CIO October 15, 2014 Issue by Sreekanth Sastry

SYSTEM X

JOINS LENOVO.

A BRAND-NEW DAY FOR DATA CENTER INNOVATION. THE POWER OF SYNERGY

The defining moment for data centers is now. As System x® joins forces with Lenovo, it opens up a world of possibilities for businesses to build their future. System x, featuring Intel® Xeon® processors, is a broad portfolio of data center solutions ranked #1 for reliability1, support and customer satisfaction2. With expertise from over thirty years in the x86 industry, we consistently deliver innovations for businesses like yours helping you read the marketplace better and accelerate growth. CREATING TOMORROW’S DATA CENTER

System x in your data center lets you securely handle the simplest to the most complex workloads, make the most of cloud and analytics, and fulfill opportunities. With our heritage and newly gained momentum, we are set to give you the tools to shape your tomorrow.

Lenovo and System x create greater value: Read the TBR review at ibm.com/futureofx/in

ITIC 2014 - 2015 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Report, May 2014. System x Servers ranked #1 in 1Q14 TBR Customer Satisfaction Survey. © Lenovo 2014. All rights reserved. Lenovo, the Lenovo logo, For Those Who Do and System x are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lenovo. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other names and brands may be claimed as property of others.

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FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF PUBLISHER, PRESIDENT & CEO Louis D’Mello E D I TO R I A L

Hangover Cure Why does it require an end of life announcement for considering a migration? One of the more enduring of memories from my childhood has to do with a Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder. This was the high-fidelity beast that brought to life the heavy bass of The Ventures guitars as well as the subtleties of Begum Akhtar’s thumris, in a way that audio cassettes never could. Compiling mixtapes was as much a part of my growing up as was learning to disassemble the recorder’s drive mechanism, since its multiple belts tended to melt given Delhi’s scorching summers. In the 70s and 80s it was possible to get replacements for melted belts, the occasionally blown vacuum tubes, and spool tapes. Later, friends and relatives heading overseas were pressed into carting back the essential supplies. Of course, a time came when the last set of belts gave up the ghost and the spools turned no more. We found a use for the recorder even then—its amplifier was going strong over 20 years after purchase. It’s quite a bit like the legacy apps that I come across in enterprises all across India. These are systems that were rolled out through an investment of time, effort and nottoo-easy-to-come-by funds. You and your teams put these into place, so I understand that it can’t be easy to let go. These systems are often all about a high order of ‘business-IT alignment’, so I do appreciate that lines of business are reluctant to swap them for a newer, shinier technology. But, do we really see the true cost of maintaining such apps and systems? Or, the expense of ensuring that we have the people who know all about them? Enterprise IT is a work in progress, so why then does it so often require technology providers to announce an end of life for IT teams to consider a migration? And, sometimes not even then. When I see the enterprise IT’s ‘love’ for legacy I’m reminded of that tape player that still inhabits my parents home over three decades later. It’s sentiment that keeps it there. What’s your reason?

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF EXECUTIVE EDITOR DEPUTY EDITOR FEATURES EDITOR ASSISTANT EDITORS

Vijay Ramachandran Yogesh Gupta Sunil Shah Shardha Subramanian Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENTS Aritra Sarkhel, Shubhra Rishi, Shweta Rao SENIOR COPY EDITOR Vinay Kumaar VIDEO EDITORS Kshitish B.S., Vasu N. Arjun LEAD DESIGNERS Suresh Nair, Vikas Kapoor SENIOR DESIGNERS Unnikrishnan A.V. TRAINEE JOURNALISTS Bhavika Bhuwalka, Ishan Bhattacharya, Madhav Mohan, Mayukh Mukherjee, Sejuti Das Vaishnavi Desai SALES & MARKETING PRESIDENT SALES & MARKETING VICE PRESIDENT SALES GM MARKETING GENERAL MANAGER SALES MANAGER KEY ACCOUNTS MANAGER SALES SUPPORT SR. MARKETING ASSOCIATES

Sudhir Kamath Sudhir Argula Siddharth Singh Jaideep M. Sakshee Bagri Nadira Hyder Arjun Punchappady, Benjamin Jeevanraj, Cleanne Serrao, Margaret DCosta MARKETING ASSOCIATE Varsh Shetty LEAD DESIGNER Jithesh C.C. SENIOR DESIGNER Laaljith C.K. MANAGEMENT TRAINEES Aditya Sawant, Bhavya Mishra, Brijesh Saxena, Chitiz Gupta, Deepali Patel, Deepinder Singh, Eshant Oguri, Mayur Shah, R. Venkat Raman O P E R AT I O N S

VICE PRESIDENT HR & OPERATIONS FINANCIAL CONTROLLER CIO SR. MANAGER OPERATIONS SR. MANAGER ACCOUNTS SR. MANAGER PRODUCTION MANAGER OPERATIONS EA TO THE CEO MANAGER CREDIT CONTROL ASSISTANT MGR. ACCOUNTS

Rupesh Sreedharan Sivaramakrishnan T.P. Pavan Mehra Ajay Adhikari, Pooja Chhabra Sasi Kumar V. T.K. Karunakaran Dinesh P., Tharuna Paul Prachi Gupta Poornima

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission from the publisher. Address requests for customized reprints to IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India. IDG Media Private Limited is an IDG (International Data Group) company.

Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief vijay_r@cio.in VO L /9 | I SSU E/12

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.

