CIO Magazine February 2014 by Sreekanth Sastry

ANIRUDDHA PAUL (sitting) succeeded C.V.G. PRASAD at ING Vysya Bank after a year of planning.

BUSINESS

TECHNOLOGY

LEADERSHIP

KEEP IT! WHY FEWER IT PROFESSIONALS WANT TO BE CIOs

LASTING

LEGACY One in every five Indian CIOs will retire in the next two years. Do you have a succession plan? Page 36 VOL/09 | ISSUE/04

FEBRUARY 15, 2014 | `100.00 W WW.CIO.IN

CXO AGENDA The surprising truth behind Thomas Cook’s online push. Page 56

WIZARD ON WHEELS How Mahindra Reva gave India its first smart car. Page 46

Gartner IT Infrastructure Operations & Data Center Summit 2014 12 – 13 May | Mumbai, India | www.gartnerevent.com/in/dc1

Take Charge, Lead Change: Your Infrastructure Transformation Can’t Wait HoT TopICs I&O Cost Optimization BYOD and Mobile Device Management Consolidating IT Operations Tools and Technology Cloud Computing and Virtualization IT Leadership in the Digital Era Information/Data Security

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FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

UBLISHER, PRESIDENT & CEO Louis D’Mello P ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Parul Singh E D I TO R I A L

Buy-in Bother How often does business agree with your thoughts as opposed to their asking for your solution to a problem? Over the past half-decade, since the slowdown set in, I’ve seen managements transform how they view IT. Indian organizations no longer invest in technology, instead they fund business results. As a consequence, the approach towards deployment is rapidly shifting from an ‘as is-transitionto-be’ model which involved selecting a product or service, customizing it and deploying the solution; to a paradigm that begins with identifying a business outcome, selecting the right product for the job, and finally adopting it in a best-practices or template model (with little or no customization) with rapid deployment. What you are pushing at business can’t be about big data or mobility or the cloud or analytics or ERP or any other enterprise-class technology—instead it has to be about revenue growth, about customer outreach, about helping them build the right product or service rather than making the product right, and about profitable growth. The technology is almost incidental. The strategy can’t be. Let’s be honest, how often does business agree with your thoughts as opposed to their asking for your solution to a problem? I’m not suggesting that IT shouldn’t be proactive, but rather that all businesses have a certain, specific rate of absorbing innovation. While I was casting about for a workaround, I came across a CIO of an automotive major whose approach allows business to sink their teeth into a new idea at their own pace. First, he dedicates a portion of his budget to sandboxing and experimentation. Next, he has his team examine possible use cases that can have business impact, and develop pilots and prototypes. The team showcases the prototypes in a special zone to which they periodically invite lines of business leaders, to go over them. At the appropriate ‘click’ moment when a specific project appeals to a department, IT is then able to roll it out super quick. Not only does IT get to demonstrate its business-savvy, it also challenges the team to come up with tangible, feasible, innovative ideas. Ideas that business truly buys in to. Wouldn’t this approach work for you? Write in and share your thoughts on delivering to today’s business ask.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Vijay Ramachandran MANAGING EDITOR T.M. Arun Kumar EXECUTIVE EDITOR Gunjan Trivedi ASSOCIATE EDITORS Sunil Shah,Yogesh Gupta FEATURES EDITOR Shardha Subramanian SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS Gopal Kishore, Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENTS Debarati Roy, Sneha Jha, Varsha Chidambaram SENIOR CORRESPONDENTS Aritra Sarkhel, Eric Ernest, Ershad Kaleebullah, Shubhra Rishi, Shweta Rao SENIOR COPY EDITORS Shreehari Paliath, Vinay Kumaar LEAD DESIGNERS Pradeep Gulur, Suresh Nair, Vikas Kapoor SENIOR DESIGNERS Sabrina Naresh, Unnikrishnan A.V. SALES & MARKETING PRESIDENT SALES & MARKETING Sudhir Kamath VICE PRESIDENT SALES Sudhir Argula GM MARKETING Siddharth Singh GENERAL MANAGER SALES Jaideep M. MANAGER-KEYACCOUNTS Sakshee Bagri MANAGER MARKETING Ajay Chakravarthy MANAGER-SALES SUPPORT Nadira Hyder SR. MARKETING ASSOCIATES Archana Ganapathy, Benjamin Jeevanraj, MARKETING ASSOCIATE Arjun Punchappady, Cleanne Serrao, Lavneetha Kunjappa, Margaret DCosta, Shwetha M. LEAD DESIGNER Jithesh C.C. SENIOR DESIGNER Laaljith C.K. O P E R AT I O N S VICE PRESIDENT HR & OPERATIONS Rupesh Sreedharan FINANCIAL CONTROLLER Sivaramakrishnan T.P. CIO Pavan Mehra SR. MANAGER OPERATIONS Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya, Pooja Chhabra SR. MANAGER ACCOUNTS Sasi Kumar V. SR. MANAGER PRODUCTION T.K. Karunakaran MANAGER OPERATIONS Dinesh P., Tharuna Paul MANAGER CREDIT CONTROL Prachi Gupta SR. ACCOUNTS EXECUTIVE Poornima

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Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027. Editor: Louis D’Mello Printed at Manipal Press Ltd., Press Corner, Tile Factory Road, Manipal, Udupi, Karnataka - 576 104.

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REAL CIO WORLD | J A N U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

contents FEBRUARY 15, 2014 | VOL/9 | ISSUE/04

Case Files 46 | Mahindra Reva M2M COMMUNICATION How Mahindra Reva leveraged the magic of telematics and mobility to give India its very first smart car. By Debarati Roy

3 6

CONSOLIDATION To enable Dalmia Bharat to take advantage of new technologies incorporating mobility and analytics, the company’s IT team embarked on an aggressive consolidation plan. By Varsha Chidambaram

36 | Lasting Legacy COVER STORY | CIO CAREER One in every five Indian CIOs will retire within the next two years. Do you have a succession plan? By Debarati Roy

43 | Keep It: Why Few Want Your Job COVER STORY PLUS | CIO CAREER More than half of IT professionals don’t aspire to be a CIO. It used to be the top job in IT, but not anymore. What’s changed? By Julia King

50 | The Politics of No FEATURE | CIO SKILLS CIOs may have good reason to reject a proposal or nix a technology request, but an inept or frequent ‘no’ will get you sidelined. By Kim S. Nash

F E B R U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 4 | REAL CIO WORLD

4 3

IT KEEP

COVER DESIGN BY UN NIKRISHNAN AV. F URNITURE ON T HE COVER COURTESY CHESTER'S BANGALORE

66 | Dalmia Bharat

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VIEW FROM THE TOP: D. Sathish Babu, Founder and CEO, UniverCell, talks about the role IT has had in making UniverCell a Rs 1,000-crore mobile retail chain.

DEPARTMENTS 1 | From the Editor-in-Chief Buy-in Bother By Vijay Ramachandran

7 | Trendlines

5 6

20 | Alert Legal | Cyberlaw: Look Out 2014! Insider Threat | Senior Managers Worst Security Offenders

69 | Essential Technology

56 | Off the Beaten Track CXO AGENDA | E-COMMERCE In the travel industry, the smart money seems to be betting on online players. Yet Thomas Cook India isn’t making its online channel central to its strategy. What is it they know that others don’t? By Shubhra Rishi

61 | Seven Devious Sneak Attacks

FEATURE Most malware is mundane, but these innovative techniques are exploiting systems and networks of even the savviest users. By Roger A. Grimes

Tech Support | BYOD Support BYOD Management | Fools Rush In

72 | Endlines Innovation | Don't Get Burned By Susie Ochs

3 0

Columns 25 | Chief Improv Officer? LEADING EDGE Improv comedy is not just for fun. It’s gaining ground in the corporate world of engagement, negotiations, team building, and leadership. Should CIOs turn to improv to rethink their business? About time. By Gunjan Trivedi

30 | Bridging India’s Skills Gap THINK TANK By about 2020, the scientific center of the world will shift from a single country to a score of nations. Here’s what India needs to do to be part of that global elite. By Gary J. Beach 4

F E B R U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 4 | REAL CIO WORLD

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CIO Online

.in CIO ADVERTISER INDEX

[ CI O TV ]

Accenture Services

Akami Technologies India

Video Library

Bharthi Airtel (Airtel Business)

27, 28 & 29

Emerson Network Power India

From peer-to-peer advice, and new technology developments to international events, our videos cover everything that affects you. Keep yourself abreast with the world of IT, watch our online videos.

Gartner India Research &

[ Ca se S tudies ] Real Solutions

To know about the different business challenges that companies in your industry and beyond faced and how their IT departments came to their rescue, read our case studies. Real problems. Real people. Real solutions. cio.in/find/case_study

[ S l i des hows ] From cloud tools to other tech projects, view our slideshows for all that and more.

Advisory Services HP EG

32 & 33

HP networking IBM India

21 BC, 3 + innovation

Konica Minolta Business Solutions India IBC NetAppp India Marketing & Services

8&9

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SAS Institute (India)

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This index is provided as an additional service. The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions.

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EDITED BY SUNIL SHAH

NEW

HOT

UNEXPECTED

Cloud Service That Hears You, Feels You that its voice-analytics software is based on 18 years of research by physicists and neuropsychologists who have conducted more than 60,000 test subjects in 26 languages. It provides primary and secondary moods, as

well as the speaker’s level of control, from calmness to anxiety. The software analyzed Steve Jobs talking about the iPad in one of his last interviews. In a short (about 90 second clip), the software pointed out that Jobs showed distress, combined with the urge to change the situation. Then it said that Jobs demonstrated restrained emotion and self control, followed by happiness and love (talking about the change in plans to make the iPhone), and finally passion and a need for instant gratification. While the software might be able to detect a marketer who’s faking enthusiasm, it’s important to note that it isn’t a lie detector. A competent actor, for instance, can deliver the correct emotions of her character, and the software will reflect this in her speech. However, the software can help speakers, presenters and call center agents perfect their craft. —By Tom Kaneshige

TRENDLINES

C L O U D C O M P U T I N G In today’s hotly competitive workplace, everyone needs to be a good public speaker, or at least an effective verbal communicator. E-mails, tweets and Facebook posts just don’t cut it when you’re trying to make an impression on bosses, business partners, colleagues and customers. But how are people really hearing you? Well, there’s a cloud service with a mobile app that will help speakers understand how listeners might be perceiving them. A start-up called Beyond Verbal has a service whereby a customer sends a recording (it needs to be at least 12 seconds long), and special analytics software provides nearly instant feedback about the mood, attitude and emotion of the speaker regardless of language and content. It’s similar to reading body language, only with voice. Beyond Verbal claims

Brushing Up on Your Brushing

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people don’t brush their teeth in a manner that prevents tooth decay. The toothbrush is connected via Bluetooth to a smartphone running Kolibree’s app. There will be versions of the app for Apple’s iPhones, the iPod Touch and Android-based smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy S III and 4, according to Kolibree’s website. The app can keep track of multiple users, but Kolibree recommends one toothbrush per user. (Makes sense). The brushing data will also be made available via an API to let third-party developers to create new apps. The toothbrush is designed to work under up to 1 meter of water for up to 30

minutes without damage. The brushhead is replaceable (two are included) but the battery isn’t. It is expected to last for about two years, and when it eventually dies, users will have to buy a new brush. Kolibree hopes to obtain funding for the toothbrush through the crowdfunding website Kickstarter during the second quarter. The company hopes to ship toothbrushes as rewards to Kickstarter backers in the third quarter. Its goal is then to start selling them online and in stores during the fourth quarter in Europe and the United States. —By Mikael Ricknäs

REAL CIO WORLD | F E B R U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

IMAGES BY MAST ERFILE.CO M

N E T W O R K I N G French upstart Kolibree demonstrated its connected electric toothbrush at the International CES trade show. The toothbrush tells users how well they are brushing their teeth via a smartphone app. Using Kolibree’s product every brushing is recorded, and the collected data tells users if they have brushed long enough and cleaned hard-to-reach but important parts of their teeth and gums, according to Kolibree. The more people learn about their brushing habits, the faster they can do something to improve them, the company said. According to a study by the Swedish Dental Journal, nine out of every 10

INDIA INNOVATING

SCRIPTING SUCCESS WITH NETAPP’S STORAGE As a premier private sector bank, ING Vysya Bank is looking at rapid business developments in the near future. Here’s the bank’s journey towards a future-ready storage solution for its core banking system. By Shweta Rao

ANIRUDDHA PAUL CIO, ING Vysya Bank

SANDEEP KAUL Head-IT Infrastructure, ING Vysya Bank

India’s seventh-largest private sector bank, ING Vysya is a leading institution with over 80 years of history. Despite its deep roots, the bank is known for constantly reinventing itself and pioneering IT adoption. With 527 branches which service more than two million customers across the country, the bank required a future-ready storage infrastructure that could help the bank build an effective ecosystem of financial services. In this interview, Aniruddha Paul, CIO, and Sandeep Kaul, Head-IT Infrastructure of ING Vysya talk about how NetApp helped the bank effectively walk on the tightrope of cost-effective, but innovative development in the context of changing market conditions.

What were the basic needs that prompted you to upgrade your storage infrastructure? Aniruddha Paul: As a premier private sector bank, delivering faster channels of services like mobile banking became important to us. As an institution that believes in innovation, we soon realized that an antiquated storage infrastructure hindered our ability to introduce new products to the market. Therefore, whenever we took up any business facing project like mobile banking and internet banking implementation, or core banking upgrades, we made world class storage an integral plan of our underlying infrastructure architecture to support these important initiatives.

CUSTOM INTERVIEW NETAPP

PROJECT BENEFITS NetApp helped ING Vysya achieve: Faster Delivery ING Vysya can now deliver online and mobile banking services to more than 2,000,000 customers across the country. Higher Uptime The solution has improved ING Vysya’s performance by 60 percent and reduced batch processing time by 100 percent. Improved Customer Satisfaction ING Vysya can now deliver innovative products to customers without compromising on quality. As a result, customer return rates have significantly improved. Agility for the Future NetApp’s new infrastructure supports business growth that will come the bank’s way for the next five to seven years, without any capacity issues.

What were the business challenges that you aimed to address through this project? AP:Most IT architecture professionals grapple with the problem of business priorities that (legitimately) is everchanging and relentless in its demand for faster execution versus application and infrastructure stacks that can be monolithic, antiquated and still serving out their payback periods. Forward looking IT architects invest in flexible building blocks at the very base of the architecture, so that we don’t get boxed into the situation that we have described above. Our desire was to invest in NetApp solutions to achieve this need.

Sandeep Kaul: As part of our plan, our team looked at building a storage solution that would reduce the business’ time-to-market drastically. What’s also important is that we execute the plan even for deep-IT infrastructure like storage as a part of business facing projects i.e. we use the business facing projects to be the tipping point for introducing deep architecture components. The new infrastructure would be able to support business growth for the next five to seven years without any capacity issues. We were planning to address the critical challenge of looking for the right fit of storage within our cost constraints. By right fit, I mean a flexible storage management system with in-built deduplication and backup capabilities. It had to make sense to us in terms of the ease of management, orchestration automation, and storage virtualization. How far have you come with regard to creating the solution you originally set out for with the project? AP: As we mentioned, we use business facing projects to bundle in IT infrastructure change, and here, we decided on NetApp storage solutions while we were planning for our core banking upgrade project. With the project, we can leverage our core banking system (CBS) to provide innovative products to customers. We are proud to be the first such instance of a core banking application in India to be hosted on NetApp storage. The solution helped ING Vysya improve performance by about 60 percent immediately. It also reduced our batch processing time by 100 percent, significantly improving business agility, system uptime, and hence, greater customer satisfaction. According to you, what is the biggest value proposition that NetApp has to offer? SK: We are always on the lookout for opportunities to utilize our existing infrastructure to cater to new needs. That, also, is a key driver when it comes to deciding the kind of infrastructure we need to procure. That’s something that NetApp does really well, as it has enough flexibility and a wide array of software with varied functionality. It gives us the confidence that we can leverage the storage infrastructure on a wider platform, in terms of the number of applications it can support efficiently. Strategic partnerships are essential for consistent enterprise growth. How would you describe your relationship with NetApp? AP: We have seen them relentlessly ensure that we get significant value out of our relationship. It is quite usual for deep technology vendors to be conservative, especially while deploying solutions in India because it is not their home country for innovation. But we found that we were able to innovate with NetApp and do things which have not been done on its platform here. And they were quite happy to organize a cross-functional, multi-country team to oversee the implementation with a very positive attitude. And their relentless drive to value is why NetApp is a valued partner. SK: We’re proud of having done the first NetApp implementation for Sybase replication in a Treasury context. It should be noted that Treasury is a quite sensitive technology area for us, considering the regulatory compliance prescriptions in place. We then confidently followed it up with NetApp’s first CBS implementation for storage in India. These are our proud ‘firsts’, and we are happy to lead the charge with NetApp.

IDG SERVICES

Find Your Shadow

F E B R U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 4 | REAL CIO WORLD

Lizard-like Robot In Space I N N O V A T I O N Lizard-like robots with sticky feet may one day work on spacecraft like the International Space Station, saving astronauts from making as many dangerous spacewalks. Researchers from the European Space Agency and Simon Fraser University in British Columbia have been working to develop a robot sticky enough to cling safely to the outside of a spacecraft while also remaining mobile. At this point, the robot, dubbed Abigaille, is able to climb walls on Earth. Scientists at Simon Fraser University and the European Space Agency are working to build a gecko-like robot that can crawl around the outside of spacecraft, doing repairs and maintenance. “This approach is an example of ‘biomimicry,’ taking engineering solutions from the natural world,” said Michael Henrey, a graduate student in engineering at Simon Fraser and a researcher on the project. “Our Abigaille climbing robot is therefore quite dexterous, with six legs each having four degrees of freedom [or joints], so it should be able to handle environments that a wheeled robot could not.” He added that the robot can transition from a vertical position to horizontal, which could be useful for navigating around the surface of a satellite or maneuvering around obstacles. For the lizard-like robot, the European Space Agency said it’s taking a lesson from the hairs on the bottom of the gecko’s feet that enable it to stick to surfaces. “We’ve borrowed techniques from the microelectronics industry to make our own footpad terminators,” Henrey said in a statement. “Technical limitations mean these are around 100 times larger than a gecko’s hairs, but they are sufficient to support our robot’s weight.” The agency has tested the robot to see if it could work in the rigors of a space environment. “The reason we’re interested in dry adhesives is that other adhesive methods wouldn’t suit the space environment,” said Henrey. “Scotch, duct or pressuresensitive tape would collect dust, reducing their stickiness over time... Velcro requires a mating surface, and broken hooks could contaminate the robot’s working environment. Magnets can’t stick to composites, for example, and magnetic fields might affect sensitive instruments.” —By Sharon Gaudin

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IMAGES BY MAST ERFILE.COM

TRENDLINES

C I O C A R E E R Gartner suggests that CIOs identify and contact possible ‘shadowing partners’ in a different business, and also spend one day a month ‘shadowing them’. The idea is to capture and compare insights and lessons from your respective roles. Gartner analysts call this “shadow a peer CIO in another industry”, listing it as one of the CIO New Year’s Resolutions for 2014. “If you learn lessons from the best people in your industry, you can become as good as the best in your industry. If you seek lessons from the best people outside your industry, you can be better than the best in your industry,” Gartner analysts John Mahoney and Mark Raskino write in the CIO New Year’s Resolutions 2014 report. The two note that this type of mentoring is doubly important in the emerging digital economy where threats and opportunities will come from a wider and more outward-looking context than previous years. The CIO’s current organization may already have mentoring programs with other internal executives, they add. While these are valuable, they tend to provide a conventional and “relatively inside out view” of the business. “You need an alternative perspective on how similar but different challenges arise and are addressed in other situations.” They recommend choosing a peer shadow mentor who has similar challenges but from another industry. “Although their enterprises have widely differing missions and values, both CIOs support urgent decision making with big and immediate consequences in highly stressful situations. The similarities and differences will prove instructive for both,” they write. Darrin Hackett, CIO of the Waikato District Health Board, looks at taking the concept further: By looking for a ‘shadow a peer’ partner in another industry, and in another C-level role—a CEO, CFO, COO or a GM for HR. “When you step into a CIO role, your specialty is IT but you are actually a C-level exec,” he explains. When CIOs ‘shadow a peer’ responsible for a different part of the business, the discussions will be about what the business needs to do, and how to “create business change and cultural change”. Hackett reckons that 85 percent of IT will be the same industry to industry but it is the 15 percent “that will make or break the IT team”, and provide the key differentiator for the organization. “If you go with someone who is in a completely different area, you then focus on the 15 percent,” says Hackett. — By Divina Paredes

In a Tech Garb Your shirt could soon power a smartphone while monitoring your blood pressure and providing alerts about harmful bacteria nearby. It’s not a scene from a sci-fi movie, as researchers at Cornell University are using nanotechnology to build such smart clothes. Members of the research team met with fashion industry leaders in Manhattan’s Garment District to discuss the technology they want and need. “The fashion industry needs an outlet to provide feedback on the technology they are looking for, to test new ideas and materials, and to determine what research they are willing to fund,” said Tom Nastos, chair of the Cornell Institute of Fashion and Fiber Innovation. Cornell scientists are using nanotechnology to make different types of smart clothing, including bike shirts with motion-detecting turn signals, a jacket that heats and lights up when it’s cold and dark and sensors that can monitor activity levels and fend off viruses and pollutants. With advances in nanotechnology, and the continued miniaturization of electronic devices, the use of smart clothes isn’t that far off, according to Cornell. Smart clothing are part of an emerging group of wearable technologies in development. Smartwatch technology has started making it to consumers, while about 8,000 people are using prototypes of Google’s computerized eyeglasses, called Google Glass. —By Sharon Gaudin

TRENDLINES

TECHNOLOGY

Mobile Movement In the last six months, Blackberry—for the first time—lost the top position within Indian enterprise. Even though Android takes the top spot, Windows Mobile is growing faster.

