CIO January 15, 2014 Issue

JOINED IN HOLY MATRIMONY

Anupam Mittal on how tech drives Shaadi.com. 16 MARKETING TECHNOLOGIST

www.cio.in

Straight-talk from a CIO with a marketing role. 18 ALL DATA CONSIDERED

How IT sharpened a radio station's marketing. 13 THE SECURITY DEBATE

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

Prevention or damage-control: What's your pick? 35

Journey to the 'Digital Enterprise'

January 15, 2015

`100.00

What does it really mean?

How do you get there? Here are five emerging models. 28

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PLUS

Happy Innovation

Happiest Minds' Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer says disruptive tech will drive differentiation. 39 1/14/2015 3:04:31 PM

$90 million worth of data center and IT research, now at your fingertips Our FREE data center white paper library app helps you make informed decisions about your data center physical infrastructure.

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VOLUME 10, NO. 3

January 15, 2015

Start

From the Editor in Chief 2 Trending 3 Numbers You Need 4 Quick Fix 6 Career Path 8 News Scan 10 World View 12

02

Digital Journey

28

The buzzphrase ‘digital enterprise’ can be a bit mushy. What does it really mean?

And how do you get there?

COVER STORY

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

16

Analytics is radio station’s marketing hero 13 Smart App tracks your electricity bill 14 Intuition takes the shape of an analytics tool 15 Shaadi.com reinvents tech for consistency 16 CIO steps into marketing’s shoes 18

B Y M I C H A E L F I T ZG E R A L D

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

Progressive Insurance benefits from analytics 19 How to leverage application-as-a-service 20 Eye tracking device helps a paralyzed speak 21 IoT doesn’t spare innerwear too 21 How to retain the best talent in a merger 26 The big data revolution comes knocking 27

19

Connect P E E R A DV I C E

35

What’s your security game plan? 35 Consolidation is a must for ad tech companies 37 Why companies fail? 38 Happiest Minds CMO on disruptive tech 39

Finish

Subconscious menu lets you order with your mind 40

40

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PUBLISHER, PRESIDENT & CEO

FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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

start

Torture Test 2

Louis D’Mello

Vijay Ramachandran Yogesh Gupta Sunil Shah Shardha Subramanian Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya Aritra Sarkhel, Shubhra Rishi, Shweta Rao Kshitish B.S., Vasu N. Arjun Suresh Nair, Vikas Kapoor Unnikrishnan A.V., Laaljith C.K. Bhavika Bhuwalka, Ishan Bhattacharya, Madhav Mohan, Mayukh Mukherjee, Sejuti Das Vaishnavi Desai

SALES & MARKETING

“If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,... you’ll be a Man, my son!”

—’If’ by Rudyard Kipling Have you ever come across this equation: Crisis = danger + opportunity?

If you have, it would typically have been followed by an explanation about the Chinese ideogram for crisis (wieji) having two parts—one that stands for danger and the other for opportunity. Then comes a bit of seemingly oriental wisdom: In a crisis, be aware of the danger but look for the opportunity. Profound? Absolutely. Smart strategy? For sure.

Except that it isn’t so really.

Wieji actually breaks down as danger + crucial point. What it really stands for is that in a crisis, you need to stay alert because you are at a critical juncture that can potentially break you.

And, color me cynical but an unstable state of affairs is hardly the time to be looking out for how to ‘benefit’ from them. Survival? Undeniably. Business continuity? Entirely. Learning? You bet. But converting catastrophe into opportunity? No way.

These are the bits about a crisis that make it interesting. Business crises test the best of executives and CIOs are no exception.

It’s remarkable the shapes and forms business crises can take these days, apart from the continuing uncertainty mixed with positivity that our economic landscape is witnessing.

I’ve heard horror tales of structured cabling in hospitals being chewed through by rodents to whole kilometers of optic fibre being stolen overnight to a server farm getting fried when the power polarity reversed to even 70 percent of an IT team quitting en masse. It’s these low-frequency, yet high-impact, black swan events that test a CIO’s mettle, his skill and ability to remain calm and look for the way forward.

Amongst the immortal lines of Kipling’s If are also these: “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew, To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you, Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ ”

PRESIDENT SALES & MARKETING VICE PRESIDENT SALES GM MARKETING GENERAL MANAGER SALES MANAGER KEY ACCOUNTS MANAGER SALES SUPPORT SR. MARKETING ASSOCIATES

Sudhir Kamath Sudhir Argula Siddharth Singh Jaideep M. Sakshee Bagri Nadira Hyder Arjun Punchappady, Benjamin Jeevanraj, Cleanne Serrao, Margaret DCosta MARKETING ASSOCIATE Varsh Shetty LEAD DESIGNER Jithesh C.C. MANAGEMENT TRAINEES Aditya Sawant, Bhavya Mishra, Brijesh Saxena, Chitiz Gupta, Deepali Patel, Deepinder Singh, Eshant Oguri, Mayur Shah, R. Venkat Raman OPERATIONS

VICE PRESIDENT HR & OPERATIONS FINANCIAL CONTROLLER CIO SR. MANAGER OPERATIONS SR. MANAGER ACCOUNTS SR. MANAGER PRODUCTION MANAGER OPERATIONS EA TO THE CEO MANAGER CREDIT CONTROL ASSISTANT MGR. ACCOUNTS

Rupesh Sreedharan Sivaramakrishnan T.P. Pavan Mehra Ajay Adhikari, Pooja Chhabra Sasi Kumar V. T.K. Karunakaran Dinesh P. Tharuna Paul Prachi Gupta Poornima

ADVERTISER INDEX Bharthi Airtel Ltd

BC

Cisco Systems India Pvt. Ltd

IBC

Cyberoam Technologies Pvt. Ltd Dell India Pvt. Ltd SAS Institute (India) Pvt Ltd Schneider Electric IT Business India Pvt Ltd. Trend Micro India Pvt. Ltd Vodafone India Ltd

9 Cover on Cover 7 IFC 5 Insert

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

Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief vijay_r@cio.in Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027.

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

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1/14/2015 3:17:54 PM

start TRENDING

,

K.

Focus With a Forehead Gizmo

n

a,

without prints to ,

Want Circuits?

Print Them Researchers have created highly conductive and durable silver nanowire ink that can be used to print durable electronic circuits on paper.

The technology is being touted by the researchers at the University of Tennessee as a breakthrough in making inexpensive, flexible, disposable electronic sensors that can be used for a wide range of medical purposes, as well as an “electronic skin” that can act as touchpad sensors on robotics.

The research, published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, highlights the low cost with which the foldable printed circuits can be made.

The system for printing circuit patterns with the silver ink takes only a few minutes, and the resulting electronics are then hardened with a pulsing light.

The paper-based circuits can be folded and unfolded up to 15 times, or rolled up 5,000 times without a failure in the device’s operation.

Anming Hu, an assistant professor and lead researcher on the project, said the research found that nano wires are critical to developing a highly flexible device on paper substrates; that photonic sintering with flashing light is better for facile processing than thermal sintering; and that ink printing is a practical way to create sensors.

“It is found that silver nanowires are highly adhesive with paper fibers,” Hu said.

The scientists have already used the printing process to create pointof-care diagnostic tests and portable DNA detectors that typically require more sophisticated and expensive manufacturing processes.

Hu said his team wanted to make a sensor that could be created on demand and respond to touch or to specific molecules, such as glucose.

The researchers are now working on a multi-nozzle printer that can lay down two or more nano inks, such as copper and silver.

–By Lucas Mearian

If you’re looking to sharpen your mental focus, Hitachi has developed a wearable brain activity sensor designed to improve learning skills.

The prototype, which looks somewhat like an old-school telephone handset, covers a user’s forehead and works with a smartphone, according to Hitachi High-Tech, a group company.

While it isn’t exactly discreet, it only weighs about 100 grams. Since it has no external power cables, it can be worn while doing daily activities, instantly showing feedback via the smartphone.

The headset emits near-infrared light at both sides of the forehead to measure blood volume changes in the cerebral cortex. The changes are associated with activity in certain brain areas and are analyzed by signal-processing circuits in the forehead unit. After analysis, the data is displayed on a Bluetooth-linked Android smartphone so users can see what their brains are doing in real time.

The headset is designed to help in applications such as cognitive training and learning, according to the company.

“Since the prototype shows brain activity in real time, it could be used for rehabilitation purposes, for example,” a spokeswoman said. “This is designed to be a compact device for general users, not something special for gaming or medical purposes.”

Hitachi High-Tech’s bread and butter is semiconductor manufacturing equipment and measurement devices, but it turned to brain sensing after acquiring the blood volume sensing technology, dubbed optical topography, from parent Hitachi in April 2014. The electronics and home appliances manufacturer collaborated with toy maker Bandai to launch BabyLabo, a toy for infants based on brain activity measurement technology .

—By Tim Hornyak

ted,

3

IMAGE SOURCE: UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE

as

Road,

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Getting Security On Board start

A global security survey reveals that the boards of Indian firms are more involved in security decisions than their global counterparts. BY VA I S H N AV I J . D E S A I

4

The year 2014 wasn’t a banner year for security as

many organizations grappled with thefts, vulnerabilities, and hacks. Though security threats are looming large, awareness hasn’t seeped in yet and the discussions around security haven’t elevated to the boards of organizations across the globe. But the Indian security scenario has something to cheer about as the board of directors in India are more active participants in security decisions of their organizations than their global counterparts.

A study on security practices, Global Information Security Survey 2015, reveals that 57 percent of Indian respondents say their organizations’ board of directors participate in deciding the overall security strategy compared to 42 percent globally. Forty-nine percent of Indian respondents say their board is involved in allocating security budgets as compared to the global number of 40 percent.

Security policies are another major component and 52 percent of Indian respondents said the board is involved in framing security policies compared to 36 percent of their global counterparts.

Security’s Welcome Aboard

The boards in India are active participants in the issues concerning information security.

Review roles and responsibilities: India

30%

39%

India 25%

49%

India

Compared to global counterparts, boards in India are more involved in making strategic security decisions.

Of Indian respondents say their boards are involved in framing security policies.

40%

Global

START_vol10_issue_03.indd 4

Onboarding Security Strategy

52 percent

Security Budget:

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navi_desai@idgindia.com

Of Indian respondents say their boards are involved in the overall security strategy.

Review current security risks: Global

Vaishnavi J. Desai is trainee journalist. Send feedback to vaish-

57 percent

19%

Global

The review of current security and privacy risks is essential for information security to be effective. Less than half of the respondents, Indian and global, gave an affirmation to the boards’ involvement in the review of current security and privacy risks. Only 25 percent of global respondents said their boards are involved in security reviews, while the Indian figure stood at 39 percent.

The survey also found that in the financial services vertical in the APAC region, 62 percent of the respondents said the board participated in decisions regarding security budgets and 64 percent said the board made its presence felt in overall security strategy.

But the figures for board participation in the technology sector aren’t all that impressive. Only 38 percent of respondents in the APAC region said their boards participated in decisions around security technologies and 31 percent in the review of current security and privacy risks.

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www.cio.in

1/14/2015 3:17:55 PM

CUSTOM FEATURE TREND MICRO

CASE STUDY

COMBATING NEW AGE

SECURITY THREATS Stuck with cyber security concerns, Sesa Sterlite Limited was fighting cyber vulnerabilities and struggling to improve its security posture. Here’s how Trend Micro helped the organization combat security threats.

By Sejuti Das

S

esa Sterlite Limited has carved a niche for itself in the aluminum industry with its superior product quality, based on state-of-the-art technology. It has setup a 1.75 MTPA aluminum smelting capacity at Jharsuguda and currently operates a 1,215 MW captive power plant and a 2,400 MW independent power plant, supported by highly modern infrastructure at Jharsuguda.

THE STUMBLING BLOCK As a leading producer of aluminum in India, it was important for Sesa Sterlite Limited, to improve its overall security posture and server-level security by reducing potential end-point threats. It wanted to implement DLP along with encryption at disks, file, and folder level. It was extremely crucial for the organization to mitigate the risk of accidental data loss by authorized users.

The company had realized that with a perfect DLP tool one can strike a balance between increasing productivity and protecting sensitive data from external threats. As IT is responsible for an organization’s information landscape, identifying the right tools will enable it to strategically plan and successfully execute strategies to decrease the risk of data loss.

