Indian CIOs Should Not Limit Their Focus To Applications

In most organisations, it is always a daunting task for CIOs to juggle their roles as IT planners and strategic business team members. However, today CIOs have realised that restricting their area of operation to IT will not help them achieve optimum benefits for the organisation or themselves, so more and more CIOs are now taking an active interest in strategic planning and core business areas. John Roberts, research VP and distinguished analyst, Gartner Inc. discusses with Biztech2.0 how the role of the CIO is being redefined in the Indian IT space.

What are some of the emerging trends in the Indian IT scenario?

In the past two or three years, there has been a transition to rapidly maturing CIOs in the Indian IT space. With changing business objectives, the significance of IT just keeps increasing and CIOs have learnt to cope with this rapid change. Due to a change in the perspective of CIOs, there has also been a fresh wave of IT investments. If analysed further, it is easy to make out that the growing Indian economy has contributed to this change in a major way. With a surge in IT investments, the responsibility of a CIO has shifted from managing IT to delivering success in business.

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What are some of the major challenges faced by CIOs in India?

The first and most interesting challenge faced by Indian CIOs has nothing to do with technology. CIOs here have to constantly grapple with a shortage of skilled IT manpower vis-à-vis a growing demand for the same. For many CIOs, finding the right people equipped with the right skill set remains a major challenge. Even for CIOs who manage to find the right people, retaining them within the organisation is a further challenge. Moving beyond manpower, CIOs further have to meet a constantly growing demand from the organisation for innovative IT solutions. The positive side of this whole story lies in the fact that these challenges are making CIOs work smarter to deliver better and faster results.

What could be some ways to manage IT optimally?

CIOs need to shift their focus to the portfolio of IT services from the functionalities of technology. In the past, CIOS have tended to focus only on technology and its procurement. If they shift their focus to the portfolio of IT services, they will be able to ensure that the right information is available to the right people in the organisation in the right format as well. This in turn will enable the business to achieve a new level of success.

According to you, how can a CIO align business processes to IT?

According to me, the only possible reason why IT exists is to help improve business processes. So we can say that they are two sides of the same coin, which are intricately intertwined. And yet, many times, performance metrics and the way businesses judge the performance of IT is lacking. In recent times, there has been a tremendous upsurge in the use of enterprise applications across Indian organisations. This should however, not restrict the CIO’s focus to applications. Looking forward, it seems that the Indian CIO will need to have a keen focus on end-to-end business processes first, as they hold the key to the organisation’s success, and only then should he think about appreciating the contribution that IT can make to that success.

What would be your advice to Indian CIOs?

Well, we are seeing a change from earlier CIOs, who spent most of their time managing technology to newer ones, who are concerned about the business’ needs and are trying to maintain a perfect balance of IT goals with business objectives. So the only advice I would like to share with Indian CIOs is this – ‘find time to work at the business manager level and develop a team under you who can look after the technology components in the system in a satisfactory way’.