June 2013

MOBILITY

55%

73%

33%

10%

77%

59%

63%

45%

10%

Dec 2013

65%

Brain Wave: Smartphones Get Smarter Qualcomm wants to make tablets and smartphones more perceptive by giving the devices a “silicon brain,” says company CEO Paul Jacobs. The company wants to load mobile devices with its Zeroth processor, which is being designed to mimic a human brain, Jacobs said. The chip can learn human patterns and anticipate actions, which could make interaction with mobile devices easier. “This is the beginning of devices that are smart,” Jacobs said. “It is a far-out research project, but it works.” The Zeroth chip is designed around neural systems and mimics the brain’s structure and operation through circuitry and algorithms. Brains are “low-power, highly parallel systems,” Jacobs said. The size of a brain is one aspect of learning capacity, so Qualcomm will build smaller brains for smaller devices, and larger brains for larger devices, Jacobs said. The Zeroth chip can dynamically rewire to sense, understand, and act on input from information sources. Qualcomm has already shown a robot equipped with Zeroth that was able to make correct decisions based on progressive learning and input. Zeroth’s computing mechanism is a step up from current computing methodologies, which require set programming by humans to generate results. Current computers also have scaling issues tied to power consumption. “Instead of pre-programing behaviors and outcomes with a lot of code, we’ve developed a suite of software tools that enable devices to learn as they go and get feedback from their environment,” wrote Samir Kumar, Qualcomm’s director of business development, in a blog entry explaining the Zeroth processor. This is not the first effort to reverse engineer the brain into silicon. IBM is trying to develop a neuromorphic chip through its SyNAPSE program and demonstrated a prototype chip in August 2011. Intel has also proposed a neuromorphic chip design. The Human Brain Project, funded by the European Union, aims to re-create the spiking neurons and synapses phenomena in brains on silicon chips within a power budget of 1 watt. —By Agam Shah

DEVICES

Source: CIO Research

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CUSTOM INTERVIEW RICOH INDIA

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

OPTIMIZATION REDEFINED Anil Saini of Ricoh India explains how the company manages to keep pace with the dynamic IT environment and consistently provides innovative solutions. By Ershad Kaleebullah You’ve been associated with Ricoh for more than six years now. How have you seen Ricoh evolving in the ever-so-rapidly changing enterprise IT scenario? In the last six years of my association with Ricoh, I have seen a good company transform into a great company. With the changing dynamics in the Information Technology (IT) & Office Automation (OA) industry, Ricoh has transformed itself from being a leader in the OA industry to a force to reckon with. In the Indian IT industry, Ricoh helps increase workplace efficiency of corporate enterprises and government agencies alike. Our 360-degree framework offers IT infrastructure services, enterprise applications, and business & IT consulting. Also, we have evolved with the changing times, achieving higher than industry growth, both in terms of revenues and customer satisfaction. According to you, how can CIOs strike the right balance between reducing capex and opex and ensuring IT plays a role in revenue generation at the same time? Today, CIOs play a big role in defining their organizations’ future. Their responsibility is not confined to just being the ‘technical guru’ of the company, but goes far ahead—into making IT an accelerator for growth. CIOs are looking at newer consumption trends like consumerization of IT to reduce costs. One example for this is their increased interest in cloud computing, which reduces both capex and opex by offering intangible benefits like optimization of IT resources and faster delivery of IT to end-users. Lately, CIOs are also making good use of different frameworks for analyzing the big data generated by customers, vendors, and employees. Departments are looking up to CIOs not only for state-of the art technology, but also for directions for future growth. I know CIOs who have been instrumental in shaping

the digital marketing strategy of their company. And there are some others who have made sure that their off-site locations and employees are always connected. According to IDC, almost 90 percent of organizations find it hard to estimate their document costs. How can Ricoh help? A good way to answer this question is to look at the lifecycle of documents in a typical office environment. Documents in the form of raw data, apps, posts, mails, scans and other printed or digital ways are generated by various stakeholders. All these documents are input for various work ways or processes to be worked on. Employees, in association with suppliers and customers, work on these to generate meaning or valuable information. If these processes are lean and streamlined, meaningful information can be generated easily. However, simply optimizing your technology or your processes will not help control costs. Addressing the people, the end-users, by adding organizational change management to the mix can provide the ultimate in sustained savings and productivity improvements. In that context, RicohDocs, our high-performance, intuitive document management system, makes it easy to drag and drop work flows to automate and optimize business processes. It is available in both “On Ricoh Cloud” and “OnPremise” models. Could you elaborate on the ‘digitization’ efforts of various Indian institutions, especially in the government and public sectors, considering Ricoh has been a part of many such journeys? The digital revolution in India has been phenomenal to say the least, however, we still have a lot of ground to cover. The India growth story with over five to six percent consistent growth in GDP has been possible not only because of the very large consumer base, but also because of the tremendous improvements

ANIL SAINI, COO-IT Services, Ricoh India

in the efficiency and effectiveness of work processes, be it in the government programs or corporate or SMB enterprises. Ricoh India has been helping India Inc. create a digital society for more than 20 years. We have qualified and skilled resources for executing large IT projects, be it in government or corporate segment. Our government projects are large turnkey engagements for citizen programs, mission mode projects (MMP), healthcare, education etcetera to help the Government achieve its e-Governance efforts. Ricoh has a major IT services focus which contributes to about 24 percent of the topline business revenue. What are the future plans? Ricoh India has been growing at the rate of more than 45 percent year-on-year for the last two years. All business lines including IT services have played a major role in making this happen. We will continue our efforts in making Ricoh a one-stop business solutions provider for increasing workplace efficiency of corporate enterprises and government agencies through IT automation and process integration. Our vision is to be the most trusted brand with irresistible appeal in the global market. We will continue to grow and expand.

This Interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Ricoh India

Your New Shopping Buddy: An App Lowe’s Companies has upgraded its main shopping app to help customers find products once they are inside a store. Lowe’s Home Improvement has upgraded its shopping app with new capabilities. Its store app already provides a searchable listing of all its products, as most shopping apps do. But now, once a Lowe’s customer identifies the product they want, the app will pinpoint its location on a store map specific to the store. The map can locate a product to a “bay” level, which is about a two-foot area in an aisle. So if all goes well, the customer should be standing in front of the product he or she is searching for. The updated app also shows the locations of restrooms, call buttons and services such as carpet cutting. The first question from customers, when they walk into a store is, typically, “where’s the bathroom,” said Colleen Maiura, a Lowe’s spokeswoman. The other question is “where is X product.” Greg Sterling, an analyst at Opus Research, said such in-store product location capabilities are not yet widely deployed by retailers, but big retailers like Walmart and Macys are showing interest. This in-store location ability can help with sales.

TRENDLINES

MOBILE APPS

Sterling says that there is “a fair amount” of research showing that customers often leave stores “without purchasing anything because they can’t find the product.” Lowe’s is using Point Inside’s cloud-based StoreMode technology, which maps products in each of Lowe’s stores. In total, they are tracking some 100 million product locations, according to Todd Sherman, the CMO of Point Inside. Point Inside has developed APIs which connect to Lowe’s backend system, and get raw data on location information multiple times a week. Not every single product will have a location associated with it, but Sherman said the technology will associate it with other similar products to provide a location. Sherman said that that their tool has ability to help the retailer understand how customers use their store, and if customers create a shopping list a retailer could use that to connect the customer to product offers. The Lowe’s app, with the upgraded in-store search, is available for both Apple and Android. —By Patrick Thibodeau

A car that can park itself even if you’re not in it. A car that can swerve around an obstacle even if you don’t notice it. Autonomous driving is getting closer all the time. The Edge Concept SUV, unveiled by Ford last year, brings both of these advanced safety features to a mid-priced model aimed at urban professionals rather than rich people. “We know they (members of the target audience) really want smart technology in their cars,” said Christina Aquino, product manager for the Edge. “It has to be something that adds value and makes their life easier.” The Fully Assisted Parking Aid in the Edge Concept improves upon the Active Parking Assist that Ford debuted in 2009. Active Parking Assist requires that the driver control the brake and accelerator. Fully Assisted Parking Aid doesn’t even need you to be in the car. It uses ultrasonic sensors to park itself perpendicularly even in tight spaces, and you can get out of the car and control it remotely while it squeezes in.

AU TO

F E B R U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 4 | REAL CIO WORLD

Obstacle Avoidance uses the same ultrasonic sensors—plus three radars and a camera—to scan the road 600 feet ahead. If it detects an object, it will warn the driver. If the driver doesn’t react in time, the car will take evasive action on its own. Ford showed a video of an intrepid test engineer sitting in the driver’s seat doing nothing, while his test car swerved around an obstacle on a test track. Car tech is as much about media as it is about safety, of course. The concept car showed the now-expected large display in the front center console, but it also demonstrated a rear-passenger setup where tablets embedded in the rear of the front headrests are controlled by a tablet in the rearcenter armrest. While this is a concept car, Ford has big plans for rolling out its SUV product line on a global scale, so it’s highly likely you will see these features on a shipping model sometime in the near future. Whether you’ll be ready to let the car take charge is up to you. —By Melissa Riofrio

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IMAGES BY MASTERFILE.COM

A Car That Cares for You

New: Chief Financial and Tech Officer added. “Who would have thought 10 years ago that these trends would become part of the CFO role? They are and will continue to do so. We could see the rise and rise of the CFTO as a regular seat on the board,” she added. Reports published by both bodies noted that what was transpiring was akin to ‘Digital Darwinism’ with CIOs and CTOs becoming more business and numbers savvy, and CFOs and FDs becoming more technology savvy. Mobile technology, concerns over cyber-crime, and big data were being seen as key drivers of the CFTO role. Jeff Thomson, IMA president and CEO, said, “Big Data has yet to reach its full potential, but CFOs will need to be at the forefront of using such data. Its value is vital to a business.” he said. This isn’t the first time that the role of IT has been merged with another C-suite role to produce a new designation. In 2013, experts foresaw the rise of the Chief Digital Officer, a hybrid between the CIO and digital marketers. — By Gaurav Sharma

TRENDLINES

Increasing reliance on technology by companies could see the rise of a new kind of C-suite executive, according to two influential accounting associations: The Chief Financial and Technology Officer. As company boards get more technologically aware and IT becomes a central plank of business models, feedback obtained by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) and Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) suggests that the rise of the ‘chief financial and technology officer’ or ‘CFTO’, could gain traction in 2014. Helen Brand OBE, chief executive of ACCA, said: “Ours and IMA’s research in 2013 has pointed to greater technological involvement for CFOs across the world. Their involvement in big data and technology trends is critical to business growth and profit. As CFOs take on a more strategic and globally-focused outlook within business, tech will loom larger in their remit.” Cyber security, cloud technology, virtual and augmented reality, digital service delivery and even artificial intelligence and robotics are featuring more and more in business strategy, Brand

CIO ROLE

Android to Surpass 1 Billion Devices in 2014 This year vendors will ship 1.1 billion devices based on Android, while Windows stages a small comeback and the number of Apple machines, percentage-wise, increases the most, according to estimates from Gartner. Shipments of PCs, tablets and mobile phones of all shapes and sizes will increase by 7.6 percent year-on-year to 2.47 billion units, as users across the globe continue to buy more tablets and phones, according to Gartner. Google’s Android is and will continue to be the most popular OS by a wide margin, much thanks to the growing popularity of low-cost smartphones. That segment of the market will this year help Android devices surpass shipments of 1 billion units for the first time. By 2017, more than 75 percent of

DEVICES

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Android’ shipments will come from emerging markets, Gartner said. So far, Android hasn’t had tremendous success beyond its core product categories, but consumers’ familiarity with the OS helps vendors like Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard, which are using the OS on new PCs, according to Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. The number of devices based on Apple OSes and Windows is also increasing, according to Gartner’s estimates. Year-on-year, shipments of Android devices will rise by 25.6 percent, compared to 29 percent for iOS and Mac OS and almost 10 percent for Windows. Even though Microsoft can’t keep up with Apple and the Android camps,

Windows’ expected growth will indicate a change in fortunes for the company. A total of 359.9 million devices are expected to ship this year compared to 328 million last year and 346.3 million in 2012. The growth will come as the decline of the PCs market slows down and more people choose smartphones running Windows, according to Atwal. Microsoft’s smartphone OS hasn’t taken off as fast as many analysts expected, but in the first three quarters of last year Nokia steadily increased the number of Windows Phones it shipped. Microsoft is now in the process of closing its acquisition of Nokia’s device business, and will have do its best to accelerate that momentum. — By Mikael Ricknäs

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CONNECTING THE DOTS

FOR SMART SYSTEMS The communications and media industry is experiencing a major transformation driven by rapid technology changes and tremendous disruption in consumer habits. Achieving sustained business growth in this dynamic business environment requires a commitment to customer experience improvement and cost optimization. Telecom equipment vendors, communication service providers and media organizations can achieve this by building new business models and realizing innovative revenue streams.

e are living in a connected, digital world that just a decade or two earlier could only have been imagined. A relentless stream of powerful new handsets, tablets, PCs, and televisions is enriching the lives of hundreds of millions of individuals, and is also one of the biggest drivers of the digital shift, while telecommunication services form the foundation of our connected lives in the digital world. The past decade has witnessed constant growth and change in the business and operational requirements of the communication industry which includes: media, telecom equipment vendors (TEVs) and communication service providers (CSPs). For example, telecom providers have graduated from providing basic voice and telephony services to offering a host of entertainment and other value-added services, media companies are expanding from their traditional print domains to online publishing, and technology firms are finding ways to deliver content across multiple platforms and devices. One example of this tectonic shift is digital advertising. With the growth in content consumption on mobile devices, telecom providers can help marketers reach the right customers at the right

"The adoption of smart systems will thrive on ubiquitous connectivity and act as a catalyst for enterprises embracing nextgen connected services." â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Malay Verma, VP & Global Head, Media Vertical & Cisco BU, Wipro

time, based on customer location data. In addition, new media companies such as social networking service providers can dramatically increase the impact of multi-screen ad campaigns with their understanding of consumersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; social networking behaviour. Together, media companies and telecom service providers can add enormous value in the delivery of targeted ads. The number of consumer touch-points is on the rise, offering new advertising and content monetization opportunities for enterprises. However, despite the demand for these services, the communications industry is grappling with multiple challenges, including falling voice revenues and rising infrastructure capital costs. It is only a matter of time before consolidation begins to happen, even as the industry boundaries are blurring across the telecom, IT and media space. The players in each of these domains are actively seeking strategic partners who can help them stay competitive. Drivers of the Digital Shift An explosion of new technologies such as social networking and smartphones has forever changed the way we share and consume information. Other technologies

like cloud, big data and analytics, and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are creating the ecosystem for enterprises to ride this new wave. To encompass them all are the smart connected systems that will enable Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications. In aggregate, these breakthrough technologies have given rise to a digital world. In order to win in this digital world, TEVs and CSPs must transform their business, repurpose and optimize investments, and shift their focus from technology infrastructure to valueadded services and delivery of a superior customer experience. Technologists and analysts alike are excited about a wide range of M2M applications or smart connected systems such as connected homes, connected cars, smart grids and many more. CSPs have the potential to play a key role in the M2M value chain. They have unparalleled experience managing complex networks, transactional volume at scale, and direct billing relationships. M2M communications are expected to grow exponentially over the next few years. The adoption of M2M will thrive on ubiquitous connectivity, proliferation of smart devices, and act as a catalyst for decisionmaking through real-time interactions and communications powered by cloud computing and big data analytics. As CSPs and enterprises embrace M2M, it will require many changes in their existing business processes, information architecture and even organization structures. In addition, the diversity of the ecosystem players, disparate systems and integration of technology platforms at different layers in each industry could be a major challenge. To cater to different enterprise segments, CSPs need to successfully ascend the value chain from communications-centric offerings into back-end systems integration and compelling business specific applications. They also need to optimize the cost to deploy and the cost to serve, ensuring margin performance in a low average revenue per user (ARPU) business, as well as transform existing platforms to support what is a fundamentally new line

of business. TEVs do not want to be just connectivity providers. They are focusing on bringing offerings for specific verticals with robust foundation services and are looking at system integrators (SIs) who can offer pre-built, loosely-configured vertical solutions that can be customized to meet the specific needs of enterprises. Betting on Services The new paradigm is “Connected Service Transformation” enabling service transformation through the enterprise connected assets. This is where SIs play a crucial role. For instance, TEVs and CSPs will expect SIs such as Wipro to put together an end-to-end ecosystem to enable the service transformation journey for their enterprise customers. Wipro believes that SIs should consider a variety of strategies to improve their competitive power. The possible offerings, which include consulting, horizontal expertise (connected objects), vertical expertise, applications, platforms, analytics, and the all-encompassing managed services and business support organizations, will need to be brought together in such a way that it will fill gaps in the customers’ business and collaboratively help in realizing their visions for service and business transformation. CSPs are looking to minimize upfront investments and are looking for an opex model which will enable them to grow as their business grows. Wipro has brought together an M2M ecosystem with partners and its own suite of IPs to enable CSPs to quickly and cost-effectively meet their customers' demands. For CSPs, it is becoming increasingly important to align operations with customer expectations. Organizations face several challenges in delivering a bestin-class customer experience, including operations scalability to support new products and services, as well as network fault and performance management, which has been complicated by the popularity of bandwidth-hungry applications. To perform this delicate balancing act and manage operational expenditures while trying to deliver a superior customer

experience, TEVs and CSPs need to invest in a device cloud, application-aware network devices with auto discovery, selfhealing, auto configuration, and strong security capabilities. As next-generation networks and smart devices proliferate, there will be further disruptions in the value chain across various industries, and more specifically, in the areas of healthcare, education, banking, retail, and consumer electronics. To ride this wave, TEVs should leverage their partner ecosystem and collaborate with those SIs who can address operational challenges and offer a solution that covers all aspects of managing operations across IT and networks. Getting Ahead of the Curve With Indian CSPs and TEVs actively seeking solutions around enabling smart connected systems in verticals such as utilities, healthcare, banking and finance, it is not surprising that India is becoming a hub for new product development. Some examples include the Indian government’s initiative for smart metering—APDRP— in the utilities space, monitoring and tracking assets such as garbage trucks and street lights and focusing on pay-asyou-go vehicle insurance, among others, all of which are powered by the smart connected systems. In order to enable this growth, Wipro has been actively investing in expanding its India business by building its connected business and services transformation competency while beefing up the sales and service delivery model. Some of the factors which inhibit this growth include a fragmented ecosystem, standardization and regulatory compliance, pricing of end-devices and calculating operational benefits to justifying ROI. However, these challenges can be overcome when the TEVs, CSPs, media organizations, and SIs take a collaborative mindset, and work together to connect the dots and build a business model based on trust.

As told to Gopal Kishore

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Best Practices

Flexi-timing Boosts Revenue

Both businesses and employees are leaning towards flexible work hours, thereby increasing revenue.

TRENDLINES

If your CEO asks you to intensify mobile and remote access for the company’s workforce, don’t be surprised. S/He is only reacting to the growing demand from employees for flexible working styles. And if a report by Regus is to be believed, businesses too are reaping benefits of allowing workers the flexibility of working from wherever—and whenever--they want. According to the report, emerging economies say they have seen an increase in revenues through flexible working, with China (87 percent), Mexico (84 percent), and India (77 percent) featuring in the top three. In fact, 79 percent of Indian respondents say that their companies are more productive as a result of more flexible working hours. The study suggests that businesses will encourage the trend, raising the pressure significantly on IT to support the change. For example: 21 percent of the respondents feel that offering these solutions helps them attract a wider talent pool. The Indian millennials sport far more radical views than their western counterparts. Consider this: 22 percent of Indian respondents say that they will never join a company that does not acknowledge the benefits of remote workforces because “they‘re too old-fashioned in their thinking”. This compares with 19 percent of Brazilians, 14 percent of Japanese and only 3 percent of American youths.

STRENGTHEN your device and mobility strategy to offer your staff alternative options to fixed office working.

OVERCOME ingrained cultural habits and boost adoption of enterprise mobile technologies.

DEVISE strategies that can enable your business to hire freelance workers and parttime employees.

KEEP an open mind. Not all organizations embrace the idea of flexible work hours. But your users are increasingly demanding it. And it has its benefits.

Flexible Working, Incredible Revenue

77%

Top Three Countries that Expect Revenue Increase Due to Flexible Working

87%

Of Indian respondents say that flexible working allows their companies to generate more revenue than in the past. China

84%

Mexico

77%

79%

Of respondents say their company is more productive as a result of more flexible working style.

India SOURCE: REGUS

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CUSTOM INTERVIEW AKAMAI

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

NEW AGE NETWORKING Sanjay Singh, SVP & GM, Asia Pacific & Japan, Akamai, talks about how CIOs can adapt to user demands in the face of a staggering growth of devices and the need to stream dynamic content on them. By Gopal Kishore What are the trends that will be driving business growth over the next few years? In the world of media and entertainment, we will continue to see the explosion of media over IP driven by connected devices, and increase in appetite for HD content online. This will drive the need for solutions to ensure quality delivery at an unprecedented scale. With enterprises, the market will continue to see an increase in cloud adoption with the CIOs and CTOs realizing the strategic, economic, and competitive benefits of moving to a cloud environment. With many applications moving to the cloud, there will be a common requirement for fast, reliable, and secure access to all their business applications over the Internet. As a result of so much business and entertainment moving online, and the Internet now integrated with every aspect of our lives, we expect a massive increase in cyber-attacks that will become more varied and sophisticated, requiring robust cloud security solutions. What are the key areas that CIOs need to address to tackle the challenges posed by this explosion of devices? CIOs need to ensure that the applications and content delivered are adapted to ensure an optimal user-experience, as customers expect similar or better experiences on these devices. On mobiles devices, every user request is unique – location, device, browser, application, network type, and network conditions. In short, each request on the Web has its own unique connectivity situation. Akamai calls this the situational Web. To meet the rising expectations of connected end-users, there is a need for a tightly integrated suite of delivery, acceleration, and optimization technologies with the intelligence required to make real-time Web experience optimization decisions based on the requirements of the given situation. Akamai’s Intelligent Platform applies automatic optimizations to match the

needs of the request and provide the best possible experience on a mobile device for that situation.

