Deriving Value From IT- Aligning IT With Business

In the current economic climate, businesses are in a constant state of quest for how they can derive value from IT and how IT is adding to the revenue- topline or bottomline of company P&L.

In these times when each and every investment is being assessed and evaluated , the CIO’s have a challenging task to continuously demonstrate and realise the value from IT investments. This value can be realised and delivered in multiple ways- Cost optimisation, which is using technology in the most optimal way with strong and lean processes; And minimum business disruptions and ensuring maximum availability and uptime of all IT and having smooth IT operations. The streamlined and effective IT operations eliminate the possibilities of revenue leakage that could happen due to the IT outages.

Secondly, a strong source of IT value proposition depends on how CIOs can empower new business initiatives through technology and its ability to fully align the IT strategy/plans with the business strategy.

IT team and the CIOs will have to embrace and align with the business strategy and plans. Until now, possessing technical skills was considered adequate for the IT team, however, the demands from the IT teams are now changing rapidly.

Now, the IT team in addition to the the technical skills should also have the business understanding and broader softskills for influencing, negotiation, progamme management, cross-functionality and co-ordination.

CIOs have a 360 degree view of the business and exposure to all departments/functions as technology cuts through the functions. Hence, CIOs are now well placed to use their holistic understanding of business, technology and processes and deliver and apt solutions to provide a competitive advantage to the company.

The value from any IT initiative should be in terms of adding to the revenue, customer experience, improving productivity and thereby reducing cost and increasing volume.

I believe you must be curious on how do we do it at Fullerton Securities. Fullerton Securities & Wealth Advisors Limited (Fullerton) had a vision to be exclusive and has leveraged technology to provide unparalleled customer experience in areas of Broking, Financial Services Distribution and Wealth Management arena while enhancing operational productivity, and providing a 360 degree view of customer portfolios and offering consistent customer experience at all times across all touch points.

Being a part of the founding management team, my first priority was to understand how the business will be done and to fully understand business strategy, plans and key priorities.

The entire comprehensive technology platform was then conceptualised and developed from scratch, in consideration of the business vision to enable the setting up of a green-field financial services distribution/wealth management business in India.

The ability to be a part of the business; appreciation of key business challenges; and prompt deployment of technology solutions to meet those needs has been the recipe for our success.

All challenges were addressed through collaborative working with business leaders and technology partners. The key guiding principles for technology delivery at Fullerton were- Optimise Costs; Maintain Scalability; Sustain Quality.’

In just one year of existence, Fullerton Securities now has a product offering and a delivery platform that is comparable to businesses which have taken close to a decade to evolve.

The business understanding enabled the IT team to think and provide long term strategic solutions rather short term tactical fixes. And this alignment with business has enabled us to deliver a strong technology foundation to scale up our business multifold and initial results have been very positive.