Trendmicro Case study.indd 1

“After a cyber-security audit by KPMG, we identified certain gaps with respect to internal hacking as well as external penetration. Which is why, we turned to Trend Micro. And they have done a brilliant job with DLP,” says Subrata Banerjee, VPIT, Sesa Sterlite Limited.

OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGE Banerjee decided to adopt Trend Micro’s DLP solution as a plugin to its existing anti-virus licenses, and iDLP (integrated DLP) for better security and manageability.

“Trend Micro Deep Security has provided us with the ability to manage anti-virus along with Web reputation and virtual patching.

Trend Micro Deep Security has provided the ability to secure servers in the event of malware attacks, which attempts to evade detection by uninstalling or otherwise disrupting a security program. “Trend Micro has provided us with complete control of our network and central policy management for data and threat protection.

Protection of confidential information of the organization is very important and Trend Micro’s solutions are patching such gaps,” says Banerjee.

Additionally, Trend Micro Deep Security can secure multi-tenant cloud environments with security policies that can be extended to cloud workloads

“Trend Micro Deep Security helped us by proactively sending alerts and prevented our organization from being harmed by suspicious or malicious threats.”

Subrata Banerjee, VP-IT, Sesa Sterlite Limited Virtual patching has given us the ability to shield cyber security vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, eliminate the operational pains of emergency patching, frequent patch cycles, and costly system downtime,” says Banerjee. Both products have provided the company with better security and ease of manageability. “Just like any new solution, we also faced some challenges related to integrating new solutions with existing infrastructure. But we were able to overcome these challenges with our expertise,” says Banerjee.

and managed centrally with consistent, context-aware policies.

“Trend Micro Deep Security helped us by proactively sending alerts and prevented our organization from being harmed by suspicious or malicious threats,” says Banerjee.

This case study is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Trend Micro

BUSINESS BENEFITS After successful implementation, today, Sesa Sterlite Limited has better control and visibility on end-points and is also able to meet compliance requirements.

16-01-2015 11:00:55 AM

quiFIX ck Tech Vintage Traded

start

Apple-1 personal computer that was sold out of Steve Jobs’ garage was auctioned.

6

A

vintage Apple-1 personal computer that was sold 38 years ago to a buyer out of Steve Jobs’ garage went for $365,000 (about Rs 2 crore) at Christie’s in New York City, thousands under the auction house’s lowest estimate. “It was a little disappointing,” admitted Bob Luther, about the selling price of his Apple-1. “But it was time for me to move on, and it’s good that it’s sold. Owning it has been an incredible experience. And I can’t complain. I’m a big Apple fan and I’m not very diversified in my 401(k) because a very high percentage of it is in Apple stock. And [that Apple stock] has been very good to me.” Luther’s Apple-1 was distinctive not only because of its rarity—there are only about 60 known to exist—but because of its provenance.

– Gregg Keizer

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

WORTH READING There’s No Such Thing as ‘Business’ Ethics BOOK

By John C. Maxwell There’s no such thing as business ethics. How can that be? A single standard applies to both your business and personal life. John C. Maxwell shows you how this revered ideal works everywhere, and how, in business, it brings amazing dividends.

Amazon.in Rs 875

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How to Prepare for Media Interviews ALWAYS prepare not just how you’ll explain the points you intend to make in the interview, but also how you’ll illustrate them. There are three methods of illustration: Citing a specific or hypothetical example, telling a relevant story, or a sharing a revealing data point.

Some CIOs do a thorough job of lining up their theoretical and abstract talking points in advance but end up leaving the illustrative content to ad-libbing. This may result in the illustrations getting shortchanged, which could be a wasted opportunity since stories are often more memorable than facts.

SOMETIMES it’s OK to mention another company by name during a media interview if your organization is in partnership with them or collaborating on a project or philanthropic initiative.

Stay away from talking about competitors or slamming them in any way in a media interview. If you say something critical about another company, it could overshadow the main narrative you want as the focus of the reporter’s story.

NEVER kid yourself that a reporter is engaging you in casual conversation. From the moment you shake their hand to the moment you say goodbye, everything you say should be quotation-friendly.

Chatting while you’re walking a reporter to the coat closet is every bit as much a quote-gathering opportunity for them as the formal interview.

Bill McGowan is founder and CEO of Clarity Media Group. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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1/14/2015 3:17:56 PM

careerPATH

Motivate Non-managers start

Organizations that don’t create career paths for both management and non-management roles risk losing their top talent. BY R I C H H E I N

8

People are motivated by different incentives, both in their personal lives and in their careers. And that holds true for IT professionals and developers as well. You may not dream of being the boss, but not because you don’t like money or power. In many cases, it’s simply because you don’t like to rely on other people to get the job done and that is largely what being a manager is about.

Putting someone on a career path that doesn’t have any room to develop is a career-limiting move for the employee.

—KEVIN GRIFFIN, CIO, GE CAPITAL

Technology careers attract all types of people and a percentage of those will be introverted or simply not interested in managing people. As a leader, you need to do your part by offering fulfilling positions for these people or risk losing them.

Why Should I Care?

“Too bad for them,” you might say, but some of these people are your best performers and great individual contributors. Losing them because there isn’t a clear place for them to go—or worse promoting them into a position they don’t want—won’t get you or your organization very far.

“The need for new skill sets and evolving roles are in demand at a rapidly growing rate, so putting someone on a career path that

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doesn’t have any room to develop is not only a career-limiting move for the employee, but a business-limiting move for the company,” says Kevin Griffin, CIO with GE Capital.

Who Are These People?

So how can you spot these individuals and how many are we talking about?

Ed Nathanson, founder and CEO of Red Pill Talent, says, “There are certainly groups of people in various functions of any company that want to grow and learn but do not equate career growth with management responsibilities. In a lot of cases, these people are looking to grow individually in their scope of impact.”

Nathanson says that this group of individuals finds the job of management burdensome. They view the

added responsibility of managing people and their careers as something that might take away from their own individual ambitions or passions.

Where to Start There are many assessment tools such as Predictive Index or 360 reviews, Nathanson says, that will provide insight and information on a candidate’s aptitude for management. Or you can have workers act as a lead or mentor before promoting them to see how they fit.

Experts agree, the process should start with a one-on-one conversation with the management candidate to find out what his or her career ambitions are.

Is Management on the Right Track?

The aforementioned conversation should also include a brief bit on what a management position is and what entails. Many employees will be able to articulate what they want but for those who are unsure. Reed says, “See if they have a realistic understanding of a ‘day in the life’ as a manager. ” To get their feet wet in a management position without changing jobs or titles, mentoring newer or less experienced team members is one way to test a management candidate’s leadership skills.

Rich Hein covers IT careers. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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1/14/2015 3:17:56 PM

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news scan

start 10

Xiaomi Faces Phone Ban in India

Smartphone maker Xiaomi faces a key setback in India after some of the company’s devices were temporarily banned by a court in a patent dispute with Ericsson.

The Chinese company may, however, try to diffuse the crisis quickly by negotiating a license for the eight standard-essential mobile patents in the lawsuit with Ericsson.

“India is a very important market for Xiaomi and we will respond promptly as needed and in full compliance with Indian law,” Xiaomi said in a statement.

—IDG News Service

‘The Interview’ is Sony Pictures’ Top Online Film Ever

“The Interview,” which is already linked to a massive corporate hack, a US-North Korea spat and an outcry over censorship, now has another claim to fame: It’s the most successful online film in Sony Pictures’ history. “The Interview” generated over $15M (about Rs 90 crore) in online rentals and sales, according to the studio.

—Computerworld (US)

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HP Inks SAP Reseller Deal

Hewlett Packard has struck an agreement with SAP to resell its Fortify application security software.

SAP is now offering the solution under the name SAP Fortify software by HP to help customers quickly identify and address software vulnerabilities. As an expansion to a longstanding reseller relationship, SAP Fortify by HP helps address security needs by enabling SAP customers to identify, triage and fix vulnerabilities in production applications, while also helping reduce risk by enabling security to be built in during software development.

Application security helps strengthen SAP’s quality assurance portfolio of solutions, allowing users to Identify vulnerabilities early in the software development process.

—ARN

Apple-IBM Partnership Off to an Impressive Start

Apple and IBM kicked off their five-month-old partnership with an “impressive” 10-pack of focused mobile business apps catering to sectors ranging from financial to law enforcement.

“The three that I’ve seen were pretty impressive,” said Van Baker, an analyst at Gartner.

Among the 10 apps that Apple and IBM touted were an airline in-flight customer service and engagement app, another aimed at telecommunications firms for field repair calls and a third for law enforcement incident response. Others targeted business sectors ranging from banking and insurance to retail and government social services.

The apps put flesh on the partnership’s bones, and signaled how the two companies decided which apps to design and what markets to target.

—CIO (US)

Riverbed Goes Private in USD 3.6B Deal

Riverbed Technology is the latest major tech company to bow out of public trading, announcing a $3.6 billion (about Rs 21,600 crore) takeover by private equity firm Thoma Bravo. The price is the highest ever paid by Thoma Bravo, and works out to $21 (about Rs 1260) for each share of Riverbed currently in circulation.

The deal should close in early 2015, pending regulatory and shareholder approval.

With those in hand, Riverbed would join a growing list of high-profile tech companies in going private, including Dell, BMC and Blue Coat.

—Network World (US)

Cisco Buying Neohapsis for Security Brainpower

Cisco Systems plans to expand its security consulting services by acquiring Neohapsis, a small Chicago firm that tells enterprises how to secure their applications.

The Neohapsis acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, is a classic “aqui-hire” intended to bring an experienced team at Neohapsis into the Cisco fold. Neohapsis President and CEO James Mobley and other key players in the 57-employee company came from @stake, a security firm acquired by Symantec in 2004. They will help to run the Cisco Security Services organization under Bryan Palma, who oversees that group and several others within Cisco.

—IDG News Service

Microsoft and IBM Keep the Pressure on Amazon’s Cloud

Until further notice, Amazon Web Services is the reigning public IaaS cloud leader. But deep-pocketed companies Microsoft and IBM are keeping the pressure on AWS with a flurry of announcements beefing up their clouds.

IBM, which in early 2014, committed to investing in its cloud platform, is accelerating its roll-out of new datacenters across the globe. Microsoft, meanwhile, has continued the steady drumbeat of feature enhancements to its cloud in recent months.

—Network World (US)

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Gatwick Airport Increases Runway Capacity with Cloud

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L O N D O N London Gatwick Airport is the first to implement Amadeus’ cloudbased Airport-Collaborative Decision Making Portal (A-CDM) to improve operations. Gatwick said it opted for Amadeus’ “cost effective” cloud technology to speed up the implementation time of A-CDM, rolling out the Amadeus portal to 300 users “in just eight weeks”. The aim of the A-CDM standard is to bring the entire airport ecosystem (airport operators, airlines, ground handlers and air traffic management) together to operate more efficiently and transparently, sharing accurate information in a timely manner. This is designed to deliver better air traffic management with fewer delays and increased capacity, as well as an improved passenger experience. Computerworld UK

Ghost Car for Drivers to Follow

FRAMINGHAM Jaguar Land Rover has revealed two new

research projects it’s working on: A 360 Virtual Urban Windscreen to give a driver a 360-degree view outside the car and a ghost car navigation aid that projects a virtual vehicle ahead of you to follow. The ghost car is a navigation aid for busy urban roads and uses heads-up display technology to provide information to keep the driver’s eyes on the road and reduce distraction, Range Rover said in a statement.

Pedestrians, cyclists and other vehicles would be visible all around the car and the movement of others on the road could be highlighted with an on-screen halo moving across the car’s virtual windscreen. www.computerworld.com

One-hour Delivery Arrives

M A N H AT T A N With Prime Now, Amazon’s customers will be able to have toys and books shipped to their door in one hour or less via a new mobile app. Perfect when you have forgotten that important birthday present. Amazon launched Prime Now in select areas of Manhattan, and the necessary Prime Now app is available for iOS and Android devices. Additional cities will be added next year, Amazon said. Not all products are available through Prime Now. IDG News Service

India Recommends Banning Unregistered Web Taxis

NEW DELHI India’s federal government has recommended that states should ban unregistered Web taxi services, following an outcry over the alleged rape of a female passenger in Delhi by an Uber driver.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh told Parliament that his ministry had advised local governments to ensure that the operations of Web-based taxi services are stopped until they get themselves registered with the local administrations.