SANJAY SINGH,

How can a cloud ecosystem help CIOs deliver business benefits? One of the primary benefits of a cloud ecosystem is business agility. It enables enterprises to rapidly take advantage of new business opportunities, capitalize on new revenue streams, and also reduce their IT costs and complexities. Akamai’s cloud-based Intelligent Platform empowers organizations to instantly enter new markets, improve customer interactions, do business via lower-cost online channels, enable end-users to get more done in less time, and realize the holy grail of higher revenue and lower costs.

SVP & GM, Asia Pacific & Japan, Akamai

Akamai is well-known for helping enterprises accelerate innovation and adapt to user demands. Can you highlight some of the recent innovations? Some recent innovations, tapping into our experience of delivering thousands of cloud applications, were driven primarily from our customers’ feedback and business requirements. CIOs are managing an increasingly heterogeneous environment made up of private cloud, public cloud, and SaaS-based applications. To better manage this complex ecosystem, and seamlessly balance application load across heterogeneous environments, we offer our customers a Cloud Balancing solution. As CIOs migrate an increasing number of applications and business processes to the cloud, they’d face challenges in maintaining visibility and control over end-to-end application performance and usage. Akamai has a Cloud Monitor service that is a realtime, cloud-based, push API service delivering critical transaction and security event data from

What is Akamai’s vision to solve the mobile, media, cloud, and security conundrum to help customers leverage these opportunities? Akamai’s vision is to extend our Akamai Intelligent Platform to home, office, retail and mobile users’ devices and be the integral cloud platform provider, enabling enterprises to overcome the complexities of technology so they can focus on driving their business by capitalizing on opportunities presented by these trends. We plan to achieve this by leveraging our ubiquitous, open, and self-serviceable platform, which will offer them the ability to scale reliably, quickly adapt to changes, and yet continue to ensure secure, high-performing userexperiences on any device, anywhere.

Akamai’s Intelligent Platform to a customer’s reporting environment. As websites become richer and more complex, with more computing requirements built into a single page, new performance bottlenecks are emerging for mobile devices. Akamai’s front-end optimization solution addresses these challenges by reducing the number of requests required to load a page, reducing the size of each request and allowing pages to render faster on mobile devices.

This Interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Akamai

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Cyberlaw: Look Out 2014! T oday’s CIOs are dealing with never-before-seen volumes of information. At the same time, we’ve seen numerous developments in legislation and in judge-made case law. Together, these two trends demand that CIOs learn more about the evolving nuances of cyberlaw and the legalities of using the electronic and digital ecosystem. This year promises to be filled with action, specifically from the perspective of CIOs. Here are some prominent cyberlaw global trends for 2014.

Surveillance, Monitoring and Interception IMAGES BY MASTERFILE.COM

One of the most significant trends of 2014 is likely to be the growing inclination of governments to undertake the surveillance, monitoring and interception of computer networks. This being the case, it is likely that 2014 will see ‘costeffective’ interception, monitoring

and surveillance being carried out by governments. At the same time, the Snowden revelations will encourage many countries to implement stricter laws to check unauthorized access to computer networks. One challenge will be finding a balance between an individual’s right to privacy and the need to carry out surveillance, monitoring and interception in the interest of national security.

Fragmentation of the Web Post Snowden, the f ragmentation of the Internet is being discussed as a measure to counteract the dark Internet and secure national networks and critical infrastructure from unauthorized intrusion, damage, etcetera. The Internet has begun to break up into national segments. Until recently this only applied to the Great Firewall of China. However, several countries, including Russia, have adopted or are planning to adopt

Pavan Duggal

legislation prohibiting the use of foreign services. In November, Germany announced that all communications between German authorities would be fully locked within the country. Brazil has announced its plans to build an alternative Internet channel.

Cyber Security Given the fact that the dark Internet has already established itself as a

Security Breach Thy Name is Human FINDINGS

According to a recent survey, more than half of the reasons security breaches take place comes down to human error.

Top Human Error Sources 42% End-user failure to follow policy and procedures

41% IT staff failure to follow policy and procedures

39% Lack of security expertise with website/applications

38% Lack of security expertise with IT infrastructure

55%

The share of human error as a factor of security breaches. SOURCE: CompTIA

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CUSTOM INTERVIEW HP NETWORKING

EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT

CHARTING A NEW ROADMAP The next generation of networking technology is here. Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, HP Networking, talks about why CIOs need to reconsider their networks and how HP can help. By Gopal Kishore What do you think are the largest trends that will emerge in the networking space in 2014? The networking equipment market in India is growing tremendously, and growing along with it are opportunities for network integrators to put together complex networks that will serve as platforms for next-gen enterprise applications. Take, for instance, the way Wi-Fi standard 802.11n had fared in the past. It grew 76 percent worldwide in the year 2009 despite most other IT segments’ reeling under the recession. Although over a smaller base, the growth was indicative of the growing universality of the standard across most devices. Similarly, over 68.5 million WLAN devices were shipped worldwide in 2009, making it a robustly growing IT subsegment. Large enterprises maintained their dominance in the WAN optimization market, with BFSI and service provider verticals being the key adopters. This trend is expected to continue. In fact, in my opinion, businesses have started to accept Software-Defined Networking (SDN) as a serious investment option. With IDC predicting a market of $2 billion (about Rs 12,400 crore) for SDNready products by 2016, this is a trend that enterprises cannot afford to miss. And in a trend closely associated with the emergence of technologies such as SDN, many customers are seeking simple management tools to manage and monitor networks. All enterprise vendors are either investing in building competencies or are acquiring companies to build nextgeneration management consoles. With new technologies becoming pervasive, is it time for CIOs to take a long, hard look at the networks, and revamp

their legacy systems? Undoubtedly, the biggest transformation is taking place inside datacenters, because when most of the modern datacenters were built a few years ago, virtualization was still being discussed for server consolidation alone. We have sure come a long way since then. The increasing adoption of BYOD with the influx of smart mobile devices and the continued proliferation of higher performance 802.11n networks are driving organizations to upgrade, extend, and replace their wireless infrastructure. For instance, Power over Ethernet (PoE) is fast proliferating in today’s enterprise, and has begun to garner a significant amount of CIOs’ mindshare. Similarly, business video is no more just about faceto-face communication or a tool to reduce travel expenses. Business video now goes beyond, and is being used within enterprises for education, training, and digital signage. So far, the WAN optimization and application acceleration market was limited to datacenters and large enterprises. But vendors are betting on newer markets opening up in the next 12 months. There are situations where bandwidth alone cannot improve application performance, and latency becomes a bottleneck on even the largest of links. With traffic moving from within the LAN to WAN, application acceleration remains a great opportunity. Therefore, I think CIOs will need to reconsider the networks and their legacies. How is HP positioned to provide the best of all worlds to a customer, for a truly unique experience? HP Networking has clearly established itself as a global access layer vendor with its unified wired and wireless FlexCampus

PRAKASH KRISHNAMOORTHY Country Manager, HP Networking

solution. In fact, HP features as a leader in networking in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Wired and Wireless LAN infrastructure. HP’s integrated security, policy enforcement and network management application provides a comprehensive solution across wired and wireless components. Its Intelligent Management Center (IMC) also has the ability to provide a single pane of glass for wired and wireless solutions. HP offers wired and wireless management of over 6,000 devices from over 220 thirdparty vendors, which provides end-to-end access layer management from a single managed application. In my opinion, the lifetime warranty offered on many of the HP access points and switches is an important element when calculating the overall TCO of any access layer solution. In fact, I strongly recommend that every organization should at least consider and competitively include HP in all network evaluations of any size. We do promise best-in-class experience.

This Interview is brought to you by IDG Services in association with HP Networking

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formidable force, and that cyber crimesas-a-service are now being provided, the protection and preservation of the cyber security of a country’s national networks and its critical information infrastructure are likely to be top priorities. This is likely to result in an increased emphasis by lawmakers and legislators, across the world, to come up with the legal framework and provisions to protect the cyber security of their computer systems and networks.

Cyber Crime Jurisprudence Cyber crime reports point to the fact that in 2014 we will see more cyber attacks and that corporations will have to conduct more boardroom scrutiny to manage their data supply chains. According to Panda Security, cybercriminals will get more creative with social engineering and will target more mobile users in 2014. As such, we are likely to see an increase in the demand for effective remedies to protect victims from cyber criminal attacks and offences.

Mobile, BYOD, and Social Media Kaspersky, in its security bulletin for 2013, stated that the mobile world is one the fastest-developing IT security areas. As mobile crime continues to grow at a rapid pace in 2014, there will be louder call made by stakeholders on governments across the world to effectively strengthen their cyber legal systems to cover and regulate newlyemerging mobile threats and mobile crimes. This, in turn, will lead to the growth of mobile law as a new area in cyber-legal jurisprudence in the year 2014.

This year is also likely to bring forward new and complex legal policy and regulatory challenges in the context of social media because it is gaining center stage attention, which would require cyber legal intervention. We are likely to see a growth in the cyber legal jurisprudence in this regard. BYOD or bring your own device, is indeed a magical phenomenon which helps companies lower their infrastructure costs. However, the security, confidentiality and veracity of data—and its jurisdiction—are important legal challenges that have to be appropriately addressed by the cyber legal regimes in order to enable the mass scale adoption of BYOD.

Cloud Computing Cloud computing is likely to be another growing trend in 2014. The cloud has already become a significant buzzword in our lives. While cloud computing has tremendous advantages, there are a large number of legal challenges pertaining to the large-scale adoption of cloud computing as a popular technology. This year is likely to see significant development in the jurisprudence around cloud computing.

Bitcoins and the Law In its security bulletin for 2013, Kaspersky predicted that attacks on Bitcoin pools, exchanges and Bitcoin users will become one of the most highprofile topics in 2014. Bitcoin crimes are likely to emerge as a significant phenomenon in 2014, thereby forcing relevant stakeholders to look at

appropriate regulatory frameworks which can effectively regulate activities in the digital currency ecosystem.

Big Data Another important cyberlaw trend for 2014 is likely to be the legal and policy issues concerning big data. Emerging like a big giant, big data seems to be slowly waking up from its slumber. The advantages of data analytics have been demonstrated to one and all. However, the advent and adoption of data analytics at large scale requires that appropriate attention be given to ticklish issues concerning big data which are likely to include issues of authenticity, the veracity of data, data collection, data archiving, data retention jurisdiction, privacy, confidentiality and other data collection-related issues. This year will call for creating appropriate legal frameworks in this regard. Cyber-legal developments around technology are based on fundamental questions of law, which don’t change much over a period of time. It is expected that some important cyberlaw issues that are detailed in this article will continue to be relevant and topical and will continue to consolidate their respective positions in the emergence and further development of cyberlaw jurisprudence in 2014. CIO

Pavan Duggal is advocate, Supreme Court Of India; president, Cyberlaws.Net; and head of Pavan Duggal Associates. He is a leading cyberlaw expert and authority. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

[ONE LINER]

Numerous developments both in legislation and in judge-made case law demand that CIOs learn more about the evolving nuances pertaining to cyberlaw. — PAVAN DUGGAL, ADVOCATE, SUPREME COURT OF INDIA AND PRESIDENT, CYBERLAWS.NET

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Senior Managers Worst Security Offenders

F E B R U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 4 | REAL CIO WORLD

there’s not a pervasive culture of security emanating from the top of the organization, the top people believe that somehow their status exempts them from corporate policies,” Friedberg said. The fact is, for a company to make good security practices a normal part of doing business, senior management has to abide by the same rules as everyone else. “That culture of security comes from the top of the organization,” Friedberg said. “Managers and senior executives have to be active proponents and evangelical about security as part of the corporate culture.” In regards to the high percentage of executives who use personal e-mail to upload work files, Friedberg believed many did not understand the potential consequences of their actions.

Google Voted Out

enior managers are the worst offenders of information security, primarily because of a combination of job pressures, busy schedules, and an attitude that they are above the rules, an expert says. Surprise. A recent study by Sroz Friedberg, which specializes in digital forensics and risk management, found that almost nine out of every 10 senior managers in the United States regularly uploaded their work files to a personal e-mail or cloud account. In addition, more than half of those surveyed had accidentally sent the wrong person sensitive information, and had taken files with them after leaving a job. The percentages, 58 percent and 51 percent, respectively, were much higher than that for general office workers. The reason why senior management skirts the rules is two-fold, point out the report. First, senior management tend to be under a lot of pressure due to their busy schedules, so they often have no patience for security measures that add time to their work, said Eric Friedberg, co-founder and executive chairman of the firm. In addition, many managers, particularly those who worked in large organizations, travel a lot and often find themselves in countries or hotels where Internet access is subpar. “They often can’t deal with the complexity and inconvenience of connecting to the corporate network through a secure channel (such as a virtual private network),” said Friedberg. There are also those senior managers who feel they are above the rules. The chairman of a public company Stroz Friedberg once worked with had his e-mail tapped for six months, Friedberg said, because he never changed his password. “He just said, ‘I’m above it. Changing passwords is not for me,’” Friedberg said. Inflated egos when it comes to security are more often found in companies in which security is not practiced and emphasized at the C-level. “In a company where

If a legal problem arose, the content of those personal accounts could be subpoenaed, along with corporate e-mail, pointed out Friedberg. “They probably don’t realize that although they’re transferring things to their personal account for convenience, they’re really setting the groundwork for a litigation adversary or regulatory adversary to rummage through their personal e-mail accounts looking for relevant corporate information,” said Friedberg. The Stroz Friedberg study was based on an online survey of 764 US information workers. KRC Research conducted the survey. CIO Antone Gonsalves is a contributing writer. He also writes for Bloomberg.com and Businessweek.com. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

A proposal by Google to offer voter lookup services was declined by the Election Commission of India, after cybersecurity experts and political parties voiced concern about the plan’s security implications. The commission confirmed that it had seen a Google presentation for electoral lookup services to provide information to voters. “However after due consideration, the Commission has decided not to pursue the proposal any further,” it said in a statement. Google offered the commission facilities for free online voter registration, search and other services, the Press Trust of India reported. The report drew criticism on the belief that the collaboration would provide Google with access to a vast amount of data on Indians. To register online as a voter on the commission website, people have to provide their e-mail IDs and mobile phone numbers, said Jiten Jain, a member of Indian Infosec Consortium, a group of cybersecurity experts. By the tie-up with the commission, Google would have access to the e-mail IDs, mobile phone numbers, and the IP addresses of voters who register online, he added. “Tying with Google was tantamount to tying up with the US. NSA [National Security Agency],” said Jain, who cited media reports that the agency may have access to real-time to data on the servers of Internet companies. Indian companies and agencies can provide the services offered by Google to the poll commission, he added. — By John Ribeiro

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Gunjan Trivedi

LEADING EDGE

Chief Improv Officer? Improv comedy is not just for fun. It’s gaining ground in the corporate world of engagement, negotiations, team building, and leadership. Should CIOs turn to improv to rethink their business? About time.

IMAGE BY PHOTOS.COM

his Saturday afternoon I got this funny itch to dig up the old episodes of Whose Line Is It Anyway? on Youtube. Most of us, I am sure, would have laughed out hard till either our throats croaked or ribs hurt on the improvisation comedy game show that became a household name in the 90’s. As I scrambled through one episode after another, I stumbled on the Youtube channel of a certain corporate comedian, Tim Washer. Don’t ask me how. Among others in the playlist, what caught my eye was this three-part series of CIO interviews called Fast Innovation and the Slow Waiter that Washer had done for Cisco. Set on the backdrop of a plush restaurant, Washer played an over-friendly waiter who interviews real-life CIOs on subjects of customer experience, loyalty and analytics. Laced with humor and great stories to tell on business-IT strategy, these crisp customer testimonials were a little under three minutes long. But what was more interesting was the backstory of these videos. Author, speaker and MarketingProfs’ Chief Content Officer, Ann Handley, details in her blog that instead of shooting the regular talking head videos, the makers showcased real people with real personality, who played along as Washer improvised on camera. All this was done at a CIO conference during the 15-minute session breaks. Results? Impressive. This took me back to the very essence of Whose Line Is It Anyway?—improvisation. Sure, it can be an unconventional method for CIOs to address a wide spectrum of business and leadership scenarios: From creating innovative solutions, to negotiating with vendors, to fostering mutual trust with business peers, and collaborating with teams.

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REAL CIO WORLD | F E B R U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

Gunjan Trivedi

LEADING EDGE

Improv, as they call it, is all about working with a spontaneous approach to entertain in a highly constrained environment of being live, on stage, without any script whatsoever. It is all about relying on your mind, your skill to listen and your ability to be witty to come up with lines that feed off your partners’ comments and take the story further. Quite interestingly, this approach is being frequently applied to the fields of business leadership, ideation, negotiation and team management, and is teaching executives to grab unexpected opportunities, take risks and respond to sudden threats. Here are the four key attributes of improv that can be successfully adopted by CIOs to significantly enhance the way they work with their teams, users, vendors, and business management: Yes, and….: Improv comedy acts rely solely on acceptance. And, so does the art of negotiation or fostering team collaboration. Falling prey to impulsively deny, differ or disagree kills the act. Welcome the unexpected and even the unwanted demands, and coax your counterpart to top it in response. This can surely help in either shaping the negotiation to your advantage or collaboratively improvising on an innovative solution to a problem. Make My Partner Successful: In one of his speeches Washer says that the most powerful question in managing

any conflict is to understand how you can make your partner successful. On stage or at work, the pertinent point is to understand the motivation of your partners and figure out what you can do to help them reach their goals. This encourages empathy and works wonders in building mutual trust. Failure is Good: In an improv comedy on stage, there are no mistakes. Even if a performer goes blank, it can be used as an opportunity to take the act further. Business is all about risks. And, without taking risks, CIOs and their teams can never uncover the unconventional path to success. Follow the Fear: Washer says that on stage when your partner says something to you, there’ll be multiple ideas popping up in your head in response. One of those ideas may scare you significantly, such as ‘someone may not like this’ or ‘I am unqualified to do this’. Washer strongly recommends that you follow the fear and push that idea through. Perhaps, that will be the greatest thing that you may ever do. Sounds interesting? Your turn. CIO

Gunjan Trivedi is executive editor at IDG Media. He is an awardwinning writer with over a decade of experience in Indian IT. Before becoming a journalist, he had been a hands-on IT specialist, with expertise in setting up WANs. Reach him at gunjan_trivedi@idgindia.com

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Integrated Mobility Simplifying the Maze

Trends such as mobility and BYOD are changing the face of enterprise workstyles. It’s now important to separate personal data from official, and also enable seamless connectivity to end-users. Here’s how an integrated mobility approach can help organizations achieve these goals.

he ratio between employees and smart devices is fast moving from 1:2 to 2:1. Along with that, the customer’s smartphone is becoming (39 percent of the time) a major reason to walk out of an enterprise store (whether offline or online). With both internal and external customers slipping deeper into the mobility envelope, no enterprise can afford to be mobility-averse. Every enterprise is, therefore, investing in the mobile enablement of desktop applications and traditional processes.

Integrated Mobility Solutions – The Need of the Hour An integrated solution stitching all three— network, mobile devices, and applications— is needed. It should take care of the individual

challenges they throw, and make the most of the collective opportunity. Companies today need an integrated mobility approach which can let them: imagine end-user mobility scenarios and challenges, understand device, system, and connectivity limitations, and work around them to arrive at a mobile enablement solution. However, before going any deeper into the integrated communication approach and how to implement such a solution, it is essential to understand the need for it in the first place. Mobile Application Challenges: An integrated mobile application platform with a diverse set of templatized and out-of-thebox applications, built with a comprehensive understanding of business processes across verticals, can help overcome this challenge.

Mobile Device Challenges: Authenticated and encrypted corporate data spaces on personal devices can help enterprises strike the right security balance for corporate data residing on the devices. Network Challenges: With a diverse range of network options, many mobility strategies face the issue of choosing the appropriate network. What organizations, therefore, need is a 360-degree business solution that supplements the power of applications with the power of the network.

Integrated Mobility Approach An integrated mobility approach, which can help overcome the aforementioned infrastructure challenges, comprises two components: a mobile application platform and a mobile data management solution.

Airtel’s Mobile Application Tool for Enterprises (MATE) is a mobile application platform that fits the requirements for the first component. Airtel MATE offers multiple mobile applications customizable to fulfil any business need. It offers close to 29 unique applications, some of which are vehicle tracking, people tracking, wearable ID tracking, movable asset tracking, mobile sales order management system, and biometric attendance monitoring system, among others. The second element of the integrated mobility approach involves managing devices. The advent of containerization gives corporations the ultimate mobile data management solution to embrace device/ platform dynamism without any worries. Airtel DME, powered by Excitor, is one such mobile data management solution. Only a service provider with communication, mobility, and telecom experience can help implement an integrated mobility strategy. In that sense, telecom service providers like Airtel are best suited for the task. Here’s why: We understand your network, mobile devices and applications. This makes us capable of building comprehensive mobility solutions. We can provide single-point support across the network, devices, and applications. We can provide a bird’s eye-view into mobility delivery from both applications and networks. We understand a diverse range of technologies that impact mobility: Cloud, analytics, and big data. In that vein, bring your own device (BYOD) is that technology trend which would affect enterprise networks directly. Fortunately, the integrated mobility approach can address the challenges that BYOD poses as well.