IDG Offices in India are listed on the next page

REAL CIO WORLD | J U N E 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

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contents OCTOBER 15, 2014 | VOL/9 | ISSUE/12

72 | Buying from

a Startup

FEATURE | IT STRATEGY Get ready for radical changes in software purchasing. By Howard Baldwin

Case Files 58 | NABARD CLOUD COMPUTING How NABARD introduced cloud computing in rural India and revolutionized both state and co-operative banks. By Shubhra Rishi

62 | Biocon

3 8 38 | Good Medicine

COVER DESIGN BY UNN IK RISH NAN AV

COVER STORY | HEALTHCARE CIOs in the healthcare industry have all the challenges of their non-healthcare peers—and one additional one: Keep patients alive and healthy. It’s a tough ask, this life and death responsibility, but these CIOs are finding new ways IT can help. By Stephanie Overby with inputs from Ishan Bhattacharya and Shubhra Rishi

MOBILITY How a mobility-based CRM system on the cloud helped Biocon increase productivity and customer satisfaction. By Madhav Mohan

5 8

64 | Build a Developer Talent Pipeline FEATURE | STAFF MANAGEMENT In the digital era, it is important to build a talent pipeline of software developers to drive business and ensure greater success. By Sharon Florentine

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DEPARTMENTS 1 | From the Editor-in-Chief Hangover Cure By Vijay Ramachandran 7|

Trendlines

5 0

Have Arrived Auto | Make Way for Self-service Cars Wearables | A Second Skin for Space Tour Electronics | Lens-less Camera for Clear Vision By the Numbers | Big Data Gains Ground

22 | Alert Privacy | Social Media Plays Spy CSO Role | CISOs Struggle for Respect from Peers

50 | The Social Media Brandwagon

77 | Essential Technology

CXO AGENDA | MARKETING Samar Singh Shekhawat, SVP-Marketing, United Breweries, talks about why businesses should get on social media and how it can enhance a brandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relationship with its consumers. By Shubhra Rishi

Columns

30 | IT at Your Service IT MANAGEMENT It is necessary to build a client-focused IT culture as the goal is to create positive, memorable experiences for clients.

Mobility | The Mobile Revolution Enterprises | Mobile Dead End

80 | Endlines Robotics | Robot to the Rescue By Sharon Gaudin

3 4

By Lou Markstrom

34 | The Identity Trivia SOCIAL MEDIA Suddenly, major tech companies are flipping out, remaking themselves to be more like their competitors. By Mike Elgan

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E D I T E D B Y VA I S H N AV I J . D E S A I

NEW

HOT

UNEXPECTED

Colonizing Mars

Other than hoping to save the human species, Musk also said colonizing Mars would be thrilling. “It would be just the greatest adventure ever,” he said. SpaceX is scheduled to launch a resupply mission to the space station on September 20 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Along with cargo of food and equipment, the spacecraft also will carry what’s been dubbed the ISS-RapidScat instrument. —By Sharon Gaudin

TRENDLINES

POPULAR SCIENCE Elon Musk, CEO and co-founder of SpaceX, not only wants to send astronauts to Mars, he wants to build a city there. SpaceX is vying with Boeing Co. for a project that would have astronauts in spacecraft launching from US soil again. Since the US retired its fleet of space shuttles in 2011, NASA has been dependent on Russia to ferry its astronauts back and forth to the International Space Station. That arrangement has proved to be increasingly sticky given the increased tensions between the two countries since Russia has aggressively moved to annex Ukraine. NASA executives hope to have the spacecraft and launching capabilities to send humans into orbit by 2017. SpaceX, one of two private companies ferrying supplies, food and scientific experiments to the space shuttle, wants to be the company ferrying humans as well. And in a press conference, Musk reportedly reiterated that he wants to populate Mars and he wants SpaceX to be the company at the core of that project. In a press conference, Musk echoed what he said over the summer in an interview with Stephen Colbert, host of the TV show, The Colbert Report.

A Toilet that Tweets

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via a video Skype session.Ruecker is seeking a job in engineering management or project management. If @iotoilets draws some attention to his experience, skills and creativity and leads to job prospects, so much the better, he said. The genesis of the project began with a series a Tweets from a manager at his former firm, Taneli Tikka, a “successful serial entrepreneur,” said Ruecker. Tikka wrote: “Silly sensor IoT question: does anybody know about “smart toilets & sinks” something that measures liquid flow? # of flushes? :)” Ruecker Tweeted back and said he could. Ruecker gutted a servo motor to get its potentiometer, a resistor used to control a device, and created a

plastic arm using zip tie cut to length. Styrofoam acts as the float in the tank. “The arm translates water level inside the tank into a circular motion that can then be read as a function of the resistance of the potentiometer,” said Ruecker. The device is capable of precise measurements, but the Twitter feed is only showing rounded off usages. Ruecker said he plans to improve the accuracy of the reported values. From an environmental perspective, the idea of knowing how much potable water is being flushed away may be a good thing. Ruecker says it also illustrates yet another way how a connected home can invade privacy. —By Patrick Thibodeau REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

IMAGE: PCWO RL D.COM

Take Thomas Ruecker’s project. With parts from an electric motor, a few household items, an opensource hardware board running Linux, and some coding, he built a connected toilet that Tweets with each flush. The first reaction to the Twitter feed at @iotoilets may be a chuckle. But the idea behind this and what it illustrates is serious. It tracks water usage, offers a warning about the future of privacy in the Internet of Things, and may say something about the modern job hunt. Ruecker built his device on a recent long weekend after he was laid off as an open source evangelist at a technology firm undergoing “rightsizing,” as he put it. He lives in Finland, and was interviewed

INTERNET

A Nobel Twist The Ig Nobels are the bizzaro counterpart to the prestigious Nobel prizes, rewarding the most offbeat, weird, gross or otherwise strange contributions to science and human culture every year, with a ceremony that contains light opera, paper airplanes and plenty of other schtick spread in between the actual presentation of the awards. An addition wrinkle is that many of the actual award presenters are genuine Nobel laureates themselves. Order is kept by an eight-year old girl, Miss SweetiePoo, who marches over to speakers who exceed their 60-second time limit and says “please stop, I’m bored” until they wrap up. The bacon thing was part of an experiment in curing serious nosebleeds with salted pork, while the polar bear costumes were meant to help researchers determine whether reindeer behaved differently around humans in said costumes. I’m still not entirely certain how the discovery about dogs arranging their hindquarters based on the Earth’s magnetic fields was made, but made it was.

