'CIO Is A Business Analyst & Technologist Rolled Into One'

Canon India has been on the list of media favourites for sometime now due to the various initiatives launched by the company related to its partner program and a slew of technology product launches, the latest one being in the security surveillance market.

Biztech2.com spoke exclusively to Shikha Rai, director of IT/ QEHS and General Affairs, Canon India to understand the company’s strategy and her insights into being a woman CIO.

What is the scope of IT in the functioning of Canon India?

We use IT in our everyday functions and business processes. As we ourselves are a technology and digital imaging company, we like to use technology to the optimum. We have our main data centre here in Gurgaon. All other branch locations are connected to the main server. We also have our applications server hosted here. We have been using Oracle’s E-Business Suite as our ERP base for a long time now. We are also live on many applications currently.

What are some of the recent IT initiatives taken at Canon?

We have recently gone live with a Business Intelligence tool called ClickView, which we had been considering for some time. It was desperately needed for the management and top sales executives to keep a check on what is happening in their particular regions. The other recent IT initiative at Canon has been the development of a partner/ vendor portal. We have been looking to engage more with our channel partners through the launch of a program called PEP – Partner Enhancement Program. This has been one of the biggest IT initiatives of its kind at Canon India where we engaged and mobilised more than 350 partners. This portal enables them to connect with each other, put in their orders, track status of the same, be aware of new schemes, file requests for development funds etc. This was an in-house project.

Do you think this system can be implemented in other verticals?

Wherever you have a B2B kind of interaction with any partner or vendor and where supply chain is an essential part of your business process, I think it would be applicable to any vertical.

Has the role of the CIO evolved over the years?

It’s been 20 years since I am a part of this industry. Earlier, the profile was very EDT [Engineering, Design and Training> oriented and involved back-end work. It was more limited to the hardware, and IT wasn’t really considered a part of the whole business process. Whereas now it is more managerial – buzzwords like Infrastructure Management, Application Management etc have only added to that managerial responsibility. So if you have good people in IT, who are competent enough to take good IT decisions keeping in mind the overall business focus, I think that is what the profile of a CIO is all about today. It is more like a business analyst with a strong hand in technology. It is essentially all about aligning the IT strategy with the business strategy.

How do you think women CIOs bring value to the role of a CIO?

It is not really a gender specific role. But yes, noticeably there are very few women in this field. In our Btech batch, we were six girls among a batch of 300 men. It is perceived that women are multi-taskers, are good at building teams etc. But it all boils down to the competency level and how one is groomed to take the key position of an IT decision-making role.

What are some of the other innovations on at Canon?

We have been developing a solution for the printer environment where it would tell us about the amount of printing, how much is done, how often it is done etc related to a particular network. We haven’t implemented this solution anywhere but we have done a pilot here in our office. It is called UniFlow. We have our own portfolio of services related to Document Management System and this solution is one of the focus points in that.

What is your focus going to be as far as overall IT is concerned at Canon?

We are going to align ourselves with the IFRS – International Financial Reporting Systems, for which we would be reviewing our ERP. This is a big challenge and to align ourselves to such kind of reporting, we need to get our IT systems in check. Secondly, internally there is a huge need to digitise documents and automate their archival and retrieval, planning the whole architecture and systems. Normally what happens is that for legal requirements you archive them in a third-party store, which results in downtime due to non-availability immediately. We also have a strong focus on server virtualisation at this point. We would be going in for blade servers soon. We plan to move all our critical apps first and then gradually move the other processes.