BYOD Doesn’t Have to Be All or Nothing BYOD is no longer hypothetical, and ignoring it is no longer an option for CIOs. However, there are varying levels of acceptance that make it possible to plan a phased adoption that matches employee demands for smartphones, tablets, and notebooks or PCs in the enterprise. Few CIOs are unaware of BYOD. The majority either has policies in place, or are planning to create policies in the near future. However, there is a misconception on the part of many IT leaders (or their management) that BYOD is all or nothing, meaning that all end-user platforms must be embraced equally, and that the choices are either no support, or an all-out campaign to promote increased participation. But it need not be so.

Enterprises can tap the potential of future transformation only if they set their mobility present right. We are geared up to win the mobility race with you.” SUKESH JAIN CMO, Airtel Business

Here’s how organizations can strike a balance between the two:

Step 1: Assess true level of BYOD (sanctioned and unsanctioned) in your organization across all user platforms. Be willing to take a truly dispassionate view of what’s really going inside the organization. Recognize that all those user-owned iPads and notebook companions need to be considered in the BYOD tally. Despite all the press hype, not all users want to work with personal devices, so be realistic about how many will be willing to move from enterprise to personal tools. This also is the time to assess situations where BYOD is not suitable. Examine roles, departments and projects where BYOD introduces inappropriate levels of risk or lack of demand, such as: High-security environments Strict legal, compliance or SLA requirements The potential for a PR fiasco Lack of adequate network controls, data protection and/or MDM tools Employee digital-literacy skills gaps No employee demand or resistance Even if you have a BYOD policy in place, unless it is less than six months old and was done after a brutally honest assessment, it may still be worth going through the assessment in Step 1 to ensure that the policy covers the rapidly changing BYOD environment.

Step 2: Assess the organization’s readiness to support BYOD across all platforms. Examine network and data security tools, support processes, and policies: Does the company have network access control (NACs) in place? Does it have mobile

device management (MDM) tools? Do the types of data that BYOD users will want have sufficient security controls? Are the support processes ready to handle the growing number of devices and user questions BYOD will bring? Do the policies cover all the potential use cases and platforms for BYOD? Remember, the answers may vary across different end-user computing platforms. The levels of acceptance for each platform should be based on the answers to the questions in Step 1 and Step 2. The acceptance levels do not have to be the same for each platform.

Step 3: Focus investment first on initiatives that build end-point independence. To shift the focus from end-point control to endpoint independence: Make network access a primary control point via NAC, Group Policy options (GPOs) and other tools. Isolate and secure enterprise digital assets by keeping critical enterprise data off the device, or by using containerization. Apply managed diversity to minimize the BYOD support burden. Explain to users that the trade-off for more device choice is reduced support. Ensure that policies cover all the scenarios and constituencies that will be impacted by BYOD. This should not only address users, but also the managers who will have to encourage compliance, and the IT support staff who will have to learn which levels of support are provided. It is also critical to communicate the policies to these constituencies. Remember, you can’t carry out all these steps at once, but you can create a strategic roadmap that moves you in the right direction.

Seven Things to Watch Out for While Adopting Mobile Applications Is your enterprise hanging out of the enterprise mobility bus or has it made its way inside – secure and seated? What’s going wrong? Here are 7 common mistakes made by enterprises wanting to avail the benefits of mobile applications. 1

Failure to drive a feeling of ‘my’ mobile app amongst employees

Choosing apps with an enterprise sticker, but missing the enterprise glue

Making users fit mobility rather than enabling mobility that fits users

Underestimating security concerns, or security over-paranoia

Lack of a mobile ecosystem

Inappropriate choice of network and devices

Poor application management

Securing Corporate Data in a Mobile World A corporation can choose either device control or data control to ensure security of critical data in a mobile environment. Device control is restrictive by nature, locking down the devices by disabling applications/access and creating a standard user environment. This would be met by stiff resistance from end-users (employees). They would look at such control as an intrusion into their personal space and devices. The data control approach, on the other hand, follows a liberating policy wherein a secure corporate data container—an authenticated and encrypted space—is created within the device. The corporate IT team can roll out IT policies, secure corporate applications etcetera in this space without touching personal mobile data.

Is Containerization Ready for Your Current and Future BYOD Challenges? Applications and end-points are critical routes of data access and consumption for any business. The rise of BYOD has led to the massification of both routes, making security management for corporate data a large and complex task. Along with that, BYOD has opened corporate doors to consumer platforms such as Android and iPhone, which, by design, are low on security parameters to enable simplicity and user convenience. Containerization, by creating

a corporate partition on your mobile, paves the best route to guarantee data security. Containerization’s Strong Promise A secure, distinct container for corporate data allows you to handle any kind of mobile infrastructure. Some of the containerization solutions available also provide corporations the ability to disable copy-and-paste between approved and unapproved apps. Further, a secure container ensures easy usability for employees, who can benefit from segregation of personal and official space. Containerization also ensures “invisible control” for end-users, resulting in greater employee acceptance. With a strong business and end-user proposition, containerization is here to stay. Integrated Mobility’s Success Stories Seeing is believing, and rightly so. Here are some enterprises that bit into the integrated mobility pie, and are now basking in the glory of its aftertaste. State traffic police chooses integrated mobility; witnesses 150 percent revenue increase A state traffic police association had been constantly facing allegations of corruption in challans, violators roaming scot-free, and

other such operational issues. The biggest challenges were the lack of an integrated system compiling all violations, and a lack of real-time access to information for cops, who were constantly on the move. While they knew the solution lay in mobility, the association didn’t want to give the police a solution that just provided visibility into past offences. They wanted an integrated mobility solution that provided visibility, and also allowed for instant action to close the loop. Airtel MATE was their choice. On the one hand, MATE allowed cops to access offender/vehicle data in a secure manner via BlackBerry devices. On the other, it provided a portable printer to issue challans instantly and close the loop. The result was a revenue boost of 150 percent in just five years. Leading FMCG firm switches to integrated mobility to achieve 96 percent adherence to client visit plan Managing its rural sales personnel (RSP) was a challenge for a leading FMCG which was aware of the fact that rural India couldn’t be ignored in its market penetration strategy. It wanted to trace its RSPs on the field to manage client visits better and ensure employee safety. However, the network was a huge constraint. Many locations had limited connectivity, and most RSPs had feature phones. They needed a mobility solution that would work despite network and device limitations. Airtel’s 360-degree business solution came to the rescue. The cell ID-based tracing solution, compatible with any GSM device, provided the location of the RSP to an accuracy of 200 meters, every 15 minutes. The result was a 96 percent adherence to client visit plan. These success stories are proof enough that integrated mobility is a tried and tested route. Take this route to reach the mobility finish line fast.

To know more, please write to business@in.airtel.com or visit http://www.airtel.in/business

This article is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Airtel Business

Gary J. Beach

THINK TANK

Bridging India’s Skills Gap By about 2020, the scientific center of the world will shift from a single country to a score of nations. Here’s what India needs to do to be part of that global elite.

ILLUST RATION BY MASTERF ILE

ndia’s National Skill Development Corporation, like many public/private initiatives, has its critics and supporters. But most can agree on this: The group knows how to set audacious goals. The organization’s plan to skill/upskill 500 million people by 2022 is, by far, the most ambitious human resource project in the history of mankind. Moreover, the target date is auspiciously on the mark. Here’s why. In my book, The U.S. Technology Skills Gap, I write about an obscure Japanese physicist named Mitsutomo Yuasa who wrote a 45-page essay in 1962 about broad shifts in technology trends. In his prescient essay, Yuasa formulated a theory, later hailed as Yuasa’s Phenomenon, demonstrating that since 1540, every 100-110 years, the world’s scientific center shifted, mostly westward, from one country to another. Dr. Yuasa plotted shifts from Italy to France to England to Germany and finally to the US in 1920. If Yuasa’s Phenomenon is occurring again, another country, a nation west of the US, will become the world’s scientific leader between 2020 and 2030. Ominous signs seem to suggest the shift away from the US is already underway. In 2007, the US was ranked number one in the World Economic Forum’s annual, Global Competitiveness Report. By 2013, the US had fallen to number five. In that same 2013 report, the strength of the US education system was ranked 25th, and the quality of America’s math and science teachers trailed 48 other countries. (India was ranked 60th overall in the 2013-2014 report, a drop from the country’s 50th place rating in the 2007 survey. And in the 2013 survey India’s education system ranked 33rd and the quality of science and math teachers was at the 32nd place.) Other information points to the decline of America as a global leader. 30

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Gary J. Beach

THINK TANK

Which country will be the next global scientific leader? I have asked that question to hundreds of business and technology leaders in America.Most select India or China. I disagree. America’s share of global GDP has fallen from 25 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2013. Some say this is to be expected because of globalization. Others claim the 28 percent drop is caused by flawed domestic economic and societal policies that have produced a labor enigma: An economy with 11 million unemployed people while 4 million job postings remain ‘open’. They remain ‘open’ because employers say job applicants do not have the skills needed— thereby creating a ‘skills gap’ in the country. America’s education policies have been ineffective for decades. In 1983, the American government released a report entitled, A Nation at Risk, which starkly warned that American education was “drowning in a sea of mediocrity which threatens our very future as a nation and a people.” Thirty years later, in December 2013, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development shocked America with the results of the PISA test—a triennial assessment examination that measures math, science and reading skills for 15 year-olds in 70 countries— placing American students 36th in math, 28th in science, and 23rd in reading. Data certainly supports the decline of America and another country’s shift in Yuasa’s Phenomenon. If so, the key question is: Which country will be the next global scientific leader? I have asked that question to hundreds of business and technology leaders in America. Most select India or China. I disagree. I believe Yuasa’s Phenomenon will occur again in the 20202030 decade. But in its final act, the world’s center of scientific activity will not shift to another country. Rather, it will shift to scores of countries; nations that have highly-skilled workers connected to the Internet via ultra-high speed fixed line and mobile broadband infrastructures.

Ensuring India’s Place in the Future How is India prepared for a future where broadband rules? With 929 million mobile phone subscriptions (second in the world) and 137 million Internet users (third in the world), India has an opportunity to lead in the post-Yuasa Phenomenon world. But to leverage that position, particularly as the country plans to upskill 500 million people by 2022, the Indian government and its industry leaders must also commit to a significant expansion of ultra-high speed broadband infrastructure throughout the country. (Note: Gartner defines ultrafast broadband as minimum download speeds of 50Mbps. According to the research group Speedtest, the current average download speed in India is 4.06 Mbps, which ranks the country in 138th place out of 188 nations.) It will be economically impossible to wire the entire nation with ultra-fast broadband. Perhaps, though, a more feasible plan VOL/9 | ISSUE/04

might focus high-speed broadband deployment in the 30 Indian cities where 75 percent of all Indian Internet users reside. Based on the six years it took to research and write The U.S. Technology Skills Gap, here are my recommendations to help India skill/upskill 500 million citizens in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math by 2022. Hire The Best People to Teach in India’s Classrooms. American business executive Lee Iococca once said, “in a truly rationale society, the best of us would teach, and the rest of us would find something else to do”. Volumes of research has come to this conclusion: Hiring gifted and intelligent teachers is the most prudent national strategy to most effectively educate young people. Many of the top performing countries in global science and math tests have stringent national education strategies to only hire new teachers from the top 20 percent of college graduates. With early childhood education such an important component to later learning in life, South Korea exclusively hires K-3 teachers only from the top five percent of a college graduating class! Pay Teachers Well. McKinsey and Company reports the brightest college graduates often pursue career choices based on one overwhelming criteria: Compensation. The average starting salary for a K-12 teacher in countries like Finland, Japan, Singapore and South Korea—countries that lead the world in science and math assessment tests—is Rs 24 lakh! According to Payscale Inc., a global compensation firm, the median salary for an experienced K-12 teacher in India is Rs 2 lakh. But the prospective lifestyle for a computer science major in India is quite decent. An article in The Times of India reported that Facebook offered a starting salary of Rs 75 lakhs to a computer science graduate from IIT Guwahati! For me, it is clear. A key strategy that the National Skill Development Corporation must take to skill/upskill 500 million Indian citizens by 2022 is to make a concerted effort to put the country’s smartest people in front of Indian classrooms. And pay them competitive salaries. Create the Indian IT Ambassador Corps. Eighteen years ago, from the Oval Office of the White House, I founded a non-profit called Tech Corps. The goal of Tech Corps—which continues to operate to this day and is the longest running education/technology non-profit in the US—is to recruit talented IT professionals to work in US classrooms helping schools manage IT. Since 1995, 15,000 Tech Corps volunteers have contributed over $100 million (about Rs 600 crore) of volunteer time to America’s schools. So here’s a business plan for how Indian business leaders can create the Indian version IT Ambassador Corps. A plan courtesy REAL CIO WORLD | F E B R U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

Converged Cloud – The New Style of IT At the recently concluded HP CIO Thought Leadership Summit, leading IT decision-makers from across the country gathered to discuss ways to boost efficiency and augment revenue through effective use of the converged cloud model. By Vinay Kumaar Thanks to the great strides it’s made on the convergence front, cloud computing has now achieved that level of maturity where it can assure enterprises multiple benefits. Just like different work styles and disparate services are now converging on the cloud platform,

SPECIAL EVENT COVERAGE

CIOs from leading enterprises across verticals converged at the HP CIO Thought Leadership Summit, recently organized by CIO magazine in association with HP and Intel, at Ananda in the Himalayas. One of HP’s greatest strengths is its diversification and expertise in different technology domains. However, it’s imperative for a vendor with such a vast portfolio to ensure that the underlying philosophy of the individual entities is in harmony. Aman Neil Dokania, VP & GM, Cloud Division, HP APJ, shed light on how HP’s cloud strategy ensures this. He said, “Our One-HP Cloud approach has made it possible for the different divisions of HP to carry the same messaging throughout. The primary focus is on business transformation irrespective of vertical and business needs. One of the most noteworthy instances where this has worked wonders is the G-Cloud implementation for a renowned government customer.”

Neelam Dhawan, HP India’s managing director, elaborated further on HP’s strengths in delivering a robust cloud service for customers. “HP has been in India for the past 25 years, and globally, we are 75 years old and still going strong. The new style of IT today is driven by mobility, cloud, social, and big data. The rise of a collaborative work style has also altered the way enterprises work. Enterprises, today, are also heading towards an increasingly software-defined infrastructure. At HP, we have mastered the science of developing a cloud ecosystem, be it private, public, or hybrid. There are many innovations lined up on the flexible capacity, cloud OS, HP Public Cloud, Next-Generation CloudSystem and Openstack areas,” she said. HP India’s VP-Enterprise Group, Som Satsangi elaborated on HP’s cloud offerings. “HP is ready to aid enterprises in

“At HP, we have mastered the science of developing a cloud ecosystem, be it private, public, or hybrid.”

“Different functions are looking up to IT departments to expedite their processes and work flows. HP’s cloud solution lets them do just that.”

“The primary focus of our OneHP cloud approach is business transformation irrespective of vertical and business needs.”

their cloud journeys. We have vertical- and sub-vertical-specific custom solutions. These are of great relevance to enterprises because different functions are looking up to IT departments to expedite their processes and workflows.” In addition, V. Ramachandran, country manager-Cloud Solutions, HP India, spoke about the relevance of IT convergence in today’s tough economic climate and how organizations can get the best out of it. “The needs for efficient application delivery, enabling simplicity in the organization, and cost reduction can be addressed effectively through convergence. HP can help you build an IT setup that’s completely agile and completely open. As a result, we can also deliver infrastructure, applications, information, and services anywhere,” he said. A panel discussion at the event saw leading CIOs share their views on how organizations can benefit from cloud technology. The discussion, which was moderated by IDG Media’s editor-in-chief Vijay Ramachandran, facilitated CIOs across different verticals to share their experiences and best practices on how cloud computing enabled collaboration, criticial service delivery to users during peak times, and information sharing among different stakeholders at their respective organizations. Until a couple of years ago, organizations hesitated to make the leap to the cloud. However, the technology’s maturity has had a profound impact on the market. The HP team shared more information on this market trend. The CloudSystem Matrix, the building block of HP’s cloud technology, was launched in India in 2009. The system, which saw gradual increase in adoption over a period of three years—from 2009 to 2012, received a huge boost in 2013, when the adoption rate increased by 150 percent. Also, most conversations with C-suite members of enterprises seem to be positive today. They

are willing to take non-mission-critical apps to the cloud as of now. Additionally, the rate of adoption of cloud technology among SMBs is also increasing steadily. This is a very positive development for CIOs, considering the fact that there are many value propositions now that would make it easy to convince the top management to adopt the cloud. It also means that the CIO role would evolve into a more business-oriented one, wherein they can use the cloud technology in hand to drive innovation and growth further. Also, one factor that baffles IT decisionmakers after they choose to move to the cloud is selecting the right flavor—private, public, or hybrid—to host their applications. Organizations fail to look before they leap in this case, and, as a result, reap unsatisfactory outcomes. Mayur Sahni, research manager Cloud Services, IT Services & BPO, IDC Asia/ Pacific, presented a simple rule of thumb that would make this decision easier for CIOs. “Assess the value and priority of your apps as the first step. Apps of high value and high priority can be hosted on a converged system or a private cloud. Those of low value but high priority can be outsourced and put on a managed cloud. Finally, low-value and low-priority apps can be migrated to a public cloud,” he said. Overall, this year’s HP CIO Thought Leadership Summit, which was the sixth edition of the premier event, provided a great platform for Indian IT decision-makers to understand how they can future-proof their IT infrastructure and achieve the everelusive business-IT alignment by making effective use of cloud technology. This event coverage is brought to you by IDG Services in association with HP

IDG SERVICES

Gary J. Beach

THINK TANK

of a soon-to-be-launched non-profit in the United States. In the spring of 2014, a public/private partnership entitled, US2020, will launch. “2020” is not a reference to the year 2020. Rather, US2020 has the ambitious goal of encouraging every company in America to have 20 percent of their IT staff donate a minimum 20 hours of technology volunteer work to any cause they so choose. The US subsidiaries of TCS, Wipro, UST-Global, and Cognizant are participating. I encourage the entire Indian IT and business community to follow this plan and launch the Indian IT Ambassador Corps in the near future. Choose Teaching as a Second Career. The pipeline to teaching in Indian classrooms does not necessarily have to be solely from undergraduate school to teaching in the classroom. Practicing IT professionals, often individuals endowed with skills in science, technology, engineering and math, often make the best teachers. Interested? Look up “Teach for India”. Start Teaching Math and Science at Age Two. When I started to write The U.S. Technology Skills Gap, I was convinced that the middle school years (grades six to eight) were the point where America had to improve its effort to teach science and math to young boys and girls across the country. I was wrong. The internationally respected group FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology) introduced me to a program called Junior FIRST Lego League, where FIRST partners with the toy manufacturer LEGO to offer children aged five to eight an engaging way to design and build machines with motors! But there’s more. The Sesame Workshop, the educational group that has enriched the lives of tens of millions pre-school children around the world for nearly four decades, launched a science, technology, education and math program online for children aged two to five that stars “Grover” as a STEM super hero. The “13” Factor. Here’s the next most important age to skill/ upskill young Indians: Thirteen. By that age, researchers conclude, a country must have a national education system that identifies top science and math performers and develop tailored education tracks that accelerate the education tracks of these gifted math and science students. No corporation in India has a human resource policy that promotes workers based on age. Nor should your education system. To continue to be a world leader in science, technology, engineering and math, India must identify the country’s gifted students by age 13 and fast track their education careers. This is a particularly vital component for a future Indian economy based on innovation and invention.

a new set of skills from job applicants. Skills like how to make sense of and process massive amounts of data. How to work in cross-cultural environments. And how to master new media literacy and virtually collaborate. The Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley think tank, has done an excellent job identifying these new skills in a report, The Future of Work 2020. These skills identified by the Institute for the Future are the skill sets that the National Skill Development Corporation must embrace. And find teachers to teach them.

Embrace Self Directed Learning Online, or virtual learning, has been around for decades. But Dr. Suguta Mitra, a professor at the University of Newcastle in England, took the concept to new levels with his incredible Hole in the Wall project where he gave poor children in India unlimited access to computers and the Internet and then sat back and watched. What happened amazed the world! Within minutes these children, who had never seen a personal computer before, knew how to point and click and open documents. And surf the Web! For elementary students in India with Internet access, I recommend the Kahn Academy as an excellent example of online self-directed learning. Another key initiative in this area is a phenomenon called “MOOCS” (Massive, Open, Online Courses). Good examples of

To be a world leader in science, tech, and math, India must identify the country’s most gifted students by age 13. This is vital for a future Indian economy based on innovation.

