Optimising Existing Technologies Is Key To Combat Recession

A CIO’s role, apart from looking after the technology within an organisation, stretches to ensuring that the technology-in-use plays a bigger role in enterprise innovation and efficiency. Sudip Banerjee, CEO, L&T Infotech, throws light on how a CEO can help make better technology-buying decisions and how different visions add value to organisational strategy.

What role does a CIO play at L&T and how do you as a CEO help him make more efficient technology purchase decisions?

The L&T CIO has got a diverse range of businesses to cater to. One of those businesses is IT; however there are a lot of people who can claim their expertise in IT. We have ensured that the CIO makes certain that we are at the cutting edge of business processes; everything is well co-ordinated; and services are delivered at a reasonable cost. In terms of helping out the group CIO, we help with partner relationships, we also come into the picture in some areas where he needs additional information or requires additional technology to help smooth process flow, and obviously we help him with resources from time to time.

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As a CEO, what are your views on business technology and how do you decide which technology should be purchased?

We do it in a very collective way. We discuss it with our business users, technology groups, CTO as well as the CIO. Being a CEO of a technology company, one has access to what is current and new, which are the present best practices etc. So I try to bring in that perspective when we have to buy any technology for our company. Also, there are relationships we have with different product companies and because of these relationships we get an advantage sometimes in terms of pricing, sometimes in getting alpha-beta versions of these products, while sometimes getting to participate in their conferences etc that keeps us on the cutting edge.

How does the CIO help you in deciding which technology should the company go in for?

The interaction between the technology arm of the business and all the other divisions helps in bringing forward the perspective that you do not use technology for technology’s sake but you use it to improve the business in terms of making it more efficient, cost effective and agile. One has to also make sure that all information is available at the tip of the finger, which helps in decision-making. Before implementing anything, we make sure that the technology will enhance our ability to protect our cash flow and to manage data better; and the ability to use the information available to the fullest extent to get the best possible business results.

What are your views on different technologies like virtualisation and SOA and how do you see them as business enablers in your organisation?

Everytime a new thing comes up in the market, organisations feel that they need to adopt it and use it. Some technologies like virtualisation are quite promising, and we will be using a lot of it as we go forward. As far as cloud computing is concerned, we have adopted a ‘wait and watch’ approach for now; we have yet to decide when we want to deploy it and how we want to use it. Virtualisation will however, have an early adoption within our businesses. We are just getting into it; it is not something which we are doing in a big way as of now.

SOA has been in the market now for a couple of years. Some organisations have started adopting it and changing some of their existing systems to make them SOA compliant. However, there hasn’t been a runaway adoption or implementation of it. There are already many different systems existing and who will use it and who will derive the maximum benefit from it is yet to be seen, for there are too few examples right now to make conclusions. SOA adoption will continue; however, it is unlikely that the conventional way of development and running applications will completely change.

During recession, what would be your message to CEOs and CIOs?

CEOs and CIOs should really look at what kind of systems are required to make sure that businesses are either able to cut cost, improve their projection in terms of information, project cash flow and design systems, and finally streamline the decision making process. These are also times to be cautious in terms of new systems development or implementations, so it is necessary to get more out of existing systems right now.