Other winners included: A team that studied whether living with a cat was bad for your mental health. A study that suggested that people who stay up late are more likely to display “dark triad” personality traits–narcissistic, manipulative and psychopathic. An attempt to understand what’s going on in the brains of people who see Jesus Christ in slices of toast. A test to determine whether people feel more pain, while being shot in the hand by a laser, depending on whether they’re looking at a pretty picture or an ugly one. The government of Italy, for expanding the nominal size of its economy by including revenues from prostitution, illegal drug sales, smuggling, and other types of criminal activity. —By Jon Gold 8

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Feed the Popular Facebook users will soon start to see more posts higher in their feeds tied to popular events or topics of conversation, with less relevant posts getting pushed farther down. The change comes courtesy of an update to Facebook’s news feed algorithm, focused on giving users “more timely stories.” It affects posts both from users’ friends and from pages to which they’re connected. Facebook wants more of its users to engage on the site when they might be watching the same sports game or TV show—something that already happens on Twitter—and then brush their posts under the carpet when the event’s over or the topic fizzles out. This update has the potential to advance the company’s efforts in the area of news delivery. It’s a departure from the site’s roots as a means for solely keeping in touch with family and friends. The update is built around two changes. First, posts that are related to trending topics will appear higher and faster in the feed, Facebook said. When a friend or a Page to which you’re connected posts about something that’s currently a hot topic of conversation on the site, the post is more likely to appear higher in the feed. Facebook users can already get a sense of what’s popular on the site by looking at the “trending” topics section in the right-hand column, which Facebook rolled out earlier this year. Second, Facebook said it would be considering not just the number of likes that posts receive in determining their placement, but when people choose to like, comment and share. For people who use Facebook to stay on top of news and events, that could be a nice change. But for others who log in less frequently, they may end up missing out on certain types of posts. Twitter, at least at the moment, does not use a feed filtering algorithm like Facebook does. Facebook walks a tricky line between connecting people and providing them with information that Facebook deems relevant.

SOCIAL MEDIA

—By Zach Miners

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IM AG E : THIN KSTOCKPHOTOS

TRENDLINES

E D U C AT I O N

Ensuring Energy Availability and Efficiency Through Secure Power Keeping IT systems up and running, in the face of fast-depleting energy resources, poses a serious challenge to IT leaders. What they need is a robust, reliable, and highly-available power infrastructure. Here’s how Schneider Electric promises just that.

he one serious energy challenge that enterprises are facing today is that their energy demands will double by 2030, while they need to simultaneously halve their CO2 emissions. In their quest to achieve these conflicting objectives, organizations run the risk of adopting energy-saving initiatives which could have serious implications such as a drastic rise in energy prices, frequent power outages, climate change, and conflicts over access to and control of resources. Organizations, however, can overcome all these issues by implementing integrated energy management solutions for industry, infrastructure, and buildings; and changing their design and manufacturing processes. By partnering with an industry leader such as Schneider Electric, organizations together can save up to 30 percent of three-quarters of the world’s final energy consumption in the short run. This is what makes Schneider Electric’s Secure Power Systems portfolio a leader in the segment.

These solutions are well-suited for critical applications in areas such as semiconductors, healthcare, marine, oil and gas, energy and power plants, water/waste treatment, airports, transportation, and mining.

Why Schneider Electric?

Adaptability: Whatever an enterprise’s harshest constraints—air saturated with moisture or dust, seismic zones, vibrations, security, among others—Schneider Electric’s highly-skilled project teams put together their core competences to design the best Secure Power Solution anywhere in the world—on schedule.

Schneider Electric, which has finetuned and perfected its power systems and solutions over the years, offers a complete electrical distribution architecture that will maximize uptime, and adaptable modular solutions with very low TCO. The resulting energy efficiency and maintenance optimization can help organizations save up to 30 percent on operating costs. Additionally, the presence of service teams can help improve performance throughout the complete lifecycle, ensuring total reliability and peace of mind.

Three Key Benefits

Schneider Electric’s Secure Power Systems has been at the forefront mainly because they assure availability, adaptability, and performance of organizations’ power infrastructure. Availability: Schneider Electric’s unique project management approach ensures that organizations get a well-thoughtout global solution based either on APC by Schneider Electric systems or on GUTOR by Schneider Electric with its totally customized systems and architectures, taking into consideration the specific constraints of a business and its operating environment.

Performance: Schneider Electric’s equation of peak performance and efficiency depends on the capability to offer a perfectly-tailored response to the very specific needs of each industry, infrastructure and building. The initial design and planning consultation is a

key stage to ensure a successful outcome: A global Secure Power System offering longterm optimized performance with significant energy and cost savings. Also, Schneider Electric prides itself for the service excellence it delivers. It provides companies with the expertise, services, and support of a trusted adviser; enabling organizations to benefit from the requisite level of care and uncompromising maintenance that prolongs the life of systems. It also ensures an optimized return on investments through longevity, peak performance, efficiency, and cost savings.

The Schneider Electric Commitment To power, protect, cool and maintain critical applications and facilities To plan and design, build and implement projects, whatever the constraints To give enterprises the benefit of highly-trained and responsive teams, ensuring your system is up-and-running rapidly

This feature is brought to you by

For more information and stories, visit: http://www.greenenterpriseit.com/ Contact Us: Email: indiainfo@apcc.com Phone: 1800 4254 272

IDG SERVICES

Ant-sized Radio Engineers at Stanford University have developed a tiny radio that’s about as big as an ant and that’s cheap and small enough that it could help realize the “Internet of things”—the world of everyday objects that send and receive data via the Internet. The device, which could cost pennies to make, is expected to help enable the Internet of things The radio is built on a piece of silicon that measures just a few millimeters on each side. Several tens of them can fit on the top of a US penny and the radio itself is expected to cost only a few pennies to manufacture in mass quantities. Part of the secret to the radio’s size is its lack of a battery. Its power requirements are sufficiently frugal that it can harvest the energy it needs from nearby radio fields, such as those from a reader device when it’s brought nearby. RFID tags and contactless smartcards can get their power the same way, drawing energy from a radio source, but Stanford’s radio has more processing power than those simpler devices, a university representative said. That means it could query a sensor for its data, for instance, and transmit it when required. The device operates in the 24GHz and 60GHz bands, suitable for communications over a few tens of centimeters. Engineers envisage a day when trillions of objects are connected via tiny radios to the Internet.

