A Peek Into The CIO Mindset For 2009

It is that time of the year again! As the clock ticks towards 2009, our minds are only buzzing with images and incidents from the year gone by. Recession, terror attacks, job cuts definitely made 2008 a kaleidoscopic year with varied colours. The new year to come will also be having its own sets of challenges. Let us take a look at the varied shades Indian CIOs foresee on the enterprise IT landscape.

All the CIOs Biztech2 interacted with unanimously agreed that coping with the global economic slowdown would be the biggest challenge for enterprises and IT teams in 2009. While controlling business expenses with innovative technology solutions would be a daunting task for the IT team, the cost of IT itself will also be under close examination.

In this period of uncertainty, P Sebastian, VP-IT of Mudra Communication believes that not getting caught in the web of ‘meltdown’ and postponing new IT Initiatives (that have a direct bearing on future growth) will be a tough task for CIOs. According to Satish Pendse, CIO, HCC, enterprises will work towards leveraging their previous investments in IT solutions and will also demand new IT solutions to tackle the crisis situation. “Implementing critical new IT initiatives through smart negotiations would be one of the top challenges,” he says.

The financial crunch has directly affected new IT projects and investments and this has consequently affected the morale of the IT team. According to Umesh Jain, CIO, Yes Bank, keeping the IT staff motivated in 2009 and getting them to align quickly to the new world would be a serious human resources issue. IT and business alignment would now become all the more important. “Changing business models and strategy will result in a paradigm shift and consequently IT alignment and agility will become crucial,” says Jain.

Combating Crisis

No crisis comes without its solution. Various CIOs gave Biztech2 varied solutions for the challenges that the current scenario is posing. In the face of global recession, CIOs are looking at cost optimisation and are equipping themselves with innovative technologies to tide over uncertainties.

Prashun Dutta, Sr EVP (IT & Quality), Reliance Infrastructure, feels that virtualisation of existing infrastructure is a good option to maximise utilisation of available resources. Pendse says, “Using virtualisation, the server capacity can be optimised.”

Smart negotiations with vendors and IT service providers will become the key to get best deals and stretch the rupee to the maximum. Jain says, “Vendor engagements need to be enhanced to explore opportunities. For example, application portfolio management can be examined to identify gaps and explore areas where further enhancement or replacement of existing solutions is possible.”

Revealing his plans for HCC, Pendse says, “We will be critically evaluating various services provided by IT service providers. Some of these services may not be absolutely necessary at this juncture and hence they may get discontinued at least for some time. Other essential services may get negotiated to get better pricing and better payment terms.”

Delayed or shelved projects can have immediate impact on the morale of the IT team. Keeping the aspirations of the team alive is very vital for efficient human resource management. Jain says, “One of the key steps that we have identified to address this issue is to have IT employees embedded in respective businesses. This way there is automatic alignment of priorities, pro-active and collaborative participation, better sense of urgencies/ business pressures/ focus areas and timely contribution in terms of what technology can do for the business.”

Pendse says, “We need to work closely with the team to integrate them with the larger business objective so that this temporary phase of going slow on certain new IT initiatives is handled by everyone relatively smoothly.”

Hot Technologies to Watch Out for in 2009

In the next year, CIOs will be escalating their investments in intelligent technologies, which will not only help them to control costs but also make them reach new levels of performance. CIOs are vouching for collaboration technologies to meet the needs of expanding businesses across different geographies and for the obvious cost benefit they offer.

Pendse says, “Communication technologies are likely to get more attention. For example, organisations are likely to curb travel and hence video-conference, web-ex types of audio/ video conference etc will become more important and will get used more extensively.”

Open source technologies will also gain more significance in 2009. Sebastian says, “I anticipate a great amount of adoption of open source software primarily in the areas of operating systems, office applications, application servers, business intelligence (BI) tools and enterprise content management (ECM) systems.”

Those organisations, which already have a wide footprint of various applications, would be keen on deploying integration related technologies. Both Dutta and Jain expressed interest in investing in technologies like SOA, application mashups or integration-centric Business Process Management and Middleware.

Like 2008, the charm of certain technologies will not fade away through 2009. SOA, Web 2.0, SaaS, PaaS, BI and GPS will continue to rule the CIO wishlist. So keep yourself glued to the Biztech2.0 site to follow the enterprise etch scenario through the new year.