Pat Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer, Helios & Matheson
In today’s business dynamics, no longer is a leader required to only lead and direct a team towards a given goal or target. A leader should have the requisite skills to anticipate future potential (being a visionary), provide mitigation strategies and position the company for a growth path.
The key quality that a CIO should bring to table is strategic thinking. Superb communication, ability to gauge the technology path, pragmatic approach to providing solution and, above all, high levels of integrity are the other key qualities that a CIO/CTO needs to possess.
If I may say, the perception is changing and increasingly IT departments are treated as profit centers rather than an overhead center. This certainly puts pressure on the quality of output that IT department has to produce to be in the limelight. We are close to seeing IT departments aligning towards company’s goals and objectives to maximize benefits.
Leaders in our team are identified based on the four essential qualities of Innovation, Integrity, Communication and Entrepreneurial. This is the recipe of a good leader, according to me. In the event a candidate lacks one of above, we generally try to groom and get the person going.
On-going training is very essential considering the shelf life of emerging technologies. Training is an essential part of our metamorphosis and sets the basis for understanding the nuances of issues, be it technology or soft skills. We train our employees in both technology and soft skills as these are like the two edges of a sword.
Retention in general is also a huge problem for any company today and is a very formidable task. We believe that monetary gains and handsome pay packet for an employee is no longer a means to retention. There has to be job enrichment and career prospects have to be discussed with every employee, which is pivotal to retention. This is due to the technological innovations that happen in the industry, which forces the employees to be in the limelight. In a nutshell, keeping the employees in the thick of technological innovations is a key driver to retaining skilled talent.
Our company dwells in the philosophy of fostering career prospect to the employees by providing training and challenging assignments, which in turn has resulted greatly in the performance of our employees. This value system has created a halo effect, which breeds commitment and dedication in our employees. Working hours have become very flexible with employees working towards a unitary goal to see that customer satisfaction is on the top of the list.
A major challenge in any deployment lies in convincing the benefits of the implementation to the departments that are affected. Cross communication and information sharing by the different departments is essential in a successful deployment. Skepticism on the benefits of the implementation makes deployment a challenging task.
The industry has an assortment of toolsets to design, develop and implement software applications. This is due to the innovations largely in the areas such as Object oriented technologies, fostering Open source software surrounded by a community and SOA that has enabled information sharing between disparate applications using facile SOAP calls where the effort to understand the gory implementation details of a third party component is minimized to a large extent.
Top 5 Management Tips :
1. Focus on corporate goals,
2. do collaborative planning,
3. communicate with conviction,
4. champion the effort and
5. measure the success of the outcome.
--------------- As told to Sonal Desai
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