How do CIOs compare the IT function as it existed 10-15 years back to the situation today? Read on to find out
By Pankaj Maru
One of the common factors between time and technology is that both are dynamic in nature. With changing time, technology also changes. But it’s the complexity of problems, whether in life or on the business front, that actually allows new forms of technology to get invented and evolved over a period of time.
In the past one and a half decade, the broad base of technology has been moving away from analog to digital. Form factors are shrinking in size and shape, software is getting lighter and quicker with different versions. Enterprise applications and storage are moving out of premises onto cloud and thirdparty data centers.
Among other changes, mobile phones and devices are becoming mainstream in the enterprise world. Personal devices are finding place at work with the BYOD concept, and enterprises see economic value in mobile workforce as well as the work-from-home approach. In addition, legacy and proprietary systems are giving way to open standards; outsourcing and managed services have come a long way from just being a cost cutting norm to becoming quite an essential and well-accepted component of doing business today.
The people who have closely observed, experienced and worked with these changing and evolving technologies in the course of time are the CIOs and IT managers. In fact, they are the ones who have seen the entire life cycle of technology – right from invention to adoption to becoming obsolete with During the course of time, some technologies fail to take off or fade out prematurely, while others find strong footholds through the benefits they offer and become highly popular with mass adoption.
However, amidst these technology changes, it is interesting to know and understand how much impact have the changes made on the roles, responsibilities and day-to-day functioning of CIOs across industries and enterprises.
According to UK-based Steve Durbin, Vice President, ISF (Information Security Forum), information is the life-blood of the modern organization and with the rise of cloud-based technology, mobile and social networking, it flows faster and reaches further than ever before.
“Gone are the days when information could be protected behind an impenetrable firewall along the corporate boundary. Technology solutions for information security are no longer enough—increasingly, the role of the CIO is to try to out-smart and stay one step ahead of cyber criminals and hackers,” says Durbin.
Changing technology and CIOs
Recalling the technology changes in the last 10-15 years, Samrat Das, CIO, Tata AIA Life Insurance Company says, “Every evolution or innovation in technology has a business imperative – whether it is ERP, CRM, SOA, cloud, virtualization or BYOD. For every innovation, I look out for IT strategy that is aligned with the business strategy.”
Talking about cloud, he says, “I see cloud more on the economics of IT than on the technology of IT. The financial industry is undergoing turbulence globally. So cost pressures are definitely there and cloud gives me the opportunity to leverage the economics of IT.”
According to Ram Medury, Vice President – Technology, ICICI Lombard, about 10-15 years ago, technology was still seen as esoteric and something new that had to be mastered and such mastery of technology was seen to generate competitive advantage – for example, the core banking system implementation by some leading banks in the 1990s.
“However, as technology started becoming more and more common and even commoditized, some people started questioning the relative advantage. Innovations such as large ATM networks and core banking systems were soon copied by other players. In the ensuing decade, technologies like cloud computing have matured and it is indeed easier to deploy new technology today,” says Medury.
“Applications have become more service oriented, which means that they can be integrated more easily with mobile devices leading to the rise of pervasive computing. All this has meant less sweating on the mundane stuff and more energy on the brainier problems such as business process innovation,” he adds.
While Ashish Pachory, CIO, Tata Teleservices Limited agrees that changes have certainly happened in the last 10-15 years, he agrees, and also feels that today’s professional needs to stay connected anywhere, anytime; which throws up new challenges as well as opportunities for the IT department across enterprises and businesses.
“Today’s IT systems and processes are much more concerned with the need to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data. IT has to stay that one crucial step ahead of the cyber-terrorists. All this has to happen without restricting the business, thus making it a very fine balancing act. The need to render data correctly on a multitude of end-user devices and platforms poses further demands for modern IT,” says Pachory.
Amidst those challenges, Pachory sees some new opportunities for the IT departments. “It is also an opportunity for IT to become a lot more integral to the organization and influence its market
performance, than say 10-15 years ago when IT was back-end processor. Moreover, unlike past decade or so, the social media boom has brought in an unprecedented need to not only store but also analyze massive amounts of data, which was not on the radar of IT in companies earlier.”
Based on the views of CIOs, it is certain that today’s IT departments and their CIOs are expected to do and deliver more to their respective businesses and enterprises. The shift in organizational demands from IT departments has translated into re-defining the roles and functions of CIOs.
According to Arup Choudhary, CIO, Eveready Industries, with multiple legacy applications running, 10-15 years ago, the CIOs would be in a fire-fighting mode most of the time, but today’s integrated systems have given them time to step back and innovate.
