CIO May 15, 2015

CHANNELING SOCIAL MEDIA

SET (Sony) uses social media to tweak content. 11

www.cio.in

SECURITY’S FINE BALANCE

FireEye's CIO on security’s changing dynamics. 16 PERKS ON BOARD I.T. CRUISE

Royal Caribbean Cruise introduces personalized tickets. 17 DEFY CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

B U S I N E SS T EC H N O LO G Y L E A D E R S H I P

Why is Intex defying the online norm? 31

DECONSTRUCTING IT

May 15, 2015

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IT departments are constantly reorganizing, but a few companies have gone so far as to break the traditional IT department into pieces. 22

PLUS

Is Vistara’s Service Focus Enough?

Phee Teik Yeoh, CEO, Vistara, on why he believes a focus on service and innovation will make Vistara India’s airline of choice. 14

VOLUME 10, NO. 7

May 15, 2015

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From the Editor in Chief 2 Trending 3 Numbers You Need 4 Quick Fix 6 Career Path 8 World View 10

02

Grow I N N OVAT I O N & B U S I N E S S VA LU E

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Sony leverages social media to better content 11 Control your devices with your thumbnail 12 IT needs to behave like a doctor 13 Why Vistara’s CEO believes in service? 14 FireEye CIO on balancing security with opportunity 16

Deconstructing IT

22

IT departments are constantly reorganizing, but a few companies have gone so far as to break the traditional IT department into pieces.

BY K I M S . N AS H

Run L E A D E R S H I P & O P E R AT I O N A L E XC E L L E N C E

How Royal Caribbean Cruise personalized tickets for passengers 17 All you need to know about hybrid clouds 18 Now charge your phone in a minute 19 Meet your new 3D scanner: Your smartphone 19 The right time to fix Periscope’s security loophole 20 Ransomware: Pay it or fight it?21

17

Connect P E E R A DV I C E

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The manybenefits of a CIO-CISO tiff 27 Diversity is the new success mantra 29 Fighting the dysfunction in a team30 How Intex is defying conventional wisdom 31

Finish

Don’t be surprised to see a robot butler bringing you a snack 32

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PUBLISHER, PRESIDENT & CEO

FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

EDITORIAL EDITOR-IN-CHIEF CONSULTING EDITORS EXECUTIVE EDITOR DEPUTY EDITOR FEATURES EDITOR CONSULTING ASSISTANT EDITOR ASSISTANT EDITORS PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENTS VIDEO EDITORS LEAD DESIGNERS SENIOR DESIGNERS TRAINEE JOURNALISTS

start

Make the Leap 2

“If you think of [opportunity] in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.”

—Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon All businesses, even the most successful ones, at a point will run out of

room to grow. The options aren’t too many—reinvent the business periodically or simply stagnate and perish. But, committing to reinvention doesn’t come naturally to most companies, specially when the existing line of business is strong.

The alternative is to make the leap to a new, growing business from an existing, slowing one before revenues from that core market have stalled.

Not by any means easy given how change doesn’t come easy. For it is in the nature of humans to resist transformation.

While I’ve seen myriad organizations struggle to make this leap, a few distinctly stand out. My favorite has to be Japan’s Sumitomo Group. One of the largest of Japanese kieretsu, its roots lie in a 17th century book and medicine store in Kyoto founded by Masatomo Sumitomo.

Over four centuries, the Group has thrived, getting into new markets and actively seeking new opportunities (copper smelting, trading in textiles, mining, forestry and banking, to name just a few). Each time the Group has translated its dominance in one sector to growth in another, before the earlier cash cow ran dry, while staying true to its founder’s principles of not pursuing “easy gains”.

I truly believe that for to sustain profitable growth in these challenging times businesses will have to identify value-added lines of business that have the growth potential to allow them to transition out of current core areas.

How many organizations I wonder would be willing to risk killing a solid line of business in order to build a potentially more profitable future?

However, to not do so is likely to be hazardous to the health of that business.

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Healthcare Gets an AI Makeover

Headsets to Simulate Autism Japanese researchers want to show people what it’s like to have autism

by using a headset that distorts imagery of people nearby.

The researchers from Osaka University and the University of Tokyo mounted a forward-facing Wi-Fi webcam on a Sony HMZT3W headset, which is designed for watching movies and covers the eyes with two screens.

The webcam’s video is relayed to the screens, but when the simulation’s image-processing program is activated, the faces of people become washed out and fuzzy, making their expressions impossible to see.

White dots like swirling snow also appear on the screens in response to loud noise, distorting the high-contrast image. Earphones linked to a microphone in the webcam also relay a distorted audio signal.

The effect is aimed at simulating the vision and hearing of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who can experience sensory overload and deficit. They can also struggle to understand the emotional states of others.

Based on augmented reality techniques, the image processing is done in a separate computer that receives the webcam’s signal by Wi-Fi and then wirelessly transmits the altered image to the Sony headset.

“We hypothesize that (people without autism) experiencing an artificial ASD perceptual system would have the same difficulty with environment recognition and taking action,” the researchers wrote.

They are planning to publish more detailed papers of the experimental device, said Yukie Nagai, an associate professor at Osaka University’s Emergent Robotics Lab. –By Tim Hornyak

Two patients receiving the same treatment for breast cancer may be entirely different in significant ways.

One may be a marathon runner, the other a more sedate reader. One might be a smoker, while the other is considered a health nut. One may be in her 60s while the other just turned 40.

With all these differences, these two women might need different cancer treatments.

The challenges for scientists and doctors is in finding information about treatments for specific types of people.

That critical information is lost in mountains of data, and doctors don’t have the time it would take to sift through all of that data to find what they need.

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh are working to use artificial intelligence to cull through electronic health records, diagnostic imaging, prescriptions, genomic profiles, insurance records and even data from wearable devices to create health care plans designed not just for a specific disease but for specific types of people.

The researchers are putting big data to use to create designer treatments, head off epidemics and find cures to deadly diseases.

“The idea started with the frustration that the current system is unsmart,” said Eric Xing, a professor in the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon. “Data is stored in a system. Machine learning and artificial intelligence makes knowledge out of a huge collection of big data. You can make reasoning about it. It’s like an artificial brain at work on the data instead of just a storage system.”

—By Sharon Gaudin

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I M A G E S O U R C E : T H I N K S TO C K . C O M

Kumar

Risky Road to Digitization start

Digitization has moved center stage in enterprises but CIOs say that they aren’t yet well equipped to deal with the risks. BY M A D H AV M O H A N

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The economic landscape is changing in businesses

with an increase in the Indian IT budget. The CIOs are all set to run the digital race in their enterprises.

Digitization has moved to the center stage for CIOs in India, according to Gartner, Inc.’s 2015 CIO Agenda survey results.

But the rapid rise of digital opportunities also brings with it an unprecedented increase in risk to the enterprise. A study carried out by Gartner revealed that 82 percent of CIOs in India are embracing an expanding array of digital opportunities bringing a set of new higher-level risks. But are the enterprises well equipped to deal with the risks? Seventy percent of respondents say that their enterprise isn’t. The survey also revealed that 85 percent believe that they need to improve enterprise agility to deal with these risks.

Also, the survey indicates that Indian IT budget growth of 11.7 percent is one of the highest in the world, whereas the global average is only 1 percent.

Around 74 percent of CIOs expect an increase in their IT budget. Thereby, 41 percent of CIOs in India see

themselves leading the digital change within their enterprises.

The continued massive growth of budgets in 2015 is likely fueled partly by the need for establishing fundamental infrastructure and capabilities, augmented by the new requirements posed by digital business opportunities in cloud, mobile, and analytics figuring prominently in both Indian and global investment priorities.

It’s now important to not only concentrate on the IT budgets and the digitization trend but also on how secure the infrastructure can be.

Madhav Mohan is a correspondent. Send feedback to Madhav_mohan@idgindia.com.

Digitization Brings Potential Risks Few insights into the hurdles of digitization.

Here’s what CIOs say:

Digital opportunities bring a set of new higher-level risks.

82% Businesses are ill-equipped to handle it.

70%

Need to improve enterprise agility to deal with risks.

85% S O U R C E : G a r t n e r ’s 2 0 1 5 C I O A g e n d a S u r vey

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quiFIX ck Ferrying Robots

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An imposing humanoid robot can ferry pedestrians across and then return to its starting point.

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n Vietnam, crossing the road can feel like a life or death experience. A group of university students has deployed a humanoid robot to help people get from one side of the road to another. The researchers from Duy Tan University in central Vietnam installed the humanoid on a wheeled platform and have experimented with it at zebra crossings in Da Nang, according to Vietnamese news media reports. When pedestrians want to cross the street, they grasp its left hand and push a red button. The robot then automatically leads them through traffic to the other side of the road. Once it’s across, the machine says goodbye, turns around and rolls back to its starting point.

—By Tim Hornyak

For more articles, see: www.cio.in/article

WORTH READING B O O K What the CEO Really Wants From You

By R. Gopalakrishnan In this book R. Gopalakrishnan has gleaned wisdom from years of experience and offers readers the benefit of all he has learnt, summarized in the four A’s: Accomplishment, Affability, Advocacy, and Authenticity. This is a book just might bring the answers it takes years to find: What the CEO really expects from you. Amazon.in Rs 299.

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3 Ways for CIOs to Understand Their Company’s Bottom Line SHADOW CO-WORKERS. The best way to learn about departments beyond IT is to have a guide to familiarize you. Or, as Mark Tonnesen, currently CEO of the Santa Clara, California-based startup MapMyID, puts it, “Get out of your seat.” By shadowing co-workers on an ongoing basis, you’ll develop strong insight into not just what they do, but how that contributes to the bottom line.

