicon. graphene is also extremely thin, consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb structure. earlier this year, ibM researchers build the first graphene-based integrated circuit, able to operate at frequencies of up to 10gHz, or 10 billion cycles per second. t today’s silicon-based circuits can only scale to about 4gHz. experiments with graphene have revealed a multitude of other potential uses, including accelerating future high-speed internet, manufacturing fast-charging batteries and improving the speed and density of printable electronics.

However, Kis’s team identifies one key advantage that molybdenite has over grapheme-it can amplify electronic signals at room temperature, while graphene must be cooled to 70 Kelvin (cold enough for nitrogen to turn into liquid). despite molybdenite’s potential, the researchers say it will be at least 10 to 20 years before it enters commercial use. in the meantime the group intends to explore whether the material can be made more conductive.

—by sophie Curtis

trendlInes

swiss researchers have created the first computer chip made out of molybdenite (Mos2), a naturally occurring mineral that has been touted as a low-energy alternative to silicon. the integrated circuit was made in the laboratory of nanoscale electronics and structures (lanes) at the cole polytechnique Fdrale de lausanne (epFl). the researchers said their experiments prove that molybdenite chips can be made smaller than silicon chips, use less electricity and be more flexible. so far, it has not been possible to make layers of silicon less than two nanometers thick, because of the risk of initiating a chemical reaction that would oxidize the surface and compromise its electronic properties. Molybdenite, on the other hand, can be worked in layers only three atoms thick, making it possible to build chips that are at least three times smaller. even at this minute scale, the material remains stable and conduction is easy to control, according to lanes director andras Kis. Molybdenite can also rival silicon in its ability to amplify electronic signals, with an output signal that is four times stronger than the incoming signal. this means that Mos2 transistors are very energy-efficient, and Kis claims there is “considerable potential for creating more complex chips”.

Finally, the flexibility of molybdenite could make it suitable for use in flexible electronics, such as in the design of flexible InventIon

5 Signs Your Competitors Will Steal Your Best Workers Michael Greco, a partner in the Employee Defection & Trade Secrets Practice Group at law firm Fisher & Phillips LLP, identified five signs that indicate a company risks losing its employees to competitors. Here are the top five. Are you at risk?

Morale is in the toilet. Greco notes that savvy hiring managers and recruiters search social media sites for status updates from competitors’ employees that express interest in new career opportunities, and they actively engage those professionals in discussions about jobs. your industry is in turmoil. y "Employees that are facing increased career

regulation, an onslaught of mergers or uncertainty about tomorrow's profitability are more apt to want to find a more stable environment," writes Greco. "If your industry is in transition, don't leave your employees guessing about what's going on. Employees who feel like they are being kept in the know feel more loyal to their companies.”

Managers and top executives are leaving. Greco notes that turnover at the executive level can cause a domino effect inside companies, leading to defections that cascade throughout the company. If employees see top managers leaving, they too may follow, he writes.

CIO.In

Vol/7 | issue /02

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y your competitors have set up shop in your backyard. If a competitor opens an office near one of your company's facilities, says Greco, you can bet they're going to shop for talent chez vous. your company is not sharing its y fortunes with employees. As the economy rebounds (albeit feebly) and corporations enjoy record profits, the employees who endured pay cuts or pay freezes during the recession are taking notice, says Greco. Employers that don't share their wealth with employees will see their best employees walk out the door.

—by Meridith levinson

to find the hottest jobs in the indian market visit itjobs.cio.in

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compIlED BY Sneha Jha

Best practices

Virtual Shopping, Real Risks

s

trendlInes

over 90 percent of indian it leaders say their employees spend upto four hours shopping online, inviting risks.

Shop, shop, shop till you—and your company—drop. that’s the new mantra this festive season as employees get ready to shower their loved ones with gifts bought online during work hours. this expensive affair, reveals a recent survey, will cost organizations a truck load of money and expose them to risks. according to the 2011 isaCa shopping on the Job survey urvey, 43 percent of enterprises say their employees would spend more time shopping online during work hours this year compared to last year.

While a majority of indian enterprises (92 percent) say their employees spend about 2-4 hours online, 56 percent of organizations believe they end up losing between rs 50,000 and rs 2,50,000 per employee in terms of productivity. and some more due to the security risks that tag along online shopping. “Cookies and other tools used by online sites for gathering information could be gathering confidential information from employees’ systems,” says niraj Kapasi, it auditor and chair of isaCa’s india t task Force. but organizations aren’t turning a blind eye to these security concerns. about 60 percent of respondents say their enterprise prohibits employees from accessing social media sites. t to minimize the risk associated with online shopping, 52 percent of companies prohibit the use of work e-mail for personal online shopping and 56 percent have a security policy that covers mobile.

1

eMbraCe and educate. enterprises should adopt the ‘embrace and educate’ approach where companies enable usage, but have a thorough security policy and controls in place.

2

Monitor or block employee internet usage. organizations should block access for those employees that habitually visit risky websites.

3

update security tools. the it department should ensure that the security tools and processes protecting their users mobile devices are up to date.

Shopaholics At Work Amount of time emloyees spend shopping online 92%

56%

2-4 hours

61% Of organizations say

online shopping during work hours is responsible for upto 29 percent of security incidents.

6 hours

What Security Measures Have You Taken to Limit Online Shopping?

15% educate employees on the risk of online shopping

56% have a policy in place that addresses online shopping

68% have technology to protect against web-based attacks

70% provide security awareness training

sourCe: isaCa sHopping on tHe Job surVey, 2011

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Vol/7 | issue /02

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alert

Enterprise Risk management

10 ID Management Metrics W

IMAGES by PHOTOS.COM

ithin the IT security community, identityand access-management (IAM) initiatives are considered high value, but are notoriously problematic to deploy. Yet despite IAM’s complexity, it represents 30 percent or more of the total information security budget of most large institutions, according to IDC (a sister company to CIO’s publisher).

Ironically, the deployment difficulties stem from having to reconcile the very people and process breakdowns IAM automation is meant to solve, such as too many or too few people involved in authorizing requests, a lack of documentation for access requests and approvals, connecting to target systems with ‘dirty’ or obsolete data, and so on. This conundrum has led to the rise of what is called identity governance.

Identity governance involves defining and executing the identity-

related business processes that are most critical to the organization. For example, an engineer needs root access to the server hosting an ERP system—who needs to approve that request? Who is the one who actually takes the action that grants that access? How does that process get documented?

Where is it stored, and for how long? How can we report on it during an audit?

Getting your organization’s governance processes locked in is a tall order, but well worth it. Here are 10 of the most common measurements for gauging the effectiveness of identity governance.

Password reset volume a month This one is a classic in identity management, and it’s key to helping organizations measure the effectiveness

findings

Not (Yet) Ready for the Cloud Yet, the percentage of respondents months in APJ saying the public cloud is more secure than on-premise has increased in the last 12.

No difference

23

14%

The cloud is more

secure

63% The cloud is less

secure

of their IAM programs. Businesses typically look at password-related helpdesk calls, account lockouts, and self-service resets per month as good indicators of passwordpolicy effectiveness. This metric should generally trend downward, although there may be peaks and valleys driven by business events. If it doesn’t, your organization’s password policies and management tools require a closer look.

Average number of distinct credentials per user Another IAM classic, and for years, a key business justification for single sign-on (SSO) initiatives. The industry average ranges from 10 to 12 unique accounts per user. Organizations should strive to bring this average down as close to one as possible.

Only

30%

of Indian organizations have process safeguards as part of their cloud strategies, although 53% plan to have them next year.

Source: Forrester Research and CIO Global Information Security Survey

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Vol/7 | ISSUE/02

12/12/2011 11:31:53 AM

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alert

EntErprisE risk managEmEnt

number of uncorrelated accounts These are accounts that have no owner, and occur most frequently when a change happens, such as a promotion or a termination, and that person’s accounts were not transitioned properly. Too many uncorrelated accounts can lead to unnecessary risks—they are open, live accounts that can be easily hijacked for un-authorized use.

number of new accounts provisioned This number should closely follow the number of new joiners to the organization. An effective IAM program should always account for any new user who needs to be granted access to systems and applications. If there’s a discrepancy or a significant lag between the number of provisioned accounts and the total number of new joiners for a given period, that indicates inefficient processes or poor identity data.

Average time it takes to provision or de-provision a user This shows how long a new user waits to get access to the resources they need to do their work. It has implicit productivity and ROI ramifications. Nine times out of 10, if

someone doesn’t get access to applications in a timely fashion, there are process issues behind the delay. This metric can flag a business process that needs to be reviewed and possibly adjusted.

Average time to authorize change This metric can provide insight into the efficiency of an organization’s approval processes. For example, if there are four people involved in approving a sales rep’s access to Salesforce.com, but it takes two weeks for that approval to be granted, that’s two weeks the sales rep is limited in his capacity to sell. Knowing how long it takes for approvals to be granted can help identify bottlenecks or out-of-date processes.

number of system or privileged accounts without an owner These are also known as orphaned accounts. They crop up when people who had the credentials to grant them access to important resources—making them privileged users—no longer need access to those resources but never had their privileges removed. This problem here is obvious—who wants privileged accounts that don’t belong to anyone floating around?

[OnE :: LinEr]

“With more companies adopting the cloud, laws and compliance related to the security of data will catch our law makers’ attention in the coming months.”

number of exceptions per access re-certification cycle A high number of exceptions is expected for new applications or user sets being brought under governance, but over time this should trend toward zero. A consistently high number of exceptions is a strong indicator of poor identity data quality (that is, lots of users having access that they should not have), or of process problems (that is, the person requesting re-certification does not have all the information they need to complete the process.)

number of reconciliation exceptions Reconciliation exceptions are typically caused by the inability of an IAM platform to reliably tie an identity to an account in a target system. This is usually the result of manual entry errors (that is, user names or unique identifiers are not matched), or worse yet, of an account created by backdoor channels.

These exceptions should trend toward zero over time, and any spikes should trigger a thorough investigation and further discussion.

separation of duty violations Examples of separation of duty violations include developers who have admin access to production databases and traders who can submit and approve their own transactions.

These are more difficult to catch and measure, given their sophistication and cross-application nature, but are also the riskiest to miss, given the potential damage that could be inflicted if they’re exploited. Exploitations of these problems are the kind that often make headlines. The organization should implement preventive controls to monitor these violations, report them and orchestrate their remediation. CiO

SureSh Iyer, CSO, ADItyA A BIrlA MInACS Frank Villavicencio leads Identropy’s Managed Identity Services business. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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Enterprise Risk management

Underground Calling

R

esearchers from security vendor Trusteer have come across a professional calling service that caters to cybercriminals.

The business offers to extract sensitive information needed for bank fraud and identity theft from individuals.

The security company spotted an advertisement for making on-demand calls in English and other European languages to private individuals, banks, shops, post offices and similar organizations. At a cost of US$10 (about Rs 450) per call, cybercriminals were offered the possibility of obtaining the missing pieces of information they needed to pull off attacks.

Fraudsters can either use malware to steal personal and financial information or buy it from the underground market in bulk, said Amit Klein, Trusteer’s CTO. However, sometimes this information is insufficient to perform fraud, he added.

Cybercriminals are commonly faced with this problem because many financial institutions have implemented advanced anti-fraud mechanisms. For example, many banks require one-timeuse passwords (OTPs) to authenticate customers. Others require unique codes sent to mobile devices (mTANs) to authorize transactions.

One of the easiest ways to obtain information from a target is social engineering—convincing someone to provide it. However, not every cybercriminal is skilled in such techniques and those who are capable of pulling off these attacks are often faced with a language barrier.

This is where call services like the one found by Trusteer come in. Their staff is trained to impersonate bank employees, computer technicians, travel agents, recruiters and other people to whom targeted individuals are likely to disclose information.

The callers receive background data 24

Alert_DEC2011.indd 22

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about the targets from cybercriminals and use it to establish trusting relationships with the victims.

For example, if a fraudster wants to log into an account using stolen online banking credentials, but is prompted for an OTP because he uses a different IP address than the real account holder, he can give a caller the information needed to impersonate a bank employee.

Armed with things like the victim’s name, account number, birth date and other personal information, the caller can claim that he’s performing system checks and ask the targeted individual to read back the code sent to their phone.

Illegal call services are not new. In September 2010, a Belarusian man was extradited to the US to face charges related to operating CallService.biz, a service that allowed cybercriminals to bypass phone verification checks enforced by US banks.

Double Standards

alert

However, the number of rogue call centers has increased in recent years.

This year security companies reported cold-calling campaigns in the UK, Canada, US, Australia and other countries, in which the callers impersonated computer technicians from ISPs or Microsoft to trick people into installing malware on their computers.

Some of the schemes were tracked back to India, where because of low-cost labor, these businesses are very profitable.

In this case the advertisement was seen on a Russian forum, so there is a high probability that the service is managed

by Russian-speaking individuals. “In addition, since the service is available during American and European working hours, it might indicate that the group is operating in these regions,” said Trusteer security researcher Ayelet Heyman. CIO Lucian Constantin writes for the IDG News Service. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

While most consumers are angry about security measures taken by custodians of their online data, three out of every four of them don’t even take minimal measures to protect themselves from incursions on their privacy, according to a survey by AdaptiveMobile, a mobile security firm.

The survey noted that 75 percent of mobile users don’t bother to read the terms and conditions of mobile applications. Many of those apps, like Angry Birds, access physical location information about their users as a condition of their use. Yet 69 percent of the 1024 consumers surveyed found collection of such data unacceptable.

“Consumers are outraged that their data may not be secure but are unwilling to protect themselves,” said AdaptiveMobile Vice President of Handset Security Ciaran Bradley. “It’s like getting angry at the prospect of being burgled, but announcing in public when their house is unoccupied.”

“We are downloading more apps than ever before, but people are unaware that their location and other information can be harvested by applications,” he continued. “This is comparable to half of the population being unaware that they need to lock their front door.”

Nevertheless, many consumers appear to be getting wise about information harvesting by mobile apps. Although the survey showed that 25 percent of consumers were happy to willingly trade personal information for a free app.

— By John P. Mello

Vol/7 | ISSUE/02

12/12/2011 11:32:04 AM

Bernard Golden

strategic cio

Hung Up on SLAs IT departments would do better spending their time planning application architectures rather than duking it out with their cloud computing providers over SLAs.

I

Illustration by PH OTOS.COM

was looking through the program for an upcoming cloud computing conference and noted a number of sessions devoted to negotiating contracts and service level agreements (SLAs) with cloud providers. Reading the session descriptions, one cannot help but draw the conclusion that carefully crafting an SLA is fundamental to successfully using cloud computing.

The sessions described at length how they would help attendees with cloud computing topics like: Definitions of uptime, availability and performance; negotiation techniques in crafting an SLA; what factors to include in an SLA: virtual machines availability, response times, network latency, etcetera.

Having sat through a number of discussions on the topic of SLAs, these session descriptions ineluctably brought to mind the following truth: SLAs are not about increasing availability; their purpose is to provide the basis for post-incident legal combat.

However, none of the sessions pointed this out. The session descriptions seem to suggest that clever SLA negotiation somehow ensures that one's applications will be immune to outages.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

The reality is that all infrastructure will have outages of one sort or another. While careful assessment of a provider's capabilities may enable selection of a more robust provider and paying a higher fee may ensure faster response or communication with a dedicated response team, there is no immunity to outages.

So why do people obsess about SLAs? For one, it gives people a sense of control. Sitting in a room redlining a contract and replacing one set of language with another all make people feel like they're asserting their dominion. But don't imagine that you're going to fundamentally change the provider's contract.

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12/12/2011 11:34:58 AM

Bernard Golden

strategic cio

I learned this at an SLA presentation given by an attorney. After devoting 90 minutes to the minutiae of contracts, he concluded by saying, "Of course, you won't be able to change the standard contracts much, because they're written to reduce the provider's responsibility. What you're discussing is how much of a service credit you're going to receive."

People also obsess about SLAs because they provide a basis for post-outage haggling. Being hard-nosed up front may mean greater compensation later. But keep it in perspective: No matter how much you haggle, you're not going to be fully compensated for the business loss resulting from the outage.

To reiterate: SLA compensation is limited to a credit against the cost of the service—not the user's cost of the outage—and the cost of the service is often a tiny percent of the cost of the outage.

Here's an example that a former employee of one of the largest outsourcing companies shared with me: Their very large retail customer's website crashed on Black Friday. The application was down for six hours, resulting in a loss of $50 million (about Rs 225 crore) in revenue. The outsourcer's compensation to the retailer? Six hour's service credit—approximately $300.

The moral of this story? Keep the whole SLA discussion in perspective. It's not going to make you whole if your application is unavailable. The worst thing about investing too much energy into SLA haggling is that it may distract you from the far more important issue: How to ensure uptime. If you're on the Titanic, and it hits an iceberg and sinks, all of the time you spent negotiating the location and conditions of your deck chair isn't going to help your prospects one bit.

The most important issue is, how should you think about application outage and what are your options for improving uptime? As a starting point, keep in mind Voltaire's observation: "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien." Loosely translated, that means, “Perfection is the enemy of good”. Applied to cloud computing, this might be thought of as "Don't avoid adopting a cloud provider because it can't guarantee 99.999 percent uptime, when one's own datacenters fall far short of acceptable uptime."

If adopting cloud computing improves uptime significantly, it's the right thing to do. If there are no actual statistics of the uptime availability of one's own computing environment, that's a telling sign that moving to a cloud provider is a step in the right direction. It may not be perfect, but it's way better than an environment that can't even track its own uptime.

Uptime Forward!

Here are some steps you can take to improve your application uptime: More Cloud Ideas Architect your application for resource failure. Perhaps To read more Bernard Golden the greatest single step you can columns and understand the take to improve your application's impact of the cloud, visit www.cio. in/mustread c o.in uptime is to architect it so that it can continue performing in the face of

Vol/7 | ISSUE/02

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individual resource failure. Redundancy of application servers ensures the application will continue working even if a server outage kills a virtual machine. Likewise, having replicated database servers means an application won't grind to a halt if one server hangs. Using an app management framework that starts new instances to replace failed ones ensures redundant topologies will be maintained in the event of an outage.

Architect your topology for infrastructure failure. While judicious design can protect application availability in the event of an application hardware element failure, it can't help you if the application environment fails. The answer in this case is to implement application geographic distribution so that even if a portion of one's application becomes unavailable due to a provider's large-scale outage, the application can continue to operate. This makes application design more complex, of course, but it provides a larger measure of downtime protection.

Architect your deployment for provider failure. Of course, it is possible for a cloud provider's complete infrastructure to go offline. Even though the circumstances under which this might occur are quite rare, it is within the realm of possibility.

People obsess about SLAs because being hardnosed may mean greater compensation later. But no matter how much you haggle, you're not going to be compensated for the business loss resulting from an outage.

For example, the provider's entire network infrastructure could down, or the cloud provider might abruptly shut down.

The solution is to extend your application's architecture across multiple providers. Despite what many vendors will proclaim, doing so is extremely challenging because the semantics of how cloud providers vary makes it difficult to design an app that can incorporate differing functionalities.

What should be obvious from this discussion is that higher levels of uptime certainty require increased levels of technical complexity, which translates into increased levels of investment.

Deciding whether a given app requires this level of investment is an exercise in risk assessment. Certainly this should be an explicit exercise, in which the tradeoffs between business exposure, investment, and technical operations complexity are evaluated. It's not easy, and there probably aren't any easy answers. However, doing this is much more likely to result in an acceptable outcome than an extended SLA contract slugfest. CIO Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

REAL CIO WORLD | D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

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Undercover Officer

Anonymous

My Deputy Left on a Gurney This CSO thought he’d planned for a disaster—until he experienced an unexpected absence of a key staff member.

I

was sitting in a meeting when my assistant rushed in and whispered to me that there were paramedics in my deputy CISO’s office. I excused myself, and as I walked out of the conference room, I saw my deputy on a gurney being pushed into an elevator by three paramedics and two firefighters. The only thing they told me before the elevator door closed was that she was having difficulty breathing and they were taking her to the hospital.

After they left, I realized that I didn’t know what hospital she was going to or what, if anything, I should tell her family. About five minutes later, her husband called me and said that he was the one who had called the ambulance. They had been talking on the telephone when she began having medical problems. A couple of hours later, I got another call from her husband, who said that although his wife wasn’t in critical condition and would recover, the medical staff wasn’t sure when she would be able to return to work.

Although I was relieved to hear that she would recover, I began thinking about the projects she was working on and the people she was dealing with. I knew she was working with the legal folks on a contract issue and with HR on a critical personnel situation. Unfortunately, though, I had 28

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few details about most of the other things she was involved with. We had a couple of pilot projects and technology reviews with some vendors, but I didn’t have any names or numbers for the people she was working with. Most importantly, we were in the middle of our annual budget development, and she had been working with several groups to gather metrics and establish new security requirements for the subsequent funding they would need.