—By Martyn Williams

Safety First SECURITY Indian firms are increasing investments in security, thanks to a spate of breaches and new threats that are accompanying new technologies.

CIOs are investing in:

42%

Improving security and risk mitigation

corporate 30% Securing or customer data

21%

Securing the cloud

13%

Mobile security Source: CIO Mid-year Review 2014

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Cheetah Unleashed R O B O T I C S Robots with legs should be able to go where wheeled robots cannot—over obstacles and crevices. A team of researchers at MIT may have figured out a way to make a four-legged, cheetah-like robot run and jump more gracefully and efficiently. To get there, they studied animals like dogs and cats and used that biological information to create a new algorithm for bounding. “Our robot is about 20 times more efficient than other quadruped robots,” Sangbae Kim, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, told Computerworld. The robot, which is about 3 feet tall and 3 feet long, can sprint up to 10 mph. It also can jump a foot high and make a leap more than a foot long. Kim said the Cheetah robot has used only about 40 percent of its power, and is expected to eventually jump much higher and reach a running speed of about 30 mph. The researchers are slowing increasing the robot’s power so they don’t risk damaging it. Kim said the key to the bounding algorithm lies in programming each of the robot’s legs to exert a specific amount of force in that moment when the feet hit the ground. “We studied a lot of biology,” he said “I studied a lot of mechanics of quadrupeds, like cats and dogs. We studied how the brain controls the legs. To know how much force I need to exert each step, I need to know so much about the mechanics.” Once the engineers calculated how long a leg–whether biological or robotic–needs to be on the ground and how long in the air, they were able to figure out how much force to apply to that leg to compensate for the gravitational force. To enable the robot to jump, they simply tripled the force. “Most robots are sluggish and heavy, and thus they cannot control force in high-speed situations,” Kim said. “That’s what makes the MIT Cheetah so special. You can actually control the force profile for a very short period of time, followed by a hefty impact with the ground, which makes it more stable, agile, and dynamic.”

—By Sharon Gaudin

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IMAGE CREDIT: JOSE- LUIS OLIVARES/MIT

TRENDLINES

DEVICES

Brain-inspired Computers Have Arrived synapses, much larger than the 2011 design of roughly 260,000 synapses. IBM has also tethered 16 of these chips together in four four-by-four arrays, which collectively offer the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses, showing that the design can be easily scaled up for larger implementations. The chips represent a radical break in design from today’s von Neumann architecture of computing, where computations are quickly made in a serial fashion. This chip architecture approximated how the human brain works, in that each “neurosynaptic core” has its own memory (“synapses”), a processor (“neuron”) and communication conduit (“axons”), which all operate together in an event-driven fashion. By working together, these cores could provide nuanced pattern recognition and other sensing capabilities, in much the same way a brain does. Like the brain, this chip requires very little power—only 70mW during a typical operation, which is an order of magnitude lower than what standard processors would require to execute the same operations. For instance, a processor could be embedded in a mobile device or a sensor. —By Joab Jackson

Make Way for Self-Service Cars If you get stuck in traffic a lot, your next car may be able to talk to other vehicles and help keep you off jammed roads. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used virtual tokens, cellphones and vehicle-to-vehicle wireless LANs to build a system for allocating the limited space available on major thoroughfares. It doesn’t require any physical infrastructure, such as tollbooths, so it could be implemented quickly almost anywhere, they said. Instead of using cameras or electronic tollbooths by the roadway to detect cars passing a certain point, the MIT system, called RoadRunner, is based on GPS (Global Positioning System) information from the driver’s cellphone in each car. As more cars get connected to the Internet, the system may be able to go into the car itself, according to Jason Gao, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science who developed the system with Professor Li-Shiuan Peh. RoadRunner is designed to solve the problem of congested roads, with or without a government charging tolls for driving

AU TO

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in crowded areas during rush hour. Once it detects that a particular route is crowded, RoadRunner generates driving directions to approaching cars that recommend a different way to go. At the heart of RoadRunner is a limited set of tokens that the system assigns to vehicles within the affected area. When the road isn’t crowded, every driver entering the zone receives a token, but as it fills up, later arrivals get the alternate driving directions instead. There’s nothing to stop a car from crossing the line without a token, but that action could trigger a fine if law enforcement wanted to impose one. By contrast, RoadRunner can be set up in any area, based on GPS coordinates, and can point drivers to alternative routes to help them avoid the congested area. Gao ran simulations with RoadRunner using data from the Land Transit Authority Gao and Peh also tested RoadRunner on 10 cars in Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT’s hometown. —By Stephen Lawson REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

TRENDLINES

C O M P O N E N T S IBM has taken another step toward its ambitious goal of creating a processor that acts like a human brain, creating a second, more advanced chip that mimics the way the mammalian brain operates. “It’s a new landmark of the brain-inspired computers,” said Dharmendra Modha, IBM Research fellow and chief scientist focusing on brain-inspired computing. Researchers from Cornell Tech helped design this chip as well. The researchers describe the chip in this week’s issue of the Science Journal. Once commercialized, such a chip could act as a low-power sensor for a range of embedded and portable devices. “It could become the silicon brain for the ‘Internet of things,’” Modha said. “It could transform the mobile experience as we know it.” The processor could also be planted in large supercomputers to boost the speed of machine learning and other neural network-based computations. The new processor, code-named “TrueNorth,” has 5.4 billion transistors woven into an on-chip network of 4,096 neurosynaptic cores, producing the equivalent of 256 million