Jenny Chang, senior project manager for IT strategic services at Oakland, Californiabased Kaiser Permanente, recommends taking as many opportunities to network as possible. Folks in sales and finance are a natural place to start, but keep your vision broad: Employees down at the loading dock can give you logistics insight too.

TALK TO CUSTOMERS. In addition to talking to salespeople in the company, IT executives should also accompany sales reps when they visit customers, or even make arrangements to visit the customers themselves. “I like to walk in [customers’] shoes, to understand how they use our products and services,” says Tonnesen.

GET EDUCATED. Among our sources’ recommendations: Read the annual report, especially studying the profit-and-loss statements. Figure out, as Fenwick says, “which levers to pull in order to change the numbers.” Educate yourself, too, on the board’s goals and how it defines success. Online, there are lots of opportunities to take or audit courses on a variety of topics: accounting, marketing, organizational behavior and more.

Not coincidentally, those topics tend to be the fundamentals within many MBA programs.

Howard Baldwin is a writer and editor. Send feedback to editor@cio.in.

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careerPATH

The New Workers in Town start

If you’re struggling to find high-quality tech talent locally, perhaps you should consider embracing remote work opportunities. BY S H A R O N F LO R E N T I N E

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The war for talent. The IT skills gap. Increased global competition. The tech talent management landscape becomes more cutthroat every day as organizations struggle to hire and retain workers who will give them an edge over their competition. But today’s technology allow savvy businesses a way to tap into a larger, more diverse talent pool, all while increasing productivity and staff retention at the same time.

Today, there’s no reason to avoid offering remote work opportunities or to discount potential candidates because of their geographic location.

Remote Worker Boost Productivity As Jack Santos, research vice president at analyst firm Gartner, said in a recent webinar, organizations risk being less productive if they’re not paying attention to mobile and remote work practices.

And, as current mobility trends continue to accelerate, hiring constraints based on location will all but disappear, except for those positions where an on-site presence is absolutely necessary.

“The current level of mobility is an extension of a trend that’s been happening for a long time. With increased team collaboration via remote and/or mobile technology, there’s definitely a major impact on the hiring practices for organiza-

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tions. With the ability to do work remotely and via mobile, organizations can find that the best talent is available to anyone, no matter where they are,” Santos said in the webinar.

Remote Work Increases Talent Options “To think that a company can only be successful by drawing on a pool of talent that’s geographically local is just not accurate—it’s almost obsolete. By leveraging remote work opportunities and collaboration tools that allow your people to be productive from anywhere, you can reach talent that may be geographically dispersed, or tap into the expertise of working moms, or of other folks who don’t fit into that ‘traditional,’ on-site work environment,” says Sean

O’Brien, executive vice president of strategy and communications with PGi, a provider of remote work and collaboration tools.

In today’s technology-driven business environment, there’s no reason to avoid offering remote work opportunities or to discount potential candidates simply because of their geographic location. “There are so many options available, technologically, to enable remote work, that it’s almost a no-brainer.

Why aren’t more companies taking advantage of these options? The fact is that technology has completely changed the concept of ‘work;’ it’s not just a place you can go, it’s what you can do.,” says O’Brien.

Remote Work Improves Diversity Remote work opportunities go handin-hand with another pressing business concern: Increasing diversity.

Tech talent from under-represented groups—like women and minorities—is out there and in huge numbers, and to reach it, organizations must allow talent to work differently, says Jessica Gilmartin, chief business officer for online collaboration platform Piazza, which helps female STEM students collaborate effectively while in school and helps place female STEM talent with businesses once they graduate.

Send feedback to editor@cio.in.

LEADERSHIPCONVERSATIONS

MOVING TOWARDS AN IT-LED ORGANIZATION On the cusp of Ashok Leyland’s next digital transformation phase, its CIO Venkatesh Natarajan explains why he is excited to initiate an IT-led organization.

Venkatesh Natarajan,

By Shantheri Mallaya

CIO, Ashok Leyland

What are the top two challenges that you face today as an IT leader of your organization?

Ashok Leyland, being 12000 employees strong, with seven manufacturing facilities across India and overseas, and being the second largest commercial vehicle manufacturer in India, has complex business and IT infrastructure requirements. Our IT organization operates on a shared services model across the group companies.

Given these, the priorities that will drive our agenda can manifest as challenges.

The first priority is how to use technology to transform customer experience. Earlier, the key to organizational excellence was vested in superior customer experience.

Now, this has devolved as the key to organizational survival.

The ultimate objective of enhancing external customer experience can be attained if we consistently improve the experience of people within, right down to sales engineers, through tools and techniques that IT would complement.

The second priority as an automotive company surrounds agility in product engineering.

How do you tackle the challenge of innovation management? Also, could you give us an example of such innovation in your company.

We work on the strength of five pillars: Quality, brand, innovation, efficiency and people. Innovation is paramount to building a culture where you allow people to question

and challenge status quo. It also means we are constant benchmarking with local and global standards. We have had sustained success with innovation. About a decade ago, we introduced at the production base, Gemba, a Japanese initiative, the rationale being full alignment of the workmen on the shop floor.

There were different schemes to encourage workmen. All through this process,

"We are looking forward to digital and integrated technology platforms, such as SAP HANA, that would be bringing in the much needed agility to be an IT-led organization. " IT came up with a platform to help with ideation, evaluation and also the metrics to measure outcomes, mapped through the IT solution.

This solution has now been institutionalized and has been much appreciated in the industry as a unique initiative. A more recent initiative is value engineering. This initiative seeks to optimize value internally and externally. IT has again provided comprehensive tools to support this innovation.

What is your take on big data technologies such as in-memory database and enterprise mobility?

Let me put in context, Ashok Leyland’s IT journey which has been marked by three phases. The first one, IT 1.0, till around 2009 was about decentralized systems. IT 2.0, which was between 2010 and 2014, was a watershed in our technology transformation journey. Now, I have presented IT 3.0 for the next 36 months. I envisage us evolving into an IT-led organization. If you see, decisions are increasingly being taken based on facts. Our objective is to engage with and integrate an entire ecosystem externally.

We encourage the culture to expand the digital footprint. We also aim to be a data-driven organization internally, at a granular level. All of this would be possible only by bolstering the technologies that go with this. We are one of the early adopters of the in-memory computing offered in SAP HANA for business acceleration but also a robust platform to build a ‘real time enterprise’. HANA, we believe, is the technology platform for realizing our vison of a ‘Digital Ashok Leyland’.

This interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with SAP

world Fresh Ideas from Around the Globe

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After Nepal Earthquake, Internet Connectivity is Key

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K AT H M A N D U The Internet played an important role in communications in Nepal after a devastating earthquake, as phone links were choked by the large number of people trying to connect. Internet service was disrupted after the earthquake hit near the capital city of Kathmandu and cloud services provider Akamai said its traffic to the country saw a steep decline.

Nepal Telecom survived the earthquake while smaller Internet service providers experienced outages, Internet performance monitoring company Dyn said. Google has deployed its Person Finder to help track people in Nepal. The Web application lets people post or search for information on relatives and friends affected by a disaster. Google first built the tool in response to the January 2010 Haiti earthquake. IDG News Service

UNICEF Taps Snapchat to Aid Children Fleeing Boko Haram

SIERRA LEONE UNICEF has turned to Snapchat for a social media campaign highlighting the plight of the 800,000 children who have been forced to flee their homes in northeast Nigeria by the conflict raging between the military and Boko Haram insurgents. To reinforce the message of its new report, Missing Childhoods, UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) is using Snapchat for the first time. The agency is sharing images from leading Snapchat artists based on drawings by children in Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon. IDG News Service

Drone Found on Roof of Japanese PM’s Office

TOKYO A camera-equipped drone carrying

a bottle marked with the radioactive symbol was discovered on the roof of the Japanese prime minister’s office in central Tokyo. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was away at the time, attending a regional conference in Indonesia.

The drone was discovered close to the building’s heliport by a worker at around 10:20 am, who raised the alarm and called the police, according to local media reports. IDG News Service

What’s with Africa’s Cyberattack Trap?

NAIROBI The rapid development of Internet access throughout Africa has not been accompanied by an equivalent increase in awareness of security issues, opening up the possibility of a rise in cyberattacks. With many countries testing 4G broadband technology, an increasing number of Africans are being introduced to the Internet through mobile devices. Most new users are excited and would click on almost anything, oblivious to lurking dangers, according to Mikhail Nagorny, head of Business Development and Security Intelligence Services at Kaspersky Lab. IDG News Service

–Compiled by IDG News Service from CIO magazine affiliates worldwide

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grow innovation and business value

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Channeling Social Media Sony Entertainment Television India launched a social media command center to analyze audience views and better craft content. By Madhav Mohan Want to bring up the results of a recent hashtag campaign or the feedback of your customers

and fans with the tap of your finger? Social Media Command Center is the answer! Real-time feeds of social activity can transform every business. And Sony was quick to take advantage of it.

Consider this: It’s 5:00 pm, time to head home, eat food and watch your favorite television serial which is in tune with your expectations. You post on any social platform about the show. With company’s social media command center, your view and sentiments are observed and if it is not in-line with your expectation, the show may have certain changes to bring the sensibility of the viewers.

“We wanted to touch base the television viewers and understand their sentiments, views and trends.

We were looking for a better methodology and tools with expertise in social understanding,” Ajay Kumar Meher, SVP-IT and Post Production, Sony Entertainment Television India, says.