“Cloud is not new. It is the new buzzword for virtualization. In early 2000, Citrix and Tarantela had the thin client solutions that made desktops work like workstations. We had centrally hosted solutions in the past out of a data center. These are being called public, private and hybrid cloud these days,” says Choudhary.
“However new offerings have sprung up like SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc. Mobility and BYOD on the other hand have added a lot of value to the enterprise. Today a person has become location agnostic. It really doesn’t matter where you are operating from. You have enterprise-wide visibility wherever you are,” he adds.
Interestingly, Srikanth Raman, Group Head – IT, Narayana Health says that the role of CIO has moved dramatically from IT infra to information. “Today, CIOs have less and less to do with the IT hardware, backup software etc., which has become part of the SLA for the cloud service provider. The role for the CIO has evolved into a more strategic delivery of information, thus focusing on the end result rather than on the means as it was earlier,” he points out.
Besides the ‘value’ factor, the new technologies have eased some pressure on IT budgets and CFOs, as well as brought in the much needed efficiency component in today’s businesses. The economics of IT plays a huge role in making the new technologies highly popular.
“The economic, social and technological landscape has transformed over the past few years, with the rise of Internet-based technology and mobility. These changes mean that CIOs need to ensure the safety, integrity and security of growing volumes of sensitive data far beyond the traditional information security boundaries,” observes Durbin of ISF.
New tech: simple or complex for CIOs?
So, does the new technology make life easy for CIOs by simplifying IT, or has it further added complexities? “New technologies always bring along opportunities to improve cost efficiencies. However, there could very well be hidden costs of deployment and implementation,” says Medury of ICICI Lombard.
He explains that mobility is a great new enabler and it is indeed possible to deploy new applications quickly. However, in the security context, managing multiple devices raises network issues and requires new skill sets. Also, the cost equation is not that sanguine. The same is true with big data as well, as it calls for more robust technology solutions while offering new analytical insights.
On cloud technology, Medury points out that the technology helps in converting capital expenditure into operating and it would be good for cash starved start-ups, but not good for companies which can easily access capital as low interest loans are available today.
“In this context, the role of IT gets fairly complex in ensuring that appropriate SLAs are in place, contracts are structured to meet stringent availability timelines and standards complied with. So while I see new technology bringing new promise, it will take some adjusting before standards mature and things really become simple,” he explains.
Talking along similar lines, Pachory of Tata Teleservices points out that very few large organizations have taken the mobility and cloud migration journey. “In that case, I would certainly imagine that it would give a level of freedom from daily chores that enables the CIO to spend more time at home. However, this is yet to be proven! Most of us are at very early stages of adoption.”
“I strongly believe that moving to a cloud based application architecture is a lot more than a fork-lift operation. It’s an opportunity to re-architect the business processes, get rid of redundant applications, consolidate IT architecture and clean up the data warehouse. This is a lot of work, over a sizable period of time, so I am not really sure that the time has come for CIOs to leave the office at 5 pm!,” he says.
Pachory, however, does says that once the organization is able to move to the new technology, then the CIO would be relatively less concerned with issues like hardware and software upgrades, storage enhancements and the operations and management (O&M) aspects.
“There could however be other counter-balancing influences on your peace of mind – like the need for increased security, perceived loss of control, etc. All in all, there are both sides to the issue but I do believe that in the end, the barriers will be overcome and CIOs will be able to have the time as well as peace of mind to think about their next vacation,” opines Pachory.
Adopting new technology by organizations doesn’t mean less work or fewer responsibilities for CIOs. According to Raman of Narayana Health, today the workload has shifted, though not necessarily increased or reduced; while the management of server farms has gone, it has been replaced by optimization of network access to the cloud.
“The ability to extract SLA-based delivery is in as against negotiation for hardware purchase. The negotiations now tend to be focusing on aligning with long-term organization vision and strategy,” says Raman.
“You have more choice as to what the organization wants to do within the IT department and what can be outsourced. Still, the responsibility in some ways remains the same – the IT systems have to be always available or available anywhere and be secure,” he stresses.
According to Das of Tata AIA, one cannot say for sure that today’s IT is easier than legacy systems of yore. He believes that innovation is a continuous process and with innovation, there is an evolution of mindsets on IT for enterprises. While 10-15 years back, IT was just looked at as support, today IT is considered as a business enabler.
Though from IT manageability perspective, new technology may have given some breathing space to CIOs but certainly not from the SLA management stand point as SLAs have become a center point in CIO’s functioning and responsibilities across enterprises.