A Second Skin for Space Tour

TRENDLINES

W E A R A B L E S As NASA works to one day send astronauts to asteroids and eventually to Mars, the space agency is also looking for new spacesuits that will keep astronauts safe, while enabling them to move freely. Scientists at MIT say they are making such a spacesuit—one that is less bulky than the typical gas-pressurized suits and more like a second skin. “With conventional spacesuits, you’re essentially in a balloon of gas that’s providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere [of pressure,] to keep you alive in the vacuum of space,” said Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, in a statement. “We want to achieve that same pressurization, but through mechanical counterpressure—applying the pressure directly to the skin, thus avoiding the gas pressure altogether. Ultimately, the big advantage is mobility, and a very lightweight suit for planetary exploration.” Newman has worked for 10 years to design a form-fitting, flexible spacesuit. She’s found the material needed and the technology to build a suit that is not bulky like the suits that astronauts wore to walk on the moon more than 40 years ago and as recently as on a spacewalk. The new technology could also lead to spacesuits that are lightweight, stretchy and form to an astronaut’s body like a shrink-wrapped second skin. This second-skin spacesuit is expected to be built out of a nickel-titanium shape-memory alloy, a smart material lined with

tiny muscle-like coils that contract when heated. The material “remembers” an engineered shape and, when heated, can spring back to that shape. When heated, the material compresses with so much force that it acts as a pressurized suit, equaled the pressure required to fully support an astronaut in space. To take the suit off, the astronaut would only have to apply modest force, returning the suit to its looser form, according to MIT. They applied a current to the cuff to generate heat. When the cuff reached a specific temperature, the coils inside the material contracted into their “remembered” form, just as they would need to in order to form a second-skin-like spacesuit. “These are basically self-closing buckles,” said Bradley Holschuh, an MIT Ph.D candidate, who conceived the coil design. “Once you put the suit on, you can run a current through all these little features, and the suit will shrink-wrap you, and pull closed.”

—By Sharon Gaudin

E L E C T R O N I C S There’s a type of camera technology emerging with a view of the world similar to what a honey bee sees. The images appear blurry and hazy, but if you’re a bee, good enough for finding flowers and people to sting. It could also be perfect for the Internet of Things by making it cheap to add vision capability to just about anything. That’s the idea put forth by Rambus, a company that designs technologies and then licenses them, for its lens-less sensor. The sensor captures light and relies on computation to shape the data into an image that’s good enough to tell whether someone is in a room or a door has been left open. It can also be used to activate an optical lens if a higherresolution image is needed. The key benefits of the lens-less technology are

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its size, cost, and power usage. “What we think this technology will enable is eyes everywhere,” said Patrick Gill, senior research scientist at Rambus. He said the technology can cut the cost of putting low-resolution imaging onto an IoT device “by a factor of 10.” The lens-less sensor can be manufactured using processes now used for other sensors. It is very inexpensive for product makers to add sensors that detect motion, vibrations, temperature, pressure, and noise because these microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are made with the same low-cost wafer fabrication processes used for chip manufacturing. These sensors only cost pennies. A combination of improved manufacturing techniques and demand is driving prices down, said

Randall Restle, director of applications engineering at Digi-Key, a major electronic components distributor. The lens-less approach may sacrifice high resolution, but “the animal kingdom has shown that that kind of level of vision can be sufficient to navigate environments,” said Gill. The $1 (about Rs 60) estimate can be seen as a basic cost for adding a network and processor chip, excluding integration costs, said Nick Jones, an analyst at Gartner. He’s also assuming that embedded software costs will be “approximately zero” since those are amortized across a large number of devices. Gartner’s prediction doesn’t assume that all the protocols and interoperability issues will get sorted out. — By Patrick Thibodeau

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PHOTO- IL LUSTRATIO N: JOSE-LUIS OL IVARES/MIT

Lens-less Camera for Clear Vision

C O M P I L E D B Y I S H A N B H AT TA C H A RYA

Best Practices

Big Data Gains Ground Even though there has been a lot said in the past few years about big data and how it is going to change the way businesses operate, Indian CIOs may not be entirely convinced yet, but they seem to acknowledge its potential. According to the State of the CIO Mid-Year Review 2014 survey, 26 percent of Indian CIOs believe that big data is an over-hyped technology. But the number of CIOs who believe big data is over-hyped is coming down. Last year, 33 percent of Indian CIOs said big data is an over-hyped technology, that’s 7 percent higher than this year. As much as 29 percent of CIOs in the healthcare and pharma sector believe that big data is an over-hyped technology. That’s fewer than last year’s number of 36 percent. Interest among Indian CIOs in the IT/ITeS sector regarding big data has gone up this year compared to last year. In 2013, 44 percent of Indian CIOs from the IT/ ITeS sector thought big data was an over-hyped technology, this year the number stands at 29 percent. That was not the case in the services sector. The 2014 survey revealed that 30 percent of Indian CIOs in the services sector believe that big data is over-hyped. In 2013, that number was 25 percent. There still aren’t many takers for big data but the technology has made some in-roads into the Indian CIO’s mindspace.

DISTINGUISH between data and big data to generate valuable information for your company.

DEPLOY distinct tools and management approaches for higher volume, complexity, and dynamic data processing.

STRATEGIZE and plan well to manage large volumes of both structured and unstructured data.

TRENDLINES

The number of Indian CIOs saying that big data is a over-hyped technology has come down.

Big Data, Big Deal? CIOs from different sectors believe big data is over-hyped.

26%

Of Indian CIOs believe that big data is an over hyped technology—down from 33 percent in 2013.

30% Services

29% Healthcare and pharma

29%

48%

of Indian CIOs say that their organizations do not distinguish big data from data.

IT/ITeS SOURCE:CIO MID-YEAR REVIEW 2014

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Social Media Plays Spy S

IMAGES BY THINKSTOCKPHOTOS.IN

ome companies go to a lot of trouble trying to keep their intellectual property and corporate secrets safe. Naturally, they’re on the lookout for corporate spies and extortion-minded cyber thieves, as well as insiders turned Benedict Arnolds. Few of them, though, give much thought to employees who unintentionally leak sensitive data. The problem is that the ways of doing that just keep growing, and most people are blissfully unaware of the dangers. Social media has become a big part of this problem. Here’s an example. You would be amazed how many corporate coders are apt to include in their LinkedIn profiles deeply detailed accounts of things like disasters they helped avert at their company. Say that a programmer helped fix a deeply flawed database implementation. It wouldn’t be unusual for him to go on