The project was initiated and proposed to the management in September 2014. The implementation started in November 2014 and completed in January 2015.

••••••••••••• 57% of CIOs state data quality problems as the top barrier to adopting BI/analytics products enterprisewide. SOTC 2015 •••••••••••••

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Hurdles En route to Mobility

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At the command center, there are eight Mobility is now a seasoned word in the tech industry. television screens. Multiple activities can Every other company seems to be deriving tangible be shown on the TV sets. For instance, one benefits out of mobility. But getting here hasn’t been screen could show the tweets, the other easy. Here are the top challenges organizations overcould be twitter influencers. “You can create a cumulative of the eight screens came to launch mobility initiative: Securing data access 42% into one single screen or break them into smaller screens.”

Defining a business case 37% Then, the data analyzers do a brainOptimizing business apps for a mobile UI 35% storming session where they look into Determining ROI 33% trends of all their brands, competition Skill level of internal IT staff 29% stand and make sense of it. The analyzers S O U R C E : S OTC 2 0 1 5 also give objective or actionable things to each and every aspect with respect to sales, marketing, and programming.

“For example, a negative comment about any channel or show can create a negative impact on any social platform and can trigger a conversation. A real-time monitoring on such conversa“We have tion can help in positive management. That’s the prime reaped benefit of a command center,” handsome says Ajay Kumar Meher.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a tiny wireless Besides, a trending dis- dividends with trackpad that can be worn on a thumbnail. cussion on social media this project.”

Called NailO, the prototype trackpad is similar to helps Sony Entertainment to —Ajay Kumar Meher, SVP-IT, the stick-on nails sometimes used as a fashion put a show in the right conand Post Production, accessory. The researchers say an advantage text, so that the reach of the of the device is that it’s discrete. Running a Sony Entertainment programme improves. “For finger over a thumbnail is a natural activity, so Television India example, Swach Bharat is a most people wouldn’t notice this as a deliberpopular discussion today, capturing the attention of people. ate action to control a device. It attaches to the Subsequently, we incorporated the idea of cleanliness on our user’s thumb and can be controlled by running show– Tarak Mehta Ka Ulta Chasma,” Meher says. a finger over its surface. It can also be an easier control option than a traditional trackpad or As much as the project may seem interesting and easy, it mouse in some situations. The processor, did pose challenges. Ajay says, though the SMCC project was battery, sensing chip and Bluetooth radio are cost-effective, it was difficult explaining and putting forward included on a circuit board that sits under the the benefits to all the stake holders. capacitive trackpad. The two are connected via But, Sony Entertainment gained feet after implementing a small ribbon cable, which means the trackpad this project. “We have reaped handsome dividends with the is not quite as thin as a stick-on nail, but reduccommand center because the response time is quick and ing the size is one of the aims of the researchgood. One gets information on a real time basis,” Meher says. ers. Researchers are looking to consolidate the

Trackpad on Your Thumbnail

Send feedback to madhav_mohan@idgindia.com.

components into a single chip, which will make it smaller and reduce power consumption, said Artem Dementyev, a graduate student in media arts and sciences and one of the developers.

—Martyn Williams

•••••••••••• 52% of CIOs say security policies hinder collaboration in their enterprise. SOTC 2015•••••••••••••

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IT SECURITY

IT is the Doctor

A good physician has to find out what ails the patient rather than just prescribe what the patient requests. IT needs to behave like that. BY PAU L G L E N

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’ve been privileged to meet IT professionNon-technical users ask us to make changes to applials around the world, and I’m always struck cations, security or databases; they request that we by their many fine qualities. One of the most purchase new technology; or they ask us to develop common of these is the desire to help others. As something new from scratch, and we eagerly comply. a group, IT people believe in progress and hold And in doing so, we deprive them of the benefits of that technology can be an important part of making our expertise. people’s lives better. At work, we like We become order takers rather to see that our products contribute to As IT professionals, than professionals. the efficiency, effectiveness and hapIn the process, we not only miss we aren’t really piness of users and consumers. the opportunity to serve our constitudoing our job unless Wanting to help is great, but ents well, but we also transform our we determine what self-image. sometimes we instead seek merely to will be helpful, please. They are not at all the same Instead of thinking of ourselves as thing. competent, caring experts to be conregardless of what When all you want to do is to sulted the way a patient would conwas asked for. please your users, you become overly sult a doctor, we imagine ourselves eager to say yes to every request. The being involved in retail transactions problem with that is that requests need to be examwith “customers.” But thinking of our stakeholders ined. You have to dig and find out what it is that the as customers comes with unfortunate associations. users actually want to accomplish. When you do “The customer is always right,” they say, and no that, you will find often enough that what is being one wants to alienate a customer. But doctors somerequested isn’t the best way to achieve the real goal— times have to deliver difficult news and convince and sometimes it won’t even come close. patients that what they want may be bad for them or As IT professionals, we aren’t really doing our job not accomplish what they imagine it will. unless we determine what will be helpful, regardless Of course, in many organizations our reputation of what was asked for. Being experts in technology is exactly the opposite. We are known as the “Departcarries a professional responsibility to do more than ment of No.” simply fill orders.

This happens when we attempt to take on the proImagine a doctor who, when a patient asks for a fessional role and advise our stakeholders clumsily. prescription for Prozac, instantly responds, “Sure.

Instead of trying to understand what they want to What dose would you like?” No history-taking, no accomplish, we simply explain why they can’t have conversation, no tests. Such a doctor would be guilty what they want. of malpractice.

No doctor worthy of the title simply fulfills every prescription request that comes her way. Doctors are experts in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, and they shouldn’t start treatment until they have Paul Glen is the co-author of The Geek Leader’s Handbook and performed their own assessment of the patient’s cona principal of Leading Geeks, an education and consulting firm. dition. But we do the IT version of this all the time.

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VIEW from the TOP Phee Teik Yeoh, CEO, Vistara

Phee Teik Yeoh, CEO, Vistara, on why he believes a focus on service and innovation will make Vistara India’s airline of choice.

How is the Indian aviation sector differ from other Asian countries?

The Indian Aviation sector has immense growth potential, though it is yet not a mature market compared to its Asian

BY S U N I L S H A H counterparts. Indian carriers operate about 450 aircrafts, compared 1,800 in Chinese. Compared to other Asian counWhat’s Vistara doing to create competitive differentiation? tries, a very low percentage of Indians At Vistara, innovation is at the core of our operations and service. travel by air; about 60 million tickets are Take for example, our auto check-in service. If customers have not sold annually in India. That’s means less self-checked-in four hours prior to departure time, we auto check them than three percent of Indians fly comon their flight and send their boarding pass via SMS or e-mail. OT take pared to over 50 percent of Malaysians. our loyalty program Club Vistara, where loyalty points are accrued Here’s another indicator: Indonesia based on actual spend on the fare, rather than miles travelled. has 57 scheduled airlines; India has only We’ve also launched in-flight entertainment providing Vistara’s about a handful. So the Business Class customers with Samsung Galaxy tablets huge reservoir of potential with preloaded content. Vistara’s entire fleet will incorpoIndia can be in the Indian aviation space rate this modern IFE (in-flight entertainment) solution in remains underutilized. the next six months enabling inflight wireless streaming well poised The cost of operations of content on the PEDs (portable electronic devices) of to achieve in India is very high. ATF customers in Premium Economy and Economy cabins. its vision of in India is far costlier Besides being pioneering, this system lowers the than many other parts of overall weight of the aircraft compared to aircraft with becoming the the world. The lack of an incorporated back-of-the-seat entertainment. third-largest MRO ecosystem in India is aviation market another glaring gap. These Is offering higher levels of service sustainable, are some of the factors that given Kingfisher’s experience? by 2020. hinder the sector’s growth.

Yes it is sustainable. For us, consistently delivering a high The aviation environstandard of services is a given. Our strategy is determined ment in other Asian countries is much by the unique value proposition we offer based on our brand promise more liberal. In China, regional governof delighting our customers with intuitive thoughtfulness. ments strategically support airlines, to boost connectivity and economic benefits.

What role does IT play in ensuring higher levels of service?

The health of the aviation sector is an IT plays is the lead enabler of high quality services to Vistara’s customindicator of a country’s prosperity. With ers. It is also an absolute necessity to provide strong IT support to our supportive policies and an enabling business units and teams who are directly or indirectly involved in environment, India can be well poised to customer interface. achieve its vision of becoming the thirdOur IFE solution is a pioneering concept backed by state-of-art largest aviation market by 2020 and the technology. While deploying Wi-Fi onboard would elevate the flying largest by 2030. experience of our customers, it will require prior government approvals and infrastructure. We would definitely like to offer onboard Wi-Fi connectivity to our customers soon.

Send feedback to sunil_shah@idgindia.com.

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grow

grow

Vistara Takes on the Competition

The New Age of Business-ready IT:

The Fastest got Faster CIOs talk about the challenges of a BI investment, developing trends like HANA and the benefits they derive from it. By Madhav Mohan

C

IOs today are confronted with multiple emerging trends, in the face of rising competition and pressure to scale operations across geographies. Practical, reliable roadmaps for innovation are critical as is smooth operation of technology systems-without debilitating delays that can stall progress and destroy the credibility of your IT department. Cost and time to innovation is critical and awareness of the traps essential.In order to gain a deeper understanding of big data, in-memory analytics and converged infrastructure, HP in association with CIO magazine conducted a roundtable at Gurgaon.

“In recent years, the power of hardware has gone up by 1000 times affecting business intelligence and warehousing. That said, the limiting factor is the hardware which means one has to design the BI system well in advance for warehousing. It’s important for one to be sure of dimensions, so that they can easily analyze them and do real time analysis,” said S S Mathur, GM – IT, Centre For Railway Information Systems.