“From a CIO perspective, it (new technology) does simplify workload to a great extent, however it brings up another nuance called SLA management with the service provider. If you outsource even with the most stringent of SLAs, you still end up chasing vendors most of the time. The penalty clause in SLA is only reactive in nature,” says Choudhary of Eveready explaining the pain staking part of SLA management that the CIOs have to deal with.
Further, “CIOs need to think of more innovative ways of managing the SLA in future if we go by what the analysts are saying. In my opinion, it does not reduce cost but transfers capital to revenue expenditure. In doing so, the companies can’t take advantage of the depreciation factor,” he explains.
While, the CIOs are learning to deal with vendors and their SLAs, the old enemy of ‘security threats’ haven’t gone out with time, in fact the ‘security scenario’ has become extremely intensive today than ever before and it continues to defy IT departments and security strategies of CIOs.
On the security aspect, Durbin of IFS explains that many security solutions require technical infrastructure support and to secure funding for such initiatives, CIOs must assure stakeholders and demonstrate how their function adds value to the business.“This means that the CIO role continues to involve the management of technical issues, but with an increased understanding of compliance and regulatory issues,” he adds.
So with the array of changes that are happening in the technology world, some have been good and beneficial to the CIOs while others haven’t been. Given those technology changes, the key question arises — how useful it has been to CIOs in their respective organizations, where they are able to get involved in innovative projects and are free from mundane tasks and functioning?
New tech: innovative or intensive for CIOs?
Certainly, the role of CIOs has got evolved with the new technology in recent years and the reach has expanded beyond the walls of IT departments into the company’s executive boardrooms. CIOs are asked to talk IT and business and not just IT as today IT is considered as business enabler.
“Definitely the role of CIOs has evolved for the better and attained a strategic dimension as against an earlier operations role. Adopting technologies like cloud and seamless mobility is today a competitive advantage which would enable scalability, growth and on time deployment of IT systems,” says Raman of Narayana Health.
According to Pachory of Tata Teleservices, the role of CIOs in organizations is constantly evolving and in today’s time it’s more about proactively adopting newer technologies to aid business growth.
“The key issue for CIOs moving forward will be integrating and managing a complex environment, where many necessary business services and applications will be provided by service providers. I do think that freedom from routine tasks through an IaaS or cloud adoption would give the CIO the one thing he/she lacks today – time,” he explains.
However, Pachory feels that this will take some time for most CIOs. “In the steady state, this does offer the opportunity for the CIO to invest his/her time working more closely with the business,
understanding their priorities and ensuring IT readiness to meet those priorities, rather than be in a reactive mode trying to hold it all together.”
“This would play a big role in enabling IT organizations to take the leap from being technology leads to becoming thought-leaders that business depends on for creating crucial market differentiation,” he adds.
Even Medury of ICICI Lombard agrees with his fellow CIOs and says, “Definitely, I see this trend happening – new technology for instance, has helped abstract out the complexity of managing a data center and rather focus on the business problems on hand. In this new era, successful IT departments and IT managers will play a more strategic and a consultative role such thinking about marketing implications of apps and social media.”
“A good IT department should act as a bridge between technological possibilities and business goals. The game is now much less about optimizing the technology itself and more about connecting the dots resulting in innovation leading to the creation of sustainable competitive advantage for the organization,” he adds.
Most CIOs agree that the new technology has a link in making their roles more innovative and constructive toward business and not just IT. However, Choudhary of Eveready Industries takes a
slightly different stand from other CIOs. “In my opinion, it is a mix of both. While outsourcing has freed up time for diving into strategy and innovative thinking, the complexity of the enterprise often bothers the CIO in terms of what should be kept in-house and what should move to the cloud,” he opines.
“Besides this, the cloud service providers are yet to find a solution to the licensing problems with the software vendors. With so many devices and platform agnostic applications, integration has become a key challenge for CIOs. In my view the IT landscape still remains as complex as it was before; only the stakeholders have changed,” criticizes Choudhary.
“They need to manage increasingly complex business relationships in the supply chain and implement risk-based decision-making to accommodate what is a fast-changing threat landscape,” says Durbin of ISF.
“In effect, CIOs need to deliver more for less, both in terms of new investment and existing resources. CIOs must accommodate this shifting technology landscape that may be immature from a security perspective while managing the risks as far as possible,” he says.
With so many technology changes, CIOs are bound to get influenced and impacted by them. Going ahead, since innovation is a continuous process, the role and responsibilities of CIOs will also evolve with time. However, the ones who are able to embrace the rapidly changing technology and equally manage the associated risks will become successful CIOs of the future.