The Delhi Transport Department had already banned Uber from operating in Delhi for violation of its rules, and followed up with a prohibition on unregistered Web-based taxi services. Uber did not immediately comment.

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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All Data Considered

Data quality projects show Boston’s WGBH how to segment customers for more lucrative target marketing. By Mary Pratt

Public TV and radio station WGBH wanted to build deeper relationships with current and potential members, but the Boston-area PBS and NPR affiliate couldn’t easily analyze its donor data from within its Salesforce customer relationship management system. That put targeted marketing efforts beyond reach, says Cate Twohill, the station’s senior director and managing partner for CRM services.

Using RedPoint Global’s Interaction and Data Management tools, Twohill’s team mirrored the Salesforce data, to clean and analyze member information. Ultimately, WGBH wanted to find out which marketing programs appeal to which donors and to potential members.

WGBH pays $140,000 (about Rs 84 lakh) annually for RedPoint tools and services and is already seeing returns, Twohill says. The station cut 80,000 duplicate records, saving $100,000 (about Rs 60 lakh) by eliminating double mailings. Also, the station now automates administrative portions of membership renewal campaigns, which used to take 1,200 hours every year to run. So far, the

•••••••••••••  92% of Indian CIOs expect to spend most of their time in 2015 in strategic business planning. SOTC 2014 •••••••••••••

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crunch Inside Out

grow

In 2014, security didn’t have much

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new tools have cut hours in half. Most importo write home about. New threats tant for growth, WGBH now segments conlurked in every corner giving sumers for targeted appeals, selecting people Indian CISOs sleepless nights. likely to show interest in, say, a wine tasting Their biggest source of grief? or a family event. “We can send people inforInsider threat. mation based on the data and then track who opens e-mails and who gives gifts based on Current employees 48% [specific appeals],” Twohill says.

Former employees 39% Ted Friedman, an analyst at Gartner, says Current service providers 22% WGBH’s deployment of customer analytics folFormer service providers 21% lows a growing trend of organizations focusing Customers 15% on data quality. Tools that help the quality effort SOURCE: GISS 2015 are in high demand, Friedman says, but these products aren’t as simple to use as they could be. For example, they often don’t integrate easily with other customer and analytics systems and could use better visualization capabilities, he says.

At WGBH, Twohill’s group now embarks on more ambitious marketing initiatives than it could in the past. For example, “Now we Smappee (an acronym for Smart App for the station borrows demographic can be as Energy Efficiency) is a sensor that measures and other data from similar orgathe total electrical power that your home flexible and as nizations, such as National Geodraws from the grid. That’s not unique, but graphic and other PBS stations, sophisticated Smappee’s ability to uniquely identify each to analyze against its own. appliance—large and small—is new. as we want.”

Before, Twohill shied away Smappee CEO and founder Stefan Gros—Cate Twohill, Senior from experimenting with such jean says awareness leading to behavior Director and Managing change, plus the ability to remotely power potentially useful borrowed data devices off with Smappee Comfort Plugs, because it would have been dif- Partner, CRM Services, WGBH will reduce the typical consumer’s energy ficult to keep it segregated if she bill by 12 percent. put it in the Salesforce system for analysis. That’s because of data Clamp a pair of sensors to the main management rules built into Salesforce tools, she says. “We don’t power lines coming from the grid into your want to push data that inadvertently gets kept,” she says. circuit-breaker panel. The sensors measure WGBH has also been able to identify neighborhoods with a fluctuations in the magnetic field emanathigh volume of active donors and target areas with the highest ing from the electrons flowing through potential receptiveness for door-to-door canvassing, creating the cables and send the information to the maps with such detailed information as membership saturaSmappee box.

The box uploads this data to the cloud via tion levels by neighborhood. There’s no doubt that non-profit your Wi-Fi network, where Smappee’s servWGBH is seeing ROI, Twohill says. The station’s membership ers analyze these patterns, disaggregating renewal rate is up 10 percent in the past year, and revenue is the data to identify the consumption sigup 11 percent. She credits insights from better analysis and tarnature for each device in your home. These geted marketing for 80 percent of those increases. “Now we results are then pushed to an app on your can be as flexible and as sophisticated as we want,” she says.

Map the Energy Bill

smartphone or tablet.

Send feedback to editor@cio.in

—Michael Brown

•••••••••••• 55% of Indian CIOs expect to complete mobile BI projects in their organizations in the next 12 months. SOTC 2014•••••••••••••

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IT MANAGEMENT

Intuition: The New Analysis Tool Executives that define their organizations as ‘data-driven’ value intuition highly and use it as a tool for data analysis. BY T H O R O L AV S R U D

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he desire to make better decisions faster “However much data you take in, and whatever the interis one of the fundamental drivers of new big view process, when you get to the end there has to be an data analytics technologies and a general element of gut feel too,” says Alison Robb, group director push toward data-driven decision-making. for people, customer, communications, and commercial at But the relationship between data and intuNationwide Building Society, one of the expert practitioners ition is a complicated one, says Peter Swabey, senior editor, interviewed for the EIU report.

Technology at the Economist Intelligence Perhaps nothing illustrates the inextriUnit (EIU), the research and analysis divicable link between data-driven decisions Both intuition sion of The Economist Group. and human intuition better than how and analysis “They both play a role,” Swabey says. people would respond if the available data contribute “The process of developing data is the procontradicted gut feeling. Fully 57 percent to effective cess of trying to identify what the true state of survey respondents said that if condecision-making fronted with that situation, the first thing is. In identifying that, your intuition could be a useful guide.” they would do is reanalyze the data; 30 in business EIU surveyed 174 senior managers and percent said they would collect more data as in life. executives from around the world and from a and only 10 percent said they would take range of industries, 49 percent of whom repthe course of action suggested by the data. resented organizations with more than $500 million (about “Evidently both intuition and analysis contribute to Rs 3,000 crore) in annual revenue. EIU also conducted ineffective decision-making, in business as in life,” she says. depth interviews with practitioners and experts.

“Rather than a weakness that must be avoided, intuition The study found that 42 percent of respondents said they should instead be seen as a skill that is appropriate in the collect and analyze data as much as possible before making a right circumstances.” decision, while an additional 17 percent said they approach In the report, 19 percent of respondents said decisiondecisions empirically by developing hypotheses and permakers in their organizations are not held accountable at all, forming tests to prove or disprove them. In other words, 59 while 59 percent acknowledged that poor decision-makers percent rely on data to help them make decisions. Of the will still be allowed to progress within their organization. remainder of respondents, 32 percent said they seek to col“This implies that in a significant minority of organizalaborate on decisions as much as possible, while only 10 pertions, senior managers take decisions behind closed doors cent said they primarily rely on intuition to make decisions. for opaque reasons and, should those decisions turn out to be “Despite the apparent popularity of data-driven decisionthe wrong ones, are not held accountable,” Bird says. “This making, however, intuition is in fact valued highly,” says is a disturbing state of affairs.”

Jane Bird, author of the EIU report. “Nearly three-quarters “I’m a great believer in accountability, and I’m happy of respondents (73 percent) say they trust their own intuition that my board members have got some liability,” says Gerry when it comes to decision-making. Even among the dataGrimstone, chairman of insurer Standard Life. “They take driven decision-makers, over two-thirds (68 percent) agree better decisions if they think that there are reputational conwith that statement.” sequences if they get it wrong.”

And, Bird notes, 68 percent of them would be trusted by their peers and superiors to make a decision not supported by data.

Send feedback to editor@cio.in.

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VIEW from the TOP Anupam Mittal, Chairman and MD, People Group

Joined in Holy Matrimony grow

Technology has kept an 18-year-old People Group going in an industry where businesses run the risk of becoming obsolete, sometimes too soon. BY S H U B H R A R I S H I

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management system has also been built in-house keeping in mind what we think is important, in terms of performance, for building a valuable business.

How are you using analytics in the match-making business?

A newly wed couple is playfully conversing about how they met on a matrimony site and a new ad from Shaadi.com insinuating that happiness is just an app away. It’s a company that has used technology to bring people closer. And for Anupam Mittal, chairman and MD of People Group—that owns Shaadi.com—people and technology mean business. In this interview, he says, one must constantly invest in technology, and reinvent every few years.

You have come a long way since 1996. How have you managed to survive the dotcom bust and stay relevant even today?

When it comes to Shaadi.com and Mauj Mobile, analytics plays a huge role. Analytics helps us answer many questions, and hence, is very critical from a matchmaking perspective.

Cloud, mobility, and analytics are three critical areas and priorities for us.

Cloud helps us reduce cost, but analytics and mobile are critical for the growth of our busiAnalytics nesses. And that’s something we are investing a lot helps us In terms of analytics, we answer many in. invested in significant platquestions, and forms this year.

We have been around for a really long time. Technically, Shaadi.com was founded in 1996 but didn’t really focus on the business till early 2002. For the first five years, it was more of an experiment. Finally in 2002, we started evolving Shaadi.com seriously, and that was hence, is very really the time we started putting energy into it. Thanks What lessons have critical from a to the dotcom bust, hiring engineers and designers had you learned from your match-making journey so far? become inexpensive.

At the time, most people had written off Internet busiThere were many. I have perspective. nesses. But we saw a huge potential in building somelearnt that momentum is thing long-term. very critical, never comThe next phase came post 2009, when social media, especially promise on it. As an entrepreneur, we Facebook, took over, and we realized that the old style of marketare wired to be distracted because we ing wasn’t going to work anymore. We realized that when it comes are opportunists. Distraction is good to to match-making we must optimize Shaadi.com in a way that not start a business but focus is critical if only direct competition, but even social networks couldn’t offer you’re going to scale it, that’s another such a service. important lesson.

Never compromise on talent. Find good, entrepreneurial, and professional How does technology tie all your businesses together? talent if you’re going to build someTechnology is not tying our businesses together. Instead, it has thing valuable. given us capabilities for building an HR system which allows our employees to perform operations such as promotions, skills, and reimbursements, or build an in-house finance system which helps Send feedback to shubhra_rishi@idgindia. our employees carry out financial approvals. The performance com

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“Businesses need to reconsider their defense strategies to combat the new breed of cyber attacks.”

Anil Bhasin, MD-India & SAARC, Palo Alto Networks

Securing the Next-Gen Architecture Reducing information security complexities and costs are some of the key challenges faced by Indian enterprises today. Palo Alto Networks comes to the rescue. By Sejuti Das

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oday, organizations are struggling to refine and manage their complex IT environment while meeting the mandate to bridge the gap between managing operational expenses and increasing productivity. Therefore, they are continuously challenged to keep up with core business activities and limited resources to uphold their information security posture.

In order to get a better understanding of how CIOs are looking at the security measures and the challenges of reducing IT security costs and complexities, Palo Alto Networks, in association with CIO magazine, conducted a roundtable in Chennai, on the sidelines of the CIO Year Ahead 2015 program.

Anil Bhasin, MD-India & SAARC, Palo Alto Networks, kickstarted the discussion by saying that CIOs should be aware of the known and unknown threats in their enterprises in order to build a robust security posture.

The velocity and variance of attacks makes it imperative for organizations to be in a position to respond to them. “Businesses need to reconsider their defense strategies to combat the new breed of cyber attacks,” Bhasin said.

And to be able to do that CIOs need to prepare and gear up to combat sophisticated security threats. “Security versus convenience is always a challenge, and that’s where it starts.

CIOs should be well prepared as nobody can actually do much

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about undiscovered threats,” Ashok Kannan, AVP-IT, Ashok Leyland John Deere Construction Equipment said.

To minimize IT security concerns and comply with regulations, businesses have to control their networks. With the increasing cyber security risks, it has become clear that outdated security infrastructure, based on legacy firewalls, is largely incapable to handle new-age threats. “We are in a generation wherein everything is transformed to digital. More often than not, by the time OEMs launch a security solution and the digital market matures, the technology might already be old,” Srivaths Varadharajan, CIO, Reliance Securities said.

To fix these problems, Bhasin said CIOs should devise a threepronged strategy. “First, it’s important to have full visibility on what is running on your network—known and unknown.

Second, one should understand the root cause of these threats— whether it’s the people, process or the product. And third, one should propose a strategy to tackle the same.”