LinkedIn and name specific vendor products used and provide lots of specifics about how bad the problem was and how he helped craft a nontraditional fix. The coder’s intent is to tout his own creativity and resourcefulness. But one result is that a lot of information that his employer would prefer to keep quiet is visible to just about anyone. And there are people who will go looking for that sort of thing, including competitors, financial analysts and reporters. But there are subtler ways to give away information without ever suspecting that you had done so. Let’s say that you and some co-workers take a business trip together. When you go out to dinner one night, one of you posts a photo

of your smiling faces to Facebook or Instagram. It all looks like innocent fun. And it would be, except that the photo probably carries geotag information that can tell anyone who cares to know your precise location. If the point of the trip is to save the relationship with your company’s biggest customer, a rival might be able to make something out of repeated trips to that customer’s locale. If you’re visiting a company that is being confidentially considered for acquisition, that geotagged photo could tip your hand. One employer that takes the dangers of geotagging seriously is the US Army. It has instructed personnel to always disable geotagging. For the military, of

Confidence Takes A Dip FINDINGS

Indian organizations are not as confident about the effectiveness of security activities as they were a year ago. New and emerging technologies have dented their confidence.

Security Activities Confidence Level

39%

Very confident

37%

Somewhat confident

11%

Not very confident Not at all confident

35%

Of Indian CIOs are confident that their partners’ IS activities are effective. SOURCE: GISS 2014

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EVENT REPORT AMAZON WEB SERVICES

Unearthing the

Cloud’s Real Value Cloud computing has long progressed from being an “emerging” trend. Today, it’s a valuable technology that offers real benefits to organizations. In a recent roundtable, CIOs brainstormed for strategies to leverage the complete potential of the cloud. By Vinay Kumaar

ore than ever, today’s CIOs, feel the pressure to provide IT services that keep up with the business—and that’s making them look at a wider mix of IT delivery mechanisms. The cloud has emerged as a viable option, thanks to the cost savings, flexibility, and speed-to-market it offers. To know how IT decision-makers are handling changes in service delivery and consumption models, and to discuss how cloud computing can help them in this journey, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Intel, in association with CIO magazine, recently conducted a roundtable in Bangalore. The belief that cloud computing can help organizations be more flexible, scalable, secure, and agile has gotten stronger over time. In fact, in some organizations, CIOs wish to implement ‘cloud-only’ and ‘cloud-first’ IT strategies. “Personally, unless there’s strict regulation against it, I’d rather do everything on the cloud,” said Satish Gidugu, CTO, Medi Assist. “The world is moving towards an application architecture where everything runs in the browser, where everything is on mobile devices, and where everything is instant. I also believe cloud providers can do a better job of setting up the necessary infrastructure to handle these demands—rather than each CIO trying to build these capabilities in-house.” Today’s tough economic conditions demand that organizations be more agile and that they deliver products and services as rapidly as possible. This need for agility is, in turn, forcing business leaders to demand quicker turnaround times from their IT counterparts. Venkata Raman, head-IT at MTR Foods, shared an example of how the cloud can help

with this agenda. “Recently, a business leader in my organization discovered two cloud services that could be used effectively for our employee rewards and recognition program. Creating something similar from scratch would have required a lot of time and effort. Since such services are already available on the cloud, we make good use of them.” However, CIOs at some enterprises are still apprehensive about moving mission-critical applications to the cloud. Highlighting this, Vijay Doddavaram, GM-ITS India, Texas Instruments, said, “Like in most organizations, there are some workflows we don’t care about. We’re moving those to the cloud. For us, the really interesting application of cloud computing would be getting a hybrid model for core applications such as EDA (Electronic Design Automation).” On the other hand, security, which used to be a concern among CIOs during the cloud’s infancy, isn’t so anymore. In fact, the cloud has improved the security of many enterprises. “A lot of customers tell us that their security posture has improved greatly after moving to AWS cloud,” said Bikram Singh Bedi, Head of India, Amazon Web Services India. “We have the important industry security certifications such as SAS 70, ISO 27001, and PCI-DSS compliance, among others. We listen closely to our customers on what are important to them; innovate quickly; and implement new features, updates, and services on the AWS cloud platform so that all our customers can benefit.” Intel has also been making massive strides in bolstering cloud environments. “Intel has been investing in the cloud space for a long

time now,” said Mukesh Gangadhar, tech lead-Datacenter at Intel. “Since virtualization is the foundation of cloud computing, you need strong hardware capabilities that can not only do virtualization better, but can also cater to your SLAs better. There is a tag called “Powered by Intel Cloud Technology” which tells you what Intel server you’re running on. This means you can be confident of the performance you can get from the cloud infrastructure you’ve deployed. Additionally, Intel has also been making huge investments to ensure security across all aspects of its hardware platforms.” Bedi also shared a general suggestion around how IT decision-makers can make the best use of cloud computing. “Engage in a detailed discussion with your service provider. AWS has been in the cloud business for more than eight years. Chances are that if you have an issue or a problem, we’d have solved it for somebody else in the past,” he said. All CIOs were of the opinion that cloud computing is here to stay. They also agreed that the flexibility and agility that cloud services provide the IT team and lines of business would hasten cloud adoption.

This event report is brought to you by IDG Services in association with Amazon Web Services and Intel

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course, this amounts to a matter of life or death. A geotagged photo could broadcast the exact location of a unit. And it’s not just a hypothetical danger. Steve Warren, deputy G2 for the Maneuver Center of Excellence, is quoted on the Army’s website regarding an event that occurred in 2007: “When a new fleet of helicopters arrived with an aviation unit at a base in Iraq, some Soldiers took pictures on the flight line. From the photos that were uploaded to the Internet, the enemy was able to determine the exact location of the helicopters inside the compound and conduct a mortar attack, destroying four of the AH-64 Apaches.” Your enterprise may not have Apache helicopters to protect, but it does have information that’s every bit as valuable. And as I said, the ways of unintentionally exposing data are growing. Twitter recently started allowing its network to mark the precise location of every tweet. This development has already been blamed for disclosing the home addresses of celebrities. But it won’t be a problem just for celebrities. It can be a problem for your company if your employees tweet from the road. But this should be an easy problem to address, right? Just tell your employees to disable the location option on Twitter. Maybe not, if IBM Research is to be believed. It has developed an algorithm that it claims can analyze anyone’s last 200 tweets and determine his or her city with almost 70 percent accuracy. I have my doubts about assumptions