New Skills Needed Proficiency in math, science and reading are table stakes skills for employment in the 21st century. Global employers are demanding 34

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MOOCs are Coursera, Ed/X and Udacity. MOOCs can make a huge skill/upskill impact on India. But the gating factor will be the availability of ultra-fast broadband connections. In September 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited Harvard University where he said in a speech to entire student body, “empires of the future will be empires of the mind”. In 2014, a full 71 years later, Churchill’s comment might serve well as the positioning state for the ambitious plans of the National Skill Development Corporation. I am very impressed with the goal to skill/upskill 500 million human beings in the next seven years. In India’s day-to-day efforts to reach that goal I hope some of the ideas I discovered writing The U.S. Technology Skills Gap might prove useful to Indian IT and business leaders. CIO Gary J. Beach is the author of the bestselling book The U.S. Technology Skills

Gap: What Every IT Executive Needs to Know to Save America’s Future. He is also the publisher emeritus for CIO Magazine in the US and was part of a team that helped launch CIO India in 1999. He can be reached at gbeach@cio.com or on Twitter at @gbeachcio

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IDG EVENTS STERIA

EVENT REPORT

CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO: LOOKING BEYOND JUST DATA CENTERS At a recent roundtable, CIOs discussed how ‘four disruptive IT trends’ are making the IT landscape more complex and how to use them strategically for business growth. By Gopal Kishore

a heady mix of challenges,” he added. Taking the discussion further, Murali Krishnan, VP-Technology Operations, MetricStream, said that in the past 15 months, over 70 percent of his company’s new customers have chosen the cloud. “One of our biggest challenges is storage, and our focus in 2014 is to get better at managing storage, backups, DR setups, and restoration capabilities,” he said. Krishnan also acknowledged that security is of great concern and they take pains to ensure that their data center partners adhere to the highest standard of security and compliance. Many CIOs were of the opinion that while security was indeed an important concern. It can be easily overcome by ensuring that proper controls are in place. For instance, Hemal Shah, CIO, Dell India, said that with the explosion of data, CIOs need to consider three important aspects: utilizing the storage infrastructure in the data center as well as the cloud, dealing with new age cloud storage applications such as Dropbox and Box, and leveraging structured and unstructured data to derive insights. “While CIOs can build the capabilities “By leveraging our highrequired to host and secure performance, highly reliable data, most of the times, network, we are now offering a it is safer to leave it to the full range of cloud computing experts,” he said. services to our customers.” Echoing this thought, Prashant Cherukuri, CIO, C.R. SRINIVASAN [24]7, said that the cloud VP, Global Product Management, Data is the new hardware. “Our Centre Services, Tata Communications approach is to be optimistic

he role of the CIO is in constant flux, but the rapid emergence of big data, analytics, and cloud computing—and the accompanying proliferation of data itself—have strained IT innovation and increased complexity. All this comes at a time when companies expect IT to do more with less and the balance of IT services spending is poised to tilt away from the CIO. With this context, CIO Magazine and Tata Communications spoke to IT heads across verticals to understand how they use cloud technologies to improve businesses processes without burdening IT resources. According to C.R. Srinivasan, VP-Global Product Management, Data Centre Services, Tata Communications, the data center along with the IT infrastructure itself is evolving rapidly, and everyone is in the middle of this change. “Trends such as hybrid cloud, big data, and analytics are causing the shift towards consolidation and cost optimization, thus driving the data center discussion in a new direction,” he said. “This has resulted in an intoxicating mix of new technologies and

and use the cloud where it makes sense. There are several companies whose data got hacked in the data center, and not on the cloud. So, anyone can get hacked,” he stressed. Summing up the discussion, Srinivasan said that in an era when every component of data centers is offered as a service—from infrastructure, storage and even in-house applications—connectivity has become a key theme to link these applications. He provided an example of how Tata Communications helped one of its clients, a prominent healthcare service provider, improve application availability using managed hosting and other services. “As observed in the case of disruptive business models in the past, certain technical, legal, and personnel challenges must be overcome before these technologies can enter the mainstream. Nonetheless, organizations would do well to begin the evaluation process,” said Srinivasan. “By leveraging our extensive high-performance, highly reliable network, Tata Communications is now offering a full range of cloud computing services to our customers,” he added.

This event report is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Tata Communications

Cover Story

CIO Career

Lasting

Legacy One in every five Indian CIOs will retire within the next two years. Do you have a succession plan? By Debarati Roy

In the early hours of January 26, the world woke up to the news of the death of Tata Motors’ MD managing director, Karl Slym. The 52-year-old Slym, who had joined Tata Motors in September of 2012, left a void that Tata Motors needed to fill as quickly as possible to maintain its stability in an already tough market. According to news reports, there was no immediate decision on Slym’s successor, interim or long-term. Slym’s sudden death shocked the corporate world, and woke industry bodies in India up to a perturbing reality: The dire need of a well-structured mechanism for

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Reader ROI: Why succession planning doesn’t happen in India Common mistakes to avoid while planning your successor Traits to watch out for when choosing a successor

succession planning. Within days of Slym’s death, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) announced plans to implement regulation that would make it mandatory for all listed Indian companies to incorporate formal succession planning programs

within their companies. SEBI says it wants to ensure that investors don’t suffer due to sudden, unplanned gaps in leadership, by mandating boards to develop an action plan for successful transitions. While most companies in India understand the importance of a structured succession program, very few companies actually invest in it. Research conducted in 2010 by management consultancy Bain & Company revealed that over 75 percent of Indian company boards do not even discuss the issue of succession planning. A study of the 44 top Indian firms found that only one

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Social Business

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CIO Career

in five board members was ever involved in talks about a CEO’s succession. When India Inc adopts such slacker approach to succession planning with the CEO’s position, there is little hope of much importance being given to the subject within the IT department. But there’s an imminent danger in that. According to CIO India research, one in every five Indian CIOs will retire over the next two

years. And one in every three says they are looking to move jobs. The fact is, there’s plenty of reasons CIOs should invest time and effort in ensuring they have a successor. That list includes greater business continuity, shielding their teams from vulnerability in case of an emergency— and perhaps more importantly—because it can ensure that their vision and their legacy is carried forward.

The question then is: Why is succession planning in India so rare?

Succession Planning is Tough Global fast-food giant McDonald’s is a great study in what good succession planning looks like. It’s helped the company come out of a crisis situation not once, but twice, in the past decade. The first time was when its popular CEO Jim Cantalupo died of a heart attack in

Leadership Back to Back Succession planning isn’t about filling an empty chair. ING Vysya Bank’s former and current CIOs tell you how they ensured a seamless transition. The first thing I did when I started to think of a succession planning program at ING Vysya Bank was to rope in my boss into the process. I realized that choosing a successor cannot be a CIO’s decision alone. Engaging my boss early into the process also meant that I had a good sounding board. The first step was to define what qualities I was looking for in the next CIO of ING Vysya Bank. But before that, I decided to do an impact assessment on how singling out some candidates would affect the rest of the team. The key thing about succession planning is to ensure it has as little adverse impact on the team as possible. For almost one year, I watched the shortlisted candidates closely, giving them assignments out of their comfort zones, job-rotation, and introducing them to various aspects of the industry. We evaluated the candidates on their performance. The final decision—on who was best suited for the CIO role— was taken in tandem with my boss and other business colleagues. The multiple assessment points helped us weed out any doubts about favoritism or bias. A full year before my successor Aniruddha Paul, was supposed to take over, we made the decision known to

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him and the other three candidates. I wanted to give them enough time to settle down with the news. I did another impact assessment on how the other three candidates had taken the news. Working a year ahead allowed us to make small team structure changes to allow every person in the running a fair chance of growth. Over the following one year, I started involving Paul more in strategic meetings with business, clients, customers, and industry bodies. It is important that your team members and business peers respect the candidate you choose. Finally, we announced that Paul would be the next CIO a month before he was supposed to take over the office. Again, this one month was a grace time for the other shortlisted candidates to settle down to the news. Fortunately, Paul is a natural leader and someone well respected. We faced no problems as far as our team is concerned when Paul moved in to his new role. I am glad to say our succession plan worked well.

C.V.G. Prasad, former CIO, ING Vysya Bank, who retired recently, believes that the key thing about succession planning is to ensure that it has as little adverse impact on the team as possible.

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Cover Story 2004, and the second occurred a year later when Cantalupo’s successor Charlie Bell was diagnosed with cancer. McDonald’s succession planning program ensured that it took the company less than six hours to name Bell the successor after Cantalupo’s death, and appointed Jim Skinner as the CEO shortly after Bell informed the company of his ailment. If McDonald’s can do it, why can’t Indian organizations?

The answer, as CIOs and experts reveal, lies in demographic and cultural framework of Indian companies. One of the biggest hurdles to creating a succession plan in Indian companies is their extremely high attrition levels. With more than 65 percent of corporate India’s population under the age of 35, India Inc is a bunch that’s on the move. Pravir Vohra, former president and group CTO, ICICI Bank, one of India’s

At ING Vysya Bank, we divide IT into ‘change the bank function’ and ‘run the bank function’. I joined ING in 2007 to head the strategic changes at the bank. I was entrusted with a certain set of responsibilities. However, as time passed I found myself gradually handling other responsibilities along with my current role. These were more leadership-oriented roles. I am thankful to Prasad for gradually introducing me to every facet of the banking industry. Not only did I gain more experience about other functions of the bank, I got a lot of exposure to clients, vendors, customers and industry bodies. I think that when people realize that they are being moved into such a huge role or are being groomed for one, the obvious fear in every protégé’s mind is whether they have enough experience to handle the various responsibilities they would need to shoulder. I was lucky that way, because by the time I was told that I would be moving into Prasad’s role, I had already been exposed to so many functions that I never doubted my experience. One thing I think Prasad Having been a part of a succession planning programme and now developing one for his own team, Aniruddha Paul, CIO, ING Vysya Bank, has realized that it’s not a science, but an art.

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CIO Career

largest private banks, points out that unlike the previous generation of employees who stuck to a company for a lifetime, today’s workers find it easier to grow their careers—and their paychecks— by switching jobs. “This uncertainty makes it difficult to plan for succession. How is it possible for a CIO to envision and groom someone for a responsibility that might come five years

handled extremely well was managing the dynamics of the team. The impact assessments helped him course correct. With strategic structural changes in the team, Prasad managed to convince everyone that they had not been shortchanged and that there was place for everyone to grow. The objective was not just about Prasad leaving and me taking over. It was about how IT can move forward as a department and carry everyone along. I would also give him a lot of credit for making the entire process smooth and well-planned. Spanning over almost two years, the succession planning process covered every aspect that needed attention. The significant time-frame between one key change to another also gave the company, its employees and prospective candidates enough time to digest and prepare for what was coming their way. Even after it was informed officially that I would be taking over after him, he had the foresight to give it a month for the news to sink in. In the corporate world, surprises are best avoided and I’m glad Prasad didn’t choose a more dramatic approach. Having been a part of a succession planning programme and now developing one for my own team members, I have realized that it’s a bit of a fine art, not a science.

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CIO Career

down the line, when you’re not even sure if that employee will stick around till the end of the month,” he says. Padmaja Alaganandan, executive directorConsulting, PwC, seconds Vohra. “Companies are often apprehensive, that in this market of high talent flux, picking and grooming a person can actually ensure that the company has fool-proofed itself against a succession crisis,” she says. Both Alaganandan and Vasanthi Srinivasan, associate professor-Organizational Behaviour & HR Management and chairperson-Centre for Corporate Governance and Citizenship at IIM-Bangalore, also say that the high rate of growth Indian companies have seen in the last decade makes it difficult to ascertain the attributes a company wants in its leaders a few years from now.

“When it is so difficult to even get to the first step of succession planning— like predicting the traits future leaders are expected t o have—how much of succession planning can one really expect?” Alaganandan asks. High growth rates, adds Prof. Srinivasan, have seen most Indian companies invest more time building functional leadership pipelines to support and head new lines of businesses and initiatives, leaving the succession pipeline high and dry. India’s corporate culture makes it hard to create a succession plan in other ways. Aniruddha Paul, CIO, ING Vysya Bank, and Prince Azariah, former CIO at ACC, MRF, and Reliance, say that the cultural mind-set of Indian staffers play

an important role. “Compared to the more formal work environment among their western counterparts, managers and team members in India share a more informal, personal relationship. So, when it comes to singling out candidates for the big position, managers skirt the issue in the fear of being accused of favouritism or upsetting other team-members,” says Paul. There’s another, more dark reason why succession planning doesn’t happen. “Many Indian managers tend to see a potential successor as a threat to their own positions,” says Azariah. Despite these factors, Alaganandan and Srinivasan both agree that they have seen more Indian companies taking the problem of succession planning more seriously, and that the issue has become a boardroom issue in a few cases. “I have seen more talk about succession planning happening at the boardroom level in the last couple of years than I’ve seen in the last decade. But, needless to say, we have a long way to go,” says Srinivasan.

Pravir Vohra, Former President and Group CTO, ICICI Bank, says it’s hard to have a succession plan with the high churn rate in Indian companies. 26

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From CIOs to industry experts, everyone agrees on this: Succession planning is not a one-man show. “Companies cannot deal with succession planning as an individual’s prerogative. It cannot be dependent on an individual who will invest time and effort either out of the largeness of their hearts or in the quest of leaving behind a legacy,” says Alaganandan. C.V.G. Prasad, former-CIO at ING Vysya Bank, who led an extremely successful succession planning program at the bank, says that many succession planning exercises fail because they are done unilaterally. “One cannot think of succession planning without the involvement of all stakeholders and parties within the company. That includes IT team members, HR, other business heads, and board members. Succession planning is not a project that can be done in a silo,” says Prasad. Alaganandan says that many pitfalls of a succession planning program can only be avoided when it is adopted as a culture, with a well-structured and formal mechanism put in place that emphasizes not just on

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PHOTO BY FOTOCORP

No One-man Show

Cover Story an individual’s choice but on a transparent system built around various data points. “Choosing potential candidates, assessing them, grooming and training them, and introducing them to other business functions all require collaboration and critical inputs from other departments. By ensuring that they have involved all stakeholders in the process, CIOs can minimize the risk of other team members accusing them of favouritism or bias,” she says.

Sourcing Talent Any succession planning process starts with the search for the right talent. That raises the question: Should a CIO look within or outside? Srinivasan points out that while both approaches have their merits, building and grooming talent from within one’s team is a preferred approach, not just in India but across the world. “By grooming people from the inside, one can not only better manage compensation costs—which tend to be lower compared to getting talent from outside—but, more importantly, drive consistency of culture and avoid the teething problems associated with a new person joining the system,” she says. Plus, this strategy works like magic with internal teams because it motivates them and assures them about their own growth within a company. That said, hiring external talent has its advantages. “Too much internal focus can breed incestuous thinking. Often, one needs fresh perspectives and new ideas to transform. In such cases, one shouldn’t be closed to the idea of looking outside for talent,” says Alaganandan. “It’s ideal if you can get someone from your own team. But if that isn’t feasible, don’t force fit a candidate,” Alaganandan says. Srinivasan says that CIOs can widen their net within their organization and look for someone who comes from the business side but has an aptitude for technology. “In the past, many business heads have moved on to lead IT within their organizations and have been fairly successful,” she says.

Performance Vs Potential It is widely accepted that first step in doing anything is the hardest one. It’s no different

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Going through the harrowing task of finding the next generation of leaders isn’t easy, but since when did great leadership become a catalogue of easy options to choose from? with succession planning. Singling out a potential successor is not easy, and it is where leaders most often bungle. One such mistake is not realizing when someone is under the ‘Halo Effect’. Alaganandan says this is a recurring problem in the corporate world. “Quite often, managers seem to hold someone in extremely high esteem because the candidate has performed exceptionally well on a recent project. That creates a myopic view of a person’s capability,” she says. Alaganandan warns leaders to not evaluate future leaders based on just recent performance but on the leadership potential they demonstrate. “Sometimes, we come across people who make a great second line. When given a job they have the ability to get the job done to the T. But they don’t have the vision to lead change or take initiatives,” she says. Srinivasan feels that identifying potential is not difficult once a company has figured out and defined what qualities it wants from its future leaders. “For example, study people when they are demonstrating initiatives in areas other than their job profiles. That is the first sign of a potential leader,” she says. Another way to spot a potential leader is by exposing them to stretch assignments and then observing their attitude, behaviour, and body language. “A stretch situation exposes people to working under pressure and pulls them out of their comfort zones. That’s the ideal condition to ascertain whether a candidate has the aptitude to learn, make mistakes, and the ability to deal with failure. It gives you an idea of how the individual would behave when under a high stress C-suite position,” she says. Prasad has one important piece of advice for CIOs looking for a potential successor. “Don’t start looking for your clone,” he says.

A great team is made of people of various strengths and styles of working. However, Prasad says that most managers end up making the mistake of being partial to people who are similar to them. “My successor at ING Vysya Bank has a completely different style of managing and handling issues. But that doesn’t mean his style is wrong, it is just different yet equally effective,” he says.

Going the Distance Succession planning is more than identifying the person that will take over your role. That’s just the first hurdle. Once a CIO has decided on a successor, it’s their duty to ensure they give their successor the tools to realize their potential. “Don’t shy away from investing in professional help like development coaches if the need be,” says Alaganandan. “The entire effort of identifying talent is wasted if a CIO is not ready to take an identified candidate to the next level.” Azariah says that the leadership skills required to be able to carry the responsibilities of being a CIO are the ones that potential CIOs need the most help with. “It’s the soft skills that are the hardest to find. The ability to get a holistic view of various lines of business, and work in tandem with business people, manage people, and communicate well are just some of the soft skills that second line managers usually need help with,” he says. Both Prasad and Vohra emphasize the need for a well-rounded and planned training schedule. Vohra suggests giving potential successors assignments that require not just technical but leadership skills like getting them involved in conversations with stakeholders including vendors, customers, management and REAL CIO WORLD | F E B R U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

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Social Business

Prince Azariah, Former CIO at ACC, MRF, and Reliance, says that many Indian managers tend to see potential successors as a threat to their own positions.

industry bodies. This, he says, not just increases the scope of exposure of a candidate, but if done well, also readies them with the experience to deal with all sorts of situations they might face as a CIO. With the number on things that need to be done, a great succession plan is not something that can be accomplished in a week or even a month. “Nominating someone from within your team and appointing them as a successor in a crisis is not succession planning. It is crisis management,” says Prasad. Srinivasan says that she has seen companies take anything from 18 to 48 months to complete a structured succession planning program. “If a potential successor is already shouldering many responsibilities and has been exposed to various roles, then I have seen that by putting them in a role which allows them to 42

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demonstrate their potential, you can groom them in as little as 18 months,” she says. However, most IT team members are typically pretty siloed from the rest of the organization and it might take CIOs anything from three to five years to successfully groom a second line of potential leaders. “Careful planning, done over a period of time, also allows you to try various permutations and combinations. There is no full-proof structured approach to succession planning, and in most cases, trial-and-error might be your best bet,” says Vohra.

It’s Okay to Rock the Boat One of the biggest reasons managers steer clear from succession planning is the fear of rocking the IT team boat. Managing team dynamics isn’t easy. Leaders often

fear that by singling out one or two people from the team, they could end up with a lot of disgruntled team-mates who might leave the organization. “There’s no denying that it’s a touchy subject and that you could end up upsetting a few people. But then you can’t procrastinate because you are afraid of rocking the boat. Leadership is all about making tough decisions,” says Alaganandan. Vohra couldn’t agree more. “People leave all the time, for all sorts of reasons. Yes, it is true that you don’t want to lose talent, but then you also don’t want to be so dependent on them that it starts hampering your decision-making capacity,” Vohra says. One way around that is to create a process that is fair, transparent and wellstructured. “People get angry when they think that someone who isn’t deserving is put on a pedestal. When you pick people who are respected, whose abilities have been proven, and you have given everyone in the team a fair chance, I think people understand,” Vohra says. Srinivasan believes that this fear of making people unhappy could be overplayed. She likes to put her trust in people and believe that they are not as unreasonable as we make them to be. “When the process of succession planning is fair and transparent and development opportunities are given to people, no one will grudge you,” she says. However, she agrees that some amount of resistance is inevitable and people might be disillusioned in the beginning. “But if you can convince people that there was fairness in the process, people will reconcile and stay,” she says. As long as a company is growing, there will always be the need for change and succession planning needs to be part of that change. What is important is that the implementation of a succession strategy needs to be systematic and not an ad-hoc response to an emergency. Going through the harrowing task of finding the next generation of leaders isn’t easy, but since when did great leadership become a catalogue of easy options to choose from? CIO

Debarati Roy is principal correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to debarati_roy@idgindia.com

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Cover Story Plus | CIO Career

Keep It: Why Few

Want Your

JOB More than half of IT professionals don’t aspire to be a CIO. It used to be the top job in IT, but not anymore.

What’s changed? By Julia King

Stephanie Jurenka started out in IT as a systems administrator more than 10 years ago. Today, she’s an IT manager with absolutely zero interest in a CIO role. position. The CIO role doesn’t appeal to me. I discovered over the “Being a CIO doesn’t offer the opportunity to do the cool stuff years that I prefer to be hands-on.” that IT people like so much to do. It’s about meetings and budgets Jurenka and Allen aren’t alone. In a recent Computerworld and politics,” says Jurenka, who works at Westway Group, a bulk (Computerworld is a sister publication to CIO) survey of 489 IT liquid storage company in New Orleans. professionals conducted, 55 percent of the respondents said they Dan Allen, an IT manager at Delta Children’s Products in don’t aspire to a CIO post. In fact, only 32 percent of New York, feels the same way. With close to 20 them said that they have set their caps for IT’s top job. years in the profession, he has no desire to be a CIO Reader ROI: Politics, relatively low pay, and a lack of prestige all either. Why IT professionals register as deterrents. “The IT management positions I pursue are don’t want to be CIO Yet there’s another reason for this shift in career almost all hands-on positions,” Allen says. “Yes, you The options now open thinking. Technology professionals are being have to take advantage of the opportunities given to them recruited to work in marketing, logistics and other to you, but I continue to work on my [technical] What’s bringing about functions outside of IT as technology becomes more certifications because I want to be in an engineering this change VOL/9 | ISSUE/04

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Cover Story Plus | CIO Career deeply embedded in virtually every aspect of the business. That trend is expanding the IT career path horizontally. Rather than one career ladder with CIO at the top rung, there are increasingly multiple career bridges across organizations. “The digital business wave is bound to reignite interest in information and technology and to lure people into different areas of the business as information and technology increase their direct impact on revenue, markets and customers,” says Diane Morello, an analyst at Gartner. “Information and technology are lifeblood for companies: No single department owns them.”

of people see is that CIOs don’t wield either the power or authority commensurate to a C-level title.” Another big disincentive: “The politics are endless and there’s not a lot of respect for the position,” Barron says. “The C-suite is pretty apathetic about the CIO position. What they want is for systems to work and they want no drama out of IT.” While Barron says that he enjoys the role, he believes the modern CIO has become an ambassador within the C-suite. “The set of skills required to be successful is not what a typical technologist would likely possess or, more importantly, value,” he notes.