I had no idea whom I should contact to cancel meetings, what could or could not be postponed and if any of the negotiations were at a critical stage where I needed to elegantly step in and take over. We’ve all heard the anecdotes about key people getting “hit by a bus” and disrupting the organization, but I was now looking at almost that same scenario. In the end, it turned out that she Vol/7 | ISSUE/02

12/12/2011 1:14:18 PM

Undercover Officer

Anonymous

was back to work sooner than I first feared, but the whole thing was an eyeopening experience for me.

It could have been much, much worse, of course. A few months ago, one of our vendors told me that one of its regional salespeople had died suddenly, and the company had to try to re-create his last few weeks of work to determine what customers he was working with, what stage of talks he was at with certain customers and what he had agreed to with others. It began getting frustrated calls from some customers wondering what had happened, and other customers even tried to take advantage of the situation by making claims that they had been promised certain things that were contrary to company policy.

What’s more, this salesman had encrypted all of his files, including his customer contact list and pending sales list. This is usually a smart move, but unfortunately for this vendor, he had used an encryption program not managed by the company, which meant there wasn’t a back-door way for it to get into his files. The company literally had to start all over with the customers in the area.

Points of Failure The day my deputy CISO left unexpectedly wasn’t the first time I faced such a scenario. Several years ago, one of my key engineers had a family medical emergency that required him to move out of state for several months while a child received specialized medical care. During this time, he was almost completely incommunicado.

Practice Makes Perfect Recover faster from missing staffers, read Successful Succession Planning Mantras.

Visit www.cio.in c o.in

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Anonimous_colunm.indd 3

In the military, there are policies that forbid leadership from traveling together due to the possibility of one disastrous event incapacitating the upper hierarchy.

He didn’t have access to a computer because this was before the days when nearly everyone had a laptop.

The immediate void caused some critical outages because, although we were able to bring in someone with the technical skills to cover his position, he had been working on a couple of very technical projects that only he had knowledge of. To complicate things further, he had encrypted a lot of the files that the organization needed for daily operations.

Since then, I’ve been pretty meticulous in avoiding any single point of failure for my technical positions. I think most CSOs are. But what about our leadership? People sometimes joke that things might run more efficiently without any managers around, but it’s obvious that some things come to an immediate halt when you lose key staff.

That’s why in the military and in a lot of major companies, there are policies forbidding leadership from traveling together and—in some instances where the political or geographic climate is unfriendly—even from meeting due to the possibility of one disastrous event eliminating or incapacitating the upper hierarchy of an organization. In many cases, we tend to over-rely on key personnel with critical leadership skills or organizational memory, and this can have a negative impact on both the business and the other people in the organization.

The reality is that the loss or incapacitation of key personnel can result in organizational chaos unless you have some form of plan that addresses how you respond. While my

organization has a business continuity plan for recovering from interrupted critical functions after various emergencies, and a disaster-recovery plan for resuming operations, neither of these addressed the loss of key leadership personnel like I have now experienced. It may sound egotistical, but it quickly became clear to me on that day that if either I or any of my leadership team became ill or died, then the entire organization would face major difficulties. I was convinced that without our corporate knowledge and professional contacts, the potential organizational risks were too high to ignore.

Strategies for Coping We don’t have the time or space here to go into the entire risk management process or details of business continuity, but a simple way to start is to ask your leadership team members what the impact would be if they didn’t show up for work tomorrow. This should lead to identifying the critical activities performed by each individual. The next step might be to detail how the loss of each of these key people would affect those activities and how the operations or business would be impacted.

From a more formal perspective, there are several other steps you can take: Better communication. Having regular communication with your team is a good way to stay abreast of the day-to-day activities in your group.

We sometimes become so dependent on e-mail that we forget how important it is to actually talk and ask questions. I can’t count the times some non-verbal REAL CIO WORLD | D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

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Undercover Officer

Anonymous

clue in a conversation led me to ask one more question that led to the nut of the problem or gave me some information that I didn’t know I needed.

Meetings, bloody meetings.

Regardless of (un)conventional wisdom and what the (mis)informed may believe, good staff meetings are an essential means of understanding who is working on what. The key word here is ‘good’. We’ve all spent time in meeting hell. On the other hand, well-organized meetings can benefit everyone.

One time I began to feel that our weekly staff meetings were wasting people’s time and that I could accomplish the same thing by meeting individually with key staff members on a regular basis. After about four weeks, I began getting comments from staff complaining that they never knew who was working on what anymore or what was going on and asking to have the staff

meetings re-instituted. The lesson here is that there’s a synergy from getting the group together, and that ability to share information is a significant component of mitigating the loss of key personnel.

KMA. Although I never want to be accused of being a micromanager, I also never want to be caught without critical information when I need it. I understand that it’s a double-edged sword, and the team never lets me forget it. My mantra to my staff is Keep Me Advised (KMA).

I don’t need to (and in most cases don’t want to) get involved in making routine operational decisions, but I always want to know when something unusual is going on. I hate getting calls from my boss, about an issue or incident that my staff is working on that I don’t know anything about. This also goes with external conversations that could potentially impact our government customers or public constituents.

Personnel evaluations and progress reports. A good time to go over major activities that your leadership team is involved with is during regular evaluations or reporting period reviews.

Because this is when you are typically establishing professional goals, it’s the perfect time to identify the formal and informal functions of your people.

Planning for the loss of key people, including your leadership team, is critical to your continuity of operations.

After my experience with my deputy CISO, I’m even more of an advocate of the old saying, “The worst time to plan for an emergency is during the emergency.” Not only is it the worst time, but it’s also a pretty painful time—even if you’re not the one who leaves the office on a gurney. CIO This column is written anonymously by a real CSO. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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12/12/2011 1:14:18 PM

Robin Johnson

Think Tank

The Price of Saving Money Dell’s global CIO explains how a company's reluctance to invest in agility can be costly. The agility tax, he says, is too high to pay.

T

Illust ration by P HOTOS.COM

he job of the CIO is not what it used to be. No longer are well-run datacenters and solid uptime metrics the measures of success—now CIOs run the business process and technology is the tool. The metric a company should use to measure the performance of its CIO these days is agility, and companies that don't—or that limit the ability of their CIOs to maximize agility—will struggle to compete in today's market.

Here's what I mean by agility. A few years ago Dell wanted to add a new payment type to the list of options on Dell.com. Not a major request, right? Just another button on the site. But it wasn't.

At that time, Dell's business was organized geographically, with different systems in every region for the same business process.

Thus adding a payment type was a layered, complex change that required synchronizing seven order-entry systems globally with five order-management platforms, then tying them into multiple regional Dell.com sites as well as the back-end financial system— and roughly 10 different customer databases.

In short, this ‘simple request’ would take almost a year to implement. What would be lost in that year? What is lost today every time your company's IT infrastructure can't quickly incorporate a new business process that would give you a competitive edge? That's what a lack of agility can cost you. I call it the agility tax.

The Inflexible Enterprise It's been years since we received that request at Dell, but that scenario is still unfolding at companies everywhere. Let's say you want to roll out a new kind of product that your business has never sold before, and it needs to be sold online as a

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Robin Johnson

Think Tank

The agility companies lack is elusive because they need to invest to streamline their systems. Deferring it isn't a way to curb costs, it's a means of subsidizing inefficiency. subscription. You'll first have to modify your billing systems to process subscription payments, then work the interface from the subscription payment system into your customer database.

Your financial systems will also need tweaking.

Last but not least, you have to add some additional parameters to your Website because this new product is configurable. Now multiply all that by two or five or nine, because that's how many websites you operate in the US Why do you have so many?

Because your company grew organically. Each time you added a new region or acquired a company, you added another site on a new server cluster in a new datacenter.

Then the company went global. Now you have an array of sites in several languages in Europe and Asia. It takes months to make the item available on each of them. The shiny new product never gets to Latin America; by the time you've completed the arduous rollout process elsewhere, your product group has released its shinier, newer successor.

Survival for the CIO in that kind of environment means keeping the business happy and fulfilling its requests—the ‘order taker’ IT model. The CIO can see the entire business process but isn't empowered to do anything about it except point out the potential pitfalls and functional disconnects. It's a no-win situation at best and an efficiency-killer at worst.

The agility so many companies lack is elusive because it requires investment in streamlining your systems. Eliminating regional variations of the same application. Virtualizing servers.

And streamlining isn't sexy. In a tough economy, it doesn't seem pressing. Then the day comes when it would be nice to add a new payment option or roll out a new product, and the IT department can't accommodate a request that would make a real difference to the bottom line.

Deferring the IT investment that increases agility isn't a way to curb costs, it's a means of subsidizing inefficiency. It used to be that a company would decide to implement a new business process and then cobble together the systems to make it work.

But that's not possible any longer.

It's no coincidence that the examples I've given touch on the company website and its ability to incorporate new products.

Online is the perfect illustration of the degree to which the distinction between business and IT is vanishing. Technology was once a tool that facilitated business, but now it's embedded in every aspect of the business.

and respond to conversations about your brand that are happening on the Web. Nearly all the functions that are critical to marketing are technology-driven. Sales, service, communication—all are inextricably linked to technology. The datacenter is the very least of it.

When Dell recognized this paradigm shift several years ago, we realized that we had 8,000 applications on our servers, many of which duplicated the functions of the others. As Dell grew, each department had chosen its own software and housed it on a dedicated server. So we worked with each division to choose standards and we've reduced the number of applications to 2,200 and counting (down).

We were also running 24,000 physical servers when virtualizing would eliminate the need for a whopping 6,000.

Our environment was relying on the most expensive storage for every piece of data, when tiering our data and reducing duplication could lower our storage costs by 50 percent. Now we're saving more than $300 million (about Rs 1,350 crore) per year—all of which leaves budget dollars that can be allocated to innovation rather than maintenance.

As of today we're about 70 percent of the way there, and we expect to finish standardizing and streamlining our systems in late 2012. We aren't devoting our resources to this project with a specific goal and that’s to make a particular change or release an upcoming product. That's the point.

Rationalizing the underpinnings of every technology that Dell uses to conduct business will increase our agility and speed, and speed is the goal.

When speed is the goal, you have to ensure you're measuring the right things to get you there. Many IT leaders focus on development timelines and delivery metrics, while business people tend to measure time to launch. But when or whether a project meets its delivery timeline really isn't relevant in the end. The purpose of IT is to create new value streams for the enterprise, so the question you must ask and answer is whether a given project achieved the benefits promised.

That's why it's not enough for today's CIO to understand the role of technology in business—he or she must understand and enable the business itself. Technology and the business are the same thing. Saving money is too expensive; the agility tax is too high. Delaying it will only raise it, probably at a moment when your company can least afford the bill. CIO

What We’re Doing About It Online doesn't exist without technology; online is technology.

So are social media and your company's effort to monitor 32

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Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

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Alternative Views

New technol0gy

Are We Ready for Big Data?

Many say the need to analyze existing and exponentially growing data can be met by big data solutions. But are enterprises ready for it? Two CIOs debate.

I

believe that we, both enterprises and vendors, are not ready for big data solution tool sets. The fact is vendor offerings are not yet mature. Today, we are where we were with server virtualization back in 2007-2008. How do I know that the market is not ready? There are a couple of ways you can tell. First, how many people are really comfortable or even know about technologies like Hadoop?

Another telling point is how many large, mature vendor companies have solution sets that are out of the beta stage? Sure there have been some releases recently from big names like IBM, but are these mature offerings?

The way I see it, it will take time for the big data solution market to mature. First, we will see large and niche players make their offerings and then we’ll see a gradual consolidation of players.

On the enterprise side, executives are not yet ready, in my opinion, to be able to use the power of big data. If you look at forecast surveys for 2012, for instance, you’ll see that business intelligence is at the top of the list of most Indian CIOs. If we haven’t got to the point where we are meeting business needs with traditional analytical tools like business intelligence then, what about big data solution sets that go beyond BI? Here’s another reason why enterprises are not yet ready: We lack the internal expertise.

Today, if I were to implement a big data solution set, I would have to depend almost entirely on my vendor—given that in-house experts would almost be impossible to find.

And that situation will ensure that support fees are prohibitive.

In my opinion, we are at least two years away from the point when both enterprises and vendors are ready to use big data solution sets.

“In my opinion, we are at least two years away from when both enterprises and vendors are ready to use big data solutions.”

—Raghu Kumar Paruchuri, Head ERP & IT, Tata Power Strategic Electronic Division

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Alternative Views

New techNol0gy

I

think big data is a concept or technology which allows a CIO or an organization to bring in a variety of structured and unstructured data to the table and use it for a meaningful purpose. It is a solution by itself. It has the ability to drive innovation in an organization and obtain better business products.

Looking back, you will observe that a number of organizations have not experienced growth at the same rate that the petabytes of data have populated their data warehouses. So it becomes necessary for these organizations to make decisions based on the variability of different kinds of data.

Older business intelligence tools created analytics, but didn’t work to determine if the right measures of an organization’s activities and performance were being used. Now with the inception of big data, methods are available in order to compare metrics and validate them.

Although several business intelligence tools are available, the real benefits of the acquired customer data are only being availed partially. In the past, large media and broadcasting companies stored their data in analog form. Even in our organization, we have implemented a platform to capture all

“It is a solution by itself. It has the ability to drive innovation in an organization and obtain better business products.”

—Ajay Kumar Meher,Vice President-IT & New Media, Multi Screen Media this information. It has resulted in a new challenge and the concept of big data is trying to resolve it.

Today, CIOs are concerned about how to use available data before their competitors figure out a method to utilize the same information. Bigger enterprises are converting their entire data libraries into a metadata format. This metadata will not only enable backend management, but help manage abundant data streams and help CIOs with better decisionmaking. The capabilities of big data solutions are plenty depending on business process requirements. With the advent of big data, technology is slowly maturing in order to manage the 3 Vs: The value, velocity and variability of data. And big data also offers me the ability to re-purpose content. CIO

As told to Shubhra Rishi and Sunil Shah Shubhra Rishi is trainee journalist. Send feedback to shubhra_rishi@idgindia.com

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61 | BUSINESS AT THE SPEED OF CLICK Ministry of Corporate Affairs gets ready for the 21st century

66| TOWARDS IDEAL E-GOVERNANCE IT needs to be mandated with a ‘lead by example’ approach, says Tanmoy Chakrabarty of TCS

An IDG Custom Solutions Initiative

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12/12/2011 2:41:52 PM

How to get people to give your ideas the

Thumbs “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” wrote Shakespeare. If Shakespeare was a business man, he’d probably have written “All the world’s a market and all the men and women salespeople.”

Up

Because isn’t that what we all do?

Whether it’s trying to get your son to take up a sport, or recommending your neigh-

By Varsha Chidambaram,

bor the new car you just bought. Or get-

Debarati Roy and

ting your boss to believe in an idea.

Yet selling an idea is one of the hardest

Sunil Shah

things to do. And it’s even tougher for IT more reactive than proactive function. But times are changing. And CIOs are learning the art of salesmanship.

We present to you some lessons learnt in the art of selling from leaders of IT and their bosses. Don’t expect to find the usual do-your-homework suggestions here.

These are real-life accounts and hardfought for lessons straight from CIOs. P.S. Pass this issue to your sales head once you’re done.

Reader ROI: New ways to get heads nodding Why doing your homework won’t cut it What CEOs want to hear when you’re pitching an idea at them

IllUST RATIoN BY PRAD EEP GUlUR AND VIK AS KAPooR

which has traditionally been considered a

Cover Story

Buy-In

Seven Little-known Ways to Sell Your Ideas

By Varsha Chidambaram I f an idea is good, it will be bought, right? Wrong. The world is not as Kant desired it and humans are not perfectly rational.

The reality of decision-making is that it isn’t based solely on the facts. Sure, decision-makers will ask for all the data they can get their hands on, will weigh the pros and cons, and they will look at the trade-offs, but when it comes down to call-time, other non-rational reasons come into play. And that makes persuading people more an art than a science.

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No other member of the business class is possibly more aware of this than the CIO. That’s thanks to the nature of IT and IT projects.

IT projects bring significant—and often frequent—changes to large swathes of the enterprise, making change management among the most important skills for IT leaders.

Also, in many organizations, especially those in which IT is seen as an enabler, the CIO needs to dip into the budgets of other departments—

PhoTo BY K AP Il S h Rof f

If you’re sick of hearing the old litany of doing your homework to get your ideas passed, try some of these uncelebrated ways to get buy-in. With the budget season coming on, they could be indispensable.

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Parakh Dave, CIO & CTO, Future Group, isn’t a big believer in PPTs. “If you can’t articulate the value of an idea without PPTs, you won’t be able to sell anything.”

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Cover Story

Buy-In

to build a CRM, for example—but has to convince business owners to spend their money in a way that IT wants. And even in companies where IT departments do have sizable budgets of their own, it needs to be spent—and justified to the top brass—on projects that are hard to sell like security, consolidation, or IT staff training.

CIOs also have possibly the most number of audiences to convince, compared to their peer group—often with the least authority. “There are at least five categories of people that IT leaders have to convince,” says Anuragi Raman, associate director, BPEX deployment leader and head-IT at Motilal Oswal Securities.

They could, for instance, be a business peer who proposes a less-than-visionary way of getting business intelligence, but whose budget a CIO needs to spend. (It might be their money and their project, but it’s your IT architecture.) Or a chief executive who doesn’t want to release funds to fight off a security threat he

doesn’t think is serious. Or it could be the hundreds of staffers who refuse to use a new ERP; a vendor who won’t budge; a business partner, like a dealer, who won’t align his systems to yours.

To coax the crowd, CIOs have picked up tricks you won’t find in business manuals. Sometimes their advice can seem completely counter-intuitive. Take this for example: To sell your ideas you need to avoid a decision and the decision-maker. Or you mustn’t be passionate about your ideas. Or how it’s okay to be politically incorrect, because if you want to watch your ideas spin into shape, like a jar on a potter’s wheel, you need to get your hands in the clay.

Here are seven little-known win-over ideas you won’t find in management books, lessons that aren’t celebrated in public forums, but rather exchanged in hushed whispers from one CIO to another.

Kersi Tavadia, CIO, BSE says that CIOs who are ultrapassionate or possessive about their ideas can be labeled as glory-seekers and not team players.

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We’ve been trained to put a lot of effort into making elaborate presentations, brimming with figures and complicated-looking graphs. They’ll take you seriously, a voice in your head says.

But here’s the truth: It is a bad idea. For two reasons. First, because the ‘presenting-mindset’ puts you, inherently, in a supplicant’s position. It’s a lower and less-tactical position with respect to the people you are trying to persuade. “Gone are the days when CIOs had to get ‘buy-in’. Today, we have discussions,” says Rajeev Batra, CIO, MTS India.

Second, people put far too much effort in ‘presenting an idea’, and, in the process, lose the idea behind the idea. “People tend to have a very high dependency on PPTs,” says Anita Shantaram, a corporate trainer and educator who runs workshops for the likes of Infosys, Reliance Industries, L&T, Godfrey Phillips, Lupin, among others. “Try supposing that your CEO says he doesn’t have time, and asks you to get into his car and tell him your idea on his way to the airport. Most people would fail there at that.”

The lesson? Your idea is bigger than the presentation. The presentation should essentially follow the buy-in and not precede it.

“If you’re not able to articulate the value of your idea without PPTs, you’re not going to be able to sell anything,” says Parakh Dave, CIO & CTO, Future Group.

Dave should know. Having worked with a diverse range of companies in the US, China and India, Dave’s been presenting ideas to decision-makers at companies like the Aditya Birla Group, and A S Watson, the world’s largest health and beauty retailer with over 9,500 stores in 33 markets. Dave believes the ‘presentation mindset’ undermines the credibility of the

P hoto by fotocorp

Don’t Present

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4

CIO within the organization. “If your CEO or the executive management board trusts you, you don’t need to sell your idea.

But you need to build that trust,” he says.

That’s the kind of trust Dave has built with his boss Rakesh Biyani, joint-MD, Pantaloon Retail India. (See how Biyani bought into one of Dave’s ideas, turn to page 48) “With such a vast experience in retail, he understands how IT can contribute to the retail business better than most. We trust his judgment,” says Biyani.

For Dave, building a close relationship with the most important people in the organization is key to winning their trust and approval—not a PowerPoint presentation with 50 slides. “Most of my ideas are closed after a 10-15 minute discussion with my CEO,” says Dave.

Fifteen minutes was all it took, for instance, to sell a new point of sale system across the group—during the recent recession when capex purchases were the new evil. “We do hundreds of projects spanning the group. If I had to spend time presenting my ideas to each of the lines of business, I’d get nothing done!” says Dave.

2 If you want to get an idea approved, go to the decision maker. It’s common sense, right? It isn’t. Ask any salesperson.

Salespeople know that one of the best ways to make a sale is to build an environment for their product. If they were trying to sell something to a CIO, for example, their first point of attack would be the people CIOs depend on to make decisions, people lower down the line who deal with the nitty-gritty’s of technology and who the CIO will depend on for their decisions.

