Shankar Krishnamoorthy, CTO, Aspire Systems
Business acumen and understanding are admirable qualities of a CIO. One has to recognize business needs and direct team accordingly.
For this one requires ability to:
- foresee the opportunities and challenges
- mentor and empower people
- play hands-on. If you have to lead, you have to lead from the fore-front.
- communicate
- attention to details
 At Aspire, we provide several opportunities to people to grow and meet their aspirations – be it in technical ladder or managerial ladder. Apart from serving our customers in their product engineering activities, we innovate organization-wide projects which serve dual purposes –things get done (eg. We build several inhouse systems on our own, say for example, capability management system, talent management system, etc.) and enthusiastic individuals participating in these projects are also identified.
These projects help individuals shape up their technical, managerial and leadership skills. They make several decisions during the course of projects as they take complete responsibility of how a system needs to be designed and used. These projects also help in instilling business perspectives of how an organization runs. Here, we don’t really count on number of years of experience; rather, we value capabilities, enthusiasm and aspirations in providing opportunities.
On-going training is very important for us. Being in product development business, our customers expect us to be on top of cutting edge technology and also understand emerging business models (SaaS / OnDemand / etc). Plus, product development needs our team to be equipped with best engineering skills (how to design a scalable architecture, how to define product road map, how to manage releases, etc.) and latest tools.
We have different layers of training: metamorphosing college grads to producteers, producteers to experts, project management training, oftskill training, communication training, business management, etc.
We also encourage our engineers to get certified in different technologies; several of our people are Microsoft certified professionals, Sun certified professionals and several other certifications. These certifications help in better positioning before our clients.
People look for challenges for job satisfaction. I go to work because I like doing what I am doing. If we can meet this aspect, you solve most of the challenges in retaining people. As a growing company, we may be doing several things – something may work out, something may have issues. But, we talk to our people for their feedback and thoughts. We bring in entrepreneurial spirit into the company by empowering people. Our people have the sense of belonging and ownership in the company.
“Customer First” thought process and “Quality Consciousness” are two things that I work on. This helps in meeting the customer expectations and keeps them happy/delighted. Once this happens, your people will take care of customers; customers will take care of your business. You can grow. We have achieved ISO 9000 certification two years back and now we are working on getting the company into metrics culture – where we can measure and improve continuously.
CTO and CIO govern different ends of the business. CTO focuses on technology aspects –developing IPs for the company, choosing which technology to focus, evaluating tools, etc; he/she should be aware of the returns and ROI. These would generally be long-term oriented and impacts the directions of the company growth.
In case of CIOs, several infrastructure related projects depend on CIO’s team. MIS is a nerve line for several companies to run efficiently. As we depend on information on our finger tips to run the business, 24x7x365 running of these systems (emails, servers, website, intranet, etc.) is very important. That brings in confidence on your infrastructure and puts you on one level up in front of your customer’s eyes. So, if the CTO/CIOs recognizes the short term and long term needs, it will help the company grow.
Strategic planning involves coming up with a business and growth plans – again, both short term (1-2 years) and long term. This will also have plans on what IP you want to generate, how you can help customers crash their product roadmap, which technology the company needs to focus on, How quickly you want to acquire new customers, how you want to acquire new customers, etc. If you look at these, it talks about two things --- business acumen and utilization of technology.
Our structured project management methodology enables upfront plans on defining development methodology, configuration management, training/induction plans, etc. We have instituted this process in executing all our work. It has simplified everybody’s life as most of the information that we need would be in a single, central place and all well defined. They would be living plans and if there are any changes in reality, these plans would also get updated. This helped us in a big way in reducing communication gaps and defects and also improved our productivity in work.
- Empowering people and succession planning: This helps in providing growth opportunities for our people and also grooms them to the next role. Succession planning is about preparing somebody to take up your place. We do this all along – for all the roles – right from engineers to management team. This strategy also helps in keeping a tab on your direct execution cost.
- Challenge people: People would like to be challenged, especially engineers. Most of the times, engineers would handle complex things skillfully; but, they may loose out on doing simple things (eg. UI may have spell-o’s which will take one minute to fix). We try to instill perfection attitude.