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[Q+A]

Marketing Technologist grow

Marketing and IT share a love-hate relationship. But some CIOs are breaking barriers and steppping into the shoes of marketing to see the world from a different perspective. Yateen Chodnekar, Group CIO, Writer Corporation, gives a glimpse of what that world looks like. BY S H U B H R A R I S H I

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Why did you decide to take up an additional responsibility of overseeing the CMO role?

The marketing role was once meant to create effective, massmarket advertising in order to increase brand awareness and loyalty. Over the years, the skills and competencies required for the marketing function have changed and technical expertise has become more important than agency experience.

I saw an opportunity in transforming the marketing function into a new age, tech-driven one.

I saw an opportunity in transforming the conventional marketing function into a new age, tech-driven one at Writer Corp. For me, overseeing the marketing role is not a transition from a CIO to a CMO role, but it is a logical expansion of the CIO role. I believe that IT leaders overseeing the marketing function and subsequently spearheading it can smoothen the adoption of new age tools, technologies, and business processes, and they can become more customer-centric. Additionally, they can play a huge role in helping the marketing function fall in sync with the rest of the business and serve as a catalyst for growth.

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Why do you think technical expertise has become more crucial for a CMO?

The emergence of new technology is stretching the boundaries of a CMO role. As organizations become more customer-centric and data-driven, CMOs are also expected to possess analytical, mobile, and social capabilities. This is a huge testament to the growing realization that modern marketing is becoming a technology-driven discipline. So, a technology leader is perfectly positioned to oversee and then lead the CMO function, and utilize the benefits of technology tools, new avenues, and funding models.

What personality traits must a CIO possess to oversee, and lead the marketing role?

CIOs who are energetic, enterprising, and have a clear vision in terms of strategy, execution, and delivery are a natural fit to oversee the CMO role.

An IT leader must also gain necessary skills in the areas of pricing, governance, mentoring, new age CRM, and collaboration tools, among others. For a CIO to seep into a tech-driven marketing function, it is not to bring about a change in marketing capabilities, but a tectonic shift in the marketing culture in an organization.

How will a dual role cope with the changing demands of the digital age?

Expanding the role of a CIO to oversee marketing function is a positive step. Today, CIOs are indulging in conversations with businesses, discussing customer response and behavior pattern. In the next two years, you will see CIOs overseeing and eventually, leading the marketing function in their organizations.

For me, this is a three-year journey during which I’ll take over the marketing role as an additional role at Writer Corp. As deliverables fall in place and firm benefits from the ROI, CIOs role will expand and envelop the digital marketing function. That’s a digital imperative of third gen IT computing!

Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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leadership and operational excellence

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Data-Driven Advertising

Progressive Insurance deploys open-source data analytics software to optimize its ad strategy to drive new customers to its website to buy a policy. BY S T E P H A N I E OV E R BY Automobile insurer Progressive is known as a leader in analyzing data to price its policies,

but last year the $17 billion company decided to apply analytics technology to find the most efficient way to spend a significant portion of its marketing budget. In the hyper-competitive auto insurance industry, big bucks are spent attracting new customers (upwards of $6 billion annually, according to McKinsey & Co.). And Progressive wanted to optimize spending, specifically on digital display advertising. While consumers may be familiar with its TV ads featuring fictional employee Flo, the company also serves up several million static advertisements on websites with the hope of driving new customers to its website to buy a policy.

The first step was to implement Hadoop open-source software, which enables the media team to review months worth of online advertising data in a few hours—something

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that would have taken a few days before, says Andrew Quigg, Progressive’s media business leader. In fact, sometimes such queries weren’t possible at all. Plus, the mainframes housing the appropriate data were devoted to issuing policies, and business leaders didn’t want to slow down that core business.

So a cross-functional team of IT and business analysts built a working prototype in the cloud, which Quigg says was the fastest and most nimble option for experimentation.

“The cloud is a less expensive option, but [also] we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” Quigg says. “We’d never looked at the data in its most granular form, so moving it off our mainframe and into the cloud allowed us to look for specific patterns and nuances in consumer behavior.”

In the past, Progressive based its online advertising strategy on the classic metrics of reach (the number of people an ad can reach), frequency (how often a consumer was served an ad before making a purchase), click-through rates (the number of users that clicked on an ad), and “last touch” (the last place to show an ad before the purchase).

With advanced analytics, Progressive can look at longitudinal data. “We were finally able to ask and answer questions that we had always wanted to investigate,” Quigg says.

The improved analytics can go beyond simply the last place a customer visited before coming to the company’s website, for example, to look at the combination of ads the consumer saw over days, weeks or months to more accurately determine what combination of ad placements might be most successful in the future. It will “allow us to eventually gain a competitive advantage by using data to make smarter, more efficient advertising buys,” Quigg says.

The user interface in the cloud was too slow and business leaders were leery of keeping sensitive consumer data off-site. So Progressive now houses all the online advertising data on-site in a facility known internally as “the bunker” due to its high level of security. Although the system is only partially deployed, it’s crunching the display ad data 200 times faster than was possible in the past, Quigg says.

Media leaders can now analyze digital display ad effectiveness from an individual customer perspective, Quigg says. “We can better understand what users are seeing our ads. Is it the same audience or a different audience? This project is allowing us to become better at being able to identify that overlap, which leads to more efficient media buys.”

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Things You Need to Know APPLICATION-AS-A-SERVICE

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ENLIST AN ARMY OF BUSINESS ANALYSTS. These IT professionals should align themselves with business relations—not applications—to handle upfront planning. They will have the business process knowledge necessary to clarify changes that will be required in the applications landscape and create new and consistent business processes. “Business analysts provide a core competency in aligning business needs for change with the underlying systems that support that business,” says Steve Keegan, principal with outsourcing consultancy Pace Harmon.

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DON’T SKIMP ON PLANNING. “The early project phases of scoping and planning that ultimately feed the business case are indeed worthy of sufficient investment,” Keegan says. Plan to spend about 5 to 10 percent of project time (and cost) developing a business case. “Spending more time planning creates not only more certainty that you’ll be pleased with the outcome, but you will know when you break ground that you won’t be making too many changes to the plan once you start,” says Keegan.

3

PUT ARCHITECTURE IN CHARGE OF APPLICATION PLANNING. “Traditional application leaders typically attempt to expand their control by increasing complexity, expanding the application suite resulting in increased licensing and maintenance cost, and expanding complexity of the resultant support–because they are accountable for delivering individual projects, not the cost of supporting what they put in. Architects have a mission to optimize the portfolio,” Keegan explains.

Incentivize efficient utilization and rationalization of the application suite, retirement and migration of less used or expensive to maintain applications and platforms, and optimal cost and quality.

4

NEVER START PROJECTS UNTIL SUFFICIENTLY PLANNED AND STAFFED. “Without an understanding of or visibility to the portfolio constraints, executives and other leaders step in to drive determination of budget and timeline that may or may not be achievable,” says Keegan. Leverage the portfolio planning function to prioritize and sequence demand for as-a-service offerings.

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CREATE AN EFFECTIVE GATING MECHANISM PRIOR TO PRODUCTION. “A capability for owning service transition needs to be baked into the model to assure that what goes into production are only changes that are ready to be supported,” Keegan says. Those responsible for these decisions should be independent, but aligned with the build and run functions.

— Stephanie Overby

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POPULAR SCIENCE

The Eyes Say It All

An eye-tracking device, helps paralyzed people interact with computers, using eye movements. BY Y E WO N K A N G

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ice to meet you all,” wrote Hyung-Jin Shin, using only his eyes.

From his adjustable bed, Shin made the words appear on the computer screen using Eyecan+, an eye-tracking device developed by Samsung Electronics.

“I’m happy that eye mouse is developed in Korea,” he continued. “The eye mouse is not just an IT product, but limbs for the disabled. Hope this kind of research will continue.”

Shin, a graduate student in computer science at the Yonsei University in Seoul, has worked with Samsung on developing the Eyecan user experience. He was born with quadriplegia.

Samsung designed the Eyecan+ to help paralyzed people like Shin interact with computers, using eye movements and blinking to perform common operations such as typing, copying and pasting, clicking, scrolling, or zooming in and out.

Although the eye-tracking technology may have other applications, Samsung sees it as particularly helpful for those paralyzed as a result of a spinal cord injury.

Other potential users include those with progressive neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

(ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. It is illness in which patients lose control of mobility and in the later stages are only able to use their eyes.

The portable, wireless device sits below the computer monitor and can respond to the eye movements of a user 60 to 70 centimeters away. After a one-time calibration process, the Eyecan+ shows a pop-up menu on the screen, which provides 18 commands that the user can choose from.Eyecan+ is the result of a voluntary project by Samsung engineers, the company said. The South Korean electronics maker introduced the first Eyecan in March 2012, and since then calibration sensitivity and the user experience have improved, it said.

Samsung has no plans to commercialize the Eyecan+ and will make only a few of the devices to donate to charity organizations. However, it will make its technology and design open source, it said.

Recent advances in eye tracking technology are expected to allow a proliferation of new applications. Tobii Technology, for example, in Sweden offers a Windows 8 Pro tablet which users can control with their eyes to perform tap, swipe and scroll gestures.

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Send feedback to editor@cio.in

The Inside Contact There will come a time when your inner garments are connected to the Internet, a French startup said at Le Web in Paris.

Stephane Marceau, co-founder and CEO of OMsignal, a company that makes biometric “smartwear” for athletes, said, “Our expectation is that you’ll go to a store and you’ll buy an undergarment and you won’t even ask, it will be a connected object. Like when you buy a car you expect there to be a dashboard.”

The claim comes as members of the public and governments

around the world raise concerns that technology companies possess an alarming amount of people’s personal data.

OMsignal’s first products, which monitor variables such as heart rate and body temperature, have been targeted at people with an interest in fitness, but the company also wants to make more generic products.

Wearable devices, such as Google Glass and the Sony Smartwatch, have yet to be taken to consumers’ under-clothes, but researchers at technology analyst house Forrester released a study that suggests things are about to change.

Speaking at Le Web, JP Gownder, VP and principal analyst at Forrester,

said: “Privacy is a key issue that everyone has to contend with in some fashion. Half of American adults say Google Glass gives them privacy concerns but 45 percent of people say I’m interested in Google Glass at the right price. So people are very conflicted.

“If these things are valuable people will be a little bit more forgiving.”

When asked what OMsignal did with its customers data, Marceau said, “We’ve built the architecture of our server in a way that we can’t identify whose data it is.”

Marceau said he’s not yet ready to sell customer data to retailers that want to send discount deals to shoppers in their store.

—Sam Shead

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Simplifying IT to Deliver

Business Outcomes

To simplify IT, we must be ready for change in a way that will help us transform, connect, stay informed, and secure our businesses from new threats.”

Ajay Kaul,

Director & GM, Geo Head-North, Dell India

In the age of constantly changing technology, instead of innovation, CIOs have to tackle issues of legacy and skillsets amid growing business demands. Is there a way out?

By Shubhra Rishi

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xperience tells CIOs that the need for change is constant. The role of technology is to make lives simpler and give IT leaders the opportunity to experiment and innovate. But it also challenges them to tackle existing concerns such as legacy issues and shortage of talent within their organizations. According to CIO Research, going forward, the expectation for IT to deliver on business outcomes is only going to

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increase. However, it’s not necessary that all IT investments will result in quantifiable results.

“An IT investment will definitely result in business efficiency, but it may or may not deliver all other business growth aspects. While I can make a process more efficient by deploying tech but can I really prove that it has also impacted the bottom line or the top line? That’s the biggest challenge. It has come to a stage

where technology is a must-have but the benefit realization will happen over a period of time,” said Annie Mathew, CIO, Mother Dairy Fruit & Vegetable, at a roundtable, organized by Dell in association with CIO magazine.

CIOs agree that there will always be strategic IT projects that will be hard to quantify. “Every time a new initiative comes from either IT or business, I categorize them into two buckets: Strategic, and others. While I am able

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SPECIAL EVENT COVERAGE DELL

to show returns on strategic projects because I don’t have to quantify them, but when it comes to other projects which are business asks, we work in collaboration with the business,” said Anjani Kumar, CIO, Safexpress.