An Issue of Status

Interested Onlookers

For Christopher Barron, CIO at Valerus, a Houston-based oil and gas services company, Computerworld’s survey findings weren’t what he expected. “I was surprised that the percentage [of tech workers who don’t want to be CIOs] wasn’t higher,” he says. Barron says he believes IT professionals today are spurning the CIO role because of the comparatively low status that the title carries at most companies. “If people are going to work hard toward getting a C-level title, they want it to mean something,” he says. “What a lot

The politics and power struggles don’t go unnoticed by the rank and file. Additionally, IT staffers say they can’t help but notice how much time the CIO role requires. Many IT professionals, especially younger people, are unwilling to trade off having balanced work and home lives for the pursuit of IT’s top spot. “I watched my VP’s transition to the most senior level and the time it takes to devote to that position is too much time to give to my career for me,” says Jurenka. “The tendency to do more with less means most IT people are spending a great deal more time on the job and the level of productivity required of each individual is ramping up,” observes Joseph Morgan, a programmer/ One of the reasons fewer IT professionals want to become CIOs is analyst at Amerigroup, WellPoint’s government business dipossibly because they don’t see a role model. That’s your fault. vision. “There’s a perception that know how to code and to set up a server, it will only get worse the higher Joseph Puzio, a business technology but I can also sit down with the business up you go and you’ll have no life,” liaison at Janney Montgomery Scott, had and figure out what they need,” he says. he adds. “The amount of money no intention of pursuing a CIO role when he The liaisons at Janney are each a CIO makes is not enough comjoined the Philadelphia financial services dedicated to specific sections of the firm— pensation for a lack of a life.” firm seven years ago. Having graduated retail brokerage, legal and compliance, All of which makes for somewith a computer science degree, Puzio and capital markets and operations. thing of a stalemate. At the same was set on advancing his career on the “We’re siloed off, so I get to know my time that so many technology network and infrastructure side of the house. constituents, but we also work together professionals aspire to advance That all changed when Bob Thielmann, strategically, so we get to know the needs through tech-focused, hands-on the company’s current CIO and of other business groups,” he says. roles, more and more of those Puzio’s mentor, took on the CIO role. From his perch in a hybrid role, Puzio roles are being handed off to serPuzio says Thielmann’s knowledge of has observed an increase in the use vice providers and contractors. the financial services industry as well as of consumer technologies and hosted Increasingly, the technology-retechnology impressed him enough to make services. But, at Janney anyway, those lated careers that remain at nonhim want to pursue the same career path. trends have led to an increased reliance IT companies fall under a kind of “Bob sits in on meetings other CIOs on developers, rather than diminishing hybrid role, which requires busimight not normally sit in on. These are the importance of in-house development. ness and process acumen plus strategy meetings as well as meetings “There’s a lot of emphasis on development, enough IT experience to underabout a new application or new vendor,” because a lot of SaaS is plain vanilla and stand how to use technology to he says. “What I’ve been able to see is the you need to customize,” he explains. “We advance the business. difference it makes when someone has get a SaaS application, then customize or The upside of this scenario knowledge in IT and the business. It really add our security layer. On the other side, is that talented technical helps point the team in the right direction.” we want to make sure these apps work professionals have a place to grow Puzio is currently in a role that also just as fast as if they were housed here.” and thrive with service providers requires both technology and business that are fully engaged with the knowledge. As an IT-business liaison, “I —Julia King

A Leader to Follow

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business knowledge and deep industry expertise. “SaaS and the consumerization Do IT staff want to avoid being CIOs because they are still hanging on of IT and cloud services are driving a clear wedge between the two to the old definition of the role? It’s possible. branches of an IT career,” says Bill the CFO and reports to the laboratory director. Mayo, senior IT director at Biogen “If IT people aren’t identifying with the “The role also has shifted away from technology Idec, a biotech company. “We’re CIO title, you have to wonder if it’s because and focusing on how to get operations to taking business-facing IT people they’ve got some old interpretation of the an optimal level and toward looking at how and switching them to directly CIO role,” says Bill Mayo, a senior director we’re leveraging technology and information reporting to the business with a of IT at Biogen Idec, who does indeed to enable the business,” Hiltbrand says. dotted line reporting back to IT.” have aspirations to one day be a CIO. The IT department has also been renamed The upshot is that the most As Mayo sees it, the CIO job has Information Management and is increasingly technical of the techies will likely changed radically in the past decade, focused on acquiring off-the-shelf software be pursuing their IT careers with making it more, not less, attractive. and services, lessening the need for highly service providers, while more “It used to be that the CIO was kind of skilled technology professionals on staff. business-oriented IT professionthe lead geek, then the guy who translated “We’re seeing a shift from people who als will remain in IT departments geek speak to business speak, then the are hands-on technologists to those who to manage contractors and overperson struggling to get a seat at the table. can manage contracts and establish a see service provider agreements Now, with so much focus on innovation, the service level and then manage a vendor to or move into hybrid roles outside CIO has emerged as the guy who is at the accomplish those directives,” Hiltbrand says. of IT. “Ultimately, it’s the delivery table causing some discomfort because To reflect these and other changes, Hiltbrand of services that is being commodhe’s pushing people to try new things,” says lab officials are working on redefining job itized,” says David Paschane, vice Mayo says. “Everything is changing, and to titles and laying out clear career paths for president of core IT at Quintiles, a some extent, the role of CIO has become staffers “so we can set expectations as to what’s clinical research company. much richer and much more exciting. The needed and to the next step they should take.” “You are starting to see a thinCIO is in a position to agitate for change.” Among other things, the revamped job ning out of database administraAt Biogen Idec, for example, Mayo recalls descriptions will include information about tors and other administrative rethat former CIO Ray Pawlicki spent more the audience the people in each role can sources because more and more than a year as the interim head of human expect to engage with, the technical skills companies are supplying manresources, where his chief responsibility they will need and a description of how they aged services to companies,” Donwas defining the biotech company’s culture will engage with the wider Department of nici says. “Some of the specialized and determining “how we would innovate Energy laboratory complex, Hiltbrand says. positions in applications, such as and how we would work as a company.” All in all, he says, the IT jobs at the lab PeopleSoft, also begin to go away At Idaho National Laboratory, the CIO role require more business and communication because there are SaaS providers. also has changed and expanded, according to skills and are more outward-facing. The macro trend is for techie peoTroy Hiltbrand, enterprise architect in the Office ple to go to SaaS and cloud compaof the CIO. For starters, the lab’s CIO, who nies and to internally retain more previously reported to the CFO, now is a peer to —Julia King business roles.” That assessment resonates with Allen at Delta Children’s Products. latest technologies and their uses. “There are more career paths into “I see more and more that in the future I will end up at a provider and out of IT than there used to be,” says Markus Bierl, CIO at Franke company or a consulting company, providing either infrastructure or Foodservice Systems in Nashville. “It’s much more important that you software as a service,” he says. “More of us [IT professionals without know and understand the business. I have people in my organization CIO aspirations] will end up having to move to those positions.” An IT career still comes down to pursuing either a technical or who came from the business side and I have IT people who transferred back to a business role. An IT career path is no longer a straight career managerial track, says Bob Dulski, director of IT at the Chicago Zoological Society. And that carries through to the CIO role. “It’s not path,” he says. CIOs from healthcare, financial services and manufacturing that important anymore that they know about VMware or cloud tell a similar story. Fast-changing business processes, the need for computing,” he says. “The CIO is a different kind of person.” CIO speed, consumers’ appetites for customization, and ever-mounting government and industry regulation are all working to complicate day-to-day business. What they need internally are people in IT with Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

A Problem of Perception?

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Wizard on Wheels How Mahindra Reva leveraged the magic of telematics and mobility to give India its very first smart car. BY DEBARATI ROY

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Case File | Mahindra Reva

How freaked out would you be if you received a call from your car company telling you that a part in your car is about to collapse and that they would replace it free of cost? You’d be spooked. Just like one of Mahindra Reva’s customers. In December 2013, the customer care team at Mahindra Reva caught a customer off-guard when they called him to inform that a certain part in his car was showing signs of failure. “We reached out to the customer and offered to replace the part free of cost. He was bewildered and refused to replace the part as he was not exactly experiencing any problem,” says Kartik Gopal, GM-Mobility Solutions and Business Development, Mahindra Reva Electric Vehicles. Two days later, the part breathed its last. And Mahindra Reva had already detected this. So, when the customer got in touch with the company, it had already ensured that the part to be replaced was ready and delivered in no time—at no additional cost. That kind of magic rarely happens. That’s because not many companies have the guts to play with ideas of the future. Mahindra Reva isn’t one of them. For the first time in India, the company built a car that can talk to its owner, thanks to a telematics-based vehicle monitoring system. Telematics is an integrated use of telecommunications and informatics, also known as ICT (information and communications technology). The system—implemented in the company’s latest offering Mahindra e2o—can help the company resolve firmware or software issues in the car remotely, among other things. Using telematics and mobility, the team at Reva has created India’s first car that can be controlled via a smartphone app. The app can help customers keep a tab on the general health and performance of a car, can control in-car features like AC. It can also send timely alerts to customers about damaged parts. “At Mahindra Reva, we have been trying to

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most parts of an EV’s drivetrain (powertrain) deal with voltages and currents, it is easy The power of telematics to digitize and sense various performance How to innovate with parameters and communicate them over a mobility wireless channel. Why M2M has arrived A study of customer usage patterns helped Mahindra Reva realize that people leave their EV on charge overnight, expecting the create a car that’s environment-friendly and car to be ready for travel in the morning. But also bonds with our customers,” says Gopal. sometimes people plug in the vehicle but In the quest to build India’s first intelligent forget to switch on the mains, or sometimes car, Gopal and the team at Mahindra Reva the car stops charging due to voltage have traversed unknown territories, and fluctuations, loose plugs or power failure. have taken the road less travelled. “In many such situations, the customer only realizes, a little too late, that the batteries are not fully charged,” says Gopal. Behind the Wheels Another battle that Mahindra Reva had to The REVA Electric Car Company (RECC) fight was the issue of ‘range anxiety’ among was founded in 1994 and launched as a customers. Range anxiety refers to drivers joint venture between the Maini Group of Bangalore and AEV LLC of USA. In May 2010, who constantly worry that their vehicles have insufficient charge to reach their India’s largest SUV and tractors manufacturer, destination. The term is primarily used in Mahindra & Mahindra, bought a 55.2 percent reference to battery electric vehicles (BEVs), controlling stake in Reva. RECC launched its first car, the two- and is considered to be one of the major barriers to large scale adoption of all-electric seater REVA in India in 2001. Few know cars. Mahindra Reva wanted to fix that. that the same car, branded G-Wiz, was It wanted a system in the car that could launched in Europe in 2004. In 2009, the make the car converse with its owner and company launched a new concept model proactively alert him or her about the called The REVA NXR M1 class electric concept car at the Frankfurt Motor Show. general health of the battery, the amount of charge left in the car and whether the car The company was looking at experimenting is charging perfectly or not. The answer: with more innovative technology to improve the functionality and the usability of the car. A telematics system that could help the company’s customer care team keep a close “The Reva-Lion—a lithium-ion battery watch on the performance of its cars. version of the Reva-I—was introduced in Another problem that the company was Europe with telematics. This was the first hoping to solve was after-sales service. In time we were experimenting with telematics. It was the first generation of intelligent cars, 2012, a Frost & Sullivan Customer Insights Report asked customers spread across 14 the lessons from which were later brought cities in India to rate different parameters that into the e2o. The telematics unit is just like the black-box inside an aircraft’s cockpit,” influence their buying decision. More than 60 percent of respondents rated after-sales says Gopal. service experience as a very important factor Electric Vehicles (EV) are very different for buying a particular brand of car. from Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) But providing customers excellent after sales cars. Mahindra Reva realized that since Reader ROI:

REAL CIO WORLD | F E B R U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

Case File | Mahindra Reva

service comes at a price. Apart from India, Mahindra Reva also exports the EV to 24 other countries. The company would have to pay through its nose to set up physical service networks in these countries. Thankfully, it wouldn’t have to. Unlike normal cars that have more mechanical parts, due to the basic build of EVs, a lot of issues can be handled and solved via OTA (over the air) firmware and parameter updates. This

opened up a completely new service model for Mahindra Reva, one that will allow it to resolve customers’ car issues faster but also help the company keep its service center costs down.

Pedal to the Metal With the proliferation of smartphones and their ability to double up as mini computing devices, Mahindra Reva found just the

The app can tell customers how much distance they can cover based on the amount of charge. This helps them plan their trips in advance and avoid being stranded on the road. — Kartik Gopal, GM-Mobility Solutions & Business Development, Mahindra Reva Electric Vehicles

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perfect device that could become the bridge between the customer and the car. “Today almost everyone has a phone that supports apps and it is one object people are most likely to always carry with them wherever they are. So, a smartphone app was our best bet,” says Gopal. Mahindra Reva teamed up with a Bangalore-based company that specializes in embedded devices to develop the telematics unit within cars. The company roped in another solution provider to create the mobile application. Apart from this, the company also developed a set of applications with Mahindra Telematics to help it monitor the cars through servers located at the Mahindra’s datacenter and a webpage user interface for its customers. When cars are shipped from the Mahindra Reva factory, they are registered with the company’s system. Once a customer buys a car from one of the company’s dealers, the dealer logs into a webpage, feeds in the car and customer details—like mobile number— and creates an account for the customer. The customer, then, needs to log in using a username and password, after which he is provided with a link to download the app for his Android, Blackberry or iOS phones. The car relays information to the company’s telematics servers via a Telematics Gateway Unit in the car and a M2M mobile carrier platform. The Telematics Servers host Webbased applications that enable the customer care team to monitor cars. The servers also store all critical information about the cars right from the time of its shipping to the customer which is being used for developing analytics based prognostics applications. Customers can access information about their cars via a mobile app or the dedicated customer Web page. The solution provides customers with a host of features on their mobile app. For example, if one leaves a car plugged-in but forgets to switch on the main, or the car stops charging due to voltage or power issues, it waits for a few seconds and sends an SMS to the customer on his mobile informing him about the problem. At any given point of time, customers can check how much charge they have in the car via the app. “The app can also tell customers how much

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Case File | Mahindra Reva

Revving It Up

Mahindra Reva’s telematics unit—fit in cars—talks to a mobile app and relays information to its servers, saving about 80 percent of fault rectification time.

The car relays information to the company’s telematics servers via a Telematics Gateway Unit and an M2M mobile carrier.

The Telematics Servers host Web-based applications that enable the customer care team to monitor the company’s cars.

A mobile app alerts customers when their cars’ charge is low. It’s also integrated with Google maps to help them locate charging stations.

distance he can cover based on how much charge the car has. This will help customers plan their day and trips in advance and avoid being stranded on the road,” says Gopal.

Going the Distance Because they were creating a first in the Indian automotive industry, Gopal and his team were not satisfied with just the bare minimum. They have integrated Google maps with the smartphone app. “Let’s say you are going from point A to B and B to C. With the help of Google maps, the app can tell you how much charge you will need to cover the distance and help locate charging points,” says Gopal. The company has installed close to 300 charging stations across various cities in India and mapped them on Google Maps. Not only that, the app also includes links to YouTube tutorial videos within the app so that customers know how to change a flat tyre, for example, or replace a fuse in the car. Telematics has also helped the company

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The telematics servers store critical information about the cars right from the time of its shipping to the customer. This is being used for developing analytics-based prognostics applications.

to get rid of the range anxiety problem by introducing a smartphone feature called REVive. Based on the health of the battery, a reserve amount of energy is made available on-demand. If customers run out of charge, they just need to press the REVive button on their smartphone app and the car would get extra energy to last them for another five to seven kms. “Customers can then check the closest charging point on their app and get their cars charged,” says Gopal. The company has applied for a patent for this concept. Last year, REVive got Mahindra into Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World list. While that’s a feat, putting this wonder car on the road wasn’t devoid of challenges. This was the first time an automobile company was experimenting with something like telematics —for personal mobility—in India and there were no benchmarks or references to base their performance parameters on. “Also, we were working with four partners at the same time for the various components of the telematics unit. We had to manage multiple

Based on the health of the car’s battery, the company’s REVive feature on the mobile app, can provide a reserve amount of energy on-demand.

stakeholders to get the job done,” says Gopal. In the end, it was a job well done. “We had two kinds of ROI that needed to be defined. One was measuring the ROI on customer satisfaction and second was to reduce our service center costs,” says Gopal. By being able to remotely diagnose, predict and solve issues, the telematics unit has helped the service engineers at Mahindra Reva save about 80 percent of time required for fault rectification. This has not only saved the service teams precious man-hours required to detect a fault, plan for course-correction and service a car, but also helped customers by significantly reducing the issue resolution time. Indeed there are automobile companies that boast of the most superior design, or unmatched luxury and some thrive on prestige value. But Mahindra Reva is a cut above the rest. CIO Debarati Roy is principal correspondent. Send feedback to debarati_roy@idgindia.com

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CIO Skills

THE POLITICS OF

CIOs may have good reason to reject a proposal or nix a technology request, but an inept or frequent ‘no’ will get you sidelined. BY KIM S. NASH

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Saying no—the right way—may be the most powerful skill a CIO can learn. A smart “no” can set boundaries and enhance your leadership position. A stupid “no” can diminish your authority and make enemies. How a CIO gets to no depends on the context, of course. Telling the CEO he can’t connect his iPad to the corporate network is different from letting down an employee keen to be promoted. Despite the old saw that IT has to stop being the Department of No, reasons to say no abound: A strict bring-your-own-device policy means some devices won’t be supported. A Reader ROI: new piece of technology The power of saying no won’t conform to internal How to say it well standards. A proposal makes The importance of creating no sense. A proposal makes a track record VOL/9 | ISSUE/04

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST IT, today, is riddled with challenges such as legacy hardware, long refresh cycles, restricted budgets, and demanding businesses. To overcome them, CIOs need to alter their course of action as well. By Ershad Kaleebullah The onset of a new year brings new anxieties. The CIOs don’t have it easy either. Their role is quite evidently going through a transition—triggered by evolving business and IT challenges—and it is high time they realized that. Sanjay Mirchandani, senior VP and GM, APJ, VMware, and T. Srinivasan, MD, VMware India & SAARC, leveraged years of experience in the industry to discuss with CIOs, across verticals, the complex and dynamic IT environments existing today and the challenges associated with them. Vijay Ramachandran, editor-in-chief, IDG Media, moderated the discussion. Dealing with legacy infrastructure is one of the major concerns CIOs face today. Taking a page out of his experience as a CIO, Mirchandani explained how virtualization helps in such scenarios. Further, talking about the changing mindset of CIOs and correspondingly, the enterprises they work for, Srinivasan said, “Today, Indian enterprises are ready to move their mission-critical apps to a virtualized environment, which is definitely a healthy

trend.” Besides this, lines of businesses (LOB), today, have the freedom to invest in technology that fits their requirement. This increases complexity, and CIOs need to be doubly alert of this new practice. Srinivasan said, “CIOs today need to be ready for the transition and need to think through this trend to set IT policies accordingly.” On the other hand, chargebacks tend to skew management’s decision in favor of departments that promise hard ROI, making it even harder for CIOs to convince the board. Murali Krishna, senior VP and member, executive council, Infosys, said, “We toyed with the idea of chargebacks. Once you start charging back, the business attitude is very different. The transition period is a difficult time.” Offering another perspective on this whole equation was M.G. Raghuram, CIO, Mphasis, who stated that he doesn’t look at IT projects as ‘projects’ anymore. “Today, I charge each LoB according to their requirements. For example, if an LOB wants a cloud-based CRM, the IT department charges a certain amount of

Build, buy, or outsource. It doesn’t matter. If a CIO doesn’t offer the best of services within the timeframe provided by customers, they will do it without him/her. SANJAY MIRCHANDANI Senior VP & GM, APJ, VMware dollar per user directly. This helps keep the number of licences in check and streamline operations catering to the budget.” However, most of the IT spend in an organization, even today, is focused on keeping the lights on. Mirchandani said, “It is important that CIOs try to strike the right balance between keeping the lights on and innovation. A 55:45 ratio helps.” This event report is brought to you by IDG Services in association with VMware

CIO Skills sense, but there’s already too much work and not enough money. The CEO doesn’t like it. A request doesn’t support corporate goals. A big idea is too much for a risk-averse culture. Few decisions are black-and-white. But now, as the CIO role shifts into new areas such as revenue generation, turf lines are less clear. CIOs don’t want to step on toes, but they also have to offer a clear position on strategic issues. “It takes finesse to look like a firm decision maker,” says Bill Deam, a former CIO at Quintiles Transnational and ACNielsen. He was a management consultant at the time he was interviewed and is now CTO of Mapi Group. “You have massive amounts of politics.” Rudy Puryear, who leads the global IT consulting practice at Bain and Co., knows of a financial services company where the CIO was asked to leave after three years of consistent negative responses. “Too many decisions came back with a ‘no’ from IT, without well-thoughtout reasons,” Puryear says. “Hard feelings and disappointment led the business community to press the CEO for a change in leadership in IT, and it was too much of a groundswell to ignore.” An artful “no” is plainly difficult to master. Cleaning up after a predecessor’s bad attempts is especially difficult. But veteran CIOs find that by using tools such as skillful conversation, deep governance and sense-and-respond intelligence, denial doesn’t have to kill a career.