- Lead from the front: I expect my managers to lead from the front; if their team needs help in testing the product, writing some modules, my managers would not hesitate to jump in. They roll their sleeves and make sure that they work closely with the team and get things done. While this may not happen often, it is important for the leaders and managers to understand the complete perspective of the work and also show the “I am there” attitude to the team. This also helps them to have an eye on the details and quality of work that is being done.
Communication is the key challenge for any deployment. In our case, we have almost 12 hours time zone difference between us and our customers apart from distance. This brings in different challenges. Even a simple question from either end has to wait 1-2 days to get clarified. Imagine, if you send 10 questions and you get 8 questions replied; these 2 unanswered questions can become bottlenecks. So, we need to have strong communication mechanism – you should be able to foresee bottlenecks / questions and work with customers ahead of time; that will help in meeting the timeline. Also, you need to have good communication mechanism in telling the customers whether you are going to meet the planned scheduled (or) are there delays and so on. If we can solve the communication hurdle, several of the challenges can be resolved. We constantly work on using the latest tools and technologies to reduce the communication gap.
- Putting yourself in your user’s shoes: This is one another challenging aspect in some of the deployments. Our engineers are very smart and they can pickup technology very fast. But, understanding domain (or end user environment) is very difficult and it comes over a period of time. Imagine, implementing ERP for a TV Station to manage advertisements (scheduling, screening, invoicing, etc.). It is a complex process and involves huge amount of money flowing through this system. Unless you work in a TV station hands-on, it will be difficult for you to completely visualize the process. So, our engineers have to go through a steep learning curve to understand complete process and digest this. We try to reduce the learning curve by bringing in experts and domain consultants or visiting end user facilities.
- Set the supporting infrastructure proper right at the beginning: this is one of the best practice or lesson we have learnt early in our business. If we set things right to work (eg. If you have a source control system right in the beginning, it will make every engineer’s life lot easier; if you set the timesheet management system right in the beginning and have your people log time, you have set yourself on right path to measure productivity).
Perception of the IT industry has definitely changed over a period of time. Now, it helps us in positioning us as a global leader. Several countries are looking at India and Indian engineers for taking care of their IT needs. It is remarkable. It helps economy. We have huge gap in computerizing our own domestic requirements. Several egov projects are in progress and we will have connected economy soon. Hardware and software costs, communication costs have reduced quite a bit. We have had times when an overseas call cost Rs 32 per minute and now, it is 6 rupees per minute. If we work on the infrastructure and cost of operations, it will further boost this.
People front, we are definitely doing a good job – educating and training thousands of people to get into IT. We need to do better in terms of getting employable grads. Going forward, IT is becoming commodity. And, cost arbitration is not going to stay for long. We need to go up on value chain by brining in niche services, improving on quality, etc. If we strengthen our infrastructure, we will have bright future assured.
We are getting equipped. We need to improve our infrastructure quite a bit. But, we have lot of positive opportunities. We can learn from developed countries in implementing new infrastructure – we don’t have to make mistakes to learn - we are in golden period where we can straight away go for latest technologies. Economy is growing.
Companies are investing in R&D. Wireless and computerization is penetrating the country. Quality of Service is getting recognized.
While, we have a long way to go, I am quite confident that we have a bright future.
The role of IT department has evolved over a period of time. It is no more EDP. It is instrumental for growth and helping in taking day-to-day business decisions. We can rely on getting past performance and metrics. If your IT department maintains history on how bandwidth is consumed, you can take better decision on when to upgrade your internet bandwidth and what investment to make in future.
Manufacturing companies can use how to use inventory / when to order for parts / and so on. Look at Railways. Few years back, we looked at computerization of reservations as a tough process. Now, everybody has realized on how it has simplified every individuals’ life + brought in growth for railways by increasing productivity, access to info, increased customer satisfaction, etc.
Tips for IT Managers:
- Instill “customers first” thought process
- Set goals
- Set expectations right
- Empower/empathize people
- Measure and review progress
--- As told to Sonal Desai
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