Innovation was the topic du jour at the CA Expo’12. Jasmine Desai reports on the themes and discussions that were in the spotlight at the event that was recently held in Mumbai.
“In today’s age, when IT must fly at the speed of business, businesses must adopt a service-centric IT approach. They must learn to best use current and emerging technologies in order to drive business growth, optimize organizational adaptability, increase efficiency and mitigate risk,” said Sunil Manglore, Managing Director, CA Technologies, India.
IT at the Speed of Business was the theme at the CA Expo ’12. The company unveiled its new Business Service Innovation (BSI) Strategy at the event.
The company charted out its road map to drive innovation that included accelerating IT, transforming IT to simplify complexity and free up resources to focus on the core business rather than wasting time on infrastructure and securing IT to reduce the risks of improper access and fraud.
The keynote addressed how this new normal is a transformative moment for IT that is shifting the CIO’s focus from managing infrastructure, maintenance and operations, to optimizing the delivery of business services for innovation and growth. The session focused on how customers must deliver business services faster, cheaper and more securely to survive in this day and age.
“We are experiencing accelerating demand at the exact same time as pressures on IT have increased and every business is looking at IT to run the show. Everyone is scrambling to do more with less, to become more agile and to find more cost-effective ways to support the business. The result is a transformative moment that offers a tremendous opportunity for competitive differentiation as well as a huge strategic challenge,” said Roger Pilc, General Manager, Virtualization & Automation, Customer Solutions Unit, CA Technologies.
Management software as a category is becoming vital as an enabler for business growth. Emerging markets are where the growth lies and CA is actively engaging itself in these markets. Saurabh Srivastava, Chairman, CA Technologies, India, said, “The power of technology to transform your business, your market and the way that you interact with your customers and services are becoming recognized.” In fact, a recent survey by IDC found that 67% of CIOs believed that their role was evolving into that of a Chief Innovation Officer. For IT to make this transformation and help drive business innovation and growth, innovation needs to become a pervasive mindset. At a time when budgets are tight and the rising complexity of IT means that existing systems are more expensive to maintain than before, the amount of money being spent on new projects to drive innovation is growing. IDC expects new project budgets to grow from 23% to 28% of the overall IT budget over the next three years.
The results of a survey The Future Role of the CIO; Digital Literacy conducted by CA Technologies were revealed at the event. A total of nine Asian markets were involved in the global survey, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. The study reveals that 81% of the Asia Pacific CIOs interviewed believe that a lack of digital literacy amongst senior executives could be hampering business growth. Only 20% of Asian CIOs in the study felt that their management fully understood the capabilities and impact of new and emerging technologies.
Surveyed IT executives found that the complexity of IT was rising while productivity was shrinking, that systems were fragile and that they were spending more time trying to maintain them than otherwise. 70-80% of IT budgets are going towards ongoing maintenance rather than new project work. IT feels that it needs to lock down systems to maintain control & compliance. However, business users are looking for openness and they want to bring new devices and use online applications and more. These security risks are inhibiting innovation.
The study showed that, while business leaders may lack digital literacy, they largely do understand the role of technology in their organizations and about 75% of Asian CIOs in the study felt that their management team considered IT to be strategically important. An extremely interesting observation was made that CIOs were transitioning into the roles of brokers of IT services and that they would also have closer involvement with Line Of Business managers in realizing value from their strategies
CIOs feared that senior-level digital illiteracy was resulting in a lack of market responsiveness, missed business and investment opportunities, poor competitiveness and slower time to market. Moreover, almost one-fifth of the CIOs interviewed believed that the C-suite did not understand the impact of new and emerging technologies.
Cloud simulation, a concept that revolves around conducting POCs in a simulated environment, was discussed. CA Expo ’12 witnessed participation from over 900 CIOs, customers, business partners and other industry veterans.