While determining measurable business outcomes from IT initiatives is difficult, another challenge is culling legacy systems. “Moving out of legacy becomes difficult because there’s a lot of resistance to change. But it isn’t always advisable to leverage change only for the sake of change,” said Vipul Jain, CIO, BirlaSoft.

Change reflects in an organization’s culture. According to Ajay Kaul, Director & GM, Geo Head-North, Dell India, there are organizations today that understand the need for change through innovation, and they are transforming themselves with changing business needs. For instance, he said, the role of CIOs has become more meaningful in e-commerce setups where they collaborate with business and drive new initiatives.

But at the same time, according to CIO Research, a lot of new IT projects are being funded by business. As a result, a lot of IT initiatives take a backseat. “I feel that CIOs must be able to communicate the business need to implement IT projects which will improve core business processes, IT infrastructure, and bring agility and efficiency within the organization, before they embark on projects initiated by business,” said B. S. Gupta, AVP-IT, Kent R-O Systems.

While that’s important, some CIOs also feel there’s a need for IT to understand business needs and ensure their initiatives tie back to business objectives. “Whether it is changing core processes, building a team or investing in new tech, CIOs must be in sync with business asks and prepare to address legacy challenges and change management issues,” said Punit Rastogi, head-IT, Gannon Dunkerley & Co. That’s something Vivek Ahuja, headIT, Syscom Corporation, agrees with.

Ahuja said that IT leaders must be able to translate IT requirements to business terms. For instance, CIOs, he

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said, must be able to communicate the business outcomes associated with an IT investment, no matter how trivial.

The other aspect is addressing the skillset challenge. Mother Dairy’s Mathew says that from an end-user company perspective, the expectation from IT is not to be skilled in the latest technology tools, but to bridge the gap between the business and technology provider. She said the need is to understand processes in-depth such that IT is able to interpret what is being proposed as a solution, evaluate

less critical IT components—such as ERP, mail and messaging, and service desk—so that we are able to simplify technology and focus on how I can help business make more money,” said Thakur.

CIOs must be willing to address existing challenges, and communicate better with business because that’s how they will embrace change. “There are challenges which give shape to opportunities and that’s what keeps us alive. Therefore, we must be ready for change in a way that will help us

between technologies available and arrive at a technology solution. “That’s a difference we have acknowledged, and from that point of view, it’s more important for a CIO to understand the business more than the technology,” said Mathew.

Apart from skillsets, it’s also important for CIOs to acknowledge the needs of business. While addressing IT needs in an organization, CIOs should be able to deliver what business needs. Prince Thakur, VP-IT, Innodata, says that the role of IT should be to take business on a growth path and deliver on business outcomes. “In our organization, we have outsourced

transform, connect, stay informed and secure our businesses from new threats. These are the four areas that CIOs must address in order to simplify IT,” said Kaul.

This event report is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Dell and Microsoft

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SPECIAL EVENT COVERAGE TATA COMMUNICATIONS

Go Digital: Accelerate

Business Innovation Digital transformation is creating waves in Indian organizations. Top CIOs share their views on the need to shift from legacy systems to digital portfolios.

By Madhav Mohan

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igital transformation is all about digitizing the customer experience, improving service and knowing customers better. At the same time, it covers three areas: Digitizing operations, products, and services.

There are demands from employees and customers to move to digital transformation for service and convenience. It is uniquely challenging, touching every function and business unit.

Digital transformation is also demanding the rapid development of new skills and investments. In this new normal, change and challenges go together.

In order to integrate and improve customer experience, businesses are entering an era of digital transformation. If companies need to meet the challenges of today’s complex technology landscape, they need to turn to digitization as it’s a great opportunity to reap promising benefits.

To gain a deeper understanding of how organizations are moving from legacy apps to a digital portfolio, Dell, in association with CIO magazine, recently conducted a roundtable in Bangalore. “Business will agree to go digital directly. Whether we take in legacy or not, it depends upon the matter

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SPECIAL EVENT COVERAGE DELL

of process it is serving. Business will allow us to go digital because of the millennial generation,” said Narayanan Subramanyam, CIO, United Spirits. He further observes that social media and marketing will move into the digital platform.

A huge part of the digital transformation journey is cloud computing. Organizations need to rapidly turn their attention to how cloud can support revenue growth as part of their digital transformation strategy.

Ravi Manivasagan, Head-India Business for Application Services, Dell, said the company did a global study along with a research organization to gauge the adoption of digital transformation.

“We have observed direct correlation between the adoption of digital transformation, specifically the cloud aspect and revenue growth,” he said.

The survey findings revealed that organizations adopting cloud are on the fast track to growth as compared to those not adopting it. “We see opportunities to move them from legacy to digital portfolio and re-hosting them,” Manivasagan said.

When it comes to the banking sector, banks require a cost effective way to leverage the strengths of legacy core banking systems. Replacing legacy systems with more modern and flexible platforms can pose huge challenges for the banking industry. The makeover can be costly and time intensive.

Atul Kumar, GM-IT, Syndicate Bank, said legacy systems continue to have a

There are risks of ignoring the digital phenomenon. If you do not embrace it, then you won’t be able to serve millennials, who are going to be your customers.”

Mahesh Kolar, Global Head-Mobility Practice, Dell Digital Business Services

place in core-banking systems. “There is no substitute for legacy systems. For the next five to 10 years, it is going to exist in the banking sector. All of us are able to access the Internet because of legacy systems and mobile apps are

getting plugged into it. If legacy systems are high end, they are going to stay,” he said.

But that doesn’t mean the banking sector isn’t going to go digital. “Digital transformation is the way forward. The delivery channels—ATM and mobile banking—have now become the main channels and branches have become only for loans and other kinds of routine jobs,” Kumar said.

It was also debated as to whether the banking sector is still shying away from the transition because of its complex processes. Research has shown that banks that continue to run on legacy core-banking systems would eventually end up spending more money to upgrade their systems, than they would if they enthusiastically accept a more modern platform.

According to Mahesh Kolar, global head-Mobility Practice, Dell Digital Business Services, it is vital to embark on a digital journey. Therefore, it is critical to focus on user interaction, visual design element, mockups and prototypes for connected user experience. With this, one can showcase the experience to all stakeholders or lines of businesses within the enterprise. “There are risks of ignoring the digital phenomenon.

If you do not embrace it, then you won’t be able to serve millennials, who are going to be your customers.

Organizations that are able to adapt it faster in a shorter cycle time will be able to react better,” Kolar said.

The race is on for CIOs to take the plunge into digital initiatives and to dramatically increase their value to customers and keep them happy. The ability to connect digitally and getting real-time visibility is going to be the only way to take businesses forward.

This event report is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Dell and Intel

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HIRING MANAGER

Talent Hunt in a Merger

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One of a CIO’s biggest leadership challenges is retaining the best IT talent in the throes of a merger, acquisition, or divestiture. BY K R I S T E N L A M O R E AU X

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n today’s dog-merge-dog world, one of the the way to build the team, community and culture is greatest challenges is determining how to weave based on investing time,” says Haindl. “During a merger, the IT talent from merging companies into one IT leadership is stretched in many ways, much like the successful, thriving organization. Divestitures organization, but you need to devote time each day to pose the same challenge: Deciding who will stay being actively engaged: Face-to-face, social media, town and who will go. hall meetings. These engagements become the new stories “Skill sets and requirements can differ for acquisition of the organization.” versus divestiture,” says Brian Lurie, former CIO of global manufacturer Gardner Denver, “but talent is needed in Merger = Bonus? both situations.” He says that when making selections, Be aware that some employees in the midst of a merger CIOs should remember that “skills can be learned, have come to expect retention bonuses. And while it’s true but talents are innate.” So it’s important to have candid that bonuses can be used to acknowledge those who are conversations with managers at the other company. most valuable, the absence of a bonus can be interpreted “The two CIOs from the merging companies need as saying, “Ah, yeah, you can go now.” to work together, along with their Lurie is leery of retention bonuses: When making executive teams, to outline the current “You need to be very careful with the organizations and develop [a vision information that is shared and assume selections, CIOs for] the future organization,” says should remember that who is on the [bonus] list will Sue Haindl, VP of Anexinet and a eventually leak. It can be like a cancer if that skills can former operations and IT leader at Pew not managed correctly.” be learned, but Charitable Trusts and Exelon. “You O’Malley agrees that retention talents are innate. bonuses are tricky. “They are a tool, but should start thinking about talent during the early deal discussions.” not one that I would pull out on day one.

There is no one correct way to handle this process.

These need to be handled very carefully and presented and But Brendan O’Malley, CIO at NSM Insurance Group, sold to the individuals involved or they can boomerang recommends avoiding the old tactic of making both sides pretty quickly.” bid for their jobs. “I have never gone the route of ‘everyone’s Haindl says that throughout her career, “The best up for grabs.’ One organization is already in turmoil. Why [M&A] transactions had several key ingredients: A throw a curveball to your own organization?” leadership team that had a vision and plan for the merged companies; frequent and transparent communication to the workforce; and a timeline that supported rapid and Building the Team efficient integration.”

Maintaining productivity and morale through a merger While as CIOs you don’t have control over all aspects or divestiture depends on two factors: The people who are of the deal, you can control your actions, the frequency of being retained and those who are being released. “How one your communication, and the attitude and energy you put treats those who are to be released has a direct effect on into choosing the best IT talent for the new organization. the morale of those who you desire to retain,” Lurie says.

The key is extraordinarily good communication, the three IT leaders say, even though a merger or divestiture is a very busy time for the CIO. “Communication and Kristen Lamoreaux is president and CEO of Lamoreaux Search, transparency are very important during a merger, but which finds IT professionals for hiring managers.

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TECH : : RADAR Sparking a Big Data Revolution

Spark goes beyond what Hadoop can do, it can analyze streaming data as it is coming off the wire. B Y J O A B J A C K S O N

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f 2014 was the year that Apache Hadoop sparked what ad to serve to users based on their last few clicks, the big data revolution, 2015 may be the year that rather than on what sites they clicked on a few days or Apache Spark supplants Hadoop with its superior weeks prior. Spark’s data processing speed is important, capabilities for richer and more timely analysis. because while the amount of data we collect is growing “There is a strong industry consensus that rapidly, the advancement of computer processing power Spark is the way to go,” said Curt Monash, head of the IT is tapering off. analyst firm Monash Research.

Spark also offers a richer palate of ways to analyze data, “Next year, you will see a lot of [Hadoop] use cases that Monash said. Hadoop’s default analysis engine, MapReduce, transcend Hadoop,” said Ali Ghodsi, head-Product Manis chiefly capable of executing one kind of problem, involving agement and Engineering, Databricks, a company formed the filtering and sorting of data across different servers (the by a number of the creators of Spark that offers a hosted “map” portion of the job) and the summarizing of the results Spark service, as well as technical support for software (the “reduce” side of the problem). distributors selling Spark packages.

In contrast, Spark was designed to Spark is an engine for analyzing tackle more complex queries involving “ The attraction data stored across a cluster of computtechniques of machine learning and preof Spark is that it ers. Like Hadoop, Spark can be used to dictive modeling, among others. “Things has a pretty nice examine data sets that are too large to that Hadoop MapReduce was pretty good API that makes it at, Spark is potentially better at,” Monash fit into a traditional data warehouse or accessible to use a relational database. Also like Hadoop, said. Another early adopter of Spark has for developers Spark can work on unstructured data, been music streaming service Spotify, such as event logs, that hasn’t been forwhich uses the technology to generate and engineers.” matted into database tables. playlists of music based on the user’s speReynold Xin, Co-founder, Databricks Spark, however, goes beyond what cific tastes based on a set of machine learnHadoop can easily do, in that it can analyze ing algorithms. streaming data as it is coming off the wire.