Building an environment is also why DeBeers, for instance, spent significant amounts of money for almost a century creating demand for diamond jewellery, although they only sell rough diamonds. It’s only in 2001 that it created jewellery of its own.

It’s a strategy that came handy when Srikanth Mattipalli, IT director at Tyco International (India), moved back to India from the US office of the $17 billion-plus provider of electronic security and fire protection products.

When Mattipalli relocated some things didn’t change—and a lot did. While he still reported to his old boss, he was thrown into an entirely new team. He says that getting buy-in from his boss wasn’t a challenge, but getting his peers on board with his ideas was another ballgame altogether.

His advice for someone trying to get buy-in from a bunch of people you don’t have credibility with? “Involve mid-level managers and they’ll sell the idea for you,” he says.

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Don’t try to get everyone onboard with your ideas, just the ones that count says Jitendra Singh, CIO, Hyderabad Industries.

That’s exactly what he did when he wanted to float an idea to improve Tyco India’s price productivity. “Traditionally, the view at Tyco was that to improve price productivity you had to cut costs. But there’s a limit to how much you can lower your costs while keeping quality constant,” he says.

His alternative was to institute a new value system at Tyco India: Figure out what the market will pay for your products and work backwards from there. But to make his case he needed historical data, which required collaboration from multiple departments including marketing, sales, and finance.

The conditions were not exactly favorable: He was a CIO who had returned to India after spending many years abroad and was trying to change how things were done. Resistance was natural.

“Reluctance to change is inevitable. My IT support can’t even get me to switch to a wireless keyboard!” he says. So, instead of trying to win over his peers, he had a series of meetings with the mid-level management across the organization. “If you get the REAL CIO WORLD | D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

P hoto by Suresh vangapal ly

Skip the Decision Maker

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Buy-In

tactical management on your side, they will push their top level and also push down to the operations managers. They will sell your idea for you,” he says.

It’s also important, he says, to share credit. “Don’t be a gloryseeking CIO. Ultimately, you have to keep the business in the limelight.”

Fear Isn’t the Key. Envy Is There are a number of emotions people can evoke when they are trying to convince people to see things their way, and each has its pros and cons. One of the most popular emotions is fear.

It’s what president Bush used to impel Americans to attack Iraq, when he brought up the specter of WMDs, for instance.

Fear could have been the key when Harish Bhavanasi, director information services, UST Global, leading provider of consulting, outsourcing and end-to-end IT services for Global 1000 companies, went to his board with a proposal to create a disaster recovery site. A proposal that was shot down. Twice.

The idea was stopped stone cold by one of the classic ideakillers, according to John Kotter, co-author of Buy-In. Saving Your Good Idea from Being Shot Down: “We’ve been successful; why change?”

At that point, Bhavanasi could have chosen to use fear, uncertainty and doubt, a.k.a. FUD and he certainly wouldn’t have been the first CIO to do it. He could also have chosen to use FUD tactic when he needed approval for a core switch, given how hard it is to articulate the business value of ITinfrastructure projects.

“CIOs have a tendency to scare people. If we don’t do this something bad will happen is the way that conversation goes,” says Bhavanasi.

But although FUD is the easiest way to win approval, it isn’t the best way to do it. Kotter points out how research has proven that although fear will get people to move, it’s not an emotion that will carry them far enough to see a decision through— although happiness is.

There’s another emotion that CIOs can bank on when trying to win approval and that’s envy. Envy makes people aim high.

And that’s what Bhavanasi was going for.

“Bring in case studies from competitors. Play on envy. In the long run it works better than threatening them of an impending disaster,” Bhavanasi.

Bhavanasi talks from experience. With the case of the core switch, for example, he roped in external consultants and a vendor and with their help built a solid case study—based on a company he know the business followed closely. The case didn’t highlight how the company would’ve suffered if it didn’t cough up for the switch, it showed how it could speed up the 42

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What Kills a Buy-In? It’s not just your boss who stands in the way of your grand idea. There are other less influential— yet powerful—tactics that could send your ideas to the burial ground. Here are some.

Getting buy-in is tough in the best of circumstances. Imagine trying to pull people on your side, when they are conspiring to put your idea down—under a veil of silly tactics.

In their book Buy-in, Saving Your Good Idea from Being Shot Down, John P. Kotter and Lorne A. Whitehead, say its these guerilla tactics that kill an idea. Before you realize what’s hit you, the idea is dead, the authors say.

Here’s an idea to save your idea: Arm yourself against these tactics. The good news is there aren’t many. Kotter and Whitehead say these attacks are based on only four strategies: Fear mongering: This is aimed at raising anxiety. People begin to worry that implementing a grand idea might be filled with risks–though it isn’t true. Someone who is trying to bully you states an undeniable fact and then spins a tale leading to frightening consequences. Words often play an important role here. Even if a credible individual falls prey, he could tip more people. Anxiety then builds like a chain reaction.

Delay: It’s unarguably the easiest tactic to employ. The wehave-too-much-on-our-plate-right-now argument has flushed many an idea down the drain. Mongers try to distract people from the current idea and focus their energies on another crisis so that the idea is forgotten. Because it is so easy to use, death by delay is a weapon available to nearly everyone.

Confusion: It’s an idea killing tactic that quietly creeps in unnoticed. Look out for questions and concerns that muddle the conversation with irrelevant facts and alternatives that make it impossible to have a clear dialog that builds buy-in.

Remember that statistics can be a powerful weapon when used not to clarify, but bewilder.

Ridicule or Character Assassination: Some verbal bullets don’t shoot directly at the idea but at the people behind the idea.

These bullets could be questions on competence and character.

A strong buy-in is rarely achieved if the audience feels uneasy with those presenting a proposal. Ridicule is used less than the other tactics because it can snap back at the attacker.

company’s network, boost the business and rake in revenues.

It worked.

Something along similar lines worked for the disaster recovery site, says Bhavanasi. He says his suggestion for a disaster recovery site fell on deaf ears till the head of sales got a whiff of what had happened to a competing firm when they lost Vol/7 | ISSUE/02

some customer data following a disaster. “What would happen if something like this happened to us?” he asked the firm’s chief IT-architect during a conversation over lunch. “We won’t be able to save the data,” said architect reported faithfully.

Within a month a disaster recovery budget was approved.

4 Remember, Politics is Part of the Game

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Yatendra Kumar, CIO at Gokaldas Exports, sold an idea differently to different people to get it approved.

“Human dynamics are complicated. It’s better to confront issues.

Confronting doesn’t mean fighting. If you push a problem under the carpet once, be sure it will happen again.”

Tame Your Passion It’s true, your passion could be your biggest enemy. While Shantaram encourages confrontation, she warns against the dangers of coming across as zealous or passionate. “Being too passionate about your ideas may put people off; people will feel you’re sold out to the idea and are blind to its flaws and pitfalls,” she says.

It’s a lesson Kersi Tavadia, CIO at BSE, the world’s largest exchange in terms of listed companies, applied when he wanted to float the proposal for the purchase of security software at a previous organization. He believed in the need for greater security enough to meet head-on rejection for months, but he never let his zealousness show. Instead, he patiently built awareness on the subject and highlighted the need of information security through workshops and seminars.

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Photo by Sujith Sujan

Love it, or hate it, you have to play the game of politics. And there are a whole of lot characters you will have to deal with. In his book, Kotter breaks down the people who will kill your ideas into eight categories. These are Pompus Meani and Lookus Smarti (will kill a good idea if it makes them seem more important by doing it).

Heidi Agenda (who has secret agendas she wants to keep safe). Bendi Wendi (who will side with the party that seems to be winning. Allis Welli and Avoidus Riski (who like the status quo and hate change).

Divertus Attenti (who likes changing the focus of a problem). And Spaci Cadetus (who imagines ridiculous problems).

You cannot avoid the Avoidus Riskis and Pompus Meanies in your workplace. But you can, however, learn how to deal with them.

“Ignore the loud mouths, and focus on the people who really need to be involved. You don’t need to please everyone,” says Jitendra Singh, CIO, Hyderabad Industries, the flagship company of the C.K. Birla Group of Companies and manufacturer of fibre cement roofing.

Singh might not be aware of it, but his advice constitutes some form of politics and to a keen observer resembles what lobbyists do for a living: Forget democracy, focus on the people who can create change.

There is another type of politics CIOs need to be aware of— the politics of the Heidi Agenda, or people with hidden agendas.

Given the push and pulls between different departments, today’s enterprises are filled with executives with ulterior motives. And then there are much saltier stories. One CIO who has requested anonymity, shares how he fought tooth-and-nail to get a project approved but kept bumping heads against one stakeholder who refused to budge. “We later found out he was personally involved with the vendor. Apparently, everyone knew about it, but confronting him would’ve been political suicide,” he says.

A play-it-safe attitude might make you diplomatic-leader of the year, but it certainly won’t help too many of your ideas see the light of day. Sometimes politics and the aggression that comes with it is the only way to get the job done.

“Sometimes confrontation becomes necessary. It’s not necessarily a bad thing if you do it right. Confrontation is like saying, “I’m making an attempt to understand your point. Let’s bring the issues out in the open and discuss it,” says Shantaram.

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Buy-In

“Sometimes you just have to wait for the right time. Being ultrapassionate or possessive about your ideas labels you as gloryseeker and not a team player,” says Tavadia.

There’s another downside to being ultra-passionate, says CIOs. It makes taking rejection hard and can therefore affect working relationships.

“I have seen that when people are too emotionally charged with an idea they find it difficult to move on when faced with rejection,” says Tavadia. “Rejection fosters a lot of negativity and you find those people who are too hung-up on past rejections are unable to participate wholeheartedly and cooperate in future projects.”

He suggests a more realistic approach “Two out of every 10 projects don’t get past approval. There will always be new ideas to implement. You need to learn to move on.”

6 Don’t Seek a Decision That’s right, one of the ways to get a decision for a project you really want is not to seek it.

It’s a piece of advice that will come increasingly handy for all CXOs including CIOs in a world where there is never enough information to make a decision. The alternative, one that CIOs have mastered with proof-of-concepts, is to say ‘let’s give it a swing,’ and create momentum until you have a de facto yes.

It’s a covert, back-door-entry way to get things done, but it works.

“You can’t always expect to get closure in the very first meeting.

Sometimes, just getting your foot in the door will suffice. As the project gains momentum other things will fall into place,” says UST Global’s Bhavanasi.

That tactic worked beautifully when Bhavanasi wanted to introduce a new lead-to-order system to speed up his firm’s sales process. Salespeople were, only naturally, less-thanenthusiastic about the idea because it could have exposed flaws to their existing system. “Let’s give it a shot and see,” suggested Bhavanasi, who backed his strategy by finding a sponsor from the finance team to champion the project.

Then a few months down the line something potentially disastrous happened: The sponsor moved out to a different department. But, by then, sales had already seen the first benefits and were more encouraged, says Bhavanasi. “Eventually, we got a new sponsor from the sales team, who drove it to finish,” he says.

The lesson? Don’t try to win buy-in upfront and in the first meeting. Your objective is to get them listening. Once you’ve got the ball rolling, people will follow. “It’s much harder to say no when a project has already been kick-started,” says Bhavanasi.

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24 Attack Tactics Exposed Being aware of your enemy’s moves is one of the most potent defenses in a battle. To arm yourself against verbal attacks, here are 24 responses to some of the most deadly attacks.

It doesn’t take much for meeting rooms to turn into boxing rings.

People on the other side of the table don’t miss a chance to take their verbal swords out to slash your idea.

Over time, these attacks have become so common and widely used that almost anyone will recognize them. They can be used anywhere, regardless of the nature of the idea or the setting–making them all the more dangerous.

But when ideas are negotiated, sold and fought over—between attack and defense—there’s a middle path that doesn’t lead to a duel. And if your response, say John P. Kotter and Lorne A. Whitehead in their book Buy-in, Saving Your Good Idea from Being Shot Down, is respectful, short, clear and filled with common sense, then you have a winner.

Here’s a list of 24 common and deadly attacks and a cracking response to each: “We’ve been successful, why change?!”

Response: True. But surely we have all seen that those who fail to adapt eventually become extinct.

“The only problem is not enough money.”

Response: Extra money is rarely what builds truly great ventures or organizations.

“You exaggerate the problem.”

Response: To the good people who suffer because of this problem, it certainly doesn’t look small.

“You’re saying we’ve failed??!!”

Response: No, we’re suggesting that you are doing a remarkably good job without the needed tools (systems, methods, laws, etcetera) which, in our proposal, you will have.

“What’s the hidden agenda?”

Response: Not fair! Just look at the track record of the good folks behind this proposal!

“What about this, and that, and that (etc.)?”

Response: All good ideas, if they are new, raise dozens of questions that cannot be answered with certainty.

“No good! It doesn’t go far enough” (or, “It goes too far”) Response: Maybe, but our idea will get us started moving in the right direction, and do so without further delay.

“You have a chicken and egg problem.”

Response: Well actually, you can do a little bit of A which allows a little bit of B which allows more A which allows more of B, and so on.

“Sounds like ‘killing puppies’ to me!”

Response: Look, you know it isn’t like that. A realistic comparison might be.

“You’re abandoning our values.”

Response: This plan is essential to uphold our traditional values.

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Cover Story “It’s too simplistic to work.”

Response: No–it’s the combination of your good work and some new things that, together, can make a great advance.

“No one else does this!”

Response: There really is a first time for everything and we do have a unique opportunity.

“You can’t have it both ways!”

Response: Actually, we didn’t say X or Y—although, I grant you, it may have sounded that way. We said A and B, which are not incompatible.

“Aha! You can’t deny this!”

Response: No one can deny the significance of the issue you have raised, and, yes, we haven’t explored it. But every potential problem we have found so far has been readily solved. So in light of what has happened earlier, I am today confident that this new issue can also be handled, just like all the rest.

“To generate all these questions and concerns, the idea has to be flawed.”

Response: Actually, many questions mean we are engaged, and an engaged group both makes better decisions and implements them successfully.

“Tried it before–didn’t work.”

Response: That was then. Conditions inevitably change [and what we propose probably isn’t exactly what was tried before.]

“It’s too difficult to understand.”

Response: Not a problem. We will make the required effort to convince them. It’s worth the effort to do so.

“This is not the right time.”

Response: The best time is almost always when you have people excited and committed to make something happen. And that’s now.

“It’s too much work.”

Response: A genuinely good new idea, facing time consuming obstacles, can both raise our energy level and motivate us to eliminate wasted time.

“Won’t work here, we’re different!”

Response: Yes it’s true, we’re different, but we are also very much the same.

“It puts us on a slippery slope.”

Response: Good groups of people—all the time—use common sense as a guard rail to keep them from sliding into disaster.

“We can’t afford this.”

Response: Actually, most important changes are achieved without new sources of money.

“You’ll never convince enough people.”

Response: You are absolutely right. That’s almost never possible, and that’s OK. “We’re not equipped to do this.”

Response: We have much of what we need and we can and will get the rest.

Buy-In

Don’t Give Everyone the Same Story No, don’t lie but don’t give everyone the same sales pitch. Unlike projects run by other departments, IT projects tend to cut across functions. And that means CIOs need to wear different hats when trying to sell their projects to different crowds. “Sometime the CIO has to act like a chameleon. You have to change your colors to suit different business needs,” says Future Group’s Dave.

That’s exactly what he did when the Future Group wanted to implement a new loyalty program across all its divisions. “To my CMO, I sold the project as a customer-centric initiative. But to my chief people’s officer, I had to highlight the process efficiency it would bring about. And to the sales department it was about how the project would improve their commissions,” says Dave.

It’s a strategy that also worked for Yatendra Kumar, CIO at Gokaldas Exports, one of India’s largest manufacturers and exporters of off-the-rack clothing. Kumar says that today he’s blessed with a tech-savvy CFO, but he wasn’t always so lucky. “My previous organization was a traditional, family-run outfit and a simple request to upgrade from a broadband to MPLS took years to clear,” he says.

When Kumar wanted to install a performance monitoring tool, he remembers his CFO being less-than-happy with the suggestion. “For him it appeared that IT was looking to make their jobs easier and making the company pay for it,” he says.

So he went with the same proposal to the sales department, only with a difference. “We told the sales department that the tool would expose where gaps, which were affecting their commissions, were coming form. You need to speak to people in the language they will respond to. The classic what’s-in-it-forme slogan is true for anyone,” says Kumar.

Finally, it helps to earn your credibility everyday. Credibility is the single-most important factor in winning buy-in say CIOs. But that doesn’t mean that must never have made a mistake.

You’re a CIO, not superman.

“Owning up is tough but it is highly-rewarding. In fact, it’s one of the first lessons we learn growing up: Admitting to your pranks always lessens the punishment that follows,” says Dave.

Hyderabad Industries’ Singh agrees. “I remember when we built a convincing proposal to implement a DR project for a client but didn’t get the necessary sanctions. It perplexed us until we found out that in the excitement of the new project, the team has neglected some of its more routine chores. It is through these seemingly-rudimentary processes that you build your credibility. When you fail, everyone notices.” CIO Varsha Chidambaram is senior correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to varsha_chidambaram@idgindia.com

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Cover Story

Buy-In

What

Clinched for Me

It

As told to Varsha Chidambaram

Ideas are like adventure sport. Some like the thrill of bungee jumping—outrageous, ridiculous and bewildering—while others would rather trek their way down—the tried, tested, and safe option.

This is what makes selling ideas an interesting challenge. They have to be tailor-made.

An outrageous idea may poke someone’s curiosity, while it may put off another. When Rajeev Batra, CIO, MTS, took a seemingly ridiculous option to his CEO, it caught the CEO’s attention. Not an approach likely to work with the Head-IT & CISO of Orbis Financial Ramkumar Mohan’s boss, a hardliner for pragmatism.

There are bosses who believe in following your gut, taking impulsive decisions and there 48

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Selling ideas is an art and no one can tell you how to sell one better than a buyer. Four CEOs and CFOs share what their CIOs did that forced them to sign on the dotted line.

are other more analytical ones who rely only on hard facts and proven solutions. You have as much luck selling Dale Carnegie books to a bunch of new-age yuppies as you have selling the latest iPhone to Mamata Banerjee. Even though the goal is same.

Journalists, writers, analysts, councilors, and experts, can all tell you how to sell your idea. But no one can tell you better than the person you’re selling it to. No one can tell you better than your boss.

We asked four CEOs and CFOs of some of India’s most prestigious organizations to share what seals the deal for them—in their own words.

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The Skeptic Vsevolod Rozanov, President & CEO, MTS

The Influencer Rajeev Batra, CIO, MTS

Clinching Factor “He constantly stressed on bringing new customers, creating and developing new products, and generating revenue.”

Vsevolod Rozanov, President & CEO, MTS, says though arguments were raised against Batra’s proposal, instead of getting into a duel, Batra listened.

When Rajeev came up to me two years ago with a proposal to build a datacenter, I was skeptical. Given that most people were moving towards cloud solutions, I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of spending millions to build a datacenter from scratch.

“But it’s not for us,” Rajeev told me, “We’ll be selling it to our customers.”

I was perplexed and surprised at the same time. Rajeev has a way of arresting your attention. He’s lead some great business projects in the past, but this idea still had me bewildered.

Rajeev was proposing we build our own datacenter and offer cloud services to small and medium businesses. At the outset, the idea seemed outrageous. Simply because we had always maintained our strategic focus on the pre-paid mass market and he was suggesting we open ourselves up to an entirely new market with a new line of services.

Yet, keeping his track record in mind, I decided to give him a chance to present his case.

Understandably, it wasn’t well received by the marketing guys. You could notice them turning their faces away, raising hurried concerns and trying to shoot the idea down.

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But I knew Rajeev was a man with a plan. I let him proceed.

And he didn’t disappoint me. Rajeev’s plan didn’t stop at the creation of a datacenter. He was talking about bringing new customers, creating and developing new products, and generating revenue. That’s music to the ears of a CEO. But because it was an idea that was unheard of, many arguments were raised and many issues were pointed out. Rajeev didn’t dismiss them, he listened. He paid heed to the arguments raised by the marketing and products departments. As a result, instead of getting into a duel, their thoughts were coalescing into a positive business synergy.

He wasn’t there to fight and win approval; he was there to form a partnership and make it happen.

Of course, the buy-in didn’t happen overnight. It took one long year where business plans were drawn out and discarded, strategies designed and rejected, till finally everyone knew and agreed that we had a winner on our hands.

And a winner it was. Today, our cloud datacenter—that opened earlier this year—has grown to be a serious source of revenue for MTS. And it wouldn’t have been possible had Rajeev not provided the much needed guidance to the marketing and products team, who were entering a new segment.

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“Shivam isn’t the kind to shove problems under the carpet. He’s willing to own them because he sees the business as his own.”

Sujit Sircar, CFO, iGATE Patni, says Shivam chose to tread the difficult path of building a new system to integrate the ERP systems of iGATE and Patni, when he had an option of taking the easy way out—letting them be.

