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The Transforming CIO
By Sudhir Narasimhan
The verdict is out. it is clear that spends on IT by Indian enterprises are going up by 20 percent on an average. This was to be expected as large enterprises that IT-enabled their business processes in the last few years are now entering the next phase of deployment which involves safeguarding business-critical data on the network and ensuring that the business continues uninterrupted. Considering the vuln erabilities of networks to a host of new threats, including natural disasters, our survey confirms the obvious—that disaster recovery and information security are among the top priorities for IT heads.
I also find it interesting that enterprise risk management, a practice hitherto limited to the banking and financial sectors, is percolating to other sectors. I’d interpret this as sign of the new maturity among enterprise users of IT. The fact that virtualization is also right on top of the agenda of many a CIO supports this. On one hand enterprises are becoming more aware of the criticality of their information assets, on the other they are looking to optimize their resources.
Our research also brought out a new facet of the emerging Indian CIO. NWC correspondent Ashwani Mishra, who worked extensively on this issue, tells me that CIOs are becoming more end-customer focused. The CIO of a bank, for instance, spends less time on technology-related issues than on finding out ways to deliver the bank’s services to the customer faster. This seems to be the trend across large enterprises, and the way I see it, this is yet another phase in the evolution of the Indian CIO into a business leader. The nirvana for the CIO still seems to be in the distance because aligning IT with business objectives continues to be the biggest challenge. This is the area we see most of you spending your energies on in the months to come.
Before I wind up, I’d like to thank every one of you who took time to respond to our survey, and for the interviews. I wish you all a great new year.
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