SAP HANA has numerous benefits like delivering on the promise of real time analytics, helping one to manage risks in real time and giving business insights in order to give better and faster decisions.

Many organizations have benefitted tremendously with HANA. Take Greenply Industries, for instance. “We recently went for HANA because the basic need of the business was real-time data. When sales people work, they want to do inventory planning and see the trends. Before we introduced HANA, it was challenging for them to get real-time data from

the system and wanted to check everything with their mobile devices,” said Vineet Bansal, GM-IT, Greenply Industries.

He even said that with SAP HANA one can analyze information and import data from other data sources.

Moreover, integration of systems can also be done making it more powerful.

Highlighting this point, Farhan Khan, VP–IT, Radico Khaitan said that innovations like SAP HANA are going to be game changing in nature. “In BI, if the consumption of information is high, then the ROI will be good,” she said.

Keeping in mind that customers are deploying mission critical applications on open platforms, HP has redesigned the system for HANA to deliver top performance and additional resiliency features demanded by such applications. “HP has multiple operating systems on a single server because people are looking to consolidate multiple independent systems on to a single server. For example, businesses are moving to a 6 TB type system and scaling it up to 12 TB,” said Pankaj Ghai, country product manager, HP Server.

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[Q+A]

Security’s Fine Balance grow

Julie Cullivan, CIO, FireEye speaks about how security is becoming a boardroom issue globally and how to maintain a balance between security and productivity. BY S H U B H R A R I S H I

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How did you handle the transition from a sales and operations role to a CIO at FireEye? I think the change has been good for me. I sometimes joke about how the transition was a payback for all the CIOs that I have given a hard time in my previous role as a sales and marketing operations head.From a business operations point of view, my role involves getting the traditional IT guys to plan and think from a business perspective. I also knew that as a

Balance security with productivity, to figure out whether the risk is worth the tradeoff.

CIO, I would need to build a strong team with a deep tech experience– particularly on the infrastructure side.

Interestingly, with a fast growing company such as ours, as much as there was an opportunity to implement business applications, the real focus was always to build an infrastructure that could scale globally. As we opened a facility in India, started call centers around the globe, and expanded sales offices, there was a lot of emphasis on making sure that we not only had the right infrastructure, but we had the right security built around this infrastructure.

Research has indicated that

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security is still not a boardroom discussion. Is that right?

It wasn’t a boardroom discussion until there was a surge in the securityrelated incidents in the industry. But now we are seeing that these dynamics are beginning to change in the US. Today, business must understand the security strategy that CISO needs to put in place. It’s because you don’t want a CISO to decide what the controls are without asking business what the controls might mean to them.

At FireEye, we have put together an Executive Security Steering Committee that’s cross functional and part of our discussion weighs in on decisions. The committee meets once

a quarter to discuss different vulnerabilities in the security space, security budgets, and take decisions in the context of risks. We are lucky at FireEye that we can use all of our own tech and services to help protect the company.

So we don’t need to debate on what technology to implement, but we need to get the buy-in from business in order to put more controls in place.

Despite the rise in security incidents, banks are enabling transactions on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

So where do you think is this confidence coming from?

Banks have made a ton of investments in the financial space. They were one of the industries that early on started to build on a comprehensive security strategy. The banks that FireEye engages with need to have a mandate to have a high security component attached to every IT initiative that they embark on. For instance, how are they going to protect their customer’s information is a discussion they need to have at the time of commencing a project than at the end. They are trying to balance opportunities with a security model that can support it. At FireEye, the CISO and I have a responsibility to make sure that we balance security with productivity and market opportunity such that we can figure out whether the risk is worth the tradeoff.

Send feedback to Shubhra_rishi@idgindia.com.

leadership and operational excellence

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Perks On-board IT Cruize

A new reservations system lets the cruise line personalize ticket prices for each customer. BY S T E P H A N I E OV E R BY

Royal Caribbean Cruises made a splash last fall with the launch of a new ship, Quantum of the

Seas, which is equipped with tablets for check-in, RFID wristbands for guests, a robotic bartender and a “viewing capsule” that lifts passengers 300 feet above sea level.

The vessel, which Royal Caribbean calls a “smartship,” is intended to wow would-be passengers with an array of onboard technologies. The second-largest cruise line in the world also deployed state-of-the-art IT systems behind the scenes: Fine-tuned pricing software generates personalized discounts, changing the customer’s experience even before boarding.

Royal Caribbean replaced its rigid proprietary reservations software with a more flexible system atop a business rules engine from IBM. “The original reservations system and pricing model was fashioned after the fare codes used by airlines, which ultimately didn’t

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align well with the more dynamic environment we are in,” says Santiago Abraham, vice president of global business solutions at the $8 billion (about Rs 48,000 crore) cruise line.

Royal Caribbean can now get more creative with its offers. For example, it can launch campaigns on the fly if a particular voyage isn’t selling well, or enable customers to use all of the offers for which they qualify. In the past, starting a new promotion took weeks, because IT had to build systems to support it. And there was no automated way for customers to combine of all their personal discounts—say, one for being member of the Crown and Anchor loyalty program, another for being a senior and yet another for being a resident of Florida. Cruisers had to call Royal Caribbean for workarounds. “It was difficult for a guest to decipher the best price we could give,” says Abraham.

Now customers automatically get the best offer based on which discounts can be combined, he says. And that makes for a much improved customer experience.

“This makes sense for cruise lines, especially if they are sending these targeted offers to their existing customers,” says Mark Ferguson, a management professor at the University of South Carolina. Cruise lines typically collect and keep more data about customers than airlines or hotels do, because they track onboard spending habits over the entire trip, he says.

Offering a discounted base price to a customer known to spend a lot of money on extras aboard ship is likely to be more profitable than offering discounts to everyone based on a simpler trigger, such as the timing of when a ticket is purchased, he says. Royal Caribbean is known for courting repeat customers. The company says that as many as 50 percent of the people on a cruise are repeat passengers.

“We can get much more dynamic because it’s all built into the system,” Abraham says. Revenue analysts and marketers can create and launch promotions in hours, as they did with the 123Go! campaign, through which passengers on Royal Caribbean’s Celebrity Cruises can choose one of three perks: free beverages, covered gratuities or an onboard credit.

That program is expected to have paid for itself by the end of this year.

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Things You Need to Know ABOUT HYBRID CLOUDS

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THE DEFINITION VARIES. There’s no consensus definition for what makes up a hybrid cloud environment, says IDC analyst Benjamin McGrath. “At the very least, it requires a mix of cloud and/or on-premises IT,” he says. “But some would add the requirement for the entire environment to be managed under the same umbrella. And some would add a portability component, where workloads can shift across public and private clouds, or non-clouds, as needed.”

Hybrid clouds are more than just private and public cloud combinations, says Gartner analyst Ed Anderson. “Hybrid cloud is anytime you combine two or more clouds in a coordinated configuration,” he says. Vendors like to position hybrid cloud as the combination of their private cloud offerings and their public cloud offerings, Anderson says, but that is “only a small subset of the possible hybrid cloud configurations.”

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START PLANNING NOW. Whatever cloud technology it has today, a company is likely to end up with a hybrid cloud in the near future, Anderson says. “It’s better to be proactive and establish a framework for hybrid cloud now, so as new cloud services are introduced to the environment they have a home,” he says.

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THIS IS THE BIG LEAGUES. “Organizations with a hybrid cloud strategy are generally more advanced both in terms the people within the organization and the processes in which they engage with their technologies,” McGrath says. “A hybrid cloud environment is the goal state for a lot of cloud-using organizations.”

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MANY TOOLS ARE AVAILABLE. The tools to manage hybrid clouds come from many sources, including cloud management vendors, IT operations management vendors, pure-play cloud management startups and cloud service providers—which have their own tools for their platforms, Anderson says. “Organizations implementing hybrid cloud should consider their wide array of options, most likely including the IT operations management tools they are using today,” he says.

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EXPECT MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES. Organizations that aspire to having a hybrid cloud strategy face big challenges because they must get to the point where they have a unified service catalog for IT resources and the ability to define cloud management policies and service-level agreements, McGrath says. “A lot of organizations have adopted some sort of cloud, or even some public and private clouds, and nearly everyone still runs some workloads on-premises,” he says. “But the key to a hybrid cloud environment is being able to manage those different deployment options.”

—Bob Violino

POPULAR SCIENCE

Re-energizing Batteries

Researchers have built a new battery could reduce phone charging to just one minute—and its safer and cheaper than lithium ion. BY M A RT Y N W I L L I A M S

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esearchers at Stanford University have devel-

oped a new battery that can be recharged in about a minute and is safer than the lithium ion cells used in everything from smartwatches to passenger jets. It could one day mean super-fast charging of smartphones and other gadgets.

The battery uses aluminum-ion cells, which are much cheaper than lithium-ion. They’re also high performance and are not prone to bursting into flames or exploding when damaged, as lithium ion batteries can do. “Our new battery won’t catch fire, even if you drill through it,” said Dai Hongjie, a professor of chemistry at Stanford.

Research on aluminum-ion batteries isn’t new but a sticking point to a commercial product has always been finding suitable materials for the anode and cathode that maintain their performance over repeated charge and discharge cycles.

“We accidentally discovered that a simple solution is to use graphite,” said Hongjie.

The result is a battery that can survive 7,500 charging cycles without losing performance. That’s well over the

A 3D Scanner Phone?