The Skeptic Sujit Sircar, CFO, iGATE Patni

The Influencer Chella Namasivayam, CIO, iGATE Patni

Clinching Factor “He didn’t take the easy route because he knew how adversely it would impact business.”

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In late 2009, we had decided to undertake the motherof-all-projects: To migrate our ERP from one platform to another. It was a tough year for our CIO, who had been toiling the whole year to ensure a smooth transition.

And then just three months before we were to go live with the ERP, iGATE acquired Patni. In no time we discovered, to our CIO’s dismay, that Patni was running on a different ERP platform.

The acquisition and its after shocks threw Shivam’s plans into complete turmoil. It was a nightmarish situation for him.

Now he had three options ahead of him: Go live with the ERP and run two disparate systems, or stop the ERP migration and forego the investment, or integrate the two— the toughest option.

The first option was the easiest, and if he had come to me with that I would’ve probably cleared it. But he didn’t take the easy route, because he knew how aversely it would’ve impacted business.

For instance, we were briefly considering sticking to the first option of running two disparate systems and building a BI layer on top that connects the two. But Shivam pointed out the dangers associated with such a move, “What about the people and processes? If we aren’t able to integrate the people and processes then the whole merger would be a failure,” he said.

Even though it was a pertinent point, it was a hard decision for both business and IT. But it was one of the hardest decisions for Shivam because he would have to undo a lot of what he had already finished.

Shivam knew what he was doing. He based his decision on three simple factors: The risk factors involved, the ease and accuracy for fast decision making, and turn around time.

As the CFO, I was most concerned about the risks we were opening the business to. But Shivam isn’t the kind to shove problems under the carpet. He’s willing to own them because he sees the business as his own.

So we decided to stop the migration, take a stop loss on our investment and build a new system integrating the disparate platforms of the two companies. It’s been six months since then, and not once have I regretted my decision of going with my CIO.

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The Skeptic Atul Gupta, MD, Orbis Financial

The Influencer Ramkumar Mohan, Head-IT & CISO, Orbis Financial

Clinching Factor “His logic was sound and inarguable against.”

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Atul Gupta, MD, Orbis Financial, says his CIO has the ability to appeal to the common business sense and that has gone a long way in supporting business growth.

“Ram isn’t someone who’d come up to you with a 50 slide presentation to sell an idea.

It’s his ability to articulate projects in business terms that have helped us so far.” integrity. But Ram put my concerns to rest. He also emphasized that the solution would help us scale and expedite our processes, something the business was looking to improve.

We spent a few more minutes talking about cost, and we had closed the deal.

The next two days Ram worked out all the nitty-gritty’s relating to the vendor and the implementation process. We were ready to roll.

That’s how Ram works. He isn’t someone who’d come up to you with a 50 slide presentation to sell an idea. Frankly, we don’t have the time for this. For a young company like us business growth is our sole focus.

And Ram has constantly helped support business growth. It is Ram’s ability to articulate infrastructural projects in business terms and appeal to the common business sense that has helped us so far.

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Photo by srivatsa shandilya

I’m not a techie; I posses just about adequate knowledge of technology to run the business.

Hence, with technology, I follow a common sense approach; if it makes perfect rational sense, at that time and at that cost, I’d give it a go-ahead.

Cost is a critical issue; if we can’t afford it we don’t waste time thinking about it.

A few months back, we encountered a situation when we had to put this rationale to use. The business was growing rapidly and our infrastructure had to keep pace with that exponential growth. We were squeezed for capacity. The simple solution ahead of us was to buy more capacity. But that additional measure came with a not-so-impressive price tag.

Ram had an idea of how to circumvent the problem. He suggested we went for deduplication. Now, I had no idea what deduplication meant. So here’s how he explained it to me: “It will help us get more capacity from our existing resources at a fraction of the cost of buying new capacity.” He had my attention.

The next ten minutes Ram explained the intricacies of the de-duplication process and how it would clean up our mess. I had some concerns relating to data privacy and security. Because, in our business, customer confidentiality is of foremost importance. I was concerned if de-duplication would compromise our data

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The Skeptic Rakesh Biyani, Joint MD, Pantaloon Retail India & Director-Future Logistics Solutions, Future Group

The Influencer Parakh Dave, CIO & CTO, Future Group

Clinching Factor

Photo by Kapil shrof f

“It was his domain knowledge and the ability to think out-of-the-box that impressed me.”

We at Future Group are a unique retailer and we’ve gotten here by our ability to do things differently. Parakh has continued this trend by offering many creative out-of the-box solutions.

Take our point-of-sale service for example. Two years ago, we were on a proprietary solution and were thoroughly convinced that’s the only way to be. But Parakh didn’t think so. He brought to our notice that while the proprietary solution was giving us flexibility, it wasn’t a secure or viable option for us. He suggested that we move from an off-the-shelf solution and build a custom one.

Our first reaction was that of skepticism.

After all we had been using solutions available in the market all this while and it’s been a smooth show. What he was suggesting would open up the business to new risks.

But Parakh strikes you as someone who knows what he’s talking about. He’s been associated with large global chains. Parakh’s credibility was unquestionable. And that gave me confidence. The new customized solution would centralize all the controls and make life much easier for our customers. For example, Parakh explained how customers tend to make a mistake while picking up a product at a retail store and assuming that it comes with a different promotion, and are unpleasantly surprised at 52

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Rakesh Biyani, Joint MD, Pantaloon Retail India, & Director-Future Logistics Solutions, says that the fact that his CIO knew what he was talking about pushed him to give a go ahead.

“Not only did the solution ensure customer satisfaction, it also made sound business sense. I was particularly impressed by the business impact Parakh envisioned.” the counter. I have witnessed this myself, and when Parakh mentioned it, I could relate with it. The new solution would take care of that.

Not only did the solution ensure customer satisfaction, it also made sound business sense. We realized that when we sat together to work out the TCO. I was particularly impressed by the business impact Parakh envisioned.

But for the solution to really work, we needed to convince different department heads. Parakh got their buy-in by presenting the solution such that it addressed each department’s pain points.

Also, I think it’s important to note that the project was approved during the 2008-2009 downturn, when markets were dull. Parakh was able to use the economic condition to our advantage by extracting a good deal. After all it is in times as these that businesses have to extract maximum efficiencies. CIO Varsha Chidambaram is senior correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to varsha_ chidambaram@idgindia.com

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Smart Ideas Don’t Cut It

One of the world’s most acclaimed experts on change talks about what it takes to sell an idea.

By Debarati Roy

“Above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it’s been done in America for 221 years: Block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.”

When Barrack Obama, the president of the United States, made that statement during his presidential campaign in 2008, he knew he faced a nation that needed a complete change from the political and socio-economic policies of the previous government. He wanted to bring in change and he told his audience that if change was to come it needed to be done urgently.

Consciously or not, Obama was using a technique to win people over that Dr. John P. Kotter has written plenty about.

Dr. John P. Kotter is widely-regarded as the foremost speaker on change and leadership. He is professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School and the award-winning author of 18 books—twelve of them bestsellers—and numerous blogs on change and leadership. Over the past twenty years, his articles in the Harvard Business Review have sold more reprints than any other author for the HBR during the same time.

His most recent book, written with Lorne Whitehead, Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea From Getting Shot Down, (See how your peers reviewed it at cio.in/ bookclub), provides ways to deal with attacks on your ideas.

In an exclusive interview with CIO, he shares some hard-won buy-in strategies to help IT leaders get their managements nodding.

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CIO: Why should people bother mastering strategies to sell ideas? If an idea is good, it shouldn’t be necessary, right?

John P. Kotter: The answer to the question of why a good idea is rather easily seen by other people as a bad idea, is that there are many good ideas. This is why it requires some time and a calculative approach to sell even good ideas.

In IT, (a good idea can be seen as a bad one) because other people are not technically sophisticated. What can seem so obvious to a technically-sophisticated person is a total mystery to someone who is not. Another reason why (a calculative approach is needed) is because everybody is very busy.

It’s also quite conceivable that someone has never heard of an idea like the one being presented before. And automatically has lots of legitimate questions. They could say to an IT leader: You listed quite a lot of expenses, does that take away from my budget? Will this disrupt work that I’m doing right now? Even if it’s a good idea, will my people push back because they don’t see it as such?

In the minds of the people a CIO is trying to buy over, they are thinking: This idea is making me anxious unconsciously for 50 different reasons. I don’t know what they are but my instincts are not going to allow me to say yes. Another way people react is: Anything new is just negative. They are thinking: My previous position has taught me not to fool around with things.

The important thing here to remember is that there are lots of reasons for people to say no.

And all these reasons have implications. The first implication is: Don’t assume that people will buy into an idea just because it’s smart.

So how do you deal with people who can’t be won by reason?

Leaders have to realize that it is neither wise nor possible to try to make everyone happy. The goal is not to win over everyone but to win over just enough people for a plan to go ahead smoothly.

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Buy-In

Dr. John P. Kotter professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School, says people misunderstand what it means to do your homework before selling an idea.

who the biggest stakeholders are, and whether your presentation covers all of their concerns. But that does not mean that you avoid or disrespect the others.

One tactic that such people (who can’t be won over by reason) always use in a meeting is to attack aggressively or indulge in fear mongering. This raises anxiety levels and makes a thoughtful examination of a proposal difficult—if not impossible. But instead of trying to schedule a meeting on a day when such elements are least likely to attend, work them in your favor. They will surely raise a bizarre issue and kick up a storm over it.

But a bit of drama in the boardroom is needed for others to move their attention from planning the next meeting on their BlackBerrys and paying REAL CIO WORLD | D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

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Buy-In

attention to what you have to say. As insignificant as it may sound, one of the biggest reasons ideas fail to float through in a meeting is because most attendees are just too busy planning or calculating what’s next on the agenda.

Also, being composed and humble when someone is trying to shoot your idea down could get you solidarity votes from your peers.

You’ve often advocated this need for a little drama and creating a sense of urgency. How does it work?

In this turbulent era, when new competitors or political problems may arise anytime and when technology is making everything faster, both business-as-usual behavior associated with complacency, and running-in-circles behavior associated with false sense of urgency are increasingly dangerous. Again and again, we have found that most companies either fail to recognize

Can you elaborate on how that’s disastrous?

It’s human nature for people to pound on negative information because they think that it’s a way to make other people realize that things are going wrong. The problem with this approach is that although it helps capture people’s attention, it raises two other problems.

The first is that people acknowledge that the issue is huge but take recluse in a self-protective shell. Their common defense is: It’s not my problem. Let the person complaining about it figure it out. This blame game ushers a sense of complacency in the system. The other

There are lots of reasons for people to say no.

And all these reasons have implications. The first implication is: Don’t assume that people will buy into an idea just because it’s smart.

the signs of urgency amidst a storm of constantly-changing business dynamics—or have developed a sense of complacency and overlook problems. Creating a sense of urgency helps an organization to get an idea going in the right direction. Urgency always catches attention. A building is on fire is always the best wake-up call for people to take immediate action.

I have seen companies do this in various ways. One organization created a wallpaper of the message they wanted to deliver and made it the desktop wallpaper for all its employees for a week. Another picked up an animal that had cultural significance attached to it in that particular country and dressed it up. Anyone who entered the company’s headquarters saw this queer spectacle and out of curiosity asked a lot of questions. The team that was trying to drive a sense of urgency deployed people around the reception area to answer all their questions. In both these cases, organizations managed to create an impact and drove this message: Here’s a situation that calls for immediate action.

That said, leaders have to be extremely cautious of what they project as an urgent situation. In the fear of their idea being shot down, a lot of people often succumb to the temptation of creating false urgency—whose impact can be disastrous.

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problem is that a sense of false urgency might throw off people into frenzied action, or anger- or anxiety-driven activity. But this activity isn’t necessarily productive.

It has been proven that anxious energy does get people off a platform, but it can only make them swim a short distance and it wears off pretty soon. But positive energy can carry people for a longer distance. The conventional decide-execute model handles large changes very poorly. As a leader, it is one’s imperative to ensure that a desired change is not just a mere sprint but is sustainable so that an idea can mature and show impact. Effective change leaders use inspirational stories that aren’t baloney, but stories that are true and inspiring, to bring out the natural optimism in people.

The best ways of doing this is looking for an opportunity in a crisis. In every crisis lies a big window of opportunity—yet people tend to overlook this. If a leader can position his idea of change around that positive opportunity, there is a greater probability that people will listen to him because they wouldn’t have seen what he has. That is when people start asking smart questions and an idea gets the attention it deserves. Once a leader has managed to create a sense of true urgency all it takes is doing the right homework to nail a meeting on D-day.

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Cover Story

Buy-In

not your field of expertise, rope in someone with enough credentials to help you with that part of the presentation. Get their support for your idea, get them to speak on your behalf, and allow them to explain to the group why the idea is great.

But this tactic of getting buy-in before a meeting could sound deceitful to some.

Don’t you think so?

Indeed it is wrong to try to manipulate people or situations by trying to attain individual buyin from people beforehand. During a meeting, if it looks like you met four people and they have prepared their speeches, you are sure to run the risk of turning a few people off.

There is a difference between playing politics and seeking help from peers. After all, they are your colleagues and both of you are working towards the same goal. Be honest during your meeting and tell the audience you had a chance to talk to some of the group before. Including their feedback into your presentations builds credibility. It gives your colleagues the idea that you worked hard on ensuring that you prepared well.

About homework. Everyone says ‘be prepared’. And everyone does, but little comes of it.

The problem is that people often misunderstand ‘preparation’ to mean knowing their own idea forwards and backwards. But rehashing what we already know does not prepare us to avoid sounding defensive, frustrated, or perhaps even disrespectful when fielding questions about our proposal. In fact, we often don’t even know we come off this way.

Neither does this kind of rehashing prepare us to parry attacks of confusion, delay, ridicule, and fear-mongering, the four tactics dissenters use against us. So we find a discussion derailed easily.

People spend an awful amount of time coming up with 63 good reasons that justify their idea and pack it into a PowerPoint presentation. Then, one by one, they proceed to hurl these reasons at their audience. The crowd would have probably lost all interest by point 27. It doesn’t help that people feel insulted if they think they are being treated like children.

Before a meeting one should spend time thinking about how one’s proposal affects other job profiles and what could be their concerns.

It is extremely advisable to seek help from peers in business roles.

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Finally, can you share an example of someone who exhibited impressive buy-in skills?

I remember the case of a large multi-national finance organization. It was an annual ritual for the CEO to visit some of the company’s more important locations in and out of the US so that local employees could share ideas with him. Over time, this became just another boring tradition that companies follow year after year.

At the point of this story, the company was trying to re-brand its image and change the way the company worked. But its CEO realized that to achieve this result, he would have to convince each and every employee in the organization to change the way they saw the organization and its values.

The first thing that the CEO did was change the time of his annual visit. That small change in an unbreakable tradition told everyone that this meeting was going to be different. On the day of the meeting, the CEO invited a few people from within that location’s organization—from both sides of the hierarchical spectrum—to talk about how the change he wanted to bring would impact them and the organization. Needless to say, people raised some genuine concerns and the idea was a hit among employees by the time the meeting ended. CIO Debarati Roy is correspondent. Send feedback on this interview to debarati_roy@ idgindia.com

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VIEW

from the TOP

S. Ramadorai, Vice Chairman, TCS, shares little-known moments from the company’s incredible journey to being one of the world’s Top 10 IT software and services companies.

Road to

the Top

By Sneha Jha

S. Ramadorai needs no introduction. As the man responsible for putting TCS on the map, and taking it from an unknown company to one of the world’s Top 10 IT software and services companies, Ramadorai has beaten a path that few leaders can match. In this interview, he shares some of the decisive moments of that journey and his thoughts on other issues.

CIO: TCS has grown from $400 million to $6 billion on your watch. What’s your secret sauce?

What do CEOs and other C-level executives expect from you? Read all about it in View from the top.

Visit www.cio.in/ceointerviews

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S. Ramadorai: To begin with, I focused on building a great team around me, with people who aligned seamlessly with our organizational vision and were ready to fire on all cylinders to fructify that vision. We’ve always had passionate people, people who are all willing to roll up their sleeves and get down to brass tacks. They’ve performed relentlessly to help TCS reach milestone after milestones. I also empowered individuals and functional departments to take decisions at all levels and supported

that by making information available on demand. The digitization of the organization and its’ IT enablement helped our efforts to keep processes transparent and maintain robust channels of collaboration. And that translated our vision into reality.

I have always believed that it’s companies that build the right team with right execution capabilities that emerge as market leaders. This holds true for TCS. We have always dug deep and wide to find the right talent, which would fortify the foundations of our organization. We got that right talent onboard, identified the right window of opportunity, and chased the dream of big growth.

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S. Ramadorai: expects I.T. to:

Empower decision-making down the chain of command Create transparency Encourage collaboration Enable fast growth

Photos by k apil shroff

In your book, you talk about the Top-10-by-2010 vision.

What’s the story behind it?

I’ll have to go back in history, so I’ll quote my book: We started as a division of our corporate parent, Tata Sons, to serve in-house electronic data processing needs. Later, as TCS sensed the business opportunities in the software industry, it began chasing the IT dream. TCS made good profits riding the Y2K bug but we were still a minnow in an industry dominated by giants such as

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IBM, Accenture and EDS. At the same time, younger competitors mushroomed and soon it became impossible to ignore them.

To take stock, I set up a corporate think-tank at TCS, which met at least once a week at my Mumbai residence, to set ourselves a new vision and that would rally the organization towards something audaciously big.

One of our first ideas was to get to Rs 2,000 crore in revenues by 2000, simply because it looked achievable and had a nice ring to it.

Soon, we realized it was too short a target.

Then emerged a new rallying point for the

company: To become a Top-10 IT software and services company by 2010. I believe that if we had set a qualitative vision—to be the best in the industry, for example—it would have been ambiguous and hard to sell internally. But, ‘Top 10 by 2010’ was pretty straightforward. The more we looked at it, the more we liked the sound of it.

How did that vision change TCS’ story?

That simple message became the driving force for TCS and the motivator for

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View from the Top

each employee. As we embraced the vision internally, we mobilized our forces, and helped them understand what they needed to do within their teams to make it happen. Every part of TCS started out by deciding what Top 10 meant to them, picking those ideas first that would immediately make sense. Open houses, which were convened regularly, helped us define four key ‘Top 10 by 2010’ success parameters: Revenue, profitability, number of employees, and market capitalization.

That vision set in motion a series of landmark changes and new initiatives to build excellence in quality, delivery, and collaboration. It eventually paved the way for perhaps the most dynamic period in our history. By 2003, we became India’s first US$ 1 billion-a-year IT services company. Only six years later, in 2009, we had grown to a $6 billion company and had achieved our target to become a Top-10 player in the global IT software and services industry. We had done it and we had done it in style! It’s been an exciting and incredible journey.

How does TCS handle scale inherent to such growth?

One step at a time. We have built robust back-end capabilities to handle scale. I strongly believe that you have to constantly keep your systems, processes and procedures intact. And I think IT plays a very important role here. Without a digital framework to support growth, you can’t get anything practically done.

What do you think had been your best business decision?

I believe that the best business decisions are those made with plenty of judiciousness, conviction, courage, and passion. Our best business decisions have been taken at different times. In 1999-2000, it was the decision to set up a Y2K factory in Chennai that would address a demand that would soar quickly.

The second was to retain our key people during the Internet boom.

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"Since IT spawns transformation, Indian organizations need to invest more in technology."

— S. Ramadorai

investing in business avenues before demand actually hit. Proactive investment increases the velocity of decision-making when a business opportunity presents itself. Chance always favors the prepared. Hence, our decision to be ever prepared has been our best across timelines.

Is the rising price of Indian talent nudging TCS to change its business model?

No. Our business model will change only when we create a different way for our clients to reach out to their customers. Price may drive new frontiers of operational efficiencies but business models will change only when there is a disruption in delivering a service to customers. And changes in business models will be largely dictated by how IT can be proactively aligned to fulfil customer needs.

Are Indian organizations under-invested in IT? I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, Indian enterprises are under-invested in IT.

There is definitely a tremendous scope for improvement. Since IT spawns transformation, Indian organizations need to invest more in technology to better their own businesses, to accelerate growth, and provide service of a higher order to their customers.

In my opinion, organizations should increase their use of devices such as tablets and mobiles to make their users more productive, and analytics in the backend to make far more sense of their data. I also believe that all IT initiatives should be driven from the top. A business’ executive management should be closely involved in IT initiatives and should champion the cause of IT within enterprises.

What changes would you like to see in IT? As I said earlier, I strongly believe that organizations should be investing heavily in IT. They should also train their employees to be IT savvy. The third thing I would like to see improved is IT-business alignment.

CIOs should work relentlessly to align IT with business effectively so that businesses, in turn, incorporate IT seamlessly.

What is your personal level of excellence for CIOs? I believe that CIOs should be extremely business savvy. They have to invest significant amounts of time and effort in understanding business operations. They should work closely with the business and understand the processes of every functional department.

