New Technology
To a large extent, this perception towards adopting new technologies remains, observed Sivakumar. What has changed over the last 10 to 15 years is that the portfolio of technologies, which needs looking into, continues to grow and accelerate. “And the luxury of waiting for a technology to mature and establish itself in the market is no longer available. Companies need to develop fairly intricate processes that allow them to keep the process running, and accelerate adoption into their companies,” he said. Sumit Dutta Chowdhury, CIO of Reliance Communications, pointed out that the problem of plenty doesn’t, however, extend to vendor choice. “Today, the number of EMA vendors is small, and there are only two chip vendors: AMD and Intel. Which one do you choose? Tomorrow, it could be storage. We’ve come down to limited technology choices and it’s a risk we must take into account.” CIO of Haldia Petrochemicals, Anjan Bose, concurred. The biggest risk associated with new deployments of technology is something that a CIO can do little about — because the risk lies with the vendors, he said. The diminishing pool of vendors hurts companies, he added. It partly explain why IT folk, more than any other lot, are prone to high risks. “Possibly, we are one of the few verticals that have single-product companies. And once these companies disappear, we are left holding the baby,” said Bose. Chinar Deshpande, CIO of Pantaloon Retail expressed disappointment over vendors’ inability to contain risk during new implementations. When Pantaloon Retail set out to install an ERP system, it wasn’t only the learning curve that was steep; the cost of the project also kept increasing, so much so that he thanks his management today for supporting his decision. “When you’re taking big decisions, involve your technology partner and let the ecosystem help you decide, so that you’re not alone in your decision. Hopefully, this will reduce the chances of failure,” advised Manoj Chugh, president, EMCIndia and SAARC. “We tried to involve our technology partners when we started ERP,” said Deshpande. “But I was wondering whether they could have shown more
“Too often, companies have very small pilots andthink enthusiasm will see them scale up.” Ramamurthy Sivakumar MD (South Asia), Intel Technology
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interest in understanding our business model. We ended up spending a lot more money than we’d originally anticipated, probably because the vendor was more interested in selling the product than studying our business model and foreseeing that we would spend so much more.” Arun Gupta, director-global infrastructure services at Philips, was more forgiving. In his experience, vendors are a mixed bag. “There are some who do a good job in assessing what organizations need before making suggestions and others who don’t,” he said. However, vendors don’t quite deliver the kind of emerging technologies that companies are looking for, he added. Sometimes, there is too much focus on features, said Chugh of EMC. “Often, as vendors, we get prescriptions from customers. I still remember customers asking me whether I supported a ‘cycle-stealing’ feature. I needed to go back and ask friends about that microprocessor class that I missed, and check whether we did, in fact, support it.” But in this process, he says, there is a risk of missing the woods for the trees. But the question of which side a vendor should play persists. Does IT have a larger share of ‘partner-failures’ than other industries? Intel’s Sivakumar, does not think so: “As with anything else, it has to do with the ability to be prepared before you take the plunge. There’s too much of the ‘Kar denge Saab’ attitude.” The thinking that IT people can figure things out on the fly is very dangerous in technology, he said. The level of evaluation a CIO might do for an accounting package versus an enterprisewide wireless implementation is very different, he said. But even if the scales are different, fundamentally, they need to think through the entire process, he added. “One of the biggest pieces of this is training,” Sivakumar pointed out. When a corporation sets out to deploy a new technology, there’re hundreds and hundreds of hours of training involved during which you tell people what’s appropriate and inappropriate use.” According to him, corporations will still have bad apples, but CIOs at least would have reduced the risks that come with new deployments. Another thing that needs to be done is identifying a complete test-bed, with a sizable REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 , 2 0 0 6
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