CIOIN

Pravir Vohra

Group CTO, ICICI

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Pravir Vohra
As the Group CTO at ICICI Bank, Vohra focuses on the alignment of technology with business goals and helps the ICICI Group remain agile, flexible and competitive. Prior to this, he worked with Times Bank as VP-corporate services group. A postgraduate in Economics from St. Stephen's College, Delhi, Vohra began his career at the State Bank of India where he worked for 23 years.

A P&L is definitely one way of running IT like a business, but it is a fairly extreme method. To me, running IT like a business has a far broader meaning. It includes: an IT department that is capable of understanding the P&L of the organization, knowing how it is contributing to the company in terms of saving or reducing costs, and quantifying the value of its own initiatives. The intellectual property that IT creates has to be commercialized.

And to do that, the IT department should be guided by the finance and accounting principles of the organization rather than functioning as an independent corporate structure.

At ICICI Bank, we believe - and our businesses tend to agree - that we run technology like a business. For example, when the business comes to IT with a request for an enhancement or a change, IT asks it to present a business case. Once IT delivers what is required, it will check around six months later whether the benefit expected was achieved.

This creates a sense of awareness. We do not maintain a separate P&L for technology. But every year we quantify in rupee or dollar terms, the business value that IT has brought to the organization under categories like cost savings, revenue, new products, new markets entered and so on.

Also, we measure the downtime of every system and ask the IT owners to work with the businesses to come up with a business loss number on per minute or hour basis for every system. Then they print a monthly P&L that generally only talks about the losses incurred. For instance, if the CRM system goes down, an automated response informs us about the outage and its duration. This is then converted into a rupee value. So, at the end of the month, every outage is added up and a value is attached to it. This helps us to focus on reducing outages.

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We need to build a culture of trust and a feeling that IT and the business are on the same side.

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Usually, most people in the organization are not aware of what happens in other departments. So internal marketing, if only just to project the facts, is a part of running IT like a business. Chargebacks on the other hand, will depend largely on the nature of the business.

At ICICI Bank, we do it across P&L entities. According to us, chargebacks make the businesses aware of the technology costs but if a company's costs are relatively low then businesses can actually become dismissive of small amounts of chargebacks. This will lead to greater transparency of the department. We'd rather be transparent - even though it might mean that the ugly side of IT is exposed.  But one needs to do it intelligently.

Running IT like a business enables trending, sensitizes users and makes technology more efficient. It also drives innovation by building a culture where every aspect can be classified as a revenue or cost.

This does involve a lot of change management. But one can easily overcome those challenges. In the end, one needs to build a culture of trust and dependency and a feeling that IT and the business are on the same side.  

As told to Anup Varier