US researchers have developed a camera chip that could give smartphones the ability to take 3D scans of everyday objects, a sought-after feature in the 3D-printing world.

Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) said their device is based on a cheap silicon chip less than 1 millimeter square and it can produce 3D scans with extremely fine resolution.

The chips could be incorporated into phones and the data could be sent to 3D printers to duplicate scanned objects, eliminating the need to use large desktop devices.

roughly 100 cycles that other prototype aluminum-ion batteries can last at present and also more than the typical 1,000 cycles from current lithium-ion batteries.

The prototype developed by Hongjie’s team combines an aluminum anode with a graphite cathode in a pouch of an ionic liquid electrolyte, which means the battery is also flexible. That’s an attractive feature for electronics companies, looking to squeeze batteries into tiny open space inside products, and even car makers, which want to layer batteries around curves inside the body of automobiles.

So what’s the catch? The current prototype produces about 2 volts, which is less than the 3.6 volts from a conventional lithium-ion battery, and its energy density—the amount of electrical energy stored in a given unit of mass— is also lower. The battery developed by Standard has an energy density of 40 watts per kilogram compared to between 100 and 260 watts per kilogram for lithium ion.

But the Stanford team is optimistic that these problems can be overcome.

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The device works by shining beams of light, which are perfectly aligned, on a targeted object. It then detects subtle differences in the light that is reflected back from that object. The differences help it build a digital 3D image of the target.

To shine the light, the device uses an array of tiny LIDAR (light detection and ranging) laser beam scanners. Useful for measuring distance, LIDAR elements have been used for years in applications such as navigation for driverless cars and robots.

The light that is reflected off the object is picked up by a small 4 x 4 grid of detectors. The detectors act like pixels in that they measure the phase, frequency and intensity of the incoming light and

assign a distance value to each pixel in the 3D image of the object that has been scanned.

The researchers used the proof of concept camera chip to create a 3D scan of a US penny from half a meter away. The scan features micron-level resolution as well as the larger undulations on the penny’s surface that are nearly invisible to the naked eye.

The 16-pixel array could be increased to hundreds of thousands to create larger, more powerful arrays for applications such as helping driverless cars avoid obstacles, according to Caltech.

—By Tim Hornyak

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TECH : : RADAR Periscope is a Security Risk

Periscope, a live video streaming app that Twitter bought, has the potential to create a huge security hole for organizations. Can it be plugged? B Y S U N I L S H A H

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“If and when this reaches broad adoption, the job of the CIO will get harder. Anything happening inside the ter bought last month, has been making waves “walls” of your enterprise (virtual and physical) can be live across the world—except in enterprise secustreamed. Risk just skyrocketed,” says Brian Vellmure, a rity departments. And that makes it a ticking management consultant, on SocialMediaToday.com. time bomb.

So what can CIOs or CSOs do? It’s tricky and right What is Periscope? It’s an app your staffers can now there are no clear answers. If the app’s on a company download and use to live stream any event in your office. phone, an MDM solution could be used to create a geoThink your next board meeting, your CEO dressing down fence and ensure that cameras are shut off within a fence. someone, the HR team deciding who’s going in the next The challenge with that is that 60 percent of Indian round of layoff, you get the idea. organizations don’t use an MDM, according to CIO India But so what? Security risks stemming from mobile research. And, in any case, a lot of people have two phones, video have been around since phones got cameras. The or use personal phones at work, on which enterprises can’t difference with Periscope is that video is really apply security policies. being live-streamed, eating into an enter“The risk has “MDM is fine but with personal prises ability to do damage control. always been phones, it becomes an issue,” says “The risk has always been there with there with mobile Saravade. mobile phones,” says Parag Deodhar, Another approach could be to conphones. But it’s Chief Risk Officer and CISO, Bharti AXA trol live-streaming apps like Periscope General Insurance. “But it’s amplified amplified now. from the network. But how do you now. Now it’s live.”

Now it’s live.” control a personal phone using 3G? Should Periscope go to the top of Parag Deodhar, Chief Risk Officer Cellular jamming is another option, but your list of security challenges, just and CISO, Bharti AXA General that would affect productivity. now? Depends on who you ask. No Insurance You could, of course, call for a ban one’s been hit by a Periscope-style sting on personal phones, “but that’s probably the last decision operation—yet. But, just like when social media first came you’ll make in that organization,” says Mishra laughing. about, it’s only a matter of time. Right now Periscope is Saravade says that tackling such a challenge requires only available on the App Store, though it’s threatening to maturity and education. “Security assurance depends on a be released on the Play Store. framework which includes people, processes, and technol“It’s a serious problem,” says Ashish Mishra, the CISO ogy.” It’s important, he says, to ensure a company’s privacy at a large retailer. policy expands to take live streaming apps like Periscope Not everyone agrees with that assessment. “In my into account. The next step is to educate users about the personal opinion, this is another case of an innovation policy and enforce it. that could turn into a risk. But I don’t rate this as a high He also believes that the law, which he says is maturchallenge,” says Nandkumar Saravade, an independent ing fast in India, needs to catch up with innovations like security advisor. “Spy cameras and other video recording Periscope. Currently the IT Act covers voyeurism, but not equipment has been around for some time.” the broadcasting of confidential company data.

Meanwhile, Periscope has been getting a lot of Someone’s going to blow the whistle on the whistling interest. On the App Store, Periscope is in the top 30 app; the question is: Will it be before or after an embardownloads in the US, and the top 50 in the UK. In India, rassing incident? it’s not in the top 145 most popular App Store down-

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eriscope, a live video streaming app that Twit-

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loads, which is probably why it hasn’t yet made waves in CISO circles in India. “It’s not being discussed. Not yet.

Periscope is very new and it’s still not reached Indian shores,” says Deodhar.

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Ransomware: Pay it or fight it?

Experts recommend fighting back against CryptoWall and other ransomware, but for many the $500 ransom is a small price to pay. B Y C O L I N N E A G L E

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sk security experts

what to do when hit with ransomware— the sophisticated malware that infects a device or network, uses military-grade encryption to restrict access, and demands payment for the decryption key—and you’ll typically get the same answer: “never pay the ransom.”

But for many, that’s simply not an option. For example, last November an employee in the Sheriff’s Department in Dickinson County, Tennessee, accidentally clicked on a malicious ad and exposed the office network to the infamous CryptoWall ransomware.

Even after consulting with the FBI and US military, McCliss said that the only solution was to pay the $500 to the cybercriminals to get their files back.

The truth today is that whether or not an enterprises is prepared for ransomware, they have no option other than to negotiate with their hostage takers.

Organizations that employ real-time backup and frequently test their tools typically survive a ransomware attack unscathed—they can simply wipe the infected device and restore the backed-up files.

But this is hardly the reality for many organizations, especially for mid-sized companies with limited to no IT resources or even larger organizations whose IT staff is spread thin. Even organizations that have prepared for this kind of scenario often find that their file restore functions don’t work, says Stu Sjouwer-

man, CEO of security training firm KnowBe4, which has advised and assisted victims of ransomware.

From there, the decision to pay basically comes down to whether the data that was encrypted is worth more than the ransom demanded.

In most of these cases, paying the ransom is a “no-brainer”, Sjouwerman says. That’s because ransomware is largely automated, demanding around $500 in exchange for the decryption key for

the price within a reasonable range will increase the chances that more victims will pay.

Along these lines, many of the people behind ransomware have focused on creating a trustworthy reputation on the Internet, honoring all ransom payments and leaving victims alone once the exchange has been made. In December, Sjouwerman said a new strain of ransomware called OphionLocker was designed to recognize the devices

Many of the people behind ransomware focus on creating a trustworthy reputation, honoring ransom payments and leaving victims alone once payment’s been made. all victims. The ransom for a police department’s evidence is the same for a personal PC user’s photos.

“Ransomware is the Walmart of cybercrime. They just have decided to automate the whole process,” Sjouwerman says. “And they are massively phishing as many email addresses and companies as they possibly can. For them, they have figured out that the business model is: Some people will have backups, some people won’t. Of the people that don’t, it has to be a no-brainer.”

The cybercriminals behind these attacks are concerned with maximizing the likelihood of their victims paying the ransom. Theoretically, they could increase the payout for cases where they’ve encrypted more valuable data. But the key is to make sure they pay up, and keeping

it had already infected so that it doesn’t hit the same victims repeatedly. And in his experience working with ransomware victims, Sjouwerman says every victim that has paid the required ransom amount did receive their decryption key, most within an hour of payment.

The IT security community may advise against paying the ransom as a means of removing the incentive for cybercriminals to engage in this kind of scam. But that is usually the last thing on the minds of IT decision makers who just want to get their files back and get back to work.

For an organization that faces losing weeks’ or months’ worth of data, they can write off the expense as a learning experience.

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DE G CON STRUCT

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IT departments are constantly reorganizing, but a few companies have gone so far as to break the traditional IT department into pieces.

BY KIM S. NASH

et ready for the disappearing IT department. Companies including Zappos, GameStop, Aetna and AccuWeather have restructured IT, sometimes radically, to respond to some harsh economic and technologic forces bearing down on CIOs. Zappos, which has been called “one of the most blissed-out businesses in America,” is exploding its entire hierarchy to replace it with what might be the equivalent of a corporate commune. The company spent 2014 reinventing itself as a holacracy, embracing an organizing principle akin to democracy—including a 31-page constitution.

Spontaneity and distributed power are hallmarks of holacracy, where people work in groups, or circles, according to their enthusiasms. The circles are rearranged as new projects emerge or colleagues choose to pursue something else. Employees take suggestions, not orders. Decision-making is pushed down, often to the lowest rungs (if there were rungs). Former managers become “lead links” who offer coaching but don’t approve or reject ideas.

