CIOs are usually bombarded with various cycles of prediction and reports made by IT research companies/consultancies and vendors to give them a fair idea of what technologies are going to make it big. But, have these technologies really had the impact which was hyped about them? Let’s take a look:
Social Or Anti-Social?
Social is not just about social media but technology becoming social with cloud, mobility and social platforms. “Apart from the market assessment campaigns, not much is happening in this area. Companies have just set up their Facebook pages and communicate with the users via a Twitter page,” says Biswajeet Mahapatra, Research Director, Gartner India. He states that there hasn’t been any enterprise-level engagement with social technology this year.
Social media has foremost become a replacement for the market research initiatives that companies used to undertake in the past. It has not yet taken predictive functionalities in terms of predicting customer behaviour and anticipating problems in business. “Considering the vast and diverse landscape of users in India the quick success of some of the global adopters cannot be emulated in India and this will lead to time being spent in trial and error. Hiring skilled people for the use of social is another issue as these are not traditional skills required of IT,” says Akhilesh Tuteja, Director, KPMG.
And why restrict use of social media to external customers alone? Prakash Dharmani, CIO, Essel Propack states that social for a manufacturing organisation like his is not concerned with the social status of the organisation but with the social idea sharing for internal employees “We were the ones to revolutionise packaging tubes from aluminium to laminated ones. Manufacturing has to make design innovations and create. We require internal social communication to keep the creative juices flowing and innovate as a company.” Sanchit Gogia Chief Analyst, Founder & CEO, Greyhound Research agrees, “Social is not just Facebook - it’s about people being…well, social. These necessarily need not be external customers. Social begins with your Intranet!”
Employees Bringing Own Device Brings Headaches For CIOs
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is in the limelight not because of the functionality and productivity it can facilitate but because of the number of new devices that have entered the market space. The adoption of BYOD is pushed by the willingness of employees who want to use their own devices. “The reason why BYOD has not done well is because Indian organisations feel the need to own the devices and have sufficient control over these,” points out Biswajeet from Gartner. BYOD also brings forth a management issue. Now a new environment has come into play and this leads to new issues of process, security and management. “Once these will be solved and more security products for BYOD projects are developed, this trend should pick up pace real soon. It is typical of any emerging technology; it always takes a couple of quarters for its proper education and adoption,” states Gogia.
Another roadblock for successful BYOD implementations lies in the fact that enterprises have invested in mobility but lacked support from network providers. “Business is not conducted only in the cities. Complete penetration, network reliability and service availability of the channel is what is required for this technology to really pick up,” predicts Tuteja. Gogia perceives the problem lies in another area, “Executives are thinking, ‘I already have an iOS or a BB app… now what?’ Migrating to an HTML5 is no easy or cheap task. Once the focus moves to the data and not the device, mobility will automatically make more sense and adoption will increase.”
Cloud: Where’s The Silver Lining?
The cloud conversations we see CIOs now engaging in are much more mature. “Earlier CIOs were held up at security but now they are undertaking work-driven approaches to the cloud. Companies have initiated projects but have limited these to the C-level decision-makers,” states Gogia.
“It was thought that trust in the cloud would increase and we would see some important IT functions moving to the cloud. But only peripheral and experimental applications have been migrated,” says Tuteja. In the coming quarters CIOs will look forward to orchestrate more third-party vendors. Legislation will soon be on its way as various hosting scenarios need to be federated.
Gogia explains the public sector scenario, “Cloud has taken up in government but the fact is that they would not always like to call it the cloud and cover it under the initiative of e-governance.”
Green IT: Misunderstood And Miscalculated
Green IT is a motherhood statement being made by many companies. Large organisations are always looking on to acquire the ‘green’ tag. But is it really worth it? The gamut of what is green is so large that even minor energy saving initiatives add on to the organisation’s green IT brand value. For instance, using infrastructure in a more consolidated manner results in a smaller carbon footprint. “There is no consensus as to what percentage of impact it has for green IT. I doubt if any enterprise starts with being green as a prime focus for any of its IT agendas,” opines Gogia.
Different companies will implement different IT policies and there is no standard to measure how green some IT initiatives really are. “The measurement can be made out of what kind of cost savings have been incurred but really then that is not the point,” points out Tuteja. Hence, a measurement of how successful green IT initiatives are cannot be conducted.
Big Issues Tag Along With BI & Big Data
Business Intelligence (BI) was touted to be the technology that would help understand the customer better and improve sales and in some cases help save money. BI was to help organisations get a head-start over the competition. But BI didn’t turn out to be that easy. “A lot of preliminary work needed to be undertaken. The parameters and the consolidated working of all the data systems needed to be in place before setting out on the BI journey and that is where most people faltered and stepped back trying to take it slow,” analyses Gogia.
“If I don’t know what kind of data I have myself, all the disparate systems don’t talk to each other and investment in BI is not doing anything because my data quality and governance is all messed up,” points out Dharmani. “That’s why many organisations, except banks, don’t really have mature BI systems,” he observes. Tuck Chan, Director, FSI Solutions Consulting, Aspect says, “We expected a lot of telecoms to step up and undertake innovative deployments but that hasn’t been the case. What they mainly use BI for is customer churn.”
Report generation has been restricted to the standard necessities of the business and out of the box use of BI for great competitive advantage is yet to be seen. “BI has not become operational and part and parcel of what employees in a company use to do their jobs better, especially marketing sections. We have not seen many deployments that set scale with global use cases like Target and others of the like”, says Chan.
Tuteja raises another issue which has hindered the adoption of BI and analytics, “People are confused from the buyer’s perspective and they are being confused from a seller’s perspective about historical reports and forecasting. What most companies are doing is querying in colourful charts and a cause and effect analysis. Prediction with the use of data analytics is really not being done.”
“When it comes to Big Data we’re just growing in the size of data and starting to see how this can be leveraged. But if there isn’t a plan of what to do with that data and how to put it to good use what is the use of buying these Big Data products,” questions Darren Reid Sr. VP – Services, Asia-Pacific, Japan & Global Delivery, CA Technologies. Over and above there is the messy business of structured and unstructured data. Products with big storage capacities got cheaper and people seemed interested in collecting data and taking a good look at what they have. But this has not turned out to be the data elixir BI and Big Data projects we’re expected to be.