Only a CIO possessing business acumen can navigate executive committees to the right decisions about IT within an enterprise.

Looking back, what would you have done differently?

I wouldn’t do anything differently (smiles).

I am so satisfied that I would like to re-live my life if given the opportunity. The journey has been exciting, challenging, exhilarating, fulfilling and satisfying all the way. CIO Sneha Jha is senior correspondent. Send feedback on this interview to sneha_jha@idgindia.com

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AN IDG CUSTOM SOLUTIONS INITIATIVE IN ASSOCIATION WITH

TRANSFORMING BUSINESS THROUGH JUDICIOUS APPLICATION OF IT

PLUS INTERVIEW

The Government of India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs embarked on the ambitious MCA 21 program to prepare the Ministry for the 21st century, enabling significant ease in doing business in India.

Tanmoy Chakrabarty from TCS talks about how IT needs to be mandated with a ‘lead by example’ approach by the leadership within the government.

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

Entity Ministry of Corporate Affairs Industry Central Government Offering Corporate & Regulatory Services

The Government of Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ministry of Corporate Affairs embarked on the ambitious MCA 21 program to prepare

the Ministry for the 21st century, enabling significant ease in doing business in India.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

M

CA 21 is the fl agship program of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), the ministry which is This was a responsible for all corporations in India. It was also the first program massive project under the National eGovernance Plan’s (NeGP) and we wouldn’t Mission Mode Project (MMP) programs. The MCA 21 program was defined by the Government of have succeeded without the India (GoI) and was awarded to TCS on a BOOT concerted efforts of all the MCA model in 2005.

The MCA is a Ministry in the Indian government, and TCS officials involved.” primarily concerned with the administration of the Companies Act, 1956, other allied Acts, rules and Mr. ANIL KUMAR BHARDWAJ, regulations framed thereunder mainly to regulate Director, Ministry of Corporate Affairs the functioning of the corporate sector in accordance with law. The MCA, thus, plays a critical function in enabling businesses to function in India, and is instrumental in ushering in international best practices for governance and compliance.

As the country’s economy started expanding at the world, and the Indian corporate sector has a significant rate, the MCA required a system that played a significant role in this growth process. would reflect India’s corporate governance goals In order to maintain the growth momentum and for the 21st century, and also create a businessaccelerate it in the long run, the MCA, under the friendly environment and transparency for both Government of India, wished to provide Indian and Indian and foreign corporations. foreign corporations with best-in-class services MCA 21 program is a holistic service transformato promote higher levels of investment in India. tion project which was defined to deliver compreHowever, the MCA was swamped with the rehensive services to corporations across India. It was cords of around 700,000 registered companies in conceptualized with the stakeholders rather than India, all maintained in paper files. Maintenance, the departments at the centre and with the other sorting, storage and retrieval of this huge volume key elements built around them. The program was were cumbersome and time-consuming. Inforimplemented in a record time of 78 weeks. Since its mation about companies was frequently incomimplementation and rollout in January 2007, there plete, often inaccurate, and tedious to extract. have been constant changes and improvements Though a citizen charter was defined for service to meet with regulatory, delivery, it was neither compliance and service possible to follow nor delivery improvement measure. Tracking of Companies incorporated till date > needs of MCA. non-compliant or de1,100,000 (10% year on year growth) TCS has helped the faulting companies was MCA leapfrog into the difficult, and the lack Service time reduced by 50% 21st century and provide of transparency in the corporations with ease working of the departand transparency in ment made service deRevenue to government up by 4 times functioning, thus bringlivery for corporations ing the country in aligna complex process. ment with its current Limited modes of Revenue leakage 0% (versus un-quantified) and future needs. payment of fees were available and reconPublic documents viewed online > ciliation of receipts BUSINESS 1,900,000 ( 20% year on year growth) was never possible unSITUATION der the manual system Over the last four years, PAN India implementation of – leading to possible the Indian economy has revenue leakages. been among the fastest electronic stamp duty Citizens and company growing economies of

• • • • • •

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

45 million

representatives had to personally visit the Registrar’s offices, to conduct business, which were limited to 20 locations across India.

With the twin objectives of eliminating the above pain points and of repositioning itself as an organization capable of fulfilling the aspirations of its stakeholders in the 21st century, the MCA decided to automate the functioning of the ministry and move from a paper-based environment to a paperless one.

TCS, with its proven track record of delivering complex IT solutions to meet governments’ demanding business needs, was the ideal choice and was selected by the MCA to be its partner in this engagement from amongst a selected list of vendors, after a rigorous selection process.

representative, thereby eliminating travel usually required for such clarifications. MCA 21 also provided a transparent mechanism for processing documents in a standardized manner across India – this enabled corporate representatives to track the progress of the applications filed and also receive electronic notification and communication.

MCA 21 program also used digital signature certificates (DSC) to ensure integrity and non-repudiation of signatures on electronic filing. This alongwith the Role Registry implemented in the project for all stakeholders ensured that only authorized signatories can digitally sign the documents.

This eliminated cases of fraudulent filing and instilled confidence in the Government and legal entities on the integrity of MCA 21 filing. As part of this project, all corporate representatives acquired DSCs – in fact, this was, and continues to be the single largest usage of DSC’s in India and possibly, in the world.

Furthermore, the implementation of e-Stamping ensured that for all documents requiring Stamp Duty to be filed with MCA, stamp duty was paid electronically rather than making multiple physical visits to acquire stamp paper and scan and file. All the above initiatives made MCA 21 a completely paperless operation – a first of its kind anywhere in the world.

MCA 21’s eFiling enables various corporations to fill in data, verify it at their convenience and then do “pre-scrutiny” online with MCA 21 portal, after which authorized signatories can affi x their signatures. This eFiling model covers all the interactions between corporations and MCA, thus introducing a structured dataoriented filing as against the paper-based filing.

This structured data has become a holistic national corporate information database. MCA has also launched the XBRL-based filing of annual return and balance sheet for 30,000 corporations in 2011.

One of the major side benefits which the program yielded was to the financial community.

The process of “charges filing” established a centralized charge database for corporations across all financial institutions (FI), thereby en-

the number of pages digitized and loaded into the electronic repository

MCA21 ACHIEVEMENTS The MCA 21 program delivered total transformation by which more than 300 services of MCA were available online to corporations and professionals on a 24X7 basis. This included various application as well as regulatory services.

The system also enabled electronic interaction between the government official and corporate

In our pursuit of continuous improvement of regulatory functions and following international best practices, MCA has introduced Balance Sheet and P & L Statement filing using XBRL instance document for select class of companies. This indicates a giant leap forward in getting the financial information from corporations which can be checked while filing and can be put to regulatory analysis using software tools.”

Mr. ANIL KUMAR BHARDWAJ, Director, Ministry of Corporate Affairs

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

As part of a citizen charter of MCA, a number of transformational changes have been implemented towards green initiatives vizPaperless operation for all interactions Anytime and anywhere access to all facilities – no more physical visits to MCA office Comprehensive electronic interaction – no more physical visits to MCA office Electronic stamp duty – no more visits to multiple entities Usage of digitally signed certificates – convenient signing of documents with electronic document, since physical document is not needed Enabling payments via National Electronic Fund Transfer Modes – no more visits to the bank Inter-operability through gateway for government entities - for accessing MCA 21 information as per approval Comprehensive corporate information data – available online suring public availability of all charges. This has immensely helped FIs to enable better control during the loan granting process.

The MCA 21 program has been successful due to the unique Public Private Partnership (PPP) model, which was adopted by the Ministry and the Operator (TCS). Change management was a priority, both within the Ministry as well as to external stakeholders like corporations, professionals. This involved extensive training across India, covering more than 15,000 representatives, besides incremental training which is available online to stakeholders and comprehensive communication model across all channels such as electronic media, paper and so on.

MCA’s senior management and its operational managers at various RoC/RD have played a very important role in this successful transformation.

MCA had established a senior level steering committee with participation from heads of other ministries within the Government of India to direct the program and ensure that appropriate decisions are taken. This “empowered committee” used to meet frequently during the implementation phase and later periodically to make strategic decisions for the project. The core committee was entrusted with the responsibility of directing and managing the program operationally under the overall directions of the empowered committee. All operational decisions were taken at the level of the core committee. A strong program monitoring unit (PMU) was also established by the Ministry.

To summarize, MCA has gained a better image both in India as well as abroad, due to increased efficiency arising out of automation that has led to a quick turnaround time with fewer errors, and transparency in dealings.

Other benefi ts for the MCA include better decision-making and greater data-based policy formulation due to accurate and real-time availability of information and formation of National Corporate Database and an improved ability to focus on increasing compliance to relevant laws.

MCA 21 has not only delivered the planned impact on various stakeholders, but has also succeeded in keeping the program up to date with evolutions to meet regulatory, compliance and filing requirements.

RECOGNITION AND ACCOLADES MCA’s successful implementation of its fl agship e-Governance project - MCA 21, has grabbed many an eyeball. The project itself has been so successful and game-changing that any article or discussion on e-Governance would be incomplete without mentioning MCA’s achievement. It has also won several awards and accolades, some of which include the ‘National Award for e-Governance’ - for best government process re-engineering, ‘DataQuest Pathbreaker Award,’ ‘DataQuest e-Governance Best Vendor,’ ‘Prime Minister’s Award for excellence in Public Administration 2008,’ and ‘Skoch Award for National Significance.’

TRANSFORMERS INTERVIEW

TOWARDS

IDEAL

E-GOVERNANCE Challenges of serving the Government are many. Tanmoy ChakrabarTy, VP, Government Industry Solutions Unit, TCS talks about how IT needs to be mandated with a ‘lead by example’ approach by the leadership within the government.

TANMOY CHAKRABARTY, Vice President, Government Industry Solutions Unit, TCS

Custom Solutions Group TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

How can the Government achieve better governance using Information and Communication Technology (ICT)?

As the citizen’s expectations grow, there is increased pressure on the Government to deliver affordable, accessible and high quality public services at all levels - central, state and local.

Governments have now recognised that old governance and delivery models are not likely to meet the citizen’s aspirations, and technology can be the transformation catalyst.

Most stakeholders now clearly understand the power of digital systems in their capacity to offer effective governance solutions, achieve outreach, efficiencies and scale along with transparency and consistency. In India the huge gap between demand and supply necessitates technology enabled interventions to achieve scale, outreach and affordability. In other words, the old ‘brick and mortar’ model needs to be replaced by ‘click and brick’ model.

Another e-governance challenge in India is to take public services to every village and hamlet. Addressing these challenges will require unprecedented deployment of current and emerging technologies and a radical transformation of how the Government works. Hence, we also need to emphasize interoperability of multigeneration and multi-vendor technologies and open-standard based technologies.

ICT has potential to help meet good governance goals in India .Yet, that potential remains largely untapped to date.

Why is this so?

For a nation that has made its mark in the global IT space, India has yet to fully reap the benefits of IT as far as e-Governance is concerned. The central government has mandated that three per cent of the total budget allocation per department must be spent on e-Governance. Unfortunately, a lot of this money is returned unspent at the end of the fiscal year. There is a huge gap in the Government in terms of the capacity to visualize and implement large end-to-end and enterprise wide IT Systems which can bring about a change in the Government.

Most departments within the Government follow an outlay-based approach when it comes to resolving their technology needs. The IT arms of various departments follow the practice of purchasing hardware, software, services and networks from multiple vendors.

Any successful IT transformation requires an overall holistic and planned approach and rather than a silo-like practice. A systemsintegration approach and a single point of accountability is required and not the age old method of looking at IT as a commodity to procure.

When the government starts to look at IT as a service to avail, it will be able to bring about radical changes and show results.

Challenges of serving Government clients are quite atypical, since the impact is on a larger audience. The user base has diverse education and literacy level, thereby making training and change management an imperative. IT needs to be mandated with a ‘lead by example’ approach by the leadership within the government.

India is recognized as a global leader in IT delivery services, but it suffers from very little internal IT development in the country. How can this be corrected?

TCS believes that the Government must recognise the ability of IT to improve the quality of life of every Indian citizen.

It is a matter of changing the mindset from outlays to outcomes, rather than the cost of the technology. We need to remove the un-

willingness to change, which entail a psychological, rather than a technological, effort.

Armed with expertise in areas such as intra-government efficiency, fiscal management systems, revenue augmentation through tax and VAT, citizen service delivery, police reforms, government healthcare delivery, urban municipal administration, among others, TCS hopes to work with the government to transform governance and make it more responsive and accountable to citizens.

What are the lessons learnt from previous e-Governance initiatives and how have they helped shape the Indian eGovernance strategy?

The MCA 21 project, undertaken for the Ministry of Corporate Affairs under the National e-Governance Plan was widely successful. This had brought about the convenience of electronic filing, electronic payment mechanisms, the use of digital signature certificates and so on.

Another successful example is that of APonline, a bilingual portal that TCS created for Andhra Pradesh. This portal was accessed through 2,300 kiosks around the state by thousands of people who could not afford a computer. It provides information, payment services and interactive services such as applying for a caste or land entitlement certificate, or getting inputs on seeds or fertilisers to name a few. Another project, the Passport Seva Programme for automating the passport issuance process is currently in its implementation phase.

Successful e-Governance programmes have shown that citizens do not hesitate from paying service fees if they are sure that the technology will save them time and effort, and ease the process of accessing government services.

How is TCS helping bring transparency and efficiency into the system by partnering the Government?

Governments today are increasingly getting into Public Private Partnerships (PPP) to bring in technology-enabled transformation to their processes to enable effective service delivery to its citizens. By partnering with the Indian government in e-Governance projects, TCS is helping to bring transparency and efficiency into the system. TCS has extensive experience in successfully developing and maintaining replicable and holistic solutions in public-private partnership mode. Our areas of focus include intra-government efficiency, citizen service delivery, social development, defence and security, revenue and taxation, public infrastructure and public healthcare. Recognising that the necessary momentum to digitize governance can only be achieved by getting into the PPP engagement models of service delivery, TCS has ventured into many innovative commercial models with Governments including BOOT (Build, Own, Operate, and Transfer), transaction pricing and joint ventures.

Transformers is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) is an autonomous body under the Ministry of Earth Sciences that provides ocean information and advisory services. Post the Indian Ocean Tsunami, INCOIS wanted an information system that could help mitigate oceanic disasters.

An accurate early warning system to issue timely alerts was required. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) developed a GIS based solution consisting of ICT infrastructure for real time data reception, processing, warning generation and dissemination. As one of the world's fastest growing technology and business solutions providers, TCS leveraged its expertise in Geospatial Technology Solutions to enable real time online monitoring of all data sources. There by enabling online alerts.

This proved invaluable when INCOIS detected an earthquake off Sumatra within 13 minutes and promptly issued a Tsunami alert to Andaman. Helping INCOIS save human lives by issuing alerts on time. And of course, enabling INCOIS to experience certainty.

Innovation

innovator

traits Innovation isn’t a part of your job, it is your job. And if you call yourself an innovative CIO, ask yourself if you possess some of these eight characteristics.

By Bridget Gray Innovation, it seems, is a rather difficult term to pin down.

Few CIOs or IT leaders would admit to not being innovative, and yet ask them to define exactly what it means and you will get a wide variety of responses.

When attempting to pin down the definition of innovation you find yourself chasing a moving target.

Ten years ago innovating wasn’t much different to experimenting and often sat on the fringes of an IT department; perhaps as an hour-a-week project of enthusiasts.

Headhunters certainly didn’t see much formal need for innovation in the job requirements that they gathered from companies when recruiting CIOs and digital leaders.

However, as the years progressed, innovation has come to mean a whole lot more to companies and their IT departments. Web 2.0, mobile, and the cloud have all presented genuinely new ways to do business both internally and with external customers, not to mention opening out new markets and revenue streams.

In fact in the latest Harvey Nash and PA Consulting Group CIO Survey published May 2011, three-quarters of CIOs believe their company will lose market share if they fail to innovate.

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Innovation

Three-quarters is a figure worth dwelling on; there has never been a time when innovation has been more important, and for most companies it is the CIO or IT leader that CEOs turn to.

This has fundamentally changed the DNA of the people that companies now look for.

A job specification for a CIO 10 years ago would have focused strongly on project management, technical understanding and the ability to relate to internal customers.

Today, important new traits are being added that reflect the more interconnected, multifarious, externally-focused and fastchanging world we live in.

So, what is the DNA of a digital innovator?

Well, through interviewing hundreds of IT leaders—some innovative, others less so—here’s a list of the eight characteristics that make a digital innovator stand out.

1 Searches in Dark Places

Innovative CIOs are able to find innovation possibilities in both the likely places (social media, cloud or mobile) but also in some rather more unexpected, dark places, which are of real interest. CIOs are one of the few people in an organization who have their fingers in just about every pie and, by connecting things together, can identify really new possibilities.

For instance one CIO of a major professional services company realized that through a change in tax laws in one country it was possible—through technology—to relocate the processing of

They are prepared to pursue multiple streams of projects, killing off the unsuccessful, and evolving the most promising. Even the primary business objective of a project is not sacrosanct to a digital innovator. This may also change during the project. It may not even exist formally at the start of a project. In lieu of this lack of certainty, digital innovators are guided by a feel for what is right.

3 Old School Business Acumen

Innovation is no longer synonymous with star gazing.

More than ever, it is rooted in sound commercial principals and a focus on return on investment.

While organizations do look for people who can create a vision, they are also looking for pragmatic people who are able to translate creative concepts into commercial value. They understand how to make a business case.

4 Mixes Form and Function

In a world increasingly being defined by products that have a strong design ethos from companies like Apple and Google, digital innovators know that even the very best functioning product is likely to have limited success if its user interface is not up to scratch. Product design is central and often the start point to the project, rather than a stage further down the project lifecycle. Interestingly, look-and-feel seems to be in a digital innovator’s DNA, even down to the way they dress. Digital innovators do not dress like techies; they dress like the rest of the business.

innovation is no longer synonymous with star gazing.

More than ever, it is rooted in sound commercial principals and a focus on return on investment. certain functions to that country and save significant costs. This might not be big-scale or glamorous innovation, but it’s innovation all the same, and many CIOs are rather good at it.

2

Open Minded and Agile

As technologies and business models continue to evolve, it is becoming increasingly difficult to come up with long, or even medium-term strategies. Successful digital leaders embrace this uncertain world and can live with fuzzy strategies and changing priorities. They are open minded, agile and are able to switch gears quickly.

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Attitude to Failure 5 Healthy

True innovators are not afraid to take calculated risks. Rather like a venture capitalist they see their projects as a portfolio that they nurture. They accept and embrace the idea that many of these projects will not result in a big return. They see failure as a learning experience, and are clever enough to have enough successes to stay in the game.

6 Embraces the Inner Geek

At the end of the day it is about technology, and digital innovators have a surprisingly firm grasp of the technical detail.

They understand that while new technology can create new opportunities, it can also create new competitors and threats.

Innovators are passionate about understanding the technical landscape that they operate in, not just because they are genuinely interested, but because they know their innovation will lack longevity without it.

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Dna of a Digital

innovator According to the CIO-Harvey Nash survey, innovative CIOs are likely to follow a specific pattern.

Digital innovators tend to foster innovation, rather than own or manage it. For instance, they will empower other people to work out how to use social networks, and then work back from the successes achieved to formulate a company wide policy or ground rules.

They are capable of guiding from the distance, without stamping out passion and innovation elsewhere.

The attitude of encouraging other people to take the glory makes them attractive people to work for.

Advisor 8 Trusted

The CIO-Harvey Nash survey revealed that CIOs who described themselves as innovative tend to: Report to the CEO (25 percent more likely than the overall CIO population) Have realistic aspirations to become a CEO (26 percent more likely) Have had budget increases in the last year (18 percent more likely) Are a member of the operational board or executive management team (22 percent more likely) Use innovation as a source of competitive advantage rather than focus on cost savings (29 percent more likely) Find their job very fulfilling (24 percent more likely) Invest to a great extent in training for your team (36 percent more likely)

interestingly, look-and-feel seems to be in a digital innovator’s Dna, even down to the way they dress. Digital innovators do not dress like techies; they dress like the rest of the business.

For many CEOs, investing in a digital innovation is a leap of faith. Which is why it is so important that the person leading the innovation has the trust of the CEO and board.

This person must also ensure that the CEO and board understand innovation and how in many ways it is different from traditional technology projects.

Jekyll and Hyde? To find an individual with all of these skills is difficult enough, but to then add to that the traditional IT skills you have an almost impossible task.

The trouble is that some of these new innovation skills don’t naturally sit alongside the traditional IT ones. It takes a very rare person, who in one breath can control a company’s security policy, and yet actively encourage an ecosystem of social networks they have little influence over.

Some argue that trying to squeeze too much into one role risks exploding it and that the job of the CIO simply can’t contain both an innovation and traditional IT remit.