When ‘No’ Hurts

eclining what seems to be a quick, simple technology request, such as to build a new analytics tool for the marketing staff, may not be the power play others suspect. CIOs know that new technology carries a 10-year ripple effect of maintenance and improvement costs. It’s a CIO’s job, Puryear

says, to explain that. CIOs have long struggled to avoid infamy for leading an IT group that too often comes up with reasons to not do something. A reputation for denying requests and dismissing ideas isolates you and your staff from peers and can take you out of key strategy discussions. Shadow IT, we know, is a response to disliking the CIO’s answers. But even worse is when IT is seen as an obstacle to growth, says Tom Phillips, CIO at Elavon, a payment processing company owned by the $20.3 billion (about Rs 120,000 crore) US Bancorp. IT may point to sound reasons for delaying or declining, say, a marketing or sales project. Perhaps staff and money are assigned elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean marketing or sales will take it well. “When we say no, it can either directly—or in the eyes of business executives—mean we are inhibiting business performance,” Phillips says. “It becomes quite an emotive topic.” CIOs get a lot of heat, but it helps to remain open-minded, he says. If a proposal to use a certain technology must be denied, acknowledge the value of the concept and offer an alternative, he advises. “It’s your responsibility to listen to new ideas, even if you do have to say no.” Finding oneself frequently declining requests signals a misalignment between IT and business, according to Deam. A CIO with an effective intelligence operation should pick up on budding frustrations outside IT. Key to good intelligence gathering are business analysts embedded in functional departments, such as finance and HR, as well as in business units. These IT staff members should know exactly how the company makes money and be able to offer suggestions for streamlining the flow of vital work, he says. Fix those trouble spots, and rarely will you need to issue a big, fat, political “no,” Deam says. “There’s no way you should have someone running in with a sudden $30 million request.”

Who’s the Decider?

CIOs must build a foundation of trust with peers for the inevitable day when “no” must be the answer. So when presented with requests, don’t turn them all into simplistic yes-or-no transactions; rather, use these opportunities to have a conversation about priorities and goals.

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any CIOs are stretching into untraditional areas, including creating new information-based products and services. As lines blur between functional domains, just who has authority over which decisions gets murky. When IT tries to go too far in defining business needs, or business goes too far into making a technology call, problems arise. A key exercise for the C-suite is to identify the 10 most important decisions the company will make this year and name who will make each call, Puryear says. Many people may influence the discussion, but where does the buck stop? Delineating those responsibilities and rights leads to more effective decision makers. The company can move faster because people accept the outcome and move on, he says. Helen Cousins, Lincoln Trust’s CIO and a member of its board of directors, advocates a strong hierarchy. If, after being fully informed of the facts and risks in a given situation, the

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CIO Skills

Helen Cousins CIO and Member of the Board at Lincoln Trust, says it’s important to “rally behind decisions made in a company,” even if you don’t agree to them.

CEO or peer makes a choice that Cousins disagrees with, she goes with it. “It’s my responsibility to support the decision 100 percent, and to get my staff to support it. I can’t show to the outside world I don’t agree,” she says. As long as they’re not unethical, she says, “you rally behind decisions made in a company.” For several years, Lincoln Trust sanctioned only BlackBerry devices on the corporate network. But when the CEO and head of marketing and sales wanted to use their iPhones for work, Cousins made it happen. “Now BlackBerry has lost tons of business and iPhones and iPads are the thing,” she says. If IT had not figured out how to make Apple devices safe for corporate use back when iPhones were the exception, Cousins says, “we’d be behind the curve now.” Ever logical, CIOs will often insist that if they provide a colleague with all the right facts, he will come to the same conclusion they did. Dispassionate analysis will win the day. Well, not always. It’s then you need to understand the nuances of the situation, says Becky Blalock, who spent nine years as CIO of Southern Co., a $16.5 billion (about Rs 99,000 crore) utility, before her retirement in 2011. Perhaps there’s history or personal bias in play. Or maybe it’s plain old whim.

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Discuss controversial topics in person, not over e-mail, says Blalock, who is now managing partner at Advisory Capital, a consulting company. People are more rational when they sit down together. “With some executives I’ve seen, [decisions] are about control and their being right,” she says. “Make it so someone’s not losing face when you say no.” CIOs sometimes have to do unpopular things, such as shutting down technology that doesn’t meet corporate standards, denying requests for upgrades or ending a perk where the company pays for home computers. One of the most memorable for Blalock was having to strengthen password criteria. Many workers complained. “Whoo-ee! Those things do not make employees happy.”

Use the Force

IOs need to do a good bit of foundational work with peers to form trust and build personal and professional credibility for the inevitable day when “no” must be the answer. So when presented with requests along the way, you don’t want to turn them all into simplistic yes-or-no REAL CIO WORLD | F E B R U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

CIO Skills transactions, says Jackie Sloane, an executive coach at Sloane Communications. Rather, use these opportunities to have a conversation about priorities and goals. Perhaps the request is too costly or doesn’t support the company’s established goals. It’s one thing to say no to your peers, quite another to Don’t answer right away, Sloane advises, have to say it to your team. Yet, sometimes, it needs to but ask your own questions to learn why the request emerged. What’s the real problem? be done. Here’s how to do it well. Why does the person think IT can help? What are the alternatives? In other words, Saying no to your staff produces a ripple effect much different from that of saying talk about it. Then, she says, position your no to peers. A CIO must avoid demoralizing a staff member who won’t receive a response the same way a marketer positions a desired promotion or can’t be given a raise. consumer product. “You say, ‘Based on what I In such serious conversations, CIOs should be authentic about the reasons for know matters to you, my suggestion is this is the decision, says Jackie Sloane, an executive coach at Sloane Communications. not something you want to do,’” she advises. Reveal what you can about the tight budget that doesn’t allow for a raise, “People love it when you know what matters Sloane says. to them.” If someone isn’t ready for a promotion, use the meeting to outline clearly the When iPhones first came out, many actions he can take to earn one, she says, and in what time frame. The idea is to employees at Southern Co. wanted to use say no, but offer suggestions or options. “When you lay down the line with people, them for work. At the time, Southern paid for it can be amazing what you see,” she says. employee phones, but iPhones were not on the Especially with staff issues, avoiding the “no” just brings trouble, says Becky list of authorized devices, Blalock says. The Blalock, former CIO of Southern Co., and author of Dare: Straight Talk on IT group had to decline these requests. But Confidence, Courage and Career for Women in Charge, in which she tells the Blalock cautioned her team to use a positive stories of 28 women in C-level positions. A common mistake they cited was not approach. “We used ‘Help me understand’ firing someone soon enough, she says. rather than ‘No, you can’t do this.’” These managers knew the person wasn’t performing and had tried to bring him In such conversations, CIOs will also reveal up to speed, but could see it wasn’t working, she says. information about themselves: Their style, “If he’s not competent, he drags the team down.” Still, the managers were thought process and leadership philosophy. reluctant to deliver the ultimate bad news. Looking back, Blalock sees that she also By doing this over time, Sloane says, CIOs made the same mistake during her career as a CIO. “It’s very difficult to say, ‘No, can build a personal force field so others you’re not doing the job,’” she says, “but those things are easier to see in hindsight.” understand their expertise and value their —Kim Nash decisions. New CIOs, in particular, tend to want to approve or decline a request immediately, even when there’s no need to do that, she says. “Successful people make a lot of requests, so you governance. She wanted to elevate IT decisions from a project-byneed to make a lot of requests, too.” Being reactionary, she says, project basis, where there are too many opportunities for conflict, “is a legacy from a lower-level role.” and instead encourage discussions of a portfolio of work related A defining moment for Blalock in building her own force field to specific corporate goals. But to get there, she realized, IT had occurred some years ago. She faced what she calls a “corporate to understand much more about operations at the $16.6 billion bully” situation that she took up the disciplinary chain. She declines (about Rs 99,600 crore) biotechnology company. to reveal details but says the incident, while painful, reinforced her In 2012, she started a mapping project, asking business belief that you must teach people how to treat you. “They won’t executives to show IT’s business analysts on a map how their unit mess with you if they know you have your facts straight and you or department works. They then rated, on a maturity scale of one have the company’s best interest at heart,” she says. “You need to to five, the strategic importance of each unit’s key capabilities and correct people who don’t know those two things.” how each one was functioning. This gave IT a working knowledge of each area, provided and endorsed by business peers. Making the maps took a year, but now interactions concerning Governance Machine technology requests have matured from yes-or-no replies to hile trying to eliminate a negative atmosphere, CIOs can build the foundation for a positive conversations about where the request fits on the map and how one, where significant decisions travel through important it is to the company as a whole. In September, the maps, which were once viewed as an IT tool a strong, clear governance process. As CIO of Amgen, Diana McKenzie knew she wanted to tackle demand exclusively, were used in a workshop by the CEO, CFO, business

Giving Your Staff Bad News

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CIO Skills unit leaders and other top executives to define Amgen’s longrange improvement initiatives, she says. Such clear governance means she doesn’t worry about saying yes or no anymore. “If a project comes forward from a business partner, we can then ask where it fits on the map.” The two years of effort have changed the dialogue for the better, she says. In 2013, for example, one strategic corporate goal was to improve quality and operational efficiency, and IT finished a complex big-data project to detect early signs of manufacturing irregularities. In 2012, one business goal was to expand in emerging markets, which for IT meant supply-chain work and provisioning offices in China. Using the machinery of governance helps a CIO skirt denials, refusals and other unpleasantries, says Deam, the consultant. He recalls a time at a previous employer when one group asked IT for an expensive new system to house a complex project bidding system. The existing set of spreadsheets had become slow and sometimes unresponsive. “It was a beast . Un-emailable,” he says. “People would cut it down in pieces to e-mail and try to bolt it back together again.” Rather than throw more technology at the problem, Deam urged the group find a way to simplify the process and the resulting data behind the bidding system. The group resisted. “We took it to the governance committee. They said, ‘Bill suggested you cut it in half. Why not do that?’” The essence of the reply from the executive in question was that no one in his group could agree how to do it, he says. To which the committee responded that he was in charge of those very people and should, therefore, take charge of the situation. “We could have done the solution they were asking for,” Deam says, “but simplicity is what they actually sought.” The magic in good governance is forcing people to make decisions where accountability lies.

To help eliminate the politics that can gum up any governing body, the company would rotate senior executives in and out of committee meetings so it was rare that anyone would be arguing the case for a proposal for their own domain, Deam says. A member attending a given meeting would advocate for whichever idea looked best, regardless of where it originated. The committee published a map each month showing why it picked the one or two projects it did. “The CIO is no longer having to explain him- or herself; the organization has made the choice,” he says. “If you want to change what comes out of the hopper, make a better case.”

When ‘No’ Pays Off

t’s important for CIOs to teach staff how to say no so that all the good work done at the top isn’t negated by unfortunate exchanges below. McKenzie, for example, wants her staff to understand the reasoning behind major decisions—as well as the business background and value of the request. “If you don’t understand the business well enough, you might answer the question wrong,” she explains. Whatever happens, she says, “Don’t leave the impression that IT isn’t going to do something because it’s hard.” Bill McCorey, CIO of Universal Parks and Resorts, says he wouldn’t be where he is today without a well-contemplated “no,” the effects of which reverberated for several years. In 2005, as CIO of now-defunct Circuit City, McCorey put out an RFP for enterprise storage systems. A large storage vendor had won the last couple of bids, but McCorey knew he wanted to diversify vendors to keep a competitive landscape. He asked to meet with that vendors’ area manager. “I brought him in and explained the situation, straight up so not to waste his time or set expectations that could not be met. He was disappointed but understood,” he recalls. Five years later, when McCorey was at IBM, he got a call from that manager, who had recommended him for the newly available CIO role at Universal. Although the two hadn’t spoken for a few years, McCorey says his former vendor referred him because of the way he had told him he would lose the bid: Direct, honest and with facts. “This reminds me of how our reputation is built based on all of our actions,” McCorey says. Sloane, the executive coach, agrees. “Having the courage to say no is important,” she says. “People will wonder who you really are if you’re always saying yes to everything.” CIO

It’s important for CIOs to teach staff how to say no so that all the good work done at the top isn’t negated by unfortunate exchanges below. Get your staff to understand the reason behind major decisions—and the business background of a request.

Kim Nash is managing editor of CIO Magazine. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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CXO Agenda | e-Commerce

Off the

Beaten Track In the travel industry, the smart money seems to be betting on online players. Yet Thomas Cook India isn’t making its online channel central to its strategy. What is it they know that others don’t? BY SHUBHRA RISHI Talk about full circles. When online travel agencies first became popular back in 2006, a lot of people predicted the end of the traditional, brick-and-mortar travel agent. Yet, the folks at Thomas Cook, the big daddy of travel agents, with its 244 locations, weren’t too worried. That’s probably because they knew something the new kids on the block—Thomas Cook India, which has been around since 1881, has earned the right to call them that— didn’t. They foresaw that the value customers saw in booking tickets online would become a commodity, and that would, in turn, quickly corrode the online-only business model. The real money, they understood from experience, lay in planning big ticket holidays. And the customer wanted that done face-to-face. They were right. Already, an increasing number of online travel agents like Makemytrip have opened brick-and-mortar stores. Suddenly, those brick-and-mortar stores, what experts called the albatross around the neck of travel agents, sinking them like bricks, made business sense again. And the folks at Thomas Cook smiled knowingly. But, if they were so smart, why did Thomas Cook India create an online channel? To strengthen and complement the company’s offline business, among other reasons—not to replace the brick-and-mortar model, says Amit Madhan, head e-commerce, Thomas Cook India. It’s a view that run contrary to conventional wisdom. 56

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Amith’s Agenda: To create an online channel that complements—not replaces— Thomas Cook India’s offline business model.

CXO Agenda | e-Commerce CIO: It must be scary for a brick-and-mortar player like Thomas Cook to see the growth of online travel companies. Your thoughts?

AMIT MADHAN: I joined the company only in 2007, but I can tell you that our team at Thomas Cook India wasn’t affected by the success of online travel companies. A lot of companies were getting into the online ticketing business and it didn’t affect us as long as they didn’t hamper our core business, which they didn’t. At the time, most offline travel agents were highly-dependent on travel ticket selling whereas our model dealt more with the international holiday package segment, specifically high-value travel packages. A number of our large customers are interested in booking big ticket travel packages for outbound travel. And, while the initial querying and itinerary preparation can take place online, the conversation quickly moves to a call center or to a customer touch point for order booking and processing.

the online channel has—and that it’s becoming a key contributor to our different businesses. It’s not just about growing the percentage of our online revenues. A recent survey we conducted revealed that young Indian travelers want an option to connect with their travel service providers, online as well as offline, with over 66 percent preferring a flexible mix of online and offline touch points. So, we will continue to leverage our hybrid approach and serve customers in whichever way they prefer. Can you describe your online model? How is it different from Makemytrip or Cleartrip?

It is essentially a hybrid model. Let me explain. Today, we are a brick-and-mortar plus clicks-and-bricks company. The main objective is to leverage our offline presence and branch networks. That’s our core strength and an important contributor to sales and profits. Instead of

nstead of making it the center of our strategy, we would rather use the online channel to reinforce our offline retail stores. According to one of our recent surveys, 66 percent of young Indian travelers prefer a flexible mix of online and offline touch points. If that’s true, why did TCI foray into the online travel business?

An online presence opens up avenues across boundaries, but it is the offline stores that provide the real connect with our customers. We have always had a strong foothold in the brick-and-mortar space and the idea behind venturing into a new channel was to ensure maximum customer centricity. Through the online channel we wanted to leverage the goodwill that the Thomas Cook brand had established in India. The online portal offers an assortment of travel products and related financial services including flight booking, foreign travel insurance, hotels, cruises and Rail Europe passes. With the help of this channel, we have boosted our distribution network extensively. Going forward, the Indian travel market is only going to expand and our online channel will only bring us closer to our customers. We are growing slowly as far as the online business is concerned. But we realize how relevant 58

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making it the center of our strategy, we would rather use the online channel to reinforce our offline stores. For instance, a significant number of our customers go online to book small packages such as domestic holidays. That’s where we push online, meaning, customers can book a travel package online. But with other high-value packages, we initially engage with customers online and then seamlessly transfer them to our physical branches for forex and visa-related queries. There’s a concurrent growth in both online traction and our pointto-point business; customers who have historically dealt with us, continue to come to us. How else is IT fuelling growth at Thomas Cook India?

With an aim to enhance customer outreach, we are in the process of deploying a CRM that will give us a single view our customers.

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CXO Agenda | e-Commerce It will cut across different channels and lines of business. The main objective is to augment channel grazing: Customers should be able to seamlessly transact and talk to us through all available channels. The other important benefits include achieving greater customer centricity, and delivering better customer service thanks to the automation of core processes. How do other channels such as mobile and social fit in your omnipresence strategy?

Mobile and social have become an integral part of our lives. In terms of leveraging it for business, it’s all about how to monetize and capitalize on that changing behavior. The technology behind mobile phones is changing constantly and the challenge is to adapt quickly. At Thomas Cook India, we have identified a mobile application strategy. We want to understand the behavior of a user on a mobile site and place all those learnings into an app. Therefore, the mobile site is helping us increase customer engagement and leads rather than transactions. Since in India, due to connectivity problems and unfriendly payment gateways, there are chances that we could lose out on customers. We see that a lot of our customers search for travel packages on their mobiles and then fill in their customer details. We, in turn, call them through our call centers and engage with them. Seen from that perspective, the mobile platform is creating awareness as well. Since customers are online, we advertise our packages in order to engage with them and make them aware of interesting offers and packages. As far as social commerce goes, it hasn’t really taken off in India. However, we still want to use it to engage and interact with our customers, this includes gathering inputs and feedback on our

products and services from customers, listening, managing our online reputation, and dispersing information on our products and services to to our Facebook fan base of over 4 lakh, and Twitter close to over 1,500. Recently, you also launched a tablet application.

Yes that’s right. In order to boost the efficiency of our sales teams, we recently created an app in which we incorporated a host of travel packages, containing detailed itineraries and options, vibrant images, videos, maps, and invaluable visa data, travel tips, and destination information. The app also provides a virtual walk-through of an itinerary along with a handy comparison of various packages, thereby significantly enhancing a customer's overall research-and-booking experience. And, it eradicates the need for paper-heavy brochures. Finally, on a more personal note, how does a focus on an offline model affect your role?

I was one of the founding members of ICICI Lombard and helped setting up its e-business. When I joined Thomas Cook India in 2007, as its head of e-commerce, online was like any other channel for the company—the purpose of leveraging it was to increase customer engagement and lead management. This created a huge opportunity for IT, and as an IT-head, my role has been to administer the guiding principles and practices to leverage new technologies and trends. We are in the process of transforming a number of business processes and core systems within Thomas Cook India to suit today’s technological requirements. CIO Shubhra Rishi is senior correspondent. Send feedback on this interview to shubhra_ rishi@idgindia.com

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Security

Most m is mund alware these in ane, but novativ techniq e are exp ues lo system iting network s and s of e the sav ven viest users. BY RO GER

A. GRI ME

Reader ROI: The dangers of being lulled by ‘known’ security threats What to watch out for How to prepare

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s u o i Dev k a e Sn ks c a t t A

ds d thousan alware an m e f n o li s n o ce day’s of pie Millions gs roam to n a e g m r e sa ck e us ha sing th of malicio upes. Reu d s, sy e a d e ca n e ying o if not d world pre for years, ing e worked av h t in exploit a g th terestin tactics in r o cy. io ew n id thing r plain they do no dgment, o ju e in m s co se hers ss, lap are researc our lazine lw a s. -m w ti n ro a yeb ear at raise e But each y niques th ch te inspired w se fe e ckers, th across a a h r o us re malwa of malicio undaries Used by o b e in th s h s stretc novation technique m as in e th a f re o a many Think novative, hacking. in g in th y Like an deviance. o ty. f simplici xcel macr o rosoft E measure ic M s ro e 0 199 ced z s Take the mly repla o d n ra y, mediately t silentl sheets, im d virus tha a re a sp al O’s in bels with to text la with capit in rs st e o b the m ing num went, for transform nges that a ch systems — p ro u e after back value of z ll e w l ti n tected u ta. part, unde ut bad da and nothing b d e malware in s ta u n io co n e g in most iving. Here Today’s and conn y h lt a e st note that re just as niques of ch hackers a te st te searcher of the la security re a are some s a st e re nd on th ed my inte Some sta . have piqu d e ll rn a a but lessons le novators, and the alicious in m rip off st a to p s f o y as way a d shoulders to e u g uch in vo are very m rs. vviest use even the sa

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Security Stealth Attack 1: Fake Wireless Access Points No hack is easier to accomplish than a fake WAP (wireless access point). Anyone using a bit of software and a wireless network card can advertise their computer as an available WAP that is then connected to the real, legitimate WAP in a public location. Think of all the times you—or your users—have gone to the local coffee shop, airport, or public gathering place and connected to the “free wireless” network. Hackers at Starbucks who call their fake WAP “Starbucks Wireless Network” or at the Atlanta airport call it “Atlanta Airport Free Wireless” have all sorts of people connecting to their computer in minutes. The hackers can then sniff unprotected data from the data streams sent between the unwitting victims and their intended remote hosts. You’d be surprised how much data, even passwords, are still sent in clear text. The more nefarious hackers will ask their victims to create a new access account to use their WAP. These users will more than likely use a common log-on name or one of their e-mail addresses, along with a password they use elsewhere. The WAP hacker can then try using the same log-on credentials on popular websites—Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, iTunes, and so on—and the victims will never know how it happened. Lesson: You can’t trust public wireless access points. Always protect confidential information sent over a wireless network. Consider using a VPN connection, which protects all your communications, and don’t recycle passwords between public and private sites.

