Vijay Sethi
On the CIO Conversation Panel:
VP and CIO, Hero MotoCorp Mobility has dramatically changed the way employees work. A few years ago, having a laptop for work was a privilege that only a few enjoyed. Today, employees expect all enterprise services to be delivered on their mobile devices, irrespective of model. Since all apps were designed keeping in mind the PC, a great deal of tweaking is required to deliver the same levels of user experience on mobile devices. CIOs can deliver consistent user experience by focusing on effectiveness, rather than on efficiency.
Vijay Sethi VP and CIO, Hero MotoCorp
Sukumar Rajagopal SVP, CIO & Head of Innovation, Cognizant
I firmly believe that IT is the biggest lever of innovation. One pressing issue in the minds of IT decision-makers today is: “How can IT be used to identify business problems and overcome them with innovation?” For example, one of the problems our company faced was making the transition from working on small screens—that of employee mobile devices—on weekends to a larger screen on a weekday. In doing that, we learnt to look at business problems from business’ perspective, and use IT as an enabler to deliver innovation.
Vinod Sivaramakrishnan CIO, Walmart India
What is fascinating about mobility and other emerging technologies is how much easier work has become for people at the end-user level. At the same time, setting up the required facilities for them has become a difficult task for the IT team at the back-end. Since Walmart has shops at various places, the complications we faced were the scale of implementation and the speed of response. Getting the back-end right will make it easy to get processes right. Technology was not mature enough to achieve this a few years ago. Thankfully, it is now.
Amit Sethi
Sukumar Rajagopal SVP, CIO & Head of Innovation, Cognizant
Vinod Sivaramakrishnan CIO, Walmart India
Amit Sethi Sr. President and CIO, YES Bank
Sr. President and CIO, YES Bank
The one term that business associates with the cloud is on-demand and in some cases lower cost. By adopting the cloud, organizations are embracing a total opex model instead of a more traditional capex model in the case of hardware and services. Being in the banking sector, we are a fairly riskaverse organization. So, the adoption of cloud computing will slow but certain. The cloud’s promise of saving time lost in implementation is a main driver. One approach that is very effective is doing a phased implementation.
T.G. Dhandapani Group CIO, TVS Motors
T.G. Dhandapani Group CIO, TVS Motors There are two angles to the “virtualization-as-a-competitive differentiator” aspect: One is from the IT point of view and the other is from the business’ perspective. Virtualization will play a major role as far as optimizing or automating operations is concerned. As a CIO, I’ll be able to show cost savings, high availability and a host of other benefits stemming out of virtualization. But this constitutes only a fraction of what a CFO expects from the technology. I’ve seen that the benefits of virtualization are just hygiene factors, and not critical success factors.
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