behind this algorithm, though. For example, tweeting “Let’s Go Red Sox” is taken to be evidence of Boston-area residency, but not all Red Sox fans live in the Boston area, and I can think of several reasons for a non-fan to tweet “Let’s Go Red Sox.” There are also assumptions about placing tweeters in specific time zones based on the frequency of their tweets in the course of each day, but those assumptions are fairly easy to dismantle. Maybe such faulty assumptions are what kept the tested accuracy of the algorithm down to 70 percent. Not that social media sites are the only way to unintentionally reveal information. Far from it. Consider publications. Ars Technica ran a story in which the author was closely tracked for several days—by Ars Technica. Like many websites that require logins, Ars Technica records the date, time and IP address that a user logs in from. The publication’s normal practice is to discard all but the last of these records. However, it made an exception for Editor Cyrus Farivar, who wanted to see just what is possible with such activity logs. As it turns out, the answer is, “A lot.” The analysis revealed where Farivar was when he logged in. It showed what he was reading. It showed how long he spent online. The information could be highly specific. Farivar writes, “In one instance, on Thursday February 6, at 9:30 am, I was logged in at a particular San

Francisco IP address. Looking up that IP on myip.ms turned up not only the city, but one of two possible street addresses as well.” The results of Farivar’s experiment suggest that another publication might have data showing that several people in your company took a sudden interest in reading about some obscure emerging technology. That information quite likely carries implications about your company’s plans. And it is entirely out of your control and in the hands of a for-profit company that sells information. Companies can’t possibly approve all social media comments and photos their employees post; those could amount to millions per day for the largest enterprises. And I would hope that companies would realize what a bad policy that would be. What they need to do is to implement strict rules and guidelines about what can’t be disclosed, and then they must raise awareness among their employees about the dangers that lurk in social media. If they have confidentiality rules already in place, they need to make sure that they explicitly mention social media. In other words, employees must become informed self-censors, always careful not to make inappropriate public posts that could be discovered by management. CIO Al Sacco covers mobile/wireless for CIO.com. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

[ONE LINER:]

IS and IT should work in a way that IT deploys a tech without worrying about threats and IS analyzes risk without worrying about tech.”

—VISHAL SALVI, CISO, HDFC BANK

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SPECIAL EVENT COVERAGE

Transforming IT Infrastructure

Into Business Strength The launch of Tata Communications’ newest data centre in New Delhi featured IT and business experts speaking on the latest technology trends and data centre strategies. Here are some insights that the audience took away from the event. By Shweta Rao

ata centres are fast becoming an integral component of the IT infrastructure and players in the data centre business have braced themselves to leverage a differentiation factor in the market. Today, a data centre is no longer considered a ‘corner room’ infrastructure but instead, is seen as the heart of the digital infrastructure. CIOs of leading Indian organizations were present at the launch of Tata Communications’ 44th data centre, which is located in the heart of New Delhi: Greater Kailash. This data centre is a step forward in helping Tata Communications achieve its overall objective of strengthening its global data centre footprint.

Growing Along the lines of Market Demands As part of the launch, Vinod Kumar, MD & CEO, Tata Communications, spoke in detail about the trends that the company sees in the market and about its data centre within the context of enterprise IT. “Earlier this year, Gartner recognized us as a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for Global Network Service Providers1, along with a bunch of players who have been in this space for a long time and have big home markets. We are proud to be in the same quadrant as them because it means we’re offering solutions that are truly global in nature,” he said. “Our customers have also helped us win Frost & Sullivan’s India ICT Awards for the sixth year in a row and the Third Party Datacenter Service Provider of the Year award for the third time in a row. This recognition shows our transformation as a company. Each year, the list has grown to include new technology services as we move from a traditional pipe provider to being more of a managed services provider,” Kumar added. Further, Rangu Salgame, CEO - Growth Ventures at Tata Communications, elaborated on the company’s data centre strategy. He said that while global technology giants are setting up base in emerging markets like India because they present them with a large consumer base, global MNCs are also expanding within the subcontinent in search of growth. Tata Communications is strongly on its way to realize its vision to become a service provider of

choice in the emerging markets for data centre infrastructure services for enterprises. Highlighting this fact, Salgame said, “We expect this market to grow significantly over the next five years and become one of the fastest growing sectors, thanks to the data explosion we’re witnessing. Tata Communications can effectively cater to this market as we have a data centre footprint of 1 million net square feet across 44 facilities globally.” CIOs Learn to Speak Business Senior IT leaders also participated in a thoughtprovoking panel discussion where they tried to understand the new rules of data centre strategy and focus on how CIOs are delivering business services and creating roadmaps for a fundamentally re-tooled enterprise IT. The panel consisted of Ramandeep Singh Virdi, CIO, Interglobe Enterprises; Varun Sood, CIO, Fortis Healthcare; Siddharth Jain, MD, EPI India; and V.S. Shridhar, Head - Global Enterprise Services (India), Tata Communications. IT servicing has changed from delivering only IT services to a wide range mainly because of the way it’s being consumed. As a result, most CIOs are looking away from day-to-day data centre operations and instead focusing on innovatively re-tooling their data centres. Virdi spoke on how he works on establishing the direct causal link between a responsive IT ecosystem and its business outcomes, “My first engagement in my current company was to make our IT more scalable. When I looked at consolidating six different businesses, I realized the only right way to do it was creating a shared service centre. While I was looking at the problem from the technology standpoint, the board was only looking at business impact,” he said. Jain agreed. “It’s very important to overcome old data centre strategies and move away from being cost-focused in order to achieve scalability. One way to do that is to think in terms of numbers such as cost of downtime. If I can quantify that in numbers, business buy-in will be much easier” he said. Similarly, Fortis’ Sood has also adopted a strategy to fundamentally change the way IT staff in his company speak about technology. “We started talking and defining technology only in business