Stealth Attack 2: Cookie Theft Browser cookies are a wonderful invention that preserves “state” when a user navigates a website. These little text files, sent to our machines by a website, help the website or service track us across our visit, or over multiple visits, enabling us to more easily purchase jeans, for example. What’s not to like? Answer: When a hacker steals our cookies, and by virtue of doing so, becomes us—an increasingly frequent occurrence these days. Rather, they become authenticated to our websites as if they were us and had supplied a valid log-on name and password. Sure, cookie theft has been around since the invention of the Web,

but these days tools make the process as easy as click, click, click. Firesheep, for example, is a Firefox browser add-on that allows people to steal unprotected cookies from others. When used with a fake WAP or on a shared public network, cookie hijacking can be quite successful. Firesheep will show all the names and locations of the cookies it is finding, and with a simple click of the mouse, the hacker can take over the session Worse, hackers can now steal even SSL/TLS-protected cookies and sniff them out of thin air. In September 2011, an attack labeled “BEAST” by its creators proved that even SSL/TLS-protected cookies can be obtained. Further improvements and refinements this year, including the well-named CRIME, have made stealing and reusing encrypted cookies even easier. With each released cookie attack, websites and application developers are told how to protect their users. Sometimes the answer is to use the latest crypto cipher; other times it is to disable some obscure feature that most people don’t use. The key is that all Web developers must use secure development techniques to reduce cookie theft. If your website hasn’t updated its encryption protection in a few years, you’re probably at risk. Lessons: Even encrypted cookies can be stolen. Connect to websites that utilize secure development techniques and the latest crypto. Your HTTPS websites should be using the latest crypto, including TLS Version 1.2.

Stealth Attack 3: File Name Tricks Hackers have been using file name tricks to get us to execute malicious code since the beginning of malware. Early examples included naming the file something that would encourage unsuspecting victims to click on it (like AnnaKournikovaNudePics) and using multiple file extensions (such as AnnaKournikovaNudePics.Zip.exe). Until this day, Microsoft Windows and other operating systems readily hide “well known” file extensions, which will make AnnaKournikovaNudePics.Gif.Exe look like AnnaKournikovaNudePics.Gif. Years ago, malware virus programs known as “twins,” “spawners,” or “companion viruses” relied on a little-known feature of Microsoft Windows/DOS, where even if you typed in the file name Start.exe, Windows would look for and, if found, execute Start.com instead. Companion viruses would look for all the .exe files on your hard drive, and create a virus with the same name as the EXE, but with the file extension .com. This has long since been fixed by Microsoft, but its discovery and exploitation by early hackers laid the groundwork for inventive ways to hide viruses that continue to evolve today. Among the more sophisticated file-renaming tricks currently employed is the use of Unicode characters that affect the output of the file name users are presented. For example, the Unicode character (U+202E), called the Right to Left Override, can fool many systems into displaying a file actually named AnnaKournikovaNudeavi.exe as AnnaKournikovaNudexe.avi. Lesson: Whenever possible, make sure you know the real, complete name of any file before executing it.

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Stealth Attack 4: Location, Location, Location Another interesting stealth trick that uses an operating system against itself is a file location trick known as “relative versus absolute.” In legacy versions of Windows (Windows XP, 2003, and earlier) and other early operating systems, if you typed in a file name and hit Enter, or if the operating system went looking for a file on your behalf, it would always start with your current folder or directory location first, before looking elsewhere. This behaviour might seem efficient and harmless enough, but hackers and malware used it to their advantage. For example, suppose you wanted to run the built-in, harmless Windows calculator (calc.exe). It’s easy enough (and often faster than using several mouse clicks) to open up a command prompt, type in calc.exe and hit Enter. But malware could create a malicious file called calc.exe and hide it in the current directory or your home folder; when you tried to execute calc.exe, it would run the bogus copy instead. I loved this fault as a penetration tester. Often times, after I had broken into a computer and needed to elevate my privileges to Administrator, I would take an unpatched version of a known, previously vulnerable piece of software and place it in a temporary folder. Most of the time all I had to do was place a single vulnerable executable or DLL, while leaving the entire, previously installed patched program alone. I would type in the program executable’s filename in my temporary folder, and Windows would load my vulnerable, Trojan executable from my temporary folder instead of the more recently patched version. I loved it—I could exploit a fully patched system with a single bad file. Linux, Unix, and BSD systems have had this problem fixed for more than a decade. Microsoft fixed the problem in 2006 with the releases of Windows Vista/2008, although the problem remains in legacy versions because of backward-compatibility issues. Microsoft has also been warning and teaching developers to use absolute (rather than relative) file/path names within their own programs for many years. Still, tens of thousands of legacy programs are vulnerable to location tricks. Hackers know this better than anyone.

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An stealth other interest operatintrick that usesing g system an itself is a g a a known a file location inst absolut s “relative vetrick e.” rs as a peInloved this fauus lt e Tens oftration tester. tho legacy p rogramusands of s are st ill vulnera location ble to tricks. Lesson: Use operating systems that enforce absolute directory and folder paths, and look for files in default system areas first.

Stealth Attack 5: Hosts File Redirect Unbeknownst to most of today’s computer users is the existence of a DNS-related file named Hosts. Located under C:\Windows\ System32\Drivers\Etc in Windows, the Hosts file can contain entries that link typed-in domain names to their corresponding IP addresses. The Hosts file was originally used by DNS as a way for hosts to locally resolve name-to-IP address lookups without having to contact DNS servers and perform recursive name resolution. For the most part, DNS functions just fine, and most people never interact with their Hosts file, though it’s there. Hackers and malware love to write their own malicious entries to Hosts, so that when someone types in a popular domain name—say, bing.com—they are redirected to somewhere else more malicious. The malicious redirection often contains a near-perfect copy of the original desired website, so that the affected user is unaware of the switch.

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Security This exploit is still in wide use today. Lesson: If you can’t figure out why you’re being maliciously redirected, check out your Hosts file.

Stealth Attack 6: Waterhole Attacks

attacks e l o h r e Wat g news i b e m a bec r when this yeahigh-profile severalmpanies, tech cong Apple, includi ok, and Facebooft, were Micros mised comproe of popular becaus tion applica ment develops their website ers visited. develop

Waterhole attacks received their name from their ingenious methodology. In these attacks, hackers take advantage of the fact that their targeted victims often meet or work at a particular physical or virtual location. Then they “poison” that location to achieve malicious objectives. For instance, most large companies have a local coffee shop, bar, or restaurant that is popular with company employees. Attackers will create fake WAPs in an attempt to get as many company credentials as possible. Or the attackers will maliciously modify a frequently visited website to do the same. Victims are often more relaxed and unsuspecting because the targeted location is a public or social portal. Waterhole attacks became big news this year when several high-profile tech companies, including A pple, Facebook, and Microsoft, among others, were compromised because of popular application development websites their developers visited. The websites had been poisoned with malicious JavaScript redirects that installed malware (sometimes zero days) on the developers’ computers. The compromised developer workstations were then used to access the internal networks of the victim companies. Lesson: Make sure your employees realize that popular “watering holes” are common hacker targets.

Stealth Attack 7: Bait and Switch One of the most interesting ongoing hacker techniques is called bait and switch. Victims are told they are downloading or running one thing, and temporarily they are, but it is then switched out with a malicious item. Examples abound. It is common for malware spreaders to buy advertising space on popular websites. The websites, when confirming the order, are shown a non-malicious link or content. The website approves the advertisement and takes the money. The bad guy then switches the link or content with something more malicious. Often they will code the new malicious website to redirect viewers back to the original link or content if viewed by someone from an IP address belonging to the original approver. This complicates quick detection and take-down. The most interesting bait-and-switch attacks I’ve seen as of late involve bad guys who create “free” content that can be downloaded and used by anyone. (Think administrative console or a visitor counter for the bottom of a Web page.) Often these free applets and elements contain a licensing clause that says to the effect, “May

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be freely reused as long as original link remains.” Unsuspecting users employ the content in good faith, leaving the original link untouched. Usually the original link will contain nothing but a graphics file emblem or something else trivial and small. Later, after the bogus element has been included in thousands of websites, the original malicious developer changes the harmless content for something more malicious (like a harmful JavaScript redirect). Lesson: Beware of any link to any content not under your direct control because it can be switched out on a moment’s notice without your consent.

Stealth Fallout: Total Loss of Control Hackers have been using stealth methods to hide their maliciousness since the beginning days of malware. Heck, the first IBM-compatible PC virus, Pakistani Brain, from 1986, redirected inquiring eyes to a copy of the unmodified boot sector when viewed by disk editors. When a hacker modifies your system in a stealthy way, it isn’t your system anymore — it belongs to the hackers. The only defenses against stealth attacks are the same defenses recommended for everything (good patching, don’t run untrusted executables, and so on), but it helps to know that if you suspect you’ve been compromised, your initial forensic investigations may be circumvented and fought against by the more innovative malware out there. What you think is a clean system and what really is a clean system may all be controlled by the wily hacker. CIO Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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casefiles REAL PEOPLE

* REAL PROBLEMS * REAL SOLUTIONS

CEMENTING

ITS FUTURE To enable Dalmia Bharat to take advantage of new technologies incorporating mobility and analytics, the company’s IT team embarked on an aggressive consolidation plan. BY VARSHA CHIDAMBARAM Some of India’s most successful companies are conglomerates with large footprints, spanning multiple industries. Traditionally, group companies allow individual businesses to function as separate entities, perhaps to maintain the sanctity of their operations, or perhaps because they are afraid of disrupting established processes. But today's technology landscape is challenging such conservative thinking. How can companies take advantage of big data, analytics, and mobility, among others, if they continue to maintain separate infrastructure stacks? How can IT support dynamic business plans if IT systems are carved in archaic datacenter architectures? These were some of the questions that have troubled Vinit Thakur, group CIO, Dalmia Bharat Group. With a vision for holistic growth buoyed by technological innovation, Thakur led the company on a cloud transformation journey. The Company: The Dalmia Bharat Group is one of India’s most prominent conglomerates with business interests in cement, sugar, refractory, and power. The last few years have seen the company grow through a series of M&As besides organic growth. Some of its notable partnerships include big names such as Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts, and Orissa Cement. In the last 12 months, the company has doubled its user base. In 2012, it acquired companies in the North-east (Adhunik Cement in Meghalaya). “The entire IT organization was segmented,” says Thakur. “Each business had its own infrastructure, applications, and ERP systems. There was no centralization.” The Business Case: At the same time, Thakur could see the writing on the wall. He knew that in the future, all businesses would run on the cloud. “The cloud is the future. We’re moving quickly to a broadband-enabled, tablet-centric environment where

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Vinit Thakur, Group CIO, Dalmia Bharat Group, says he wants the company to be a “complete cloud company.” work gets done from anywhere. The IT organization has to enable this by moving out of on-premise solutions. In short, the IT organization has to be cloud ready,” he says. Besides, with growth on its mind, the company needed fast, agile systems that could scale up and down and be responsive to the needs of the business. At first, the public cloud seemed ideal. Thakur remembers wanting to bypass the whole virtualization layer and move completely to public cloud infrastructure. “But I realized that despite the buzz around the cloud, not all business critical needs can be met on the public cloud. That was a real eye-opener. Solutions that we wanted were not available in the AIX or HP UX platform, in many ways forcing us to consolidate.” The Project: Thakur led a taskforce comprising Dalmia’s IT team and a few vendor representatives. They visited all of the company’s locations and analyzed the needs of every business. What was initially visualized as a consolidation project for the cement business, was expanded to components of the group’s other businesses. “The main driver was to extend and unite our business critical applications and users on a common ERP platform. For that we need to strengthen our underlying infrastructure on a common platform,” says Thakur. A migration plan was drawn up. In a span of six months, Dalmia Bharat successfully migrated its business critical applications and its ERP onto a single virtualized stack that resides in the company’s datacenter. The server and storage needs of the entire group were consolidated on a single virtualized platform, while legacy applications were left in their native state. Currently, the datacenter houses 259 virtual servers, housed in a single stack. Currently, the company is running on a hybrid cloud platform. The company is quickly rolling out public cloud services like Office 360 and a cloud ERP. “We want to move towards being a complete cloud company. We are already re-looking at our

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security policies to get ready for the change. But the ecosystem of partners and service providers has to mature.” The Benefits: Thakur says that the project has already driven service levels to new heights. “Fault lines have dramatically come down, the resilience of the system has increased, the response time of users has shrunk drastically,” he says. The built-in capacity now gives the company

the flexibility to add systems on the fly and enable faster integration with new companies. “We are number four in the cement business. Our aim is to break into the top two. We have been able to protect our legacy systems, while also getting business ready for the future,” says Thakur. CIO Send feedback on this feature to varsha_ chidambaram@idgindia.com

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The Business Conference for IT Leaders

PRESENTS

SPEAKERS

20-22 FEB, 2014 | HYATT REGENCY PUNE

THEMES FOR 2014

RAJEEV AGARWAL Research Vice President, IDG (USA)

SIMON PIFF Associate VP, Enterprise Infrastructure, IDC (APAC)

RICHARD VANCIL

SANDRA NG

Group VP, Executive Advisory Strategies, IDC (USA )

Group VP, Practice Group, IDC (APAC)

JAIDEEP MEHTA

VENU REDDY

VP & Country GM, IDC India

Director, IDC India

SHALIL GUPTA Director Insights and Consulting, IDC India

TITLE PARTNER

VIJAY RAMACHANDRAN

GUNJAN TRIVEDI

Editor-in-Chief, IDG Media

Executive Editor, IDG Media

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Event Organisers

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ESSENTIAL

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A CLOSER LOOK AT BYOD

The advent of BYOD is sending shock waves among tech support teams. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what you need to understand to help them cope.

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BYOD Support BY MARY BRANDEL

TECH SUPPORT | Amid the clamour of bring your own device (BYOD), a question lurks in the background: What happens to technical service and support?" Concerns for the tech support function encompass the extremes, from agents being overwhelmed with calls, to their becoming inhabitants of a help desk ghost town. On the one hand, it's easy to imagine a flood of calls as employees attempt to access wireless networks or synch their e-mail, especially in companies that permit the use of any device type. At the same time, as more people own smartphones, they are increasingly accustomed to resolving issues independently, through online forums, communities and other means of self-support. By 2016, says Gartner analyst Jarod Greene, help desks will see a 25 percent to 30 percent drop in user-initiated call volume, as BYOD drives a companion trend of BYOS, or "bring your own support." So far, with more companies embracing BYOD, no clear answer has emerged. According to an iPass/MobileIron study, 81 percent of companies now allow personal devices to be used in the office, and 54 percent have formalized BYOD policies. What is increasingly clear, however, is that demand for tech support is still strong. In Computerworld's 2014 Forecast survey (Computerworld is a sister publication of CIO), help REAL CIO WORLD | F E B R U A R Y 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

ESSENTIAL technology

desk/technical support was No. 2 on the list of in-demand skills, with 37 percent of respondents planning to hire for this skill. Similarly, Modis, a leading provider of IT staffing, placed help desk at No. 3 in its list of hot jobs in IT, after software developer (including mobile development) and business/data analyst. Meanwhile, HDI—a professional association and certification body for the technical service and support industry— says two-thirds of support centers it recently surveyed are seeing rising volumes of support tickets year over year. Here are five ways that BYOD is changing the way tech support interacts with end users:

Technical Skills Become Secondary Research from Robert Half Technology and HDI found companies struggling to identify qualified candidates across three levels of technical service and support: Frontline/ help desk, levels 2 and 3, and management.

mobile device questions, Atkinson says. "When the BYOD concept arrived a few years ago, people in the support arena were pretty frightened of it," Atkinson says, particularly the idea of having to come up to speed with an array of device types and a potentially more complex technology infrastructure. In fact, though, the increased demand has been more centered around basic communication with clients. With questions like, "I just lost my iPhone," or, "Can I get my calendar and e-mail on my Android," Atkinson says, "tech support's job is to know the company's policy or, if a containerization system needs to be installed on the device, how to walk people through it."

People Skills Come to the Fore According to James Gordon, vice president of IT at Needham Bank, customer support and communication are even more important than familiarity with the latest mobile technology. With escalating help desk volumes, the bank has added support staff. But while Gordon's latest hire was

With more Millennials entering the workforce,support staff must grow adept at responding to more channels of communication—like text,chat,and mobile apps—and knowing the right ones to use to fix the problem at hand. The skills that were highest in demand were customer service, problem-solving/ troubleshooting and communication skills, according to Roy Atkinson, senior writer and analyst at HDI. In fact, technical skills were not among the top five skills necessary for frontline/ help desk professionals, and they were ranked lower than problem-solving/ troubleshooting for levels 2 and 3 support staff in the report. Further, less than onequarter of organizations surveyed by HDI have made staff adjustments to handle 70

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Apple certified, that was just "icing on the cake," he says. "What drove the hire were soft skills, approachability and being good with people." In fact, Gordon says, the help desk needs to be even more adept with holding one-on-one conversations with the bank's iPhone users because iOS does not support remote connection sessions, which the help desk had grown accustomed to using for desktop support. "It goes back to soft skills," he says. "It's absolutely critical that remote users and tech support talk again.

49%

Of Indian CIOs say the added overhead needed to support devices is what concerns them about BYOD. SOURCE: CIO RESEARCH

The end user needs to be a partner in the resolution."

One-on-one Conversations Require Understanding With more one-on-one conversations, support staffers also need to accept that they can address just one issue at a time. "With remote sessions, you could theoretically have one person work on three or four issues at one time, using three or four monitors," Gordon says, "but you can't have four phone conversations at once. You've got to be dedicated to the task at hand and interpret what the user is saying." For instance, users at the bank continually refer to the bank's mobile data management software as "Mobiletron," rather than its actual name, "MobileIron." "You need to cut through what the user is saying and give them support. I call it 'honesty without commentary,'" Gordon says.

New Channels Demand New Ways of Responding With more Millennials entering the workforce, support staff must also grow adept at responding to even more channels of communication—such as text, chat, Web forms and mobile apps—and knowing the right ones to use to fix the problem at

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MOBILE STRATEGY

ESSENTIAL technology

hand. "Things can get obfuscated with chat," Gordon says. "A simple statement like, 'my phone isn't working' can lead to a bevy of questions: Is it broken, is the screen cracked, is the e-mail not working," Gordon says. "Sometimes it's best to take it offline so you can really connect."

Sometimes You've to Say ‘No’

Fools Rush In BYOD MANAGEMENT | A new IDC whitepaper has found companies across the Asia Pacific are investing in enterprise mobility. But many organizations' efforts are being found to be a rushed reaction to the BYOD trend and are leading to high levels of dissatisfaction and costly errors. The paper asserts that organizations need to take a strategic view of enterprise mobility if they are to understand the value it can bring and implement platforms for growth, rather than point solutions to address an immediate need. Charles Reed Anderson, associate vice president, head of telecoms and mobility, IDC Asia/Pacific, said too often companies rush to implement basic enterprise mobility solutions that solve an immediate need, instead of doing the leg work required to develop a comprehensive enterprise mobility strategy. "Rushed approaches have led to high levels of dissatisfaction and costly errors as companies implement the wrong solution," he said. "We recommend that organizations take a step back, assess their current situation and define their long term mobility goals. It can be overwhelming, but there are mobility experts available to guide them and provide strategic support along the way," he said. The whitepaper found that 74 percent of companies are increasing their spend on mobile application deployments, platforms and application lifecycle strategies. The study identifies a trend that is emerging, the Choose Your Own Device (CYOD) model, where IT departments manage the device, but provide users the choice of smartphones or tablets that they can use for work. Under the CYOD model, there is no confusion about who owns the device and data. IT departments are able to secure CYOD devices and as a result, provide users access to various applications and services. — By Brian Karlovsky

IMAGE BY MAST ERF IL E

In the age of BYOD, customer service skills can also involve knowing when to say ‘no’. Many BYOD policies today distinguish between what the support staff will handle on the mobile device and what should be fixed by the vendor. For example, if the keyboard or screen breaks, contact the vendor, and if it's a corporate app or network connectivity issue, ask the support desk. But it's not always easy to turn people away when they're asking for help. "If people want help backing up photos, and we want to maintain an amicable relationship, we don't want to say, 'Go away,'" Gordon says. "We'll give them a brief overview or a Web link. If it only takes two or three minutes, we'll give them 'drive-by support.'" At the same time, support staffers need to know where to draw the line—cordially, Gordon says. A case in point is the common matter of cracked screens. "We might show them where they can order a kit to fix their screen or tell them about a place at the mall," Gordon says. "It's always hard to say no when you're a customer service-oriented person," Atkinson agrees. "Having a well-thoughtout, clearly written and easily explained policy is a huge step toward achieving that." In the end, Gordon believes tech support staff will be called upon to stretch the boundaries of their traditional jobs, even driving to customer sites when necessary. "In this world, it's going to take the ability to help with any issue, whether local or remote," he says. "The skills we need transcend mobility—it's about customer service, and if you delight the customer, they'll keep coming back." CIO

Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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endlines INNOVATION

* BY SUSIE OCHS

When a company targets a tech product exclusively at women, it could end up making a huge pink mistake. This is not the case with Netatmo's June, a new wearable designed to help ladies avoid getting too much skin-damaging sun exposure. June is a UV sensor that looks like a costume-jewellery crystal. It comes with a leather band that makes an attractive bracelet, plus a sportier silicon band for when you're exercising. And you can also attach it to your shirt like a brooch, stick it on your headband Blair Waldorf style, or pop it on your purse strap. But cute as it is, the June is seriously high-tech. When setting up the iPhone app (the app is iOS only for now) you tell it how fair your skin is, on a 1-to–7 scale, and then on a daily basis you can tell it if you're wearing sunscreen or not. The sensor tracks UV intensity in real time—both UVA and UVB rays—indoors and out, in sunny weather and when it's overcast. Throughout the day, the app can show you what percentage of the maximum recommended exposure for your skin type you've gotten. This lets the June app warn you before you get sunburned, so you can go inside, slather on more sunblock, put on a hat, or find some shade.

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IMAGE BY MAST ERFIL E

Don't Get Burned