Time for Indian CIOs to Innovate

“Can we meet next week? I have a burning issue, one of my CRM servers is down, and I got to rush”. This was a reaction from a CIO of a large company, when I requested for a meeting to brief him on a potentially new service offering I had. I did promptly meet with him next week and discovered that a major link went down and triggered an anomaly which disrupted their CRM servers and caused an operational breakdown for over 12 hours. The business came to a standstill for that time and clearly they had not calculated their business loss and might never do that in future as well. After spending more than an hour with the CIO, it was clear that the situation was handled as an independent event and bore no significance for future such occurrences. I was there to discuss about some futuristic requirements of Business-IT alignment with him and found out that he is not yet out of daily operations management.

The organic evolution of CIO regime in India is a sweet story for the onlooker from outside. The first CIO for any manufacturing organization was termed the EDP manager and they were days of central data processing. Then came the era of distributed computing & ERP, and users of a company started running ERP at their Desktop level. The complexity grew that much more. The next era saw the companies connecting their branches across geographies and the EDP manager became an IT-Head and started managing branch-branch connectivity. His role grew beyond managing internal users to Vendor management. He had vendors in supplying Desktops, Telcos giving him connectivity solutions, ERP companies giving him Solutions, System Integrators managing their branches. There was a need for the IT-Head to create a team under him, a Manager for IT Infrastructure, one for managing applications and one for managing internal users. His complexity grew, what started off as one man army suddenly had 5 people reporting to him directly and 25 member team indirectly. His priorities got more complex, earlier he would be spending more time with business users and managing their problems directly, but, now, he spends rather more time with his team, trying to understand the new roll-out, capacity issues, team motivation, attrition. Welcome to the world of CIO’s office.

The speed of business is rapid, Indian economy is booming, acquisition is the order of the day and the seamless backward IT integration is but real. The current day CIO is a demigod, he is seen as an enabler of business.
A quick glance at his Priorities, the top ones are listed below:

1. IT Strategic Planning
2. Business-IT Alignment
3. Evaluating new trends in IT( like S-a-a-S, Remote Management, SOX)
4. Applicability to his business

What are his least priorities then?

1. Budget Provisioning
2. Vendor Management
3. Daily Operations Management &
4. Motivating IT Staff

Looking at the current scenario of operations, CIOs spend far too much time on daily operations and vendor management than they must be spending which consumes too much of their quality time which could be used for future looking constructive purposes.

The Ideal CIOs Office:

I am not an expert, but as someone inclined to better our CIOs priorities, I would like to look at how to organize a CIO’s office. The first major decision is to split any CIO’s time into two:

1. Operational Strategy
2. Business Strategy

Operational Strategy
This strategy is to streamline operational function, which takes up as much as 60% of a day’s work. The strategy for any CIO is to put this team into an auto pilot mode. How this could be done:

1. Divide Daily Operations into
   a. Infrastructure/Datacenter
   b. Applications
   c. Business User


2. Retain Program Managers for the above and outsource the activities
   a. Outsource “Hands & Legs” operations(creating in-house teams for this is a drain on time & future money)
   b. Create a model for Onsite/Remote Support combination(24X7 Onsite is a non-scalable model)


3. Entrust Program Managers to have direct control on Vendors


4. Wherever possible, automate the process
   a. Helpdesk
   b. Vendor Management
   c. IMAC

Business Strategy
To my mind, in the longer run CIOs must spend more time for this strategy than the Operational one. For any CIO who sees outsourcing the daily operations as a threat to their future and their team’s future, this strategy formulation is a direct answer. The most important aspect of any CIO would be to spend more time with business unit leaders trying to understand the business model better and ever always trying to align IT vision to business vision.
The core practices could be:

1. Business Trend Analysis
   a. Set-up a Partner channel for monitoring the IT Infrastructure on a 24X7 basis and create trend base reports
   b. Understand Capacity/Availability statistics through continuous monitoring


2. Move from a Reactive to a Proactive Support
   a. Predict IT failures and link with Business failure


3. Move towards a common SLA which is business SLA
   a. Technical SLA is no more valid
   b. CIO & CEO should look to have a common business SLA


4. Create a Service Impact Strategy
   a. Look to build a service impact plan to see how a technical downtime equates to a service or SBU down time
   b. What are the corresponding business loss


5. Move from Silo based management to Closed Loop Management
   a. Server team SLA, DB team SLA no more important
   b. SBU Uptime SLA is most critical for any CEO


6. Create a concrete BCP/DR strategy

The evolution within CIO office is seeing dramatic & paradigm shift and the CIOs of the future must look at constant innovation and newer trends to keep their corporates at cutting edge and create a space of constant competitive advantage.