For now, while companies are still exploring with innovation, most can live with this Jekyll and Hyde situation. But there are strong indicators that the future might be quite different. CIO

—B.G. bridget Gray is principal consultant in Harvey Nash’s cIO Practice. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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SPEED PREDICTABILITY The New Norm

CIO Magazine along with SAP India talks to IT leaders across various verticals to find a straightforward approach to achieve

faster business results with lesser risks and greater consistency.

mong the many challenges faced by today’s enterprises in implementing business software, the dynamism of the business leading to unpredictability is probably the most difficult to overcome.

Not far behind predictability, scalability and flexibility are high on the CIO’s wish list. In fact, they’re also high on the priority lists of businessunit IT users, who want solutions that are scalable and can grow with their business to provide the functionality they need today and in the future. CIO Magazine along with SAP spoke to several IT leaders across different verticals to understand the relevance of bringing speed and predictability to their software implementations. They also looked at how businesses can predict factors that prevent many companies from expanding their enterprise software implementations as quickly or as broadly as they’d like to.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP SAP

Managing Large Applications According to Ashmita Junnarkar, CIO, Voltas, having an application like SAP is a huge advantage in a world of changing business dynamics. However, one of the most essential requirements for any CIO is to have a team which knows the business and its IT applications. Currently, the expertise is available in silos and no single person knows the entire application in and out, due to its complexity.

The difficult economy during recent years has caused buyers to re-evaluate project risk and its impact on ROI, spurring renewed interest in methods that lead to more efficient and successful implementations by closely collaborating with the partners. According to Ajay Kumar Meher, Vice President - IT & New Media, Sony Entertainment Television India, with IT teams becoming smaller, the dependency on the partner is now becoming high. IT’s role needs to be well defined and clearly spelt out. It could be from developing applications to managing SLAs or building architecture to support the business.

Total costs and deployment time can vary from one project to another, while complex, collaborative blueprinting processes can seem frustratingly inconsistent with actual post-implementation results. “A lot of time is wasted by defining processes and blue prints in painstaking detail,” says Prashun Dutta, VP – IT, Reliance Infrastructure. It is more important to quickly have a basic system in place and then work on adding the components based on the end user feedback.

“Implementation risk is a critical factor for all participants in the enterprise software ecosystem—including customers, vendors, and SIs.” ALOK GOYAL, Chief Operating Officer at SAP India

Toward Agile IT Many CIOs were of the opinion that packaged implementation solutions include a standard process used for all customers of a given type.

Stakeholders gain visibility into the steps, tasks, and resources required to complete the project, which allows all parties to plan more thoroughly than would otherwise be possible. Says Pankaj Pandey, GM-IT, Blue Star Ltd, every packaged solution solves a specific business problem, improves a particular process, or addresses another business challenge using time tested methodologies. “These methodologies have come from a lot of research and pains which people have gone through; sticking to them with rigor really pays off. The tighter you are in adhering to this, more the chances of succeeding with your timelines, quality and expectations,” he adds.

“The era of ‘big bang’ implementations, and seemingly unlimited budgets disconnected from project outcomes, is over.”

VIJAY MOTWANI , Vice President – Services, SAP India

Quoting a recent study, Alok Goyal, Chief Operating Officer at SAP India, says that statistics state that up to seventy percent of IT projects run late, over-budget, or do not meet planned goals; this situation is pervasive among organizations of every size and geography. Consequently, implementation risk is a critical factor for all participants in the enterprise software ecosystem—including customers, vendors, and system integrators.

Consolidating knowledge and best practices learned over time makes it easier for the business to implement applications quickly and efficiently. However, according to Bhupendra Pant, Head – IT, L&T EWAC Alloys, it is better to follow leading practices instead of best practices. “The difference is that best practices are from benchmark industries and companies, but they may not be best for a company’s process. In case of leading practices, it is an amalgamation of multiple organizations and multiple industries,” he says.

Creating Predictable Outcomes Vijay Motwani , VP – Services, SAP India summed up the discussion saying that today’s enterprise customers want modular software, flexible pricing, and vendors that take concrete responsibility for ensuring successful projects. “The era of “big bang” implementations, and seemingly unlimited budgets disconnected from project outcomes, is over,” he said. He also spoke about SAP’s Rapid Deployment solutions which help customers achieve fast time-to-value and immediately address essential business and process needs. Customers know exactly what they’re getting with SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions –how long projects will take and what they cost, he added. The conclusion was that packaged solutions create predictable, clearlydefined outcomes for both IT and lines of business. They offer a straightforward approach to achieve faster business results with less risk and greater consistency.

This event report is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

casefiles real people

* real problems * real solutions

that Sugar

Rush

Every hour that Mawana Sugar couldn't get raw sugarcane to its factory hurt its bottom line heavily. But with 450 collection centers spread out over remote parts of western UP, the problem seemed insurmountable.

By Debarati Roy

What’s common between the delicate mayfly and Mawana Sugar, India’s sixth largest sugar manufacturer? They both thrive in 24-hour cycles.

Here’s the very bitter truth behind sugar: It takes only 24 hours for a stalk of sugarcane to lose 75 percent of its sugar content after it’s been harvested. If you’re a sugar manufacturer, you have less than 24 hours to get sugarcane from the field and into your factory, before your investment loses three-fourth of its value. Few industries pay such a heavy price for a lack of inventory control.

It’s tough being in the sugar business. Especially if you don’t have the IT muscle to walk that fine balance between too much and too little inventory.

Mawana Sugars had faced both realities and was set on changing the way it worked. And Subodh Dubey, group CIO, USHA International and Mawana Sugar, was the man they were depending on to get the job done.

Information Molasses The fertile plains of western Uttar Pradesh are home to the largest sugarcane farms in India and India’s the second largest producer in the world. From the air, the never-ending sugar

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plantations are a sight that’s hard to forget. But that pretty picture hides a grim reality. In a recent interview, Ajay S. Shriram, chairman of the Sugar Committee of the CII, said that none of India’s 650-odd sugar mills were making money, because the price that the government demanded sugar to be sold at was lower than production cost.

Mawana Sugar was one of those companies. According to its latest financial records covering the last 18 months leading to March 2011, the company booked losses of Rs 58 crore after taxes. One of the ways Mawana could improve its bottom line was to make production more efficient by getting more control of its raw materials supply chain.

Mawana Sugar sources its sugarcane straight from sugarcane farmers through hundreds of collection centers dotting western UP’s landscape. From here, the cane is forwarded to one of three factories in Mawana, Titawi and Nanglamal for processing.

The problem was that there was no realtime information about how much sugarcane each collection center had gathered. This made it impossible for production executives at the three factories to plan their production as optimally as Mawana’s top brass wanted.

A typical day at a Mawana collection center starts with farmers bringing in their produce, having it weighed and checked for quality. The sugarcane clerk, as the company calls them, then makes three copies of that report, one for the farmer, one for Mawana and the last one for cooperative societies. (Each farmer belongs to government-formed cooperative society which determines how much—and at what price—each farmer can sell to a sugar mill or jaggery and khandsari producers. Each society maintains a database of its farmers with details including their expected crop.)

At the end of every day, sugarcane clerks have to visit the closest Mawana Sugar factory and enter their report into Mawana’s systems with the help of a data entry clerk. This was then verified by a cane procurement officer on Mawana’s payroll to check for mistakes or fake entries. It was only then that a factory’s

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Subodh Dubey, Group CIO, USHA International and Mawana Sugar, empowered production teams, earning the company Rs 13 lakh more a year.

production team could get their hands on the data and create their production plan.

“There were up to 16-hour delays from the time sugarcane was procured to the point data became available. Multiple stakeholders made the entire process tedious, long-winding and prone to human error,” recalls Dubey.

To work around this problem, production executives relied on experience. “Without real-

time information of how much of inventory could be expected by the end of the day, production managers would have to rely on gut to create a production plan,” says Dubey.

And when their estimates were off, their back up plan was to re-calibrate equipment in the factory to accommodate the extra cane.

But that process could take from a couple of hours to a day, says Dubey.

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That’s time that Mawana Sugar couldn’t spare.

Every hour of delay only lowered the amount of sugar it could extract from its cane, which hurt the business dearly. It also brought work to halt. That was hard to swallow given that most sugar production takes place for only six months a year, from October to March when sugar cane is harvested and mills worked over time just to keep up.

If the company suffered from a glut of sugarcane during the harvesting season, it also had to endure challenges stemming from too little inventory during the off-season, or at the beginning of the harvest season when the flow of sugarcane was irregular. When sugarcane supply sputtered, there were times Mawana’s machines ran on empty, crushing air, costing the company money.

Dubey needed to come up with a solution fast. Time wasn’t on their side.

Sweet on Mobility Dubey had a bunch of solutions to chose from to deal with the problem. But not all of them would work with the constraints of the business. “We could not think of computers as some of the collection centers are located in remote villages which don’t have a steady supply of electricity,” he says.

It didn’t take Dubey long to figure out that his best bet lay with some sort of mobile device, but the question was: Which?

“The device needed to be rugged enough to endure tough treatment and the application simple enough not to scare away the sugarcane clerks, most of whom are not very educated,” says Dubey. “Also, a printer was essential because the farmers needed to be given a receipt and we needed a copy of the receipt to be handed over to the societies,” he says.

Dubey considered the option of mobile handsets with printer attached via a Bluetooth.

But the lack of electricity made him look for better alternatives.

By mid-2010 Dubey decided to call on Hyderabad-based, telecom equipment and software solutions providers Visiontek to provide handhelds. Their handhelds were equipped with a keypad, a five-line screen, an in-built Dot-matrix printer and could

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“If a truck that has left a collection center does not reach within an hour and 15 after it’s scheduled arrival time, the system sends an SMS alert to a designated person from logistics.” connect to the Mawana central server located in the cloud through GPRS. “The handheld sends and receives data using GPRS, and the middleware application and DB server is hosted on cloud using IaaS, which increases efficiency,” he says.

Dubey also made sure he chose an impact printer over a thermal one because the writing on the receipts needed to stay for long time, both for record keeping and in case a farmer wanted to encash his sale receipt later. “The thermal prints wear out pretty fast,” he says.

In the meanwhile, Dubey’s team got busy creating a master database with all the details of all the farmers the company worked with.

And he made sure that he included every detail that a sugarcane clerk needed to know about the farmer.

“Today, when a sugarcane clerk connects to the system every morning, the handheld downloads the master database,” explains Dubey. This ensures that when a farmer visits the collection center, the sugarcane clerk only has to enter his name or identification number—and the system auto-fills all the other fields from the master database.

Once a clerk weighed the sugarcane and entered the data into the handheld, it is updated to Mawana Sugar’s backend systems in real time. And the in-built impact printer prints two receipts automatically.

“The cane procurement application has been integrated with the ERP and all major business critical applications to ensure that departments like production planning, finance, and logistics don’t have to wait till the end of the day for updates,” says Dubey.

Thanks to the new system, Mawana Sugar expects to save about Rs 8 lakh a year in lower manpower costs. Before the implementation Mawana employed 27 data entry clerks during the six-month season, today it has only three.

“We have retained three data entry clerks at each plant location who input data coming from the societies or details of new farmers into the master database,” says Dubey.

Timely dispatch and better planning has resulted in reducing the time it takes from collection center to processing by two to three hours, resulting in that much more sugar recovery. “The approximate increase in sugar recovery from the cane stalks can increase by 0.005 percent,” says Dubey.

If you think that’s small, think again.

Mawana buys a total of about 10 lakh tons of sugar cane and 0.005 percent makes the company an additional Rs 13.6 lakh a year.

Course Correction For other CIOs attempting something similar, it’s important to note that Dubey faced some unexpected problems. Most of the them stem from a lack of proper infrastructure in rural India.

Take for example, how during the pilot, Dubey noticed that mobile signal strength fell in some pockets or were simply unavailable in some parts. It was a problem that could have sent Dubey back to the drawing board, since it seemed that it wasn’t a problem within their control.

Dubey says that instead of starting again, he decided to work with an ISP. Along with his team, Dubey surveyed all the areas where collection centers were located and created a map that showed where signals were weak or unavailable.

“The ISP added extra boosters to strengthen signals and even set up a few towers at places with no signal availability,” says Dubey.

Another concern gnawing most CIOs who experiment with handheld devices is the maintenance and upkeep of devices.

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Case File | Mawana Sugar

The devices chosen by Dubey, for instance, needed modifications even though he had closely scrutinized its choice. The problem he says is that the device came with a small antenna that project from the device. “A few devices suffered damage during the pilot as the antennas could break easily,” he says.

Dubey fixed this problem by working with Visiontek to ensure that the antenna was built into the device and then enclosing the handheld in a hard leather case with a tiny hole.

Sugar High Another area of the business that could do with more real-time information was its logistics. Mawana Sugar has 450 collection centers in Western UP that are situated at a maximum of 200 kilometers from the nearest factory. These collection centers are serviced by 300 collection trucks and ensuring they were being used optimally was a daunting and manual task.

“If [logistics executives] waited for complete load information (at the end of

the day under the previous regime) from each collection center before they planned truck movement, we would lose precious time. Alternatively, they could send the trucks from center to center, but there was no way of knowing which collection center had how much load in store,” says Dubey.

Today, when a truck leaves a collection center, sugarcane clerks enter either the driver’s name or the truck number into their handhelds and how much truck is carrying. With that real-time information, Mawana’s logistics team can better organize its truck movement—and the production team gets a head up on how much cane is coming their way.

Then Dubey’s team did one better.

“We have ensured that the logistics department can now also foretell which truck will arrive at what time” he says.

Dubey can do this because the master database he and his team created includes the distance between each collection center and the closest factory—allowing

them to forecast when a load of sugarcane was likely to arrive at the factory.

“If a truck that has left a collection center does not reach within an hour and 15 after it’s scheduled arrival time, the system sends an SMS alert to a designated person from logistics,” Dubey says. “With the new SMS alert system, truck drivers cannot break away from their route for unapproved breaks. It was extremely critical that we ensured that the sugarcane reaches the factories as soon as possible,” says Dubey.

The average utilization of available vehicles from collection centers to a factory was about 1.5 trips a day. With 300 vehicles available at every location, even a modest increase in average utilization to 1.6 trips a day, works out to 30 more trips.

That’s the sort of benefits that’s going to drive bottom line growth. And sweeten the sugar industry. CIO

Debarati Roy is correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to debarati_roy@idgindia.com

Cloud Zone At the Cloud Zone on CIO.in you can dive deep into the latest in the world of Cloud Computing and stay updated on issues like public & private clouds, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, DaaS, Managed Services and more.

Get In the Zone Today!

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casefiles Meru Cabs constructs an IT solution that simultaneously lowers the cost of business, and enhances its reliability, a brand trait services like Meru Cabs live and die by.

The Organization: When Meru Cabs was launched in 2007, all it had on offer was 45 cabs. But the company was in a tearing hurry to grow and within three years, it had scaled its operations to include a fleet of 5,500-plus cabs. Today, it is the world’s third-largest radio taxi service.

The Business Challenge: Growth on that scale comes with problems on many fronts, but the one that really interested Nilesh Sangoi, CTO, Meru Cabs, was how Meru’s growth was affecting its customers.

From the get-go, Meru wanted its brand to stand for one thing: Reliability.

Reliability differentiated it from the unorganized taxi crowd, reliability would spawn customer trust, and reliability would ensure that customers were willing to pay a premium for Meru’s services.

But that reliability was under fire. With over 20,000 trips a day and counting, Meru’s call centers weren’t

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Meru Cabs

* By Debarati Roy

able to keep up with cab requests. In 2010, for instance, Sangoi remembers that Meru’s call-drop rate (when customers were asked to hold) was about 18 percent.

If Meru wanted to ensure it wasn’t turning business away—and risk being seen as a service people couldn’t rely on—it would have to do better than the sweet music of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony it ran on its IVR. “We realized that we needed a solution which could help the company redirect some booking requests to less resource-intensive mediums like the Web,” says Sangoi.

The Solution: Truth be told, Meru already had an online booking facility but few consumers took to it.

That’s partially because the website required customers to fill out a form and wait while Meru’s system triggered an e-mail to its back-end, and someone manually punched that request into Meru’s dispatch system. “This business is about reliability and timeliness—if customers don’t get an immediate confirmation they won’t trust the medium,” says Sangoi.

So Sangoi decided to give the website an express makeover. The new website, says Sangoi, was built around Web APIs and was based on feedback Meru had collected from its customers.

In addition, he sought one crucial change: “We wanted the entire booking process to be in real-time. So the integration of the website

Nilesh Sangoi, CTO, Meru Cabs, found a solution for the 18 percent of his customers who didn’t want to be put on hold.

with our CRM and dispatch systems were done in-house,” says Sangoi.

Today, when a booking is made on Meru’s site, booking details are funneled into Meru’s CRM and back-end dispatch system. The dispatch system figures out if there’s a cab in the locality and either confirms or declines the booking. “The entire process takes a minute. It is automated and the absence of human intervention has made the process of cab selection more transparent to drivers,” says Sangoi.

The Benefits: “Within the first three months, bookings on the Web

shot up seven-fold, that’s 700 percent,” says Sangoi. It’s also telling that within 10 months of the launch, Meru clocked in its 1 millionth booking.

The upshot? The Rs 15-lakh project achieved ROI within one month.

But Sangoi didn’t stop there. “In mid-2011, we included a feature that would allow customers to track the location of their booked cabs on Google maps while they are waiting,” says Sangoi.

That’s how you build customer trust. CIO Debarati Roy is correspondent.

Send feedback on this feature to debarati_roy@idgindia.com

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buildtech IT In Manufacturing

ASSOCIATE PARTNERS

Wave of Change The CIO summit on the Indian manufacturing sector looked at what IT leaders are doing to transform the sector and how that, in turn, is changing the role of the CIO.

"Innovation comes when the CIo dares veer off the path suggested in the yearly roadmap.”

Girish rao, head-iT, Marico

Change and the manufa manufaCturing sector

"how do you optimize the production process?

The plant cannot stop.

The blast furnace, once commissioned, can go on for six to seven years." suneel aradhye, cio, essar sTeel

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sound like antonyms. For decades, the manufacturing sector has maintained a low profile and stayed aloof, away from the shadows of IT advancements. But today, it’s scripting a different story.

It’s hard to find shop floors that sport paper rolls and executives who follow their instincts to beat competition. That's thanks to newage technologies like BI, mobility and social media that are breaking down the stubborn walls of the manufacturing sector. And it’s this change that’s reshaping the sector and creating new paths.

CIO magazine’s Build Tech event—focused purely on the manufacturing sector—celebrated this transformation and set out to decipher how this has changed the role of CIOs in the sector.

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Event Report I Build Tech Business-IT alignment in Manufacturing The amount of influence today’s CIO has on the business has been evolving constantly. That’s great news, provided that CIOs can keep up with the ever-challenging task of transforming IT to suit dynamic business changes. It also requires taking risks.

“Doing everything that business wants is good but it isn't exceptional. Innovation comes when the CIO dares veer off the the yearly roadmap,” said Girish Rao, head-IT, Marico, in his keynote.

Rao heads technology at Marico, which is known for its brands like Parachute and Saffola, among others. One of the company’s growth strategies in recent times was to boost its top line by inorganic growth. Marico made 13 acquisitions in the last 40 months, and the company has forayed into new areas like services with specialty Kaya skin clinics, he said.

At the same time, the company also wanted to focus on improving its bottom line by reducing fixed overhead costs.

These pulls, from both extremes of the balance sheet, fell on IT. Rao was expected to fuel growth by using IT to drive long-term strategic business transformations. “With so many acquisitions, the business

“There’s no harm in dreaming—dreaming to do bigger things whether you’re in a technology or a business role.”

Manish choksi, chieF corPoraT ora e oraT sTraT ra eGy & cio, asian PainTs raT

“The demand for a pure IT role is slowing down.

Today, a CIo has to re-skill, pick up additional roles and move to business.”

Zoeb adenwala, cio (Global), essel ProPack

“I am being projected to take over as the Cfo. I am a living example of the changing role of the CIo." Valerio Fernandes, GM-iT, conTinenTal auToMoTiVe coMPonenTs (india)

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needed IT to be able to seamlessly integrate all acquired legacy systems, improve competitive advantage, and lower IT hardware maintenance costs,” he said.

One way he could do that was to modernize Marico’s traditionallyrun datacenter, consisting of 30 servers packed in five racks whose AMC was about Rs 6 lakh a year.

Using a mix of blade servers, virtualization and Open Source for his application servers, Rao reduced his AMC by 30 percent. Post the implementation, the number of racks went down to two from five—a reduction of over 50 percent. Rao helped Marico save 70 percent on datacenter power, and the server utilization went up to between 60 and 85 percent.

Rao and his IT team also came up with a new financial consolidation and reporting tool. With so many acquisitions, Marico’s finance department was facing challenges in preparing consolidated financial reports Rao said. He needed a way to templatize the entire process and ensure data integrity and audit trails.

“The standard approach would have been to pick up a tool from a solution provider in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, but we didn’t want to spend Rs 2 crore on such a project,” said Rao. So Rao looked at the available solutions and with his IT team ran many tests to check their compatibility. He finally zeroed in on a simple tool from a software company in Pune that helped Marico simplify and consolidate the accounting process from various Marico acquisitions at far lower cost.