“It’s a radical approach, and we’re passionate about trying it,” says Brent Cromley, CTO at Zappos. “We want everyone thinking about how we can improve things, not just a select few at a time or a group set aside to do innovation.”

Traditional org charts show lines and boxes, but a holacracy has clots of circles meant to merge and divide like amoeba under a microscope.

Not every revamp goes to the Zappos extreme but some CIOs are feeling pressure to change the IT group amid new business realities.

Marketing chiefs and other non-IT executives now encroach, or want to encroach, on technology decisions. Tech is changing faster than ever, while financial slumps and internal bureaucracy can inhibit quick response. And customers won’t wait.

Walt Disney Parks and Resorts reorganized its global IT operation in October, aiming to double the share of technologists working on innovation from 30 percent to more than 60 percent. General Electric has formed agile and sometimes self-governing teams. Other CIOs have abolished IT groups focused on technologies, such as email or the datacenter, and have reorganized to target business goals, such as customer acquisition or globalization, says Andrew Horne, a managing director at the Corporate Executive Board.

COVER STORY :: IT Management

Companies are struggling to transform into digital versions of themselves, often with no clear idea of what they will look like at the end. The IT group, Horne says, must be ready for anything.

“We see companies trying to create a structure that is flexible enough to be able to succeed regardless of the type of demand for technology, the type of economy or the direction the company goes,” he says.

Done well, a dramatic overhaul can make IT responsive to the unknown.

Done poorly, you fertilize staff resentment about too much change or deadend jobs on legacy systems. There are no best practices for the bleeding edge.

Just a few intrepid CIOs.

Born to Change

Zappos reorganized into a holacracy, which emphasizes spontaneity and distributed power. “It’s a radical approach and we’re passionate about trying it,” says CTO Brent Cromley.

As soon as corporate IT was born six decades ago, someone no doubt wanted to change it. We’ve seen the pendulum swing from centralized to decentralized and back. Invisible backroom mechanics became service providers, who became business partners.

What’s different today is the degree of uncertainty about what the IT group is if virtually all companies are now built on technology. CIOs themselves are divided about their own futures. In the 2015 State of the CIO survey (the US version), 49 percent of 558 IT leaders said they’re destined to become managers of contractors and cloud vendors— hardly strategic. Indeed, sometimes old ideas and established leaders don’t cut it. RSA Insurance Group in London cleaned house last year, replacing several senior executives, including all IT leaders and the CIO. RSA also created the position of chief digital officer as it tries to move to “more disciplined and effective use of technology.”

At Aetna, a move to explore ways of generating new revenue led the health

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Holacracy At Work Berlin startup Blinkist has adopted Holacracy, a working method that allows employees to govern and run a company without any management. And it’s helping grow revenues.

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Berlin startup whose book summarization app was voted as one of the best apps on the market by Apple last year has decided to remove the job titles of all of its staff as part of an effort to put everyone on a level playing field and create a self-governed organization.

The company, made up of 25 people and known as Blinkist, said it chose to adopt the newly-coined “holacracy” approach in a bid to replace hierarchies with a formal set of rules that allow employees to govern and run the organization without management.

Blinkist cofounder Sebastian Klein said: “Holacracy fits our company’s culture very well since we’ve always been a bunch of similarly smart people, where it seemed pretty counterproductive to have just a few of us call the shots while the others slaved away.”

The search for alternative organizational structures is growing among start-ups. Last year London web design and big data consultancy startup Outlandish ‘gave’ itself to its employees, in a model it copied from the UK retailer John Lewis.

Since adopting holacracy earlier this year, an approach that has also been embraced by US firm Zappos, Blinkist claims it has become more flexible, allowing it to significantly grow its revenues.

The working method has tremendous effects on productivity, motivation, and the use of creative potentials, said Klein.

Blinkist aims to help people fit more reading and learning into their day by taking high quality nonfiction books and summarizing their key insights into a bite-sized, made-for-mobile format. Each insight is called a “blink”, and an entire set of “blinks” from a book takes up to 15 minutes to read. At the moment, there are over 500 books on the platform, with more than 40 new books added each month.

“We were able to launch a big new feature (audio summaries) that we had thought would be impossible to do before,” said Klein. “We thought we would need to hire a couple of new people and spend a lot of money, but with our new structure, we didn’t need either. Even the idea of launching this new feature came from within the team, rather than from the founders.”

Blinkist is confident that an increasing number of startups and larger firms will transition to holacracy in coming years.

“We are confident that this is the future of running any successful organization,” said Klein. “Right now, we still have leaders and management-centred companies dominating our business world (such as Apple or Microsoft), but there is already a trend towards less hierarchical, more decentralized companies, as can be seen in Google or Amazon, for example.”

But not all of Blinkist’s employees were able to embrace the new working method.

“Implementing change almost always leads to resistance among a few who are trying to maintain the status quo,” said Klein. “Also, some employees are less prone to self-governance than others and hence struggle a bit to adapt to the new freedom.”

— By Sam Shead

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insurer spin out a new business unit from IT in 2011. The unit, rebranded as Healthagen in 2013, includes technology and health companies Aetna had acquired, and it offers new services based on data analytics. Hospitals, physicians and employers buy software and data products from Healthagen, essentially making it a vendor, says Brian Garcia, CTO of the unit. It could offer an alternative career path for Aetna’s IT professionals—Garcia used to be Aetna’s chief architect for software.

Race for Creativity Innovation—the desire to nurture it, the fear of it fizzling—is a prime driver of big IT reorgs. But finding the best IT structure to promote innovation is a problem that continues to vex CIOs. Seventy-four percent of respondents to the US State of the CIO survey said it’s challenging to find the right balance between business innovation and operational excellence.

The dramatic restructuring at Zappos is intended to reignite innovation, says CTO Cromley. The online retailer, which started with shoes and now sells all kinds of clothing and accessories, has never been a typical company. Employees are known as Zapponians, and they live to wow customers. In fact, the company’s No. 1 core value is to “deliver wow through service.” Passion and “a positive team and family spirit” are also key values promoted with frequent off-site meetings, occasional costume parties and intense “culture” training.

CEO Tony Hsieh contends that happy, engaged employees are naturally creative, and creativity engenders customer satisfaction and loyalty.

As Zappos grew, however, Hsieh and fellow leaders worried that the company would lose its edge. They are counting on the new holacracy to wipe out any creeping complacency.

To remind Zapponians just how different they are expected to work now, the company renamed its traditional departments. Marketing is now Life Cycle. The core retail business is Flywheel Operations. IT is Unicorn, after Hsieh’s favorite creature. As Cromley explains, “We stayed away from tech or IT because they put you in the mindset of legacy organizational structures.”

COVER STORY :: IT Management

And losing legacy thinking is critical to making the new plan work.

Most of Unicorn’s 350 staff members are organized into work circles, such as Zappos Labs for performing untraditional retailing experiments and SuperCloud for the extensive implementation of Amazon’s cloud computing services. At least 50 circles exist within Unicorn, but the number isn’t permanent: Reorgs occur weekly, as projects shift, roles change and power is redistributed. The goal is to keep cross-pollinated thinking in play. “We want people to know nothing’s stopping you,” Cromley says.

Holacracy isn’t easy to get used to. Anyone can propose a change.

Everyone can see what changes are happening in any circle.

Initially, Zappos hired an outside consulting company to teach holacracy principles in a four-day program. Zappos soon assumed responsibility for training, cutting the session to three days and offering employees ongoing, targeted classes and webinars.

When Unicorn members fall into old patterns, perhaps asking Cromley to approve an idea, he reminds them that he’s there to guide, not dictate.

Knowing whether holacracy is working isn’t easy either. Cromley says he’ll recognize it when he sees big innovations enacted without knowing they were even in the works. “We’ve seen glimpses of that but haven’t seen the breakthrough yet,” he says.

For example, there have been some promising user-experience experiments from a circle that spontaneously emerged to create a consistent Zappos digital experience across all customer contact points. “This is a self-organized group passionate about solving this problem,” he says.

really ridiculous to expect that one professional can operate effectively across all of those personas,” he says.

GTI works with IBM, Texas A&M University and 24 other outside organizations. These partners help GameStop assess the economy, emerging technologies, customer behaviors and other criteria for weak signals about coming change.

Donaldson declines to name his other external partners, but says they cover important territory too wide for any one IT leader to tackle. There’s a partner to delve into changing notions about privacy. A partner to look for nascent shifts in customer expectations, and one for exploring augmented reality. The list goes on, including a partner to help interpret all the incoming information from other partners. Getting help like this means “you’re not spreading the peanut butter too thin,” he says.

The goal of the reorganization is to keep GameStop on top.

Its main business is selling new and used, physical and digital video games for Xbox, PlayStation and Wii consoles. GameStop lists key competitors as Wal-Mart, Target and Amazon—not exactly a retiring bunch.

But they all face digital demons as gaming goes online at a fast clip. Knowing that people shop tethered to their smartphones, GameStop, through GTI, is working on integrating new technology, such as interactive marketing using beacons, in its stores. Donaldson wants to meld the online and in-person experience.

All of GameStop’s C-level execs were involved in hatching the plan to split IT and all have been involved in educating

Innovation—the desire to nurture it, the fear of it fizzling—is a prime driver of big IT reorgs. But finding the best IT structure to promote innovation is a problem that continues to vex CIOs. Split Personality If holacracy sounds unruly, there are other ways for CIOs to make dramatic changes in IT mindset and performance.

