CIOs, Ready Yourselves For Transformation: Gartner

Gartner is hosting its annual flagship event in Mumbai currently called the Gartner CIO summit. The theme for the conference this year is the current economic climate, and the kind of implications it could have on the CIO.

Many event attendees seemed especially interested in the strategies that Gartner usually dishes out for them, and they didn’t go back dissapointed.

It seems like the world is ready for a change. Every recession brings with it a transformation of fundamentals and drivers. Nothing ever remains the same after a recession. This particular recession is no exception.

Analysts expect the CIO role to gain greater weight in the days to come. Considering the amount of technology packed into enterprises today, the CIO is the one, who will optimise and bring efficiencies into the picture.

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Attendees also expressed their concerns about today’s working environment. CIOs today are under tremendous pressure to deliver results. Delivery cycles are expected to change. According to Satish Pendse, CIO of HCC, today what works is making plans that are highly executable within tight timeframes and which yield greater results.

Analysts also expressed their views on how the CIO is going to be more of a technology provider, where instead of having the conventional ‘users’, the CIO is now going to deliver services to ‘customers’, who could simply be defined as users of the enterprise architecture.

Sumit Chowdhury, head of Reliance Technology Services and also longstanding CIO of Reliance Communications, defined the mantra for today. He said, “The game is all about being the cheapest delivery mechanism for quality IT”.

Participants at the conference also speculated a transformation in enterprise architecture. The unanimous opinion was that with the sudden rise in the popularity of distributed computing models, things are definitely in a phase shift.

An interesting talk by Bhavish Sood, principal analyst, Gartner, centred on the use of BI tools and how this trend has taken a firm foothold in India Inc. Gartner recommends that CIOs move to the next wave of BI adoption, namely, ‘Defining a BI Competency Centre To Fit Your Organisation’.

Naveen Mishra, senior analyst, Gartner, was seen giving CIOs a heady dose of virtualisation, not failing to elaborate on the cocktail leading to virtual success.

Gartner clearly expects the economic climate to continue to affect business requirements, which means IT needs to be more flexible, open and scalable. Every CIO knows that technology is built to deliver sinusoidal functionality, however, business requirements often occur as a random graph, thus, demonstrating clearly that business requirements are not static, and hence, technology can’t afford to be static either; IT should be able to follow random leads with a certain level of predictability. To watch snippets of CIO views and analyst predictions from Day 1 of the Gartner Summit, click here.