CIOIN

Despite significant improvements that many organizations have made in IT, the expectations of the business continue to grow each year. IT leaders cannot simply tackle these issues in isolation, but must address them simultaneously. Hence, an IT management approach that simplifies, standardizes and automates IT processes, thus increasing efficiency, has become the need of the hour.

To understand what steps organizations are undertaking to achieve this goal, CIO Magazine, in association with HP Software, recently held a roundtable discussion among IT leaders across different verticals.

The ultimate goal of any organization would be to stay ahead of its competitors in terms of quality, service and revenue. Therefore, on some level, the onus is on IT to ensure that these goals are met. Prashun Dutta, VP-IT, Reliance Infrastructure Ltd, shared his view on what increases business’ expectations on IT. He said, “The most important factor is emergence. In an IT system, needs emerge continually as people keep using it and get used to it. We built our setup for scalability, robustness and volume. We are now receiving the dividends. However, expectations would definitely keep growing.”

Business-IT alignment, which is touted to be a great enabler of efficient enterprise, continues to be a buzzword in the business world. In fact, it is to some extent unfair that there is no such thing as business-finance alignment or business-sales alignment. Explaining the reason behind this persistent demand for IT’s alignment with business, Dhiren Savla, CIO, Kuoni Travel Group, said, “For many years, IT was treated as an external function. But IT has matured over the years and now, business has become completely dependent on it. This maturity makes it compulsory for IT to align with business.”

Besides business-IT alignment, shared services and automation are also looked at as effective IT approaches. Tarun Pandey, VP-IT, Aditya Birla Management Corporation Pvt Ltd, shared his experience on how his organization harnessed the potential of shared services and how he approached implementing the same. He said that CIOs should start by identifying the common functions and processes across the different business entities and then see if they can be made any better. He also added that the shared service model more or less acts like a private cloud.

Large-scale implementations and challenges go hand in hand, irrespective of the technology that is implemented. Automation is no exception to this unwritten law. And the complications only increase in number in a highly regulated industry like telecom. Badri Subramaniyan, CIO, Etisalat DB India Telecom Pvt Ltd, suggested ways to overcome these challenges. He said, “The challenges prevailing are missing the links between processes in a continuously evolving field. As requirements go up, processes undergo change as well. Organizations need to be prepared to face that change and should make sure that they implement standardized processes perfectly.”

Automation promises various benefits to the business on various levels. Kamal Dutta, Director BTO/IM – Asia Pacific and Japan, HP Software and Solutions, shared an interesting experience in his life through which he realized the extent to which automation could be helpful for organizations. In one of his conversations with a Japanese CIO, he came to know that the CIO wanted to automate the IT processes in his organization so that he can transfer them to a different location just with the click of a mouse during natural disasters. Considering that Japan is very much prone to seismic disturbances, we must agree that it was a clever move on the CIO’s part to implement automation.