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Vinod Sadavarte,
CIO,
Patni Computer Systems
Tenure at Patni : 3 years
Choice of career in IT: It happened both by choice and accident. I worked in L&T for many years, and my last assignment there was as an Executive Assistant in the MD’s office. After that, I had the choice of moving into different areas. Since IT was an emerging field, I joined L&T Infotech and since then, it has been IT all the way.
Evolution of IT in Patni: The company’s size has almost doubled in the last three years, both from a revenue as well as a headcount perspective; the business landscape has changed, and linked to that the IT landscape necessarily has to change. Thus, in terms of breadth and depth of IT we have today, there has been a complete change from what I inherited.
Team management and retention of skilled people: The challenge is quite pervasive and we are trying to overcome through innovative ways. Basically, I need three sets of people to deliver our IT needs. First, people who understand businesses like domain experts or business process leaders because the IT landscape has to be driven by business. Second, I need project managers who have people management and technology management skills. Third, I also need pure play technologists who possess deep technical knowledge.
My strategy has been to tap the inherent talent and interest of my people early on and set down the career tracks for them accordingly. Of course, it would be foolish to pretend money has no role to play here, but only up to a point. Hence, I emphasize the non-monetary aspects in my strategy. I identify my core team members and spend a lot of time on understanding their interest areas. Instead of focusing on short-term monetary benefits, I take a long-term bet on the individual and work towards his or hers long -term career aspects with us. More important, I lay down a career plan which is visible and realistic instead of making tall promises that look good only on paper; I prefer to walk the talk and deliver on my promises.
Size of IT team: 180. We also have an outsourcing model where I take help from my technology partners/vendors for certain key strategic inputs or high end work and also outsource low end volume work to partners.
How CIOs can be a part of the strategic management team: Today, CIOs have to be business savvy. If I don’t understand my company’s business, there will be gap in terms of what I deliver to the organization and what they really expect from my team and me.
In my case, though I had a technical degree (I am an engineer with post-graduate degree in management from IIM-Calcutta), I started off at the business side. When I moved into IT, my business experience proved useful because a CIO’s core skill is to understand the application of technology; knowing coding, Java or .Net isn’t a core requirement. A CIO should be capable of understanding what is it that will bring benefit to the business and adopt the appropriate technology.
At the same time, it is also important to make business aware of value of technology and what it can deliver. One can also argue that IT should travel a distance towards business and business should travel a distance towards IT, so that it is mutually beneficial for both.
However, the CIO is perched on a unique position where he gets a perspective of the entire organization compared to a sales person knowing what is happening sales area or HR knowing only what is happening in HR area. A CIO can correlate all this, which puts him in a better position to drive things.
The other aspect is if I leave it to the business people to drive their own business needs from an IT perspective, it can be less than optimal or even disastrous because they tend to be myopic when it comes to their needs. A CIO can bring in a fresher perspective and also correlate of one area to other area, so that he brings in an end-to-end process visibility to all the stakeholders.
In Patni, whenever I take up a strategic initiative, I make sure that my business folks are part of the initiative, that they are driving it while I am at the backseat supporting them. For example, when we were rolling out our global CRM initiative, I made a senior sales person the executive sponsor for this project; I made different sales and delivery organizations part of this initiative; helped them define the process and choose the technology too. In the end, we got a solution where the business people felt it was their solution rather than a CIO solution. As a result, buy in became easier and change management effort became that much smoother.
How I measure IT effectiveness: Effectiveness is linked not only to what you deliver but also more importantly, how you deliver. When we talk about aligning IT strategy with business needs, it is not only from a top-level strategic or directional perspective, but also from an operational requirements point of view. Therefore, when I work on IT strategy, I have to look at the strategic aspects as well as the operational and tactical aspects and plan accordingly.
I look at IT effectiveness from two perspectives – First, from a new initiative perspective where there are different milestones, so am I adhering to these milestones, are there are variances in terms of time and cost? Second, from an operational effectiveness perspective, the parameters would be uptime, the performances we are delivering to the organization, the degree of effectiveness at which we churn out the change requests from the users, etc.
While CIOs cannot afford to lose focus on strategy formulation, they cannot wish away operational issues either. What I have done is to identify the frequently occurring operational issues that account for 80 per cent of the noise, both from a time and real noise perspective and lay a down strategy for resolving them. Of course, day to day operational issues would be taken care of by senior managers and project managers.
Management Mantras
1) Plan ahead. See where your organization is going and whether you are adequately equipped from a planning perspective to support that.
2) Understand what your business peers are saying of IT and of the IT solution. More importantly, you should develop the ability to understand the pain behind what they are saying and work upon that consciously. Never take criticism to heart.
3) Balance your time and effort between ‘lights on’ and the new initiatives. Of course, it depends on where an organization is on the IT maturity curve. For large companies with mature IT, the challenge would be lower. But for a growing business low on IT maturity, the CIO will have to walk a tight rope where he will have to balance operational issues even while existing systems are not geared to deliver for tomorrow.
4) Communicate, Communicate, Communicate. And resolve 50 per cent of the problem right away. Be bold. Make your point of view known clearly and logically to the businesses, stakeholders and the management. As CIOs, we have much broader and better understanding of business processes and businesses and we should make most use of them for benefit of the organization.
5) Focus on value delivery and pure play cost management. In the long run, what matters is the value that you deliver rather than saving a few millions of rupees. That’s what you will be appreciated for.
If I weren't a CIO I would be: With my mix of business and technology experience, I would probably be advising companies on strategic planning and business strategy.
----------------------------------------------- As told to Anoop K Menon
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