Simplifying Business in the Steel Industry Like Marico, Essar Steel also wanted to simplify its business. When Suneel Aradhye, CIO, Essar Steel, went up on stage, he narrated his experience with simplifying the complexities in a dynamic manufacturing environment. He shared how multi-faceted manufacturing processes, and a multitude of planning, transaction, distribution, execution and retail systems, stretched the contours of Essar Steel’s IT landscape rapidly. This trend, he said, was compounded by the company’s ambitious growth plans.

Essar Steel, possibly the world’s only steel company in its bracket that is fully vertically-integrated (from mining iron-ore to retailing flat rolled plain carbon steel products), is on an aggressive expansion plan to increase its output by 40 percent this year, he said.

In order to make the company more agile, Aradhye wanted to streamline some of its processes. He said Essar Steel was faced by a situation in which new products and their multiple variants were being added almost everyday. What Essar Steel needed was a system to seamlessly integrate, interpret and translate customer requirements to manufacture products with defined specifications.

“I identified the need to implement the Variant Configuration (VC) tool of SAP, which would address this business imperative. This intelligence is embedded in Essar Steel’s system so that a customer requirement from SAP’s transactional systems have been mapped to quality standards in MES (manufacturing execution systems), which in turn are mapped to process standards in Level 2 (process computing systems),” explained Aradhye.

Essar Steel has reaped rich dividends from Aradhye’s project.

He demonstrated that despite having about 340 different products VOl/7 | ISSUE/02

Event Report I Build Tech and 3,00,000 variants for each, the VC tool helped shrink opportunity-loss by reducing the sales order processing time from 21 days to just two.

The VC project also curtailed data entry errors and saved about 3,000 man-hours a year in supply chain management apart from making Essar Steel more green by reducing the number of pages its prints by about 60,000 a year, Aradhye said.

Social Media in a Manufacturing firm If Essar Steel took to VC, Asian Paints turned to social media. Manish Choksi, chief corporate strategy and CIO, Asian Paints, talked about Sachin Sharangapani, Sales & Market Leader-Manufacturing, Retail and Service, Atos Origin ; hariSh Mehra, the importance of social collaboration in Global Head-Manufacturing Solutions, TCS ; Sapna SuMbly, Regional Practice Manager, Wipro Infotech manufacturing companies. “We can automate processes but people run processes and, at the heart of it, collaboration essentially involves people,” he said. collaboration has extreme powers of persuasion and suggestion and Although collaboration is at the heart of modern business it’s about time we reap its benefits. processes, most companies are still in the dark about how to manage it. Choksi cited enterprise ignorance of invisible networks within The Changing Role of the CIo their companies as one of the reasons why companies tend to Across sectors, it’s a given that Indian CIOs are evolving their roles discourage social media-based collaboration. from being pure technologists to business strategists. That applies As ‘tacit’ interactions replace more routine economic activity to the manufacturing sector, too, where CIOs are finding new ways and the scale and complexity of many corporations creep upward, to align business and technology, and are re-skilling themselves to the need to manage collaboration is growing, he said. Falling adopt additional, more business-oriented roles. That was one of the communication costs, globalization and the increasing specialization themes at an open house of manufacturing CIOs held during CIO’s of knowledge-based work make it even more imperative. manufacturing event Build Tech 2011.

So what are early adopters of social media-based collaboration According to CIO’s State of the CIO 2011 report, 38 percent of doing? They have begun identifying networks of employees doing CIOs say business or domain expertise is their core strength. That similar work. Choksi said that good collaboration in a company is represents a radical shift that’s in line with another trend: Increasing facilitated by encouraging semi-formal, formal, as well as informal management expectations from CIOs. networks that exist within it.

“The demand for a pure IT role is slowing down. Today, a CIO has Choksi talked about Huddle—a social media platform that enabled to re-skill, pick up additional roles and move to business,” said Zoeb peer-to-peer employee collaboration, that Asian Paints uses. He Adenwala, CIO (Global), at Essel Propack. pointed out how Huddle allows employees to collaborate with each There are multiple routes out of CIO-dom, although IT leaders other, share files, blogs and participate in both discussion groups interested in branching out tend to choose to be COOs or CFOs. and other activities.

“I am a living example of the changing role of the CIO,” said “We wanted to provide a platform to collaborate—and lure users Valerio Fernandes, GM-IT, Continental Automotive Components who were already on public networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, (India), who said he will soon be moving to the CFO’s role. and bring them on an internal platform,” he added. Today, about For CIOs attempting to move to a new position, some of the 4,000 employees at Asian Paints access Huddle and the platform participants at the open house suggested aligning to an important gets page hits from at least half of its user base everyday. organizational growth area. For example, if an automobile company At Asian Paints, Huddle has been used to organize an IT planning decides to steer its growth via acquisitions, then its CIO will be more meet over Lotus Connections, run a central travel desk survey, successful at promoting himself if he becomes an expert in that area maintain CEO blogs and get feedback on the company’s HR leave and aligns to the new shift. policy. Choksi said that Huddle was creating more transparency “The use of business acumen to apply technology will be the between employees and higher management because it allowed the differentiator in the CIO role,” said Bhupendra Pant, head-IT, L&T CEO to invite employees to be a part of company strategy by asking EWAC Alloys. them to provide their feedback to one of his blogs. Today, the ‘CEO Another way for CIOs to move up or across is to be more vocal Blogs’, said Choksi is the most popular feature at Huddle. when talking to his peers. “A CIO should demonstrate business traits Finally, Choksi drew the audience’s attention to the power of at a management meeting if he wishes to move into a new role, just social media collaboration within their companies. Collaboration is being a technologist will not help anymore,” says Jayakumar M., truly the next step towards inclusive growth as an effective means to head-IT, Eastern Condiments. shape the minds of the employees. Choksi signed off by saying that VOl/7 | ISSUE/02

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CIO Role

Its time to put an end to the ‘IT-and-thebusiness’ phrase. But if CIOs need to be taken seriously, they need to boost IT’s reputation and form stronger relationships with other business leaders.

By Diane Frank Technology runs the world these days, but CIOs don’t.

More often than not when a business’s mission is on the line, CIOs instead encounter the type of reaction Toyota Motor Sales USA VP and CIO Zack Hicks got from one fellow executive during the height of the company’s vehicle recalls in 2010: ‘Our hair’s on fire; we don’t have time for an IT project.’

The tendency of business execs to see IT as being useful only for projects is a huge challenge for CIOs at every size enterprise, in every industry. At Toyota, Hicks has long focused his IT team on understanding what people throughout the company do every day to shorten Reader ROI: the time between expressing a need and Why being a businessgetting a solution, which led to many CIO isn’t as hard as it is made out to be business improvements. But even if the IT How to market IT’s value group sees itself as a strategic player, the proof is ultimately whether the rest of the Importance of changing the mind-set of IT staff company feels the same way.

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Recognizing that public perception was one of Toyota’s main concerns during the recalls, an IT group that was testing a business analytics tool decided to apply it to complaints data received by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). “Within six hours, we had tremendous insight into what NHTSA’s data was actually saying versus what the press was saying,” Hicks says.

But holding that information wasn’t enough. It was just as important that Hicks, after being brushed away by the first executive he approached, didn’t back off from demonstrating IT’s potential value as a partner. (It would have been easy, he admits, to fall back into focusing on the back-end systems that were breaking under the strain of the increased volume of calls, which shot from the usual 3,000 a day to 92,000 a day during the crisis.)

Instead, he took those results directly to his president, who insisted that the entire executive team look at the tool to see if they could leverage it.

The episode was a dramatic demonstration of IT’s ability to be part of the strategic business conversation.

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CIO Role “This is where knowing I have a team that knows enough about our business— and being willing to make that strategic bet—really paid off,” Hicks says. With this example, the analytics project moved quickly into production to help functions across the company build and sell the cars consumers want.

In any industry, a cornerstone for any attempt to change the perception of IT throughout the business is improving the relationship the CIO has with other C-level executives and the relationships maintained

by IT staffers with other teams.

Members of the CIO Executive Council, have codified this relationshipmanagement effort in a framework called the Future-State CIO Journey, where stakeholder relationships and perceptions advance along a continuum. The spectrum starts with the IT function being perceived as a cost center, moving to a credible service provider, then an influential IT partner

During the height of Toyota’s vehicle recalls in 2010 a company executive told the CIO: “Our hair’s on fire; we don’t have time for an IT project.” and, ultimately, a strategic business peer that creates game-changing value.

But IT leaders must be able to translate that framework into real actions based on real problems, as Hicks and his team did, because of their understanding of Toyota’s business needs during that PR crisis.

Build a Credible Foundation In the absence of strong business relationships, it’s easy to say that the first step is to establish the IT group’s credibility, leading CIOs say. But establishing trust is personal and complex. It’s especially difficult for a new CIO brought in to turn around an underperforming IT shop, because the relationships with the business are probably already poor. If the CIO comes in on more neutral terms, starting with a blank slate, there’s a better chance of building credibility that goes beyond just keeping the e-mail flowing.

When Robert Webb joined Hilton Worldwide two years ago, he found himself on the hot seat. There were a number of projects already teed up for execution, and IT was still struggling to be an influential partner. Webb latched on to several projects that could have broader impact on the company and provide a showcase for IT’s capabilities.

Zack Hicks, VP & CIO, Toyota Motor, bridged the gap between business and IT because of his understanding of Toyota’s business needs during their car recall PR crisis.

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“In my world, the way you build trust is by making promises and keeping promises— repeatedly—and then there’s the opportunity to build a deeper relationship,” he says.

“The worst thing any CIO can do is oversell and underdeliver,” agrees Kevin Kern, executive vice president and CTO of global operations and technology at First Data, one of the largest electronic commerce and payment processing providers.

Webb believes there’s no such thing as too much communication. At Hilton, he now has a number of channels for getting his message out: A monthly update on critical enterprise initiatives, a quarterly “technology operating review” with IT and business leaders that delves into the status of major projects, and weekly steering committee meetings for each functionspecific project.

“It can’t be passive communication; it needs to be active,” Webb says. “E-mail is great for scheduling meetings, but it’s the steering committees where we’re working through really difficult issues together, and making promises and keeping promises, where the foundations of trust are established.”

Sometimes, though, you have to work up to being able to make promises. Food chain Red Robin Gourmet Burgers has grown rapidly over the last decade, and executives turned to CIO Chris Laping four years ago because the IT department wasn’t at a point where it could be involved in transforming business processes. When he came on, “No one would talk to IT unless their mouse wasn’t working,” he says.

The IT staff needed a basic shift in mindset to improve how rest of the business perceived the department. Laping started by changing the metrics that defined IT’s goals from the standard system-based ones—such as the always-popular number of help desk tickets resolved, or delivery of a project on time and on budget—to ones that reflect business process change and value to the company.

Today, all major IT projects at Red Robin are measured by business metrics. And the IT team’s work isn’t done until the business actually sees the promised benefits. “You have to build a plan that does more than

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Candid Talk Trumps the Blame Game How Hilton’s CIO uses honest communications to work through difficult times—and avoid finger-pointing.

Relationships between the CIO and business executives will inevitably become strained, with broken promises and eroding trust. So how do you keep them from going completely off the rails?

“That’s the time that is actually the true test of leadership,” says Robert Webb, CIO of Hilton Worldwide. “It’s the ability to know when that’s happening—to sense it and see it—but also to be proactively communicating when you know that’s starting to occur.”

Webb and his team have helped develop a new Expanded Rewards loyalty program, which allows guests to use points and cash for a wider range of perks at Hilton properties.

When Webb started working with the business sponsor of the project, he admits that neither of them thought they would succeed. In fact, the project didn’t really begin to click, he admits, until people from IT, marketing, HR, finance and other departments worked through the change management and business process issues in 85 countries and 10 brands. Now the program is close to full deployment.

But not every effort has gone so smoothly. Two years ago, Hilton decided to outsource the hotel help desk to a large global outsourcer—a fairly standard move for a large company. However, no one had recognized that this wasn’t a traditional break-fix support group; it handled intricate, business-specific processes for some of Hilton’s most sensitive partners. “And some of these people were not happy about the communications challenge of explaining to somebody who’s not worked in the inside of a hotel what it means to, for example, do the night audits,” Webb says.

When he got together with the brand leaders involved in that partnership, instead of spreading blame, they examined the IT and business metrics of the contract. It quickly became clear that not only did the metrics need to be redefined, but that the business goal was no longer the one they had identified at the outset. They talked openly about how the criteria for success had changed.

“We’re only able to solve this with truthful, honest communication,” Webb says. “When people say ‘This is hard, I’m not sure I’m with you anymore,’ you need to get everyone to remember it’s about one team, one vision, and let’s get grounded on why we did this.”

—By D.F.

just turn the system on,” Laping says. At Red Robin, those plans nurture the system beyond rollout to encourage and enable adoption of the system. “Because you know darn well that if you don’t do that, that finger is going to come pointing at you when the business isn’t getting what they expected from the system.”

Over the past few years, this has changed the game for both sides. As IT has delivered on more than just technology, IT staffers have come to expect to be involved through the entire lifecycle of the system, and business leaders and users now expect IT to be part of transformation efforts.

Even now, Laping’s people are working on one of the company’s most widely

anticipated transformational advances: The Red Royalty customer loyalty program that launched in January after a two-year effort. While the back-end technology involves transactional databases and data analytics, the focus is really on achieving the business goals of creating a better customer experience and improving customer retention.

A high-level business team will stay on through at least the end of this year to provide any support necessary and help improve the loyalty program to make sure it’s producing the expected benefits at a level everyone is happy with. That new role for Red Robin’s IT was formalized last year when incoming CEO Stephen Carley named Laping senior REAL CIO WORLD | d e c e m b e r 1 5 , 2 0 1 1

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CIO Role Leslie Jones, Sr. VP & CIO, Motorola Solutions, changed the mind-set of her IT staff to: ‘We’re in the business; our field just happens to be IT.’

vice president of business transformation, in addition to CIO.

Managing the Relationships Relationships forged during hard times can last, but only if you work at it, Hicks says.

After the initial recalls at Toyota, when IT provided public relations assistance, Hicks found himself with new allies. The senior management team has started to look at the IT function as a provider of business solutions and a partner in process change, not just a systems provider. This affords new opportunities for him and his lineof-business direct reports to influence the business and discuss the future of each product line.

But that influence has to be applied judiciously, not all the time.

“I’m always trying to calibrate: Is this the right time to be leaning in and making some of those changes? Or is this a time when they’ve got a busy cycle and I need to back off and give them some freedom?” he says. “It’s about actively managing those relationships.”

The payoff from better relationships is that business executives listen to IT’s perspective rather than ignoring it or dismissing it out of hand. For example, when Toyota was developing its Entune “connected vehicle” initiative, Hicks acknowledged the growing importance of telematics in the automotive industry but also pointed out the potential risks of what is essentially “a device driving down the road.” Hicks asked the other executives whether Toyota could handle the public outcry if proper security and privacy controls were not built into the in-car multimedia system.

The executives got the point. The result is that Toyota’s Entune initiative is moving ahead but Hicks is now fully involved in the project and is head of the senior management task force that’s ensuring the company is creating a safe and secure service.

Sometimes, by working side-by-side, IT and other business leaders can solve each others’ problems. At First Data, CTO Kern was having trouble managing the many business requests for IT development projects from the groups that had joined the company through 86

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acquisition. While acquisition was a significant part of the company’s growth, it had created an environment where many groups were operating autonomously with uncoordinated requests. So Kern started work on a global operating model that would establish priorities for those requests. As it turns out, the business executive in charge of new-product development had similar concerns.

Mark Herrington, First Data’s executive vice president of global product management and innovation, wanted to establish processes for determining which new-product ideas should be developed.

“We wanted to effect a 180-degree turn, from growth by acquisition to growth by

organic product development,” he says.

But one of the big holdups was the lack of prioritization for IT development requests, leading to far more customization and one-off IT systems than were healthy for the company, Herrington says. More than 280 people had authority to submit those requests, and the loudest requester often got their order fulfilled first.

So Herrington set out to create a single stream of prioritized requests from the product-development side. When he reached out to IT with this goal, he was pleased to discover that it matched up with Kern’s global operating model for IT. Herrington and Kern have now built joint processes for both sides to manage

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CIO Role requests for product development and delivery. All requests are now driven by solution maps that define needs and goals across functions, instead of by group or geography. The result is that there are only two streams of requests to IT: One from North America and one from the rest of the globe. “This helps us all set expectations for external customers, and for internal colleagues,” Kern says. “When we make decisions, then we all need to get into the fold and start executing.”

Eliminate the Phrase “IT and the Business” The goal of all this credibility, trust, alignment and partnership is for IT to be seen as a true peer, engaged in developing strategy to reach shared goals. IT is no more separate from the company (in fact or language) than finance or HR. This is a goal that few have reached. But the number of IT groups that can claim the distinction should grow every year as CIOs like Hicks, Webb, Laping and Kern continue reshaping how they and their teams engage with internal business stakeholders.

“My current and ultimate goal is that there is absolutely no distinction between IT and the business,” says Leslie Jones, senior vice president and CIO at Motorola Solutions. And what she’s done should sound familiar.

When she took the CIO role at the company in 2008, the first thing she changed was the IT staff’s focus on technology. The mind-set, she says, had to become: “We’re in the business; our field just happens to be IT.” To enforce this, as others have, she shifted the metrics of her group from IT-specific to business criteria. But she also eliminated the opportunities to fall back on old patterns— such as IT-only town halls—because she recognizes that relationships with peers cannot change if IT holds itself separate.

Over the past four years, Jones has appointed three IT people to work in other departments, and they’ve become so much a part of those other teams that Jones admits she isn’t part of their conversations and everyday decisions. Many leaders talk about embedding IT staff in business functions, or instituting functional 88

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rotations to familiarize staff with other parts of the company.

Both techniques can have a significant impact if there was no interaction before.

But it is obvious when those steps are still superficial or temporary arrangements, as opposed to when they are actually effective, Jones says. Those three people from her staff have proved time and again to both Jones and her executive counterparts that “they have a considerably more real, profound understanding of the business environment, needs and aspirations than they could ever hope to have by attending PowerPoint festivals,” she says. Now they are part of their business operations teams, determining strategies and plans for new customer services along with the other leaders in those groups. And then those teams turn to IT to help execute those plans.

It’s now clear to everyone at Motorola Solutions that IT’s metrics must be changed to focus on business results. Period. That’s true even after the systems have been deployed and adopted. For example, once a system is up and running, discussions must focus on topics such as what it would cost the business if there is an outage—not how much time it took IT to get everything back up. “And it doesn’t matter whose ‘fault’ it was,” Jones says. For example,

Relationships forged during hard times can last, but only if you work at it.The payoff from better relationships is that business executives listen to IT’s perspective rather than ignoring it or dismissing it out of hand.

when Hurricane Irene hit the east coast in September, she knew that if there were a problem with an IT-enabled business service, and a cost to fix it, that would be her responsibility.

For Jones, the primary sign of success is IT’s place on her company’s operational calendar, which identifies which initiatives will be done when. Historically, IT went through its own strategic and operational planning, but then the business asked for IT’s planning to be integrated into the companywide calendar. “Not to put too fine a point on it,” Jones says, “but the clearest indication of success is when they take money away from other people and give it to you, and that’s exactly what’s happened these last few years.”

This isn’t just the CIO’s view. Whether the discussion is about company strategy, R&D prioritization, go-to-market strategies or any other enterprise issue, Jones is there, says Chairman and CEO Greg Brown. “She’s in the fabric of the strategic and operational dialogue, and not at the tail end.”

In fact, the company is now two years into a strategy to become entirely digital, changing the processes—and therefore the systems—behind every function from the ground up. No small part of the reason that this is possible now, rather than three or five years ago, is what Jones has done with the people in her group and the role they play in the company, Brown says.

Motorola Solutions stands as testament to the fact that the goal of becoming a business peer is within reach. The real difference between this company and most others is the time spent focused on the objective. And the last step, perhaps, is one the CIO alone must take: Becoming a leader who thinks not of what’s best for IT, but of what’s best for the customers, clients, users and stakeholders.

“If you establish yourself as a technology guru, or an IT advocate, you are really declaring yourself something quite alien to the business,” Jones says. “If you can establish yourself as a person of a general manager mind-set, then I think you stand a very good chance of being successful in this kind of relationship with your business.” CIO

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A CLOSER LOOK AT mobility

More IT organizations are bypassing the desktop when building new applications, especially for external customers. Here’s what you need to know to create a strategy for mobile apps.

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Mobiles Take the Lead

By Elisabeth Horwitt

Mobile Apps | Timing is essential to the success of a mobile application. Just ask Richard Peltz, CIO of Marcus and Millichap, a commercial real estate investment services firm. In January 2010, when the commercial real estate market was starting to emerge from a twoyear slump, the company began looking for ways to increase brand awareness and exposure for its 1,200 agents nationwide. Peltz came up with the idea of providing searchable profiles of agents and loan originators on the company’s website, which clients could access with their iPhones or Android smartphones.

