Ashish Chauhan
Peer-to-Peer
usiness’ Business B isYour Business Aligning IT with business doesn't just mean ‘managing expectations’. Often, it also means being multi-faceted and getting your hands dirty in their mess.
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Illust ration by MM Shan ith
hen you are a company of 50,000 employees, IT tends to be small and very hands-on. You have to work with people closely and on a personal basis. In the process, you get to know first-hand, in a seamless and direct way, the IT needs of people and departments. When you step over the 1-lakh employee threshold, your set of challenges change. And when you have millions of users spread across the world, you have yet another set of challenges. The question then is: how do you go about aligning an IT goal with a business goal? Much of my work as a banker, 15 years ago, involved setting up companies and project finance. It gave me an understanding of how to set up and run a business. And since I knew more about IT than others at these places, I also got involved with setting up IT. Much of these experiences help me today primarily because a CIO today has to be a ‘super-user’. He has to know accounts, finance, treasury, and risk management. Each time you talk to a user, you are talking to someone who wants to do something that will make his job easier, which might not necessarily make things better for the larger organization. As a CIO, you are the only one who binds the organization. IT is the glue that holds an organization together, lends it efficiency, and directly impacts its brand. Take the Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) service network, which has nodes everywhere. Typically, a RIL customer makes an order for a certain grade of material over the phone to a regional office. These offices usually have no access to SAP — Reliance has an enterprise62
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