Even Hadoop users are getting the As such, it can serve as a faster replacement to the Hadoop message. Hadoop distributor Cloudera, which also includes MapReduce framework for data analysis. In the annual DaySpark in its releases, has about 60 enterprise customers tona Gray Sort Challenge, which benchmarks the speed of using Spark in some form or another, according to Monash. data analysis systems, Spark easily trumped Hadoop MapReThe Spark project was started in 2008 at the Univerduce, and was able to sort through 100 terabytes of records sity of California, Berkeley’s AMPLab (the AMP stands for within 23 minutes. It took Hadoop over three times as long to Algorithms, Machine and People). Now under the guidance execute the same task, about 72 minutes. Initially, real-time of the Apache Software Foundation, the project gets more processing may not seem like a big distinction, however, such contributions than any other Apache software project. Core capabilities have been used to create entirely new LOBs. contributors include engineers and developers from com“We’ve built our intellectual property around Spark,” panies such as Intel, Yahoo, Groupon, Alibaba, and Mint. said ClearStory Data CEO and Co-founder Sharmila “Part of the attraction of Spark is that it has a pretty nice Shahani-Mulligan. ClearStory Data offers a new busiAPI [application programming Interface] that makes it ness intelligence service that allows teams to assemble accessible to use for developers and engineers,” said Reyna series of data visualizations into a narrative, as if they old Xin, a Databricks co-founder. were a PowerPoint presentation. The data can come from We will see many more products and services based on many sources and can be updated as new data comes in.

Spark next year, predicted Databricks’ Ghodsi. Program“People want fast response times. They don’t want mers are often are asked about their Spark chops. to wait a day for an answer,” Ghodsi said. For instance, Spark could be used to help digital advertisers decide Send feeback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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DIGITAL

The buzzphrase ‘digital enterprise’ can be a bit mushy. What does it really mean? And how do you get there?

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ack in 1980, the woman who now runs the datacenter at State Street Bank started her career there by pricing a mutual fund in a ledger book.

That process would get automated as the bank became a computerized enterprise. Today, she can connect State Street’s systems with those of customers and partners and produce sophisticated reports to let customers analyze the mutual funds they might buy. That’s the digital enterprise.

“In the old days, like last week, you built systems in functional towers, based on what process you need to automate and what function you need to do for the business,” says State Street CIO Chris Perretta, reflecting on his colleague’s experience. But that’s not the case in the digital enterprise. That demands a company whose business rules and policies are completely digital, where people’s jobs are represented in digital fashion and, most importantly, a technology ecosystem that takes the company’s information and makes it both secure and, for those with the right access, easy to find and share.

“It’s more a philosophy of how work is going to get done,” Perretta says.

Achieving this new vision is a huge thing for State Street. Perretta has spent the past three years on a transformation project to translate that philosophy into a technology foundation that will let the financial services company share information effectively with customers. As we’re talking, Perretta’s screensaver flashes one of the banks’ four key strategic goals: “Digital Enterprise.”

The digital enterprise is more than just a CIO catchphrase. In a recent Altimeter Group survey, 88 percent of 59 digital strategy executives interviewed said their organizations are undergoing formal digital transformation efforts this year. Even CIOs who think the phrase “digital enterprise” is mushy, like Mojgan Lefebvre, CIO of Liberty Mutual Global Specialty, say that consumers wielding smartphones have shifted the balance of power. “The one thing that comes in and absolutely disrupts industries is giving the end-user customer, consumers, the ability to do anything and everything they want on their mobile device,” Lefebvre says.

CIOs interviewed for this story say the digital enterprise signifies an epic change in the way work happens. “The employee of the future is going to be different than the employee of the past,” predicts Perretta.

For one thing, tomorrow’s employees will have immediate access to much more information. The digital enterprise revolves around making information mobile.

Workers will use mobile devices, either smartphones or tablets. They’ll connect, via the cloud, not just to company data but to data from customers, suppliers and relevant outside sources, including social media and Internet-connected objects. They’ll apply

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JOURNEY

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Chris Perretta, CIO, State Street, says digital enterprise is one of the four key strategic goals of the bank and that the company’s business rules and policies are moving towards being completely digital.

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COVER STORY :: Digital Enterprise

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fancy analytics techniques to make better business decisions.

“What’s new about the digital enterprise is the emergence of all these new technologies coming together at the same time,” says George Westerman, a research scientist at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and co-author of a recently published book titled Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation.

“There’s a huge role for computers to help people do a better job of what they’re doing,” he adds.

It isn’t that past technology investments will be junked--Westerman says they form the backbone of the digital enterprise. But that backbone is being levitated by new technologies.

By the way, more tech is coming, and fast.

“There’s been a change in momentum” of technology development, says Ray Voelker, CIO at Progressive Insurance. Voelker traces this to the spread of the smartphone since 2008. He says Progressive was “100 percent” a digital enterprise in 2008, based on the Web technology available at the time; all work flows and interactions, be they with insurance agents, partners or customers, were done digitally. “But that was before everybody was carrying around HD video recorders in their pocket that could be used for claims resolution, for example,” he says.

It’s a sign that the digital enterprise is a moving target. Now, Voelker says he can’t say what the digital enterprise will look like in five years. “I don’t know where wearables are going to go, where vehithe Internet of Things will go, how the technology onboard vehi cles . . . comes together,” says Voelker.

The rise of a digitally-savvy populace that expects more from companies has also increased pressure on companies to build the digital enterprise.

are all things IT people know how to do and can help the rest of the organization learn.”

Westerman says CIOs may never see a better chance to shape corporate strategy. But “if you don’t,” he adds, “you’re going to be left out.” The Altimeter survey found that CMOs constitute the biggest group credited with leading digital transformation. Asked what executives “champion and support” digital transformation within their companies, 54 percent of the respondents said the CMO, 42 percent said the CEO and just 29 percent chose CIO/CTO. Voelker says it’s not just the CIO who is in danger of irrelevance.

Corporate success is also on the line. “I’m going to spend a ton of money making sure that everything we do is compelling on mobile devices. If we don’t do that, I do think that we will fail.”

Voelker points to the period in the early 1980s when banks built ATM networks. Those investments had to be made, but today there is no longer any competitive advantage to having the technology.

It’s gone from cutting edge to table stakes. “Nobody runs commercials saying, ‘Hey, come to our bank--we have ATMs,’” he says.

Voelker argues CIOs are facing the same challenge with today’s emerging technologies.

Competitive advantage will come in short spurts. The good news is that no one’s too far behind, yet. Stephanie Woerner, a research scientist at the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research, says that in 2012, a global survey of 2,008 executives found that 59 percent of business processes were fully digitized.

But those processes were “the easy ones,” she says. What comes next will be more challenging.

It’s one thing to see the digital enterprise coming. It’s another to build it. Some companies will need to develop entire new technol-

At AT&T retail stores, sales reps now carry mobile devices with up-to-date data on a customer, compiled from customer service updates, previous interactions in stores and even correspondence via social media.

The eruption of new technologies has brought with it shifts in how technology gets managed, with some chief marketing officers marketcontrolling big technology budgets. “The pace of change in market ing is running at a faster clip than CIOs have been able to keep up with,” says Michael Sutcliff, group chief executive at Accenture Digital, a consulting unit formed in 2013 to respond to the growing interest in digital business. But Sutcliff says CMOs would like it if IT were in sync with the pace of technology change in marketing.

Seize the Moment The good news for CIOs in all this change is that they now may have once-in-a-career opportunities. Westerman cites the emergence of the CIO-plus, where the CIO runs IT, shared services, e-commerce and other digital efforts. “What we find with digital transformation work is that it’s not really a technology problem, it’s a leadership problem,” says Westerman.

Digital leadership turns out to be about technology vision, governance savvy, and knowing your IT platforms, he says. “These

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ogy infrastructures, especially as they expand into new markets and as new things become Internet-connected. There is no template that all companies must follow.

Here are five different visions of the digital enterprise.

A Great Experience, Online and Offline Mobile phone carriers--on the front lines of the smartphone revolution but also dealing with physical networks, products and customer interactions--are under intense pressure to be digital, according to Thaddeus Arroyo, who was CIO at AT&T Services until he was recently promoted to president of a new technology development group. “I talk about the digital-physical blur,” he says, referring to the way physical products are becoming digital services. For his company, being a digital enterprise means creating a consistent experience across its digital and physical channels. To get there. Arroyo says he must weave a “digital golden thread that seamlessly extends through the enterprise.” Weaving that golden thread means putting the same kinds of customer information at

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COVER STORY :: Digital Enterprise

How Digitization Enhances Value of Data By digitizing employee documents, Mindtree has successfully reduced its time to access information and increase customer satisfaction.

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s one of the fastest growing technology firms, Mindtree delivers technology services and accelerates growth for global 1000 companies by solving complex business challenges.

But despite its envious presence, Mindtree, for quite some time, had to deal with the problem of keeping employee information in a physical form.

This created hassles during the audit period and also wasted the valuable time of the IT department in searching and accessing information. “Accessibility of information was becoming a huge challenge for us. The traditional form of storing and retrieving information posed its own challenges. We used to run helter-skelter finding information during audits,” says Subramanyam Putrevu, CIO, Mindtree.

This lead to another challenge for the company: Addressing compliance issues with hardcopies in a timely manner. While the compliance needs are met, it used to be a time consuming process.

To address all these challenges, Mindtree implemented a document management system. While the workflow for document management is implemented by Mindtree, the lowend work of scanning of documents is outsourced to a third-party.

“Now, if I want to see an employee’s educational background and employment experience, I can easily access it and also showcase it in a work-

Subramanyam Putrevu, CIO, Mindtree, implemented a document management system that reduced the time to access critical information.

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flow from a compliance perspective as well,” Putrevu says.

This has made employee on-boarding much easier. Once an employee joins the company, the third-party solution scans the person’s documents and provides it in a digital format.

“We have been rolling out more and more systems and processes at Mindtree. One such system is the visa management system. The whole process of applying and requesting for visas have been automated internally,” Putrevu says.

all the places customers touch AT&T, as well as giving it business context. For example, in AT&T retail stores, sales representatives now carry mobile devices and stand next to customers instead of behind counters. Arroyo says those mobile devices must have up-to-date information on the customer, compiled from customer service updates, previous interactions in stores and even correspondence via social media. AT&T home technicians need a different view of the same information, and call center agents should have yet another slice of it.

AT&T hopes to have 80 percent of customer interactions happen in a digital form by 2020, up from just over 47 percent today.

Meanwhile, AT&T has begun the process of figuring out how to

Owing to document digitization, time to access information has also gone down. “If I want to understand an employee’s history, I have much more context available in a digital format.

We improved the productivity of the employees as they can access required information at the click of a button.

Based on the metadata, we can now easily find out all the increments we have issued to employees. It has also increased employee satisfaction,” Putrevu adds.

—By Ishan Bhattacharya

interact with connected cars, smart homes and wearable computing devices. “The lines between technology and what we do with our business are going to continue to blur,” Arroyo says. “The first [step] is pulling down the barriers within the organization itself and really driving collaborative teams.”

A Digital Process, Start to Finish At Liberty Mutual, the company’s personal insurance unit is further along the path to a mobile-based, all-digital process than the global specialty insurance business is, says Mojgan Lefebvre, who is CIO of Liberty Mutual Global Specialty. Today, Lefebvre says, consumers expect to interact with any service the way they do with

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COVER STORY :: Digital Enterprise

Amazon.com--from their smartphones, with no need for paper and no need to physically interact with a person or place. “If the digital enterprise means to do the entire business end to end from a smartphone, the personal [insurance] lines are much closer, if not there,” she says. The commercial unit is not as digitized. Her unit, which has nearly 250 products to cover high-risk, highly specialized insurance needs, is probably furthest away.

Customers in the specialty markets, which may include insurance for fine art, sea vessels or terrorism risks, for example, have widely diverse needs. But one thing they all have in common is doc-

uments. Liberty Mutual Global Specialty this year began replacing some of its document management systems, moving toward being able to trade documents over the cloud, no matter where in its 19-country market the document starts. It’s also reworking APIs into its “book of business”--insurance industry jargon for listing customers by the volume of business they generate --so that application developers can more easily reuse the components of the system. For its largest books of business, the company has digitized most of the process, so the journey from quote to policy is all done digitally. It’s now digitizing smaller parts of its business.

Mobile App Revolutionizes User Experience Intellinet Datasys creates a mobile application that allows the field staff, site engineer, and supervisor to solve customers’ problems faster.

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smart BYOD strategy lays the groundwork for a complete consumerization approach. This trend drives the adoption of technology in the enterprise. Intellinet Datasys has harnessed the benefits of BYOD. The company was looking at new and innovative technologies to improve the efficiency of its workforce. It wanted to track and test the activities of its field force in order to improve customer order delivery and improve their service experience.

In order to do so, the company decided to deploy a mobile application.