GameStop, a $9 billion gaming retailer, last year split IT into four groups: Delivery, which includes application development and support services; Architecture, responsible for orchestrating cloud providers, among other tasks; Enterprise Strategy, which figures out how to implement major new technologies; and GameStop Technology Institute (GTI), which is focused on customer experience and product innovation.

GameStop split IT into four groups, says Jeff Donaldson, the company’s former CIO and now head of one of those groups: GameStop Technology Institute.

After studying the many roles a modern CIO is expected to assume, GameStop decided that carving IT into defined portions and installing a leader for each would be a more effective approach, says Jeff Donaldson, senior vice president of GTI and the company’s former CIO. “We came to the conclusion that it’s

employees about it. One early obstacle was convincing the rest of the company that four separate IT groups could work well together, he says.

“People want to know what the processes are, but some of those will be invented during the change and tweaked along the way,” he says. “People have to be willing to go down that path with you.”

GameStop rented a local movie theater for the initial discussion with employees. The CEO was there, and that made a difference.

“If he stands in front of us and says, ‘This is something important to me and for our future,’ then 85 percent to 90 percent of the organization will immediately support the change,” Donaldson says.

Even a year later, GameStop isn’t done figuring out its future.

Stores in Austin, Texas, are testing beacons and other interactive customer services. The company plans to bring the same technologies to three more markets later this year.

Everyone has to be able to work with ambiguity. “You’re doing something new, and there’s not a lot of prior art to look at,” Donaldson says.

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COVER STORY :: IT Management

Relentless March

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AccuWeather has spent the past few years reworking its structure, bit by bit. In 2012, the company spun out an innovation group of engineers, mainly from IT, to do advanced research for customers, especially in predicting severe weather and improving forecast accuracy. In 2013, it reordered its executive ranks, formalizing digital work that was already going on. CIO Steve Smith became chief digital officer, working with a new chief strategy officer who had been in charge of digital media.

Last year, IT got a makeover. The company took the two branches of IT—development and operations—and split each one into daily work and strategic work. New directors of strategy for each branch make technology plans for one, two and three years out, says Chris Patti, vice president of technology.

A relentless march to digital business has also influenced IT changes, and AccuWeather looks to technology companies like Google and Yahoo as models, Patti says. After all, major sources of revenue for AccuWeather are advertising sales at its Web properties, as well as mobile applications and its API business. And, like Google and Yahoo, “we produce tech to empower people,” he says.

Meanwhile, AccuWeather has moved some functions that were historically part of sales and other business groups into IT. The company has always sold weather data, starting with forecasts in print and on video. Now its products are mainly data files and application programming interfaces (API) for digital services.

The sales team had been managing these offerings.

But as the products grew increasingly technical, sales would often have to email IT engineers with customers’ questions. Then the norm became having IT staffers join customer calls to explain product details.

Last year, to field these calls, the company created the role of technical account manager and filled the jobs with technology leaders. “It’s more appropriate to put them in IT,” Patti says.

He advises fellow technology leaders to accept that today’s IT group must work in multiple ways—as developers, consultants and facilitators. Sometimes you’ll build a mobile app to realize a business goal. Other times you’ll consult with the marketing department as it buys its own technology. You might help HR negotiate a contract with a vendor. As technologists at AccuWeather delved into different roles, they received training in soft skills such as listening and phone etiquette.

and [everyone is] underwhelmed by results because they have the same people and often the same processes,” Horne says.

One advantage GameStop has is a built-in culture of lateral communication, Donaldson says. There may be titles and hierarchy but discussion and decision-making cross those boundaries.

“You need that,” he adds.

Even at Zappos, where processes very definitely changed for everyone, Cromley finds that he must remind himself to break a habit of making decisions for others. “Yesterday, someone came to me to sign off on something. I had to say, ‘I can give you my advice but this is your responsibility to decide,’” he says. “That’s one thing that’s hard for me to give up.”

When rearranging IT, don’t make the mistake of dividing the group into modern and legacy systems, Horne says. It’s tough to make the backwater sound interesting, and people stuck there grow resentful if they feel they’re not working on anything innovative. “One company called it the ‘heritage’ IT team. Didn’t last very long,” he says.

To avoid that, CIOs should consider matching the IT staff to business activities. Working on customer acquisition, for example, could include a mix of old and new technologies, which is more satisfying for more people, Horne says.

IT might organize around 20 or 30 such activities, setting funding and speed at a different level for each one. First, decide where IT must excel and where it’s OK to dare to be mediocre. For

When rearranging IT, don’t make the mistake of dividing the group into modern and legacy systems.

It’s tough to make the backwater sound interesting.

Avoiding Trouble With big change comes the potential for big problems. Approach is everything, says Horne at the Corporate Executive Board. While the CIO might absorb the new world order, staffers can easily revert to safe old ways. This underlines the dangerous perception that IT is bureaucratic and undermines the new image IT is trying to project. “IT often runs to make organizational changes

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example, if staying ahead of customer habits provides competitive advantage, concentrate on analytics and let human resources applications simply be serviceable, he advises.

Finally, beware of too much change, Horne says. The average employee experiences a significant change, such as a reorganization or the arrival of a new boss, every seven months, according to CEB research. But it can take two years for someone to absorb the change and return to full productivity. “You have to be careful about how much change any one part of the organization is going through,” Horne says.

GameStop’s IT restructuring has altered Donaldson as a leader.

Collaborating with futurists, researchers and venture capitalists has jump-started his curiosity about problem-solving and his interest in shaping the company’s future. “This lights up neurons,” he says. “There’s nothing better than that.”

Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

connect Up, close, and personal with all things IT

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CIO-CSO Tiff Boosts Business

The most important relationship in the C-suite is the one between a CIO and CSO. By Sharon Florentine The relationship between the CIO and CSO (or CISO) can be fraught with tension—

and that can be a good thing. Both executives play a critical role in your organization’s C-suite, and better understanding these sometimes overlapping roles can only make your business stronger and more secure.

Out of the Shadows

I L LU S T R AT I O N B Y T H I N K S TO C K

In the past, the CSO, or CISO, depending on your organization’s language, was a role secondary to that of the CIO, the CFO or another C-suite executive. But as security becomes a more pressing concern, CSOs have come out of the shadows to take a separate, but equally important role at the executive table.

“That can be hard for other C-suite players to swallow; this role that once reported to them—whether it was an offshoot of the CIO’s role, or a CFO or even the CEO—is now a separate role with its own distinct priorities, budgets and concerns that sometimes appear to conflict with what other C-suite members’ priorities are,” says Zia Bhutta, co-founder and COO of consulting and strategic outsourcing firm Synechron.

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Same Goals, Different Priorities

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“There’s a natural tension between these roles because they have what appear to be different priorities, and because in many larger organizations, the CSO role, and security in general, becomes a higher priority,” says Justin Cerilli, managing director, financial services technology and operations, Russell Reynolds and Associates.

“Both the CIO and the CSO are concerned with how to transform the business. What are the business’ goals? How does technology both enable and hinder those goals? How can you focus on efficiency and speed of delivery, but also maintain security? These are really similar goals, but the priorities are different,” Cerilli says.

It’s not so much that the goals of the CIO and the CSO are different, but that the priorities are flipped, says Bhutta. For CIOs, speed of delivery—for new hardware, software and applications - and efficiency are paramount.

For CSOs, the concern is with the security of data, information and privacy, says Bhutta.

Contention comes into play when the CIO and CSO don’t work together to plan and agree on an overall strategy that takes both of their needs and concerns into account, says Robert Orshaw, COO and executive vice president at Velocity Technology Solutions.

“As security becomes an increasing concern, sometimes CSOs can start to develop strategy, architecture and budget spend priorities in isolation from the CIO—that’s a problem,” Orshaw says. “When they work as a team to jointly develop architectures, priorities and budgets that consider the needs of the whole business - that is a beautiful thing,” he says.

Striking a Balance The key is effective communication, an ability to present a united front to board members and other c-level execs and to finesse compromises on both sides to achieve speed, availability and security, says Russell Reynolds’ Cerilli.

“You have to be on the same page around people and processes as well as technology; create a consistent message around the business goals, the challenges and what’s needed. Then, you can present a united front for your executive board and the market,” he says.

One of the struggles in achieving this balance and laying the foundation for a good working relationship between CIOs and CSOs is the potential for personality clashes, says Cerilli. Human Resources can and should play a major role in finding leaders who can work well together and put the business’ needs ahead of any personal need for career advancement or recognition, he says.

CSO, Prove Your Worth Working well with other members of the C-suite can require CSOs to educate their peers on their role and their value to the organization, says Orshaw. As the CSO role gains importance in the enterprise, they should consider some ongoing investment of time and energy into educating the organization on their challenges and vulnerabilities, and how the business can collaborate to solve problems, Orshaw says. Effective collaboration on every aspect of the business can only serve to make businesses stronger and more secure.

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Chief Digital Officer on the Rise WATCH There’s been a steady increase in the number of chief digital officers in India. But what exactly is it that they do? And how much does it overlap with the CIO/ CTO role? To find out we spoke to Nitin Chugh, Head Digital Banking, HDFC Bank. Watch the video to know more about his KRAs and the future of Chief Digital Officers.

http://www.cio.in/cio-tv/cxo-agendawhat-does-chief-digital-officer-do

Smartphones Boost Profit ANALYZE The new era of internet and millennials have changed the rules of the work place. Productivity has a whole new meaning to it now. And when it comes to producing accurate results in a short span, a smartphone is the first tool that comes to the rescue. A Blackberry survey revealed interesting changes in the way productivity is perceived by smartphone users. Check out our By the Numbers section to know more about the trend and its influence on productivity.

http://www.cio.in/by-the-numbers/ smartphones-helps-boost-productivity-research

Strategic Approach to Risks READ Today, information security faces a paradigm shift as organizations must look for strategic ways to handle this beast. CIOs should stress on the significance of preparing against new security threats.