When Peltz learned that at least one competitor was developing a similar app, speed to market became a high priority. While eliciting input from the marketing group and the vice president of app development, “I pretty much managed the app right off my desk, because I didn’t want to take the time to have it managed by committee,” he says. He also chose to outsource the development to AT&T, rather than try to get his staff up to speed in mobile programming languages, particularly those for the iPhone, he says.

Deployed in December 2010, the app is now being used by a growing number of real estate investors, and it has generated several leads, Peltz reports. Now comes the hard part: Designing and building an enterprise strategy and infrastructure for developing and managing mobile apps over the long term.

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Marcus and Millichap is in good company.

Mobile-first apps represent a conundrum for IT leaders. On the one hand, CIOs are excited about the potential payoffs, and often they’re being pressured to deliver sexy new apps to mobile-toting end users, executives and customers. Developing applications for mobile first, as opposed to porting limited versions of desktop apps onto mobile devices, is “reaching a tipping point, where it makes a lot of sense,” says William Clark, a research vice president at Gartner.

According to data Gartner published in June as part of its report Magic Quadrant for Mobile Consumer Application Platforms, 5 billion smartphones were in use worldwide in 2010, and that number was projected to exceed 6.7 billion by 2015, creating huge opportunities for consumer-oriented businesses. Consumer-facing mobile app development will continue to outpace development of Web apps and application development in general through 2014, the report says. Meanwhile, a recent CIO magazine survey of 261 IT leaders found 54 percent of respondents plan to boost spending on mobile applications.

Why Mobile First?

IT leaders are recognizing that in order to be truly useful, mobile apps cannot just be limited versions of existing Windows or Mac OS desktop applications. They need to be developed from scratch not only to work within the constraints of mobile devices’ small screens, finite memory and limited computing power, but also to take advantage of device features that desktops typically lack, such as multiple cameras, touch screens, and multimedia communications and animation.

Outward-facing mobile apps can help businesses get and keep customers, and please their business partners, by providing richer interactions with consumers’ mobile devices of choice.

While internal mobile apps are trailing behind consumer-facing ones, according to Gartner, IT leaders are starting to exploit them as a means of boosting employee productivity and responsiveness. For example, Marcus and Millichap’s agent lookup application spawned an internal directory that lets agents in the field use

ITleaders realize that to be truly useful, mobile apps need to be developed from scratch to take advantage of device features that desktops lack.

On the other hand, Gartner’s Clark notes that “fragmentation and chaos” in the mobile marketplace, where new releases and versions of mobile operating systems are coming out all the time, has made it difficult for businesses to develop and execute a coherent strategy. And a strategy is critical to the success of such initiatives, analysts and CIOs agree.

What follows is an overview of the state of mobile-first application development: What is driving it, what challenges and opportunities it creates for IT organizations, and how to craft a strategy for it that addresses its difficulties and exploits its possibilities over the long term.

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their iPhones or Android smartphones to look up information about each other and about loan originators, Peltz says.

At Erie Insurance, IT started off with an iPhone app that makes it easier for customers to report their property has suffered damage before filing a claim, says Eric Miller, the firm’s senior VP of IT. However, mobile information systems were also an obvious choice for an app for insurance adjusters evaluating the damage a vehicle sustained in an accident. “It would not be feasible for our agents to take pictures of an auto axle with a laptop,” but with an iPhone, it’s a snap, says Rich Warnaka, director of user experience at the company.

54%

of CIOs plan to boost spending on mobile applications in 2012.

Source: CIO Research

How to Craft a Long-Term Strategy Like Marcus and Millichap, many companies have deployed an app or two to test the waters, then put further development on hold while they design and deploy an enterprise infrastructure and strategy.

That is the tack that Matson Navigation has taken with a “multi-phase, multi-year road map” the IT department developed, says Srini Cherukuri, the container shipping giant’s senior director of IT operations. The overall goal is “to provide sustainable benefits for a broad community of external and internal users in order to get the best ROI,” he says.

Matson recently developed a shipmenttracking and vessel-scheduling application that lets customers look up transportation and logistics schedules on their iPhones and Android smartphones, and receive text alerts when particular containers move. However, other apps will have to wait until IT “acquires the expertise and tools, and builds the internal processes” for developing, supporting and managing mobile devices and apps, Cherukuri says.

Cherukuri also wants to wait a few months for the currently volatile mobile industry to stabilize before choosing which mobile devices and architectures to support, and before shopping for mobile management and security products.

Today’s shaky economy is another reason that some companies have taken

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a slow and deliberate approach to mobile app development. Timing should be based on a careful analysis of the current market and its trends, Gartner’s Clark advises.

One of Gartner’s clients, a grocery store chain, is evaluating how much to invest in apps that target the demographic segment comprising “well-heeled people carrying iPhones,” Clark reports. “Today, it’s about 15 percent of the addressable market, but within two years, mobile applications will have an impact on advertising, marketing, final selection and customer loyalty for the mainstream shopper,” because the upper 60 percent of consumers, in terms of income, will have smartphones.

AARP, for example, has been aggressively redefining itself as an

distributed the responsibilities between two groups within IT, Cherukuri says.

The global device-management group is in charge of choosing which mobile platforms to support, and the tools and platforms to use for managing them. The application group does research and talks to end users to determine which applications “provide broad-based benefits to employees and customers,” Cherukuri says.

Marcus and Millichap recently formed a steering committee to design a formal process for eliciting ideas for internal mobile apps and to create a structure for “building, testing and deploying innovative solutions,” says Peltz. The committee includes regional managers, business users, and several managing directors “who

Forcing developers to work with mobile devices’smaller screens and limited resources improves their efficiency because they have to maintain a laser focus on an end user’s activities. organization for anyone over 50, not just the truly elderly. That’s why Sami Hassanyeh, head of AARP’s 50-person Digital Strategy Group, has been pushing a mobile-first application-development mind-set across the organization.

Driving this initiative is Hassanyeh’s discovery, from checking out independent research, that a hefty percentage of AARP’s core Baby Boomer constituency is using mobile devices to access the Web and social media. Furthermore, through August 2011, AARP.org has seen 11 times more page views from mobile devices than it got in all of 2009. “We have to go where the numbers are going,” Hassanyeh says.

Who’s on the Team?

Going mobile first often requires IT leaders to rethink the mix of talent and expertise they apply to application design, development, management and maintenance. As part of its multi-phase mobile strategy, Matson

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will provide the funding and the urgency” behind the project, he says.

At AARP, the Digital Strategy Group is separate from IT. Hassanyeh reports to the executive vice president and chief communications officer, not to the CIO. His group is responsible for customerfacing aspects of mobile application development, management and support.

IT takes care of the underlying database, the internal desktop apps, and the backup, Internet and security services. AARP isn’t developing internal mobile apps at this time, Hassanyeh says.

The Digital Strategy Group brings together application developers, systems administrators, the teams that handle online marketing, online editorial and social media, and a product team that creates a road map for developing new Web-based and mobile apps and features based on what end users are asking for, Hassanyeh says.

Mobile First or Mobile Only?

Another key question for mobile strategists to address is whether a specific mobile app, or even all mobile apps enterprisewide, will be mobile first or mobile only. While some CIOs and developers treat mobile and desktop systems as different animals, many attest to the benefits of developing a mobile-first application and then porting it to desktops or the Web. Forcing developers to work with mobile devices’ smaller screens and limited computing resources improves their efficiency and effectiveness, says Erie’s Miller. “They have to maintain a laser focus on [the end user’s] activities, because we don’t have the real estate to throw everything on there” the way you could with a desktop screen or Web page.

His group now interviews potential app clients, whether employees or consumers, to “identify their needs and wants” before going ahead with an application. “You end up developing a whole lot less, decreasing your time to market” and pleasing customers, Miller says. “That’s why we’ve started to think mobile first for all our apps,” he says.

“The desktop environment is like a carp in a bathtub: It grows till it fills all available space,” says Luke Wroblewski, who was chief product officer and co-founder of Bagcheck.com. (The company was acquired

by Twitter in August.) The same goes for Web pages, he adds, and as a result, the screen gets ­cluttered with irrelevant data that can distract or frustrate end users.

Wroblewski embraced mobile first at Bagcheck.com, a service that enables people to share info and photos of objects related to their interests, experiences and hobbies.

While it was only a three-person operation, it faced many of the same mobile-development issues and constraints as large enterprises, says Wroblewski, formerly chief design architect at Yahoo. “Mobile use is growing so fast, it’ll overtake desktops and PCs in the next year or two. We have to prepare for the inevitable shift.”

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Slim SIm

essential technology

The Catch

SmallTalk,RealSmall

Devices | A new, smaller SIM card, dubbed nano-SIM, will free up room for additional memory and larger batteries, helping phone vendors create thinner devices, German company Giesecke & Devrient said recently.

Measuring approximately 12 millimeters by 9 millimeters, the nano-SIM is about 30 percent smaller than the micro-SIM. The thickness of the cards has been reduced by about 15 percent, according to Giesecke & Devrient. The new nano-SIM is approximately 60 percent smaller than traditional-size SIM cards, which are still used by a majority of phones, the company said.

Giesecke & Devrient expects the first phones to use the nano-SIM will arrive as soon as next year, it said. Using adapters, the card format will be backwardcompatible.

Apple, which already uses the micro-SIM, has been involved in developing the new form factor. In May, the company filed a proposal for a smaller card. There are so many different things that go into today's smartphones, so anything that can be done to save space is a good thing, Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner, said at the time.

Recently, Apple's future plans for the SIM also made the news when a patent application for a virtual card surfaced. A SIM card slot in user devices tends to make devices bulky and add cost, and users may also want to buy wireless services when they can't easily obtain a physical SIM card, according to the application.

It is just a matter of time before virtual SIMs take over, according to Malik Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media. For operators, it will be a mixed blessing. They will lose some of the control physical SIM card affords them, but at the same time new opportunities in, for example, the machine-to-machine sector will come, he said.

— By Mikael Ricknäs

image by p hotos.com

Developing mobile apps is only a small piece of a successful strategy, however. Once you commit to developing mobile applications, especially for consumers, you’ll need to update them frequently—more often than you would a traditional website. That’s neither easy nor cheap, but it is necessary, Hassanyeh says. While AARP is introducing new apps slowly, Hassanyeh’s group is updating existing iOS and Android apps every 35 to 60 days. Because anybody can write and try to sell an iOS app, it’s not enough for companies to just put out a mobile app, he says. They have to add value regularly.

Mobile apps can also raise major security issues, particularly, as is increasingly the case, if employees are using personal devices for work. More than one-third (36 percent) of respondents to the CIO survey said they were letting employees use personal devices for e-mail, while only 23 percent were allowing such devices to access corporate apps.

IT leaders must also ensure that the server and network systems have the capacity to meet the growing demand from mobile apps.

If mobile devices represent both the wave of the future and a growing drain on IT resources, why not dispense with desktops altogether?

While none of the IT leaders interviewed for this article said they were ready to jettison desktops, some saw it as a likely long-term scenario, for many if not all end users.

“Building client-server apps that require a storage device, a big processor and a lot of memory is not in our best interest now,” says Marcus and Millichap’s Peltz. However, his firm has “no agenda for eliminating desktop apps,” he says, because users in accounting and finance, who need to access, process and share large amounts of data, will continue to need them. “I don’t see even a tablet being able to support that level of creativity.”

At Erie Insurance, on the other hand, some employees are already fully mobilized. Says Miller, “We got into iPhones two years ago because one of our senior managers had one, and saw no reason to have two devices.” CIO

Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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essential technology

Locking Down Your Mobiles There is no doubt that mobiles have broken corporate walls and have left CIOs in a tizzy.

But don’t panic yet. Forrester offers 10 tips to better manage mobile devices.

By Al Sacco mobile platforms of choice and whether or not their devices are corporate issued.

IT Should Query Users to Understand Staff Needs, Preferences: Forrester

suggests surveying the employees who will be using smartphones and tablets regularly to learn more about their needs and preferences, and then determine the products that suit the various job functions.

This allows IT to more effectively procure and deploy the appropriate hardware and software to the staffers that need it most.

Create One Clear Policy for Corporateand Employee-Owned Mobile Devices:

MDM | Modern CIOs and their IT departments face a new, complex set of mobile device security and manageability challenges as employees bring in their various smartphones and tablets to the workplace, and as additional devices are rolled out across the enterprise.

Many CIOs are looking outside MDM (mobile device management) products for

just released a new report, titled 10 Lessons Learned From Early Adopters Of Mobile Device Management Solutions.

Here's a quick breakdown of the lessons offered within the report: Different Employees Require Different Kinds of Mobile Support from IT: No

one-size-fits-all solution exists for mobile device management and support today,

image by photos.com

IT may want to make staffers with mobile devices sign an official mobiledevice policy form that specifies IT has the right to wipe corporate devices at any time, if necessary. assistance in securing and managing these disparate devices, but with the majority of these services still in their infancy, it pays to wade slowly into the MDM water—and with caution. Technology research firm Forrester Research wants to help, and it has

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and IT must be prepared to offer varying degrees of support. Individual staffers and groups of employees will require access to different applications and systems, and therein, different types of support, often depending on their job functions, their

Organizations should come up with clear mobile-device policies and usage statements that apply to all mobile devices that will be used, including those owned by the business and employee-owned devices, Forrester says. Start by clearly stating the levels of security and support IT will provide, so it's responsible only for apps and services IT delivers and approves of.

It's also a good idea to draft official policy documents and usage guidelines to ensure that users are clear on what devices they're eligible to use and how they're expected to responsibly employ them, according to Forrester.

Know Mobile Platforms' Limitations, Prioritize Support for Those That Need It Most: Employees are sick of using only

the officially sanctioned mobile platforms of choice, and they're increasingly finding ways to circumvent IT policies and controls so they can use their devices of choice— often iOS and Android devices. Instead of merely resisting these devices and platforms, IT should attempt to identify the security and management weaknesses and at least try to find ways to address the shortcomings to the best of its ability.

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No One-Size-Fits-All-Platforms for MDM Solution: Though many vendors offer

Support Employee-Owned Devices But Set Strict Usage Guidelines: MDM

products to help manage and secure devices like iPhones, iPads and Android devices, most of the services are specific to one platform or just a few platforms, making it difficult or impossible to use one product to manage all of your various devices and platforms, Forrester says. Vendors plan to add support for lesser-used platforms, such as Windows Phone 7, but right now IT must use a variety of products to manage their various mobile platforms.

As a result, many organizations aren't seeing the same level of security and manageability for all platforms as they were in the past for, say, BlackBerry devices.

products help IT support various mobile devices and platforms, but supporting these devices means addressing a complex new set of security challenges. IT should prepare itself for the challenge by setting clear rules and regulations for which types of devices can be used or will be supportedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and which won'tâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as well as who will pay for them.

Encourage IT Suppliers to Offer App Stores that Suit the Enterprise: Few

if any MDM vendors offer application delivery methods or "stores" that truly meet enterprise management and security requirements while delivering software to various devices and platforms, Forrester says. This is a huge obstacle in the way of delivering truly robust enterprise

Make It Clear to Users Which Mobile Services are Approved: IT should provide

a clear set of guidelines on not only the devices that will be supported, but also which services are sanctioned for use on enterprise devices, Forrester says. On that note, IT should clarify that not all devices and services are supported. IT may also want to make staffers with mobile devices sign an official mobile-device policy form that specifies IT has the right to wipe corporate devices at any time, if necessary.

Reimbursement for Employee-Device Service Costs Can Serve as Incentives:

Forrester says that allowing users to employ their own mobile devices for work

To deliver truly robust enterprise apps to smartphones and tablets,ITshould push its suppliers to create app stores that meet business needs. apps to smartphones, tablets and other devices, and IT should push its suppliers to create app stores that meet business needs. Enterprises should work with suppliers to derive and test application delivery methods that can deliver complex applications to a variety of device types, according to Forrester.

Employ Virtualization for Access to Windows Apps on Non-Windows Devices:

Until vendors can offer more "mature" application stores that cater to a wider variety of mobile platforms, organizations should consider using virtualization products to bring critical Windows apps to mobile devices, Forrester says.

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purposes can reduce overall mobile device management and support costs. That's because such users often must contact their wireless carriers for help with support issues, instead of IT. It's also a good idea to determine just how your employees are using their devices for work, and how much IT support is necessary, and then tailor reimbursement for wireless service accordingly. Staffers could eventually look at payment for their monthly service as incentive to be more productive with their mobile devices, according to Forrester. CIO

MDM FAQs Here are five key questions to consider when searching for an MDM provider.

How hard will it be to integrate the MDM solution with your existing infrastructure?

Integrating MDM is hard enough when you have a single business unit to deal with but across multiple business units, an enterprise-wide MDM rollout can be a nightmare. Look for solutions with simple installation requirements, distributed control, and scalability suitable for your organization's size and structure.

What resources will the MDM solution require on the client? If the MDM system requires any significant percentage of the storage or processing capability on the client side, the solution could be problematic with mobile devices that are running other high performance demand apps or have limited storage.

Will the MDM solution support regulatory compliance, auditing, and reporting standards? This is obviously a crucial issue if you're in a regulated industry, and if you are, the key concern is whether the auditing and reporting is comprehensive enough to meet current requirements and what plans does the vendor have for meeting possible future regulatory demands.

When device exceptions (conditions that indicate tampering, client side MDM failure, etcetera) are detected can you force remote wiping and or other remediation activities? This is crucial whether you're in a regulated industry or just trying to maintain corporate privacy.

How does the MDM solution support disconnected devices? The reality of mobile communications is that it's guaranteed that there will be outages. In these situations how will MDM work? Will the client lose access to enterprise data? If data is cached on the device, will the data be secure?

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;By Mark Gibbs Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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12/12/2011 10:38:19 AM

bookclub club whAt we’Re ReAdINg

by Vijay RamachandRan

* How CoMpANIES wIN

GapAnalysis Growing in a tough economy is about addressing the gap between what customers want and what they get from you.

IN SUMMARY: How can companies

continue to grow with rising competition and oversupply? Given the way that the Indian economy is heading, it’s easy to value the insights that Rick Kash and David Calhoun have to offer.

You have to be at least 40 years old to appreciate the tectonic shift that we’ve seen in our economic landscape. From waiting eight years to get a phone line to having a choice of just two car models, we certainly have come a long way.

What’s also changed in the process is our attitude—we expect higher levels of service; we demand better quality; we expect organizations to be in tune with our needs.

And, this is the zone that How Companies Win inhabits. How do you segment customers better? Who are your most profitable customers? By buying your products or services what demand are they really trying to satisfy? How do you address the gap between what your customer wants and what he gets from you or your competitors? These are the questions the authors manage to answer fairly comprehensively. In their mind, you win in the current situation only by focusing on the demand end of things.

Even though, I felt the book’s language was stilted, academically so, and made for a ‘heavy’ read, I still value the message the book contains.

Read on for excerpts from two reviews from your peers:

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The authors have done a splendid job of sensitizing the reader to changes in the supply versus demand equation faced by businesses today, and prescribing how to address this and win in the market.

The first part of the book describes the changing dynamics in demand, over supply and demand contraction.

All this is also leading to pricing crisis for businesses straining for top line and bottom line growth.

The second part of the book brings out strategies to address this issue and beat competition. Given the current competitive landscape and extremely low tolerance to errors, the authors have introduced the Fifth P (Pricing) to the traditional 4 P’s (Product, Promotion, Place and Price) to ensure that each parameter operates at maximum efficiency and lowest cost.

The third and final part of the book focuses on execution and how to organize organizations to win. The authors have also demonstrated how one can leverage technological advances like social media to discover, identify and serve the customers better and create opportunities for delivering industry leading growth in revenues and profits. The book is replete with real-world examples, making it a rich source of insights. An extremely useful book to read for organizations of all sizes.

R. MURALIDHARAN CIO, Syntel

hOw COMpANI p pANI eS wIN: Profiting

From demand-driven business models no matter What business y you’re in

By Rick Kash & David Calhoun Publisher: Harper Business Price: Rs 1,000 I like the fact that the authors have focused on understanding consumer behavior and creating new product lines or services. The book clearly proves that what’s worked in the past may or may not do so in the future. The only way out is to keep innovating.

The authors make a strong case for boosting innovation spend, clearly proving through cases, that organizations which do so derive higher business value and returns than those that don’t.

Some of the observations contained within its pages may not be applicable to all businesses, but the authors point about innovating by keeping customer demand in mind and aligning the innovation engine with demand, with a clear focus on demand creation are bound to add value to all organizations.

Definitely worth a read.

RAJESH MUNJAL Head IT, Carzonrent India

Sounds interesting? We invite you to join the CIO Book Club. CIO Send feedback to editor@cio.in

Vol/7 | ISSUE/02