It was a heterogeneous platform comprising a GPS tracker and GPRS service. Today, every member of the field staff carries at least one handheld device. The company made use of the existing handsets owned by users without investing in new handsets leading to a drastic decrease in costs.

“The application is compatible with the Android 4 and IOS 5,” says Sharat Airani, director-IT & CSO, Intellinet Datasys.

So how exactly does this application work? Simply put, there is a three way coordination between the field staff, site engineer, and the supervisory staff.

“First, the person on the field assesses the damage, takes a photo, and uploads it via the mobile application on the server and sends it to the central location.

If there is a software problem there are logs which will get generated and uploaded. Those logs are then sent to the supervisor to analyze the problem.”

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Sharat Airani, Director-IT & CSO, Intellinet Datasys, deployed a mobile application to solve customers’ problems.

It saved 24-28 percent costs in daily expenses and served customer orders quickly.

Once the pictures are sent, the supervisor sends the nearest site engineer to serve the customer. At the same time, the supervisory staff can virtually visit the client site and see the test process, perform data verification, and check quality of the work done by the company’s field executive in real time. The data is stored on the cloud and hence it is easy to analyze.”

Intellinet Datasys reaped rich dividends with the deployment of this mobile application. “The underlying advantage of the mobile application is its ease of use. “The entire mobility

initiative has helped the company improve customers’ overall experience,” says Airani.

Additionally, it has helped the company to save costs. It saved 24-28 percent costs in daily expenses and served customer orders quickly as the person reaches the site within four hours. The report is available on realtime basis. Airani further adds that the application improved the company’s market share and enhanced employee productivity by 22 percent.

– Madhav Mohan

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COVER STORY :: Digital Enterprise

A CEO who sets a digital vision makes it easier for the other C-level leaders to collaborate on it. Digital business is a team sport.

Complicating its future plans are the millennials, people born from roughly 1980 to 2000, who don’t follow the insurancebuying patterns of previous generations. Lefebvre and other executives from Liberty Mutual are now doing things like spending time with Silicon Valley startups to get insight into how they think millennials will disrupt existing markets.

For now, “we don’t say we have to digitize everything,” Lefebvre says. “We try to look and see what makes sense and where the value is.” Knowing what’s valuable to the business isn’t easy, though. “The new business models emerging and how you should engage with your customer--those are the biggest challenges and hardest things you need to think about,” she says.

A RT C R E D I T G O E S H E R E

Data-Driven Interactions At $18.7 billion biotechnology company Amgen, the digital enterprise simply means an organization that can reach its customers in digital ways. Amgen’s customers are changing. Technologies like electronic health records, wearable health-monitoring devices and cloud computing are “creating an opportunity for a company like Amgen to participate directly in that patient/ physician and payer space that didn’t necessarily exist for us five years ago,” says Diana McKenzie, CIO at Amgen. She argues that healthcare is the industry most affected by digitization, because of how it breaks down long-standing industry silos.

She sketches a scenario that underpins the company’s technology investments: An oncologist has to treat a wide variety of cancers using a growing number of treatment regimens. “By applying mathematics we can better understand and model the human biological system,” McKenzie says. Amgen has vast clinical trial databases and thinks combining that data with real-world data from electronic health records, then applying mathematical models, may help caregivers predict how a patient will react to different treatments.

But getting to that scenario presents a huge challenge. “Our organizations were never constructed to operate in this new way,” she says. “When I’m together with my peers at payer/providers, at service companies, at life sciences organizations, the No. 1 problem we all say we could work together to solve is the data interoperability issue.”

In the meantime, she’s also working on the company’s internal operations, such as giving staff mobile access to key analytics-sales data for sales representatives, for instance. Another digital aspect of Amgen’s enterprise is an iPad video chat application, which allows doctors to communicate with the appropriate Amgen experts when they have questions.

McKenzie says Amgen’s internal operations are completely automated, but she estimates that the company is only 25 percent down the path to providing the staff with new digital tools, such as data analytics for salespeople. Meanwhile, Amgen has just started to work toward delivering the data-driven, personalized

patient care scenario that is her end goal. The company began investing in that vision 18 months ago.

Unleashing Digital Logic When he talks about the digital enterprise, Ray Voelker of Progressive Insurance starts with mobile technology. But that doesn’t just mean smartphones and tablets. He also cites his company’s Snapshot tool. A sensor device that plugs into a car’s onboard diagnostic port, Snapshot automatically tracks how drivers drive, offering dynamic updates about how their driving habits affect their insurance rates and comparing them to their peers in its databases. It’s the ultimate custom product, and more than 2 million Progressive customers have used it.

Creating Snapshot meant figuring out how to store and analyze the data it was going to feed into Progressive systems in real time. Pricing algorithms analyze the data on driving behavior to determine whether a discount is warranted.

Snapshot wasn’t cheap, and it wasn’t clear what the company would get in return for developing it. That’s one of the challenges of moving to a digital enterprise, Voelker says, adding that Progressive faced similar challenges in the 1990s, when it pioneered automated underwriting. “That was an expensive thing to do,” he says.

Progressive is fortunate for a variety of reasons, Voelker says.

For one thing, its CEO, Glenn Renwick, once worked at AT&T Labs and has experience as a CIO. In addition, the company sells a service, not a tangible product. Even so, the digital enterprise of the present, let alone the future, presents big challenges. “IT didn’t know just how happy times were when there was nothing much to worry about as long as you had Internet Explorer and a fast Internet connection,” he muses.

To get to the truly digital enterprise, virtually every consumer-oriented company “needs to take all that business logic that is digital and locked up in our legacy systems, by which I mean any system more than 10 days old,” and expose the APIs, Voelker says.

Moving the business’ logic into an API form makes it possible to mash together applications, so that Progressive can create a mobile app that gives its customers roadside services or renter’s insurance from Progressive partners, without making the customer leave its app. “It sounds straightforward, but it’s not the way legacy systems are constructed,” he says.

Getting the logic out of the legacy system is the way Voelker is preparing for the connected cars and smart roads of the Internet of Things. “That next frontier is out there,” he says.

The Digital Supply Chain Banks and factories seem worlds apart, but State Street’s Perretta talks a lot about factories. He’s especially focused on their just-intime logistics, which rely on sharing information across supply

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COVER STORY :: Digital Enterprise

chains. “As we get more sophisticated, the type of data we share with clients is not unlike how manufacturers share logistics data with their customers,” Going down the digital rabbit hole can be a trippy Perretta says. “I’m better if I can see journey and needs to start from the top. your supply chain. And if you’re my partner we can benefit from that.” data that makes the digital story he digital enterprise has State Street’s push to the digital compelling, says Ray Voelker, CIO at a paradox: It happens enterprise includes piloting an appliProgressive Insurance. He confesses because of leadership cation that lets employees see across its he’s lucky: Progressive CEO Glenn from the CEO, not the CIO. data infrastructure to follow a transRenwick preceded Voelker as CIO. But That’s because a company, the whole action from origination to completion. for the unlucky, at least in consumer thing, transforms as it goes from just It’s an infrastructure meant to let State businesses, Voelker advises building computerized to fully digital.

Street personnel answer client quesa presentation showing how rapidly “The hardest thing is knowing tions about accounts at any point durtransactions are shifting from the what the right business moves are, ing the day, from wherever they are. traditional Web to mobile platforms, the new business models emerging Perretta compares the way State the technical diversity of those mobile and how you should engage with your Street’s systems track transactions to platforms, and what it costs to keep customer,” says Mojgan Lefebvre, the way General Electric monitors its up with that diversity.

CIO of Liberty Mutual’s Global aircraft engines, “It’s like instrumentaCIOs should also highlight the Specialty business. The answers to tion,” he says. “We track every transimpact digital is having on other these questions drive a company’s action, every person and process who industries, says Lefebvre. “If the CEO technology choices. touches the transaction as we process looks around and sees how other CEOs do not implement the it around the world.” industries have been disrupted and digital business. CEOs open doors The company also offers clients a companies have gone out of business for CIOs to implement it. “We are as way to pull the data about them in the because customers have leveraged much an information company as companies’ systems and combine it other technology or business models, we are a drug company,” says Diana with market data and other data that is they’ll get it,” she says.

McKenzie, CIO at Amgen. “When the not on State Street’s systems. “They can At State Street Bank, CEO CEO is demonstrating that leadership relate their data to our data,” he says.

Joseph (Jay) Hooley definitely gets and vision, it’s much easier for He calls it a cornerstone application for it. “Jay is the No. 1 champion of the that to cascade down through the building a more digital enterprise. role technology can play in this organization in terms of priorities.”

One of the biggest challenges in environment,” says State Street CIO A CEO who sets a digital vision building that enterprise is keeping up Chris Perretta, pointing out that makes it easier for the other C-level with the pace of change. He says if you Hooley is aware that companies leaders to collaborate on it, she says. had bet him three years ago that big traignore the impact of technology at Digital business is “a team sport,” says ditional companies would be using the their own peril.

Thaddeus Arroyo, who was CIO at AT&T public cloud now, he would’ve taken For CIOs, the challenge is to be Services until a recent promotion. “The the bet. He thought it would be five or ready to engage with business CEO’s vision determines the focus, and six years before they would even start colleagues and make the vision real. collaboration comes from that,” he says. to considering doing that. “I would’ve What about CEOs who don’t —M.F. lost that bet,” he says. get it? CIOs have to show CEOs the The challenge for IT, and companies, is that the process of digitizing many things--like cars, robotic systems and wearable devices--involves more than computerizing them.

Still, it’s no wonder that the digital enterprise has CIOs like Perretta “Digitization is broader than computerization,” says MIT’s Woerner. asking fundamental questions about IT. “The question I would That makes it easier for businesses to digitize, but harder to manage. ask is ‘What’s the future of a traditional IT organization?’” he says.

Woerner and one of her MIT colleagues, Peter Weill, have “Remember the old typing pool? I wonder, will IT organizations go identified three ways that digitization can be managed. One is the way of the typing pool? If everyone is a technologist, what is IT?” converged management, where a single department or executive Not that Perretta is losing sleep over the answer. manages all digital investments. The second is coordinated man“I’ve been doing this since the Carter administration,” says Peragement, where CIOs, CMOs and others team up on digitizing retta, who is 56. “The most exciting time to be in technology is right the business. Still others might create “stacks” or siloes to spur now. We have limitless opportunities.” specific kinds of digital innovation. In any case, she says CIOs will play important cross-company roles, especially when it comes to Send feedback to editor@cio.in ensuring good data governance.

Digital Starts With the CEO

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connect peer advice from India’s veteran CIOs

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SOUNDING BOARD

Prevent or Remediate?

New technologies have forced organizations to rethink their security strategy. Three Indian CIOs debate the best way forward.

Joydeep Dutta, CTO, Central Depository Services

J OY D E E P DU T TA , C E N T R A L DE P O S I TORY S E RV IC E S

PREVENTION IS MANDATORY Cyber attacks and data breaches are increasingly becoming larger, more damaging, and common. While it may be virtually impossible for a company to prevent all attacks, it is imperative to take preventive measures to ensure that the impact of any attack is minimal and addressed in a timely manner.

In heavily regulated BFSI organizations like ours, we have technical advisory committees, including a sub-committee on cyber security set up by SEBI, which reviews our policies and recommends guidelines and audit practices.

Implementing security systems should be accompanied by the creation of a comprehensive incident response plan, adequate employee awareness, and policies aimed at reducing risks. Prevention of an incident should be the preferred option for an organization to deal with cyber-security threats. Quick response and remediation is needed when prevention fails. We need to, therefore, have a documented response plan addressing requirements to notify affected parties, investigate the cause of the breach and take steps to ensure the breach does not recur. SIEM

Gopal Rangaraj, VP-IT, Reliance Life Sciences

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

Srivaths Varadharajan, CTO, Reliance Securities

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Note

(Security Incident and Event Management) tools adopting ‘anomalytics’ solutions are expected to be increasingly adopted by organizations in the coming years. Rapid detection and efficient, as well as effective response is the new prevention mantra.

S R I VAT H S VA R A D H A R A JA N, R E L I A NC E S E C U R I T I E S

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REMEDIATION IS THE NEW PREVENTION

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We are in a generation wherein everything is transformed to digital. As a part of the Reliance Group, we have set up a lot of proactive security tools, in terms of DLP (Data Loss Prevention), among other things.