Thomson Thomas, SVP-Business Systems & Technology, HDFC Life, talks about the new technology trends, the risks associated with those trends, and the new strategic ways to be adopted to tackle the security threats.

http://www.cio.in/cio-interview/ adopting-strategic-approach-handlenew-threats

IT MANAGEMENT

Diversity is the Recipe for Success The road to success begins with non-traditional leadership that proves that diversity not only exists but can be a competitive edge. BY S H A R O N F LO R E N T I N E

A

restaurant manager and a former cook don’t fit the profile of the typical Silicon Valley IT startup employee. But they’re just two of the most recent hires at Mindflash, a company that offers an online training platform for enterprises and is taking bold steps to exemplify how diversity can exist in the Valley.

Mindflash’s CEO, Donna Wells, has a recipe for success that includes diversity as one of the main ingredients, starting with visionary board members and venture capital investors.

Hunt Where Your Competitors Aren’t Looking

based women work from home one to two days a week, and another 40 percent work from home offices.

“We want to give all employees, especially people with families, a great work-life balance. Everyone needs some flexibility to do their job well. I’ve learned over the years how easy it is for folks to spend their entire day in meetings and not accomplish any real work. That’s detrimental to the business, and it lowers morale and retention for the very employees you’re trying to retain. If they don’t feel they’re making a tangible difference every day, they’ll get burnt out and they’ll leave,” Wells says.

Skills can be

taught; attitude

“For all the bad press about VCs lately, I Leverage Technology have to be honest that the firm we work and demeanor, That flexibility is gained through with gets a lot of the credit for being very teamwork and effective use of technology at Mindflash, willing to hire ‘non-traditional’ leadership. which leverages productivity and There’s an awful lot of competition for the negotiation are collaboration tools such as Yammer, traditional white, male, 30- to 40-year-old more endemic and Skype, Asana, GoToMeeting, Sococo candidates. But there’s phenomenal talent, and Hall, which removes many of the harder to teach. exciting talent out there who are racial and geographic constraints the company ethnic minorities, who are women, who could have faced. “Because technology are GLBTQ—there’s not much competition for that talent,” removed many of the location constraints, I can have great Wells says. developer talent in Boston or Phoenix, wherever and it’s like they’re in the next room. We’ve been able to take advantage of that,” says Wells.

Focus On Soft Skills Wells adds that the company’s focus on flexibility makes Another key for Mindflash is to recruit from this diverse pool the firm more inviting and attractive for tech talent, too, as with an emphasis on soft skills, and train for the technical does the incredible diversity statistics and unconventional know-how. The restaurant manager, the cook and another approach to hiring. employee, a former professional cyclist, are just a few examples of this method, according to Wells.

“Skills can be taught; attitude and demeanor, Lead by Example communication, teamwork and negotiation—those are much “We make it a point to broadcast through our example more endemic and harder to teach,” Wells says. that diversity is a core value of ours, and that helps drive recruiting of more diversity. Once you have someone else in the company who’s female, who’s Flexibility to Do your Job Well from a racial or ethnic minority, who came up from a Flexibility is another important ingredient. Half of Mindflash’s restaurant—that sends a really strong signal to other team works out of its Silicon Valley headquarters, while the potential employees and helps bring in even more other half works remotely from home offices as far away as diverse candidates,” says Wells.

Massachusetts and Arizona. Forty percent of headquarters-

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LEADINGEDGE

Fighting Dysfunction connect

When your team can’t seem to work together, you need to figure out how your actions might be contributing to the dysfuction. BY PAU L G L E N

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Sooner or later, every IT manager finds himself at the head of a dys functional team.Peopledon’ttalktooneanother,andsometimestheyhideinformation.They can’t make decisions. They can’t stick with decisions that have already been made. Work gets duplicated or doesn’t get done at all.

It can make you feel powerless. You are under pressure to deliver, but you can’t do it when the team you’re completely dependent on can’t seem to work together.

I usually see IT managers tackle the problem of a dysfunctional team in one of three ways, all misguided: l We’ve got a bad apple on the team. And we need to fire him.

In this case, one person becomes the scapegoat for the entire group. Unsurprisingly, things don’t get better after the execution.

Time for Plan B. l We need a new process. This one tends to run into trouble because it’s difficult to respond properly to an unarticulated problem. No matter how clearly you spell out and assign tasks, the new process probably won’t work much better than the old one because you don’t have a real grasp of what it is that needs fixing. l We need to reorganize. Again, you don’t identify the real problem, and instead you try to separate the people who are most antagonistic toward each other. What you usually get are the same problems, moved from one place to another.

In every case, the solution doesn’t work because you have failed to understand where the problems are coming from.

As frustrating as a dysfunctional team is, don’t let it cloud your judgment. Remember that most people in IT really want to do a good job. You can generally assume that all of them sincerely believe that they are behaving in ways that the organization rewards. For example, team mem-

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bers who don’t respond to emails may believe that doing so would be a distraction—that completing their tasks is more important to you than communication.

Try to think of assumptions your team members might have that lead them to behave the way they do. Then ask yourself two really hard questions: l How does my behavior contribute to or perpetuate these assumptions? l How does my inaction contribute to or perpetuate these assumptions?

It doesn’t matter if you have told them that their assumptions are wrong. Actions truly do speak louder than words. People learn much more about what the organization values by what you do or don’t do than by what you say. If you tell everyone that you want them to share their best ideas, but then publicly belittle people who offer bad ones, they learn that it’s not safe to speak up, and no one offers ideas ever again.

Once you have a good idea about what underlies your team’s behavior, you can begin behaving in ways that change their assumptions and encourage them to learn about what the organization really values. At that point, you might even pursue reorganizations, removals or new processes. The difference is that, as responses to a problem that you have identified, they’ll be means to a well-understood end, rather than just confusing experimentation.

Paul Glen is the co-author of The Geek Leader’s Handbook and a principal of Leading Geeks. Send feedback to editor@cio.in.

[CXO AGENDA]

Defying Convention

Intex is setting up 400 brick-and-mortar stores in the online era. Vishal Malik, DGM-Retail Business, explains what’s the company upto. BY SUNIL SHAH Online sales dominate the IT product and mobile space. In this environment, why is Intex planning to invest Rs 100 crore to set up 400 stores?

What’s missing online, right now, is the ability experience products.

About 1 lakh Android phones are sold in India every day. Many of these buyers are first time users of

displays, support, and engagement. We’ve trained our staff to ensure that customers know how to use all the features of the products they buy, thereby maximizing their investment.

In addition, only 8 percent of India’s population lives in the top eight Tier-1 cities, and they are comfortable with e-commerce. The

At our stores, we’d like to bring to customers some of the benefits that are missing online. smartphones, and what we’re finding is that most people don’t know how to use these devices. What’s needed is a platform where customers can experience products they want to buy.

As a company, we’re trying to fix that disconnect by creating a platform where customers can experience the wide range of products Intex offers. Those products can only be experienced through stores, which we call Intex Smart World. I’m talking about more than just experiencing mobiles. I’m talking about experiencing music devices, LED TVs, etc.

Our stores are divided into two areas: One for sales and the other for experience, tutorials, digital

opportunity is in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, where Internet connections can be slow and bricks-and-mortar stores are few.

CRISIL expects the Indian e-commerce industry’s size to more than double to around 18 percent of organized retail by 2016. Even then, its share of the overall retail—organized plus unorganized—market is expected to be just over 1 percent.

That means offline stores are not going anywhere.

What’s the most important driver for the stores: Educating customers, creating greater customer engagement thereby greater brand loyalty, offering customers a better buying experience?

There are two: Experience and display (sales). In addition to giving customers an experience, we want to create an alternate (sales) channel.

We’re in an era of personal technology and we, at Intex, want to be a force in this exciting new space.

Do you think India should regulate online discounting to protect brick-and-mortar stores, a model France employs with books, for example?

We are all here to stay. I think both models can survive without regulation. We live in an era where we should not restrict anyone. It’s the customer’s right to access any channel.

I’d like to point out that in countries like the US, where e-commerce is strong, stores are doing well. In fact, I believe that online stores act as a catalyst for brick-and-mortar stores, and getting them to upgrade themselves.

In addition, didn’t the same thing happen when LFRs and multi-brand outlets launched?

Standalone shop owners had apprehensions, especially around the ability of large players to buy in bulk. But, today, both exist.

At our stores, we’d like to bring to customers some of the benefits that are missing online. I believe we can give customers a great experience.

Send feedback to sunil_shah@idgindia. com

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Robotic Butler At Work items that guests might have forgotten to pack, like toothpaste or a razor, along with snacks and candy.

The robot uses a tablet that hotel staff can use to punch in a security code—to keep mischievous guests from trying to use the robot for unofficial purposes—and to punch in the guest’s hotel room number so it knows where to go. After that, the robot uses a Wi-Fi connection to call the elevator and heads to the guest room. When it gets to its destination, it calls the guest on the room phone to announce its arrival.

Whatever the robot is delivering is carried in an enclosed hatch on top of the bot. When the guest opens her door, the hatch opens and she can take her toothbrush or snack.

—Sharon Gaudin

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I M A G E B Y T H I N K S TO C K

The Aloft Hotel in the Silicon Valley city has been using an autonomous robot as a butler, delivering small