But these strategies and solutions will only give one-level of prevention, what is more important is how proactive an organization is to stop these threats.

I am in a business where delays in transactions are not accepted, and adding more security layers will increase the possibility of latency and delay. So, there is no technology today, which can maintain speed, therefore recovery strategies should be in place.

It is very important to first make your own house clean. We, at Reliance Securities, have enough amount of governance and security built in the organization to control our datacenters within our network. We are also prepared to deal with unknown threats if and when they hit.

I don’t think any system, tools, or mechanisms are robust enough to reduce threats and take care of latency issues. So one should always be prepared to tackle the risk.

G O PA L R A N G A R A J, R E L I A NC E L I F E S C I E NC E S

PREVENTION AND REMEDIATION: BETTER TOGETHER There are known threats and unknown threats. When we know our threats we can protect, build, and make a security infrastructure framework strategy. But it’s not enough.

We can protect our organizations and its network from known threats but, we have unknown threats like Black Swan, which is an extension of the threat-line scale. The risk is the amount of effect it has on the business and therefore one can only do a guess work in terms of protecting the network.

We usually protect confidential IP information assets and rest of it we can deal with as the time comes. The network prevention aspect, which is the known threat landscape, is definitely important for an organization.

Proper protection and prevention methods within the network is necessary, but one should also have the ability to react and recover from the threat attack, if it eventually happens. We call it risk mitigation or risk control process, where one should have a proper recovery strategy to deal with threats.

The readiness to recover from a sudden hit should be a planned, tried, and implemented strategy. So both mitigation and control aspects should be kept in mind while planning the security framework of an organization.

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Let Consumers Tell Your Story WATCH As traditional marketing strategies have started making way for marketing through social media, the irrefutable transition has not been coming easy for organizations set in their ways. Enterprise heads want to use social media for corporate benefits, but the challenge still lies in making leaders take social media seriously. Samar Shekhawat, senior vice president-Marketing, United Breweries, explains how using social media lets the consumers themselves tell your brand story to the world.

http://www.cio.in/cio-tv/ use-social-media-let-consumers-tell-your-brand-story-samarshekhawat-united-breweries

The Worried CEO Club ANALYZE Recently, Indian CEOs were brimming with confidence, while their counterparts around the globe had only sob stories to trade. But this year, fortune has changed hands, according to PWC’s Annual Global CEO Survey. The survey observes that only 49 percent of Indian CEOs are confident of their organizations’ growth prospects over the next 12 months. So what are Indian CEOs worried about? Check out our By the Numbers section to know more.

http://www.cio.in/by-the-numbers/ indian-ceos-anxious-lot

Where to Store?

READ Technology is spoiling enterprises with too many choices and as a result, a situation is arising which is complex but opportune. Similar is the case with storage. If one goes for private cloud then scalability becomes a challenge, if one decides to go for hybrid cloud, determining what workloads to shift becomes an issue, and if one decides to go completely public, security becomes a major concern.

Read what Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder and CEO, Nutanix, has to stay regarding today’s storage scenario.

http://www.cio.in/feature/where-topark-your-storage

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IT STRATEGY

Ad Tech Consolidation is Inevitable There is not enough room for ad tech companies emerging today. Consolidation is inevitable. BY M AT T K A P KO

I

n just a few short years, advertising technology without appreciating that it’s an oxymoron,” Berkowitz says. has become one of the fastest growing areas in the A select few ad tech companies recently went public, but tech world. There are now thousands of ad tech many others were acquired and even more will likely flame companies vying for a piece of the digital marketing out over time. Ad tech startups used to hope for companies pie, but few are self-sustaining businesses. such as Google or Microsoft to come knocking, but buyers The crowded space of startups building tools and solualso include social networks, ad agency holding companies, tions for ad management, analytics, targeting, and optimiand major brands. zation is ripe for consolidation. As companies run out of Facebook has made “big advances” in ad tech, according capital or drag on without appropriately evolving in this to the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who spoke on a opportunistic but complex field, acquisitions are likely. recent earnings call during which Facebook expanded its “There are so many companies out Audience Network, closed its acquisition there trying to solve marketers’ chal- Many companies of LiveRail and re-launched Atlas, the ad lenges, and challenges keep getting more platform it acquired from Microsoft. are trying to complex with more money going into Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg digital,” says David Berkowitz, CMO at solve marketers’ described these “large and strategic MRY, creative and technology agency. challenges. It keeps investments” in ad tech as long term and hinted at a heightened period of investment to come. “We’re investing in ad-tech An Opportunity for CIOs—and getting complex for a simple reason. Consumers are shifta Challenge with money going ing quickly to mobile and the advertising Complexity and uncertainty about ad into digital. industry is not keeping up,” she said durtech are leading companies to make deciing the earnings call. sions that directly impact the CIO. “Marketers may keep commanding larger tech budgets, but that doesn’t mean marketers understand the ins and outs Ad Tech is Never Fully Deployed of tech,” Berkowitz says.

Marketers and publishers clearly need better tools for Berkowitz says marketers will need support from their mobile, according to Sandberg.

CIOs in coming years, as they face steep technology learn“This is an industry problem that we believe we are welling curves. placed to solve,” Sandberg says. “I think we’re in the middle “We will see content marketing technology stacks begin of what is a very fundamental shift from marketing that is to emerge,” says Rebecca Lieb, a digital advertising and cookie based on a PC, one desktop, to people based marketmedia analyst with Altimeter Group. “These are end-to-end ing on multiple devices, to marketing that is primarily for software solutions that will integrate all aspects of content online sales, to marketing that affects those online and offline marketing: Planning, production, analytics, targeting, optisales on mobile.” mization, governance, legal, compliance, etc.”

Merged content and advertising will eventually comprise what many refer to today as the marketing cloud, according to Altimeter Group’s Lieb. “These software stacks will The Irony of Ad Tech absorb social media software solutions as well as talk to the Adding to the complexity is a bevy of new buzzwords, stacks that manage digital advertising.” according to Berkowitz. “Programmatic and native are almost entirely at odds with each other, and yet you see some ad tech companies talking about ‘programmatic native’ Send feedback to editor@cio.in.

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LEADINGEDGE

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Why Companies Fail 38

Companies nearly always have plenty of time to properly address disruptive technology. So why do so many fail to do so? BY T H O R N TO N M AY

Blockbuster. Nokia. Kodak. Most businesspeople know what they have in common. They are all companies whose footsteps you don’t want to follow.

They were all market leaders that fell prey to disruptive technology. How can your company avoid that fate? I’ve been exploring that question, having taken as my topic for a recent conference the historical lessons that can be learned by organizations that failed to respond appropriately to technology disruption of their core businesses. I read a great deal about disruptive technology and enterprises that have collapsed due to inappropriate response to it, and I also conducted some research of my own, asking several senior executives to list organizations that have been disrupted technologically and what they thought of those organizations’ responses.

My immersion in the topic awarded me with two insights.

First, disruption is a wicked hot research topic. Second, there is a boatload of very powerful and affordably implementable prophylactic measures that enterprises can adopt to make sure that they do not become the next Blockbuster, Nokia or Kodak.

Disruptive technologies can come for any of us. To be prepared, we need to do detailed management autopsies on organizations that have inappropriately responded to disruptive technology wielded by competitors.

Some rather thorough autopsies were included in the books I read. Vincent Barabba is one contributor to the literature on disruption who has had a front-row seat at some of the biggest mistakes ever made by companies faced with disruptive technology. His résumé includes Kodak, famously disrupted by digital photography, where he was head of market intelligence.

And Geoffrey Moore has an extensive list of the disrupted. In Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future

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from the Pull of the Past, he includes Sperry Univac, Honeywell, Control Data, Polaroid, Lucent, Nortel, Compaq, Gateway, Lotus, Ashton Tate, Borland, Novell, Nokia, Tower Records, Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Blockbuster among companies that suffered because they failed to craft an appropriate response to disruptive technology.

The thing that I was surprised to discover as I read these and other books was that disrupted companies were not blindsided. Disruptive technology doesn’t sneak up on anybody; it’s nearly always loudly heralded long before its victims fall prey to it.

Indeed, the technology future is forecastable. Most C-suite dwellers feel relatively confident that they know the general direction that technology is heading.

Where organizations start getting confused is deciding what they are supposed to do about it. Kodak knew about digital photography; worse, it actually invented it. Steve Sasson, the Kodak engineer who created the first digital camera in 1975, infamously characterized the initial corporate response to his invention this way: “Management’s reaction was, ‘That’s cute—but don’t tell anyone about it.’” So Kodak’s leaders were aware, but in denial. When a disruptive technology appears on the horizon of your industry, you need to ask yourself, “How open-minded are this company’s leaders?”

Another question companies need to ask themselves is whether they have the right leadership to deal with an era of disruptive technologies.

Thornton A. May is a speaker, educator, and adviser. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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[CXO AGENDA]

Lead with Disruptive Tech

Salil Godika, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Happiest Minds, says enterprises can leverage disruptive technologies to drive differentiation. BY SHUBHRA RISHI What’s boosting your happiness quotient as a chief strategy officer at Happiest Minds?

and marketing initiatives for an industry group.

My source of happiness comes from working in a fast-paced environment with newer technologies and building solutions that can drive tangible business value for customers.

Another source of happiness for me is wellness. The company has rolled out

How has your prior experience with software product companies and startups helped your CSO role?

For the first 12 years of my career, I worked in product companies in the US and then subsequently moved to

Disruptive technologies are the pillars to ensure successful digital transformation. a number of wellness initiatives and encourages employees to participate in it. Our belief is that healthier lives create the happiest minds.

You adorn multiple hats. How do you dabble between these roles?

I have always followed two simple rules: To prioritize and to focus on what is controllable. Also, I am fortunate to work with a very talented and passionate team.

I handle four distinct roles: Strategy, marketing, analytics, and big data business, and some of the industry groups. I manage by trying to club related things together. For instance, for a specific area like marketing, I try to group corporate marketing initiatives for the company, marketing around the analytics space,

India to run strategy for a mid-sized IT services company.

In my role as a product manager, the focus was on having a point of view on future market needs and then making bets and choices by deciding what products to build and what would be the relevant features in it.

Today, the market has become hyper-competitive and a differentiated services company has to lead with thought leadership insights, deliver value-adds, and leverage non-linear business models like platform and automation. Therefore, my prior experience has been extremely relevant.

Happiest Minds’ core expertise lies in disruptive technologies to implement omni-channel strate-

gies. How’s IT helping you in this aspect?

IT is helping our customers meet three core objectives: Reimagining customer experience, reengineering business fluidity, and reducing risks for our customers. For any retailer today, omni-channel really means to provide a seamless experience for a customer using store, Web, phone or mobile.

We are enabling connected experience for our customers using disruptive technologies such as social, mobile, analytics, cloud, security, IOT, and M2M. Happiest Minds recorded a 122 percent dollar growth in the year 2013-14. What will be your core focus going forward?

Helping organizations pave the road of digital transformation is our focus. Digital transformation is changing the way consumers work, organizations operate, and how enterprises create value. Going forward, smart, secure, and connected experience powered by disruptive technologies are the pillars to ensure successful digital transformation.

Smart: It aims at the enterprise being driven by accurate insights across customers as well as internal processes.

Secure: Having the right advisory, transformation, and managed security capabilities. Addressing key risk pockets ensure that you are in the right path to being digitally secure.

Connected experience: Ensures that outcome and insights gained through being smart are deployed through the right channels.

Send feedback on this interview to shubhra_rishi@idgindia.com.

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leadership and operational excellence

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Pizza Hut has come to the rescue of its indecisive customers, and developed an app to predict which pizza they most desire. The “Subconscious menu” can be downloaded to a customer’s device and features 20 toppings and almost 5,000 different pizza combinations. Customers simply watch their screens to see a selection of ingredients, while the app’s algorithms select the customer’s most desired pizza.

It does this with eye-tracking technology developed by leading eye control software vendor Tobii.

The technology tracks which ingredients the customer’s eyes linger on for longer, and then an algorithm combines these ingredients and in less than three seconds selects the most appropriate pizza with these toppings.

Kathryn Austin, head of arketing at Pizza Hut, UK, said, “We are delighted to have developed the world’s first Subconscious Menu, a unique way to reinvent the dining experience.”

—Tim Hornyak

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Order With Your Mind

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