Tata Communications can effectively cater to the datacenter market as we have a footprint of 1 million net square feet across 44 facilities globally. —Rangu Salgame, CEO-Growth Ventures, Tata Communications

time. Downtime was now cost of loss of business. And when we presented our new data centre approach to the management, it translated to just two slides of business outcomes. We got a sign-off from the business in 20 minutes.” Tata Communications’ Shridhar said that the company’s best practices and deliverables will help CIOs realize their business outcomes more efficiently. “Conversations around the ICT requirements are now reflective of the dynamic times we live in; mobility, flexibility, scalability and intelligence are some of the key imperatives. We, at Tata Communications, are at an advantageous position from wherein we can see businesses across developed economies and emerging markets converge their digital dependencies. Data centres are at the heart of this rapidly changing digital economy and we are looking at investing substantially to enhance that footprint.” “IT conversations have definitely moved from focusing on business outcomes to speaking the language of the customer. That’s where Tata Communications can help CIOs become a sustainable agent for innovation. How many CIOs have a reliable partner who is willing to undertake a journey with them and stay in the long course? IT leaders also need to be aware of shadow IT when they deal with the dilemma to decide the scale at which they want to expand against the assets they want to keep,” he said. 1 About the Gartner Magic Quadrant Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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CISOs Struggle for Respect from Peers

O C T O B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4 | REAL CIO WORLD

valuable guidance on cyber security matters. However, they also felt that their CISOs did not possess enough broad awareness of organizational objectives or business needs to deserve a place at the leadership table. Barely a quarter said their CISOs were doing a good job of improving day-to-day information security practices. While business executives appeared ready to blame CISOs for data breaches, they were less ready to give their security executives the authority needed to mitigate risk in a meaningful way, Waits said. Many of the executives, for example, were reluctant to give CISOs full purchasing authority because of concerns about security tools hampering business

Is Singapore Secure?

hief information security officers (CISOs) continue to have a hard time gaining the respect of other C-suite executives despite the heightened focus overall on information security. In a survey of 203 US-based CEOs, CIOs, CFOs and other top executives, 74 percent of the respondents said CISOs did not deserve a seat at the leadership table. More than six in 10 did not believe their CISO would succeed in a non-security related leadership position in their organization. About 44 percent of the executives surveyed said that CISOs should be held accountable for organizational data breaches. At the same time, more than 50% said they did not believe information security executives should be responsible for cyber security purchases. Market research firm Opinion Matters conducted the survey on behalf of ThreatTrack Security in June and July. The results highlight the challenges that CISOs face in earning the respect of their peers. Many companies, including large ones, have balked at the idea of even appointing a CISO to oversee information security. Retail giants Target and Neiman Marcus for instance, hired their first CISOs only after suffering major data breaches. Those companies that have a CISO have tended to relegate them to a purely operational, fire-fighting role with little say in overall risk management. Over the years, CISOs have often complained about not having enough clout within their organizations to effect real change. The situation stems from an overall misunderstanding of the CISOs role in enterprises, said ThreatTrack Security president and CEO Julian Waits. Many in the C-suite view the CISO function as purely technology related and fail to appreciate the broader role that security executives can play in mitigating and managing overall operational risk. More than half of the C-suite executives in the survey said that CISOs provide

processes, disrupting service levels and decreasing productivity. More than a quarter of those who participated in the survey said their CISOs had made purchasing decisions that had led to negative effects on the financial health of their organizations, Waits said. Somewhat surprisingly, CEOs in the survey tended to have a more charitable view of CISOs compared to CIOs. A greater number of CIOs said that chief information security officers should be held accountable for data breaches, compared to CEOs. Similarly, more CEOs gave their CISOs an “Excellent” rating on their job, compared to CIOs. CIO Jaikumar Vijayan writes on data security and privacy issues. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

Singapore and China have no security restrictions, according to a report by Forrester. However, regulations governing privacy and data protection vary greatly from one country to another, posing difficulties for global business. Asian countries including India, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand have minimal privacy and data restrictions. Government of Hong Kong and Australia has posed some restrictions in this area but lag behind South Korea. Several business and law enforcement contexts require the collection and use of personal data, and Forrester advises organizations to carefully govern the handling of such data to protect individuals’ privacy rights. Argentina, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece and Israel are among nations that face most privacy and data restrictions. There are few nations that stipulate the conditions under which organizations can collect personal data. Although security and risk professionals in these nations are not solely responsible for data privacy, they should work with their general counsel and chief privacy officers to understand data privacy requirements. These professionals should also implement necessary processes and controls to protect personal data accordingly. The report identifies that government surveillance may directly impact privacy in China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore. These nations may follow many non-EU countries such as South Africa and Malaysia that have passed more stringent data privacy frameworks. — Anuradha Shukla

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Lou Markstrom

IT MANAGEMENT

IT at Your Service It is necessary to build a client-focused IT culture as the goal is to create positive, memorable experiences for clients.

hen you think of good service, what comes to mind? What separates elevated service from the norm? To answer these questions, let's first understand the difference between customer service and hospitality. Customer service includes all the things we do for our clients, while hospitality is how we make them feel and the experience we leave them with. The goal is to create positive, memorable experiences for the client. Clients remember the really good and the really bad. If it is just normal, it is forgotten very quickly. The key to delivering these types of experiences is the mindset that your team and culture brings to the daily interactions with your clients. I've worked with thousands of clients and have identified three vital mindset factors necessary to build a client-focused IT culture.

Learn to Love Complaints

IL LUSTRATIO N BY T HIN KSTOCK

Complaints are a good thing. It should be much more disconcerting not to hear your clients complaining. Too often, unhappy clients remain quiet, giving you no chance to prove you can do better or solve the issue at hand. This bad news then tends to spread more quickly than the good news. Complaints are your clients' form of communication and they should be both treasured and encouraged. They represent a learning opportunity for you and your team, a chance to get it right. You can't fix it if you don't know about it. With that being said, this is not an easy mindset to develop. This is due to the emotion that gets tied to a complaint. We take them personally and often feel the need to justify or defend.

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IT MANAGEMENT

Complaints often sound disrespectful or even hostile. You need to look beyond the personal and turn complaints into something impersonal, trackable and logical. What if you stripped away all the emotion from the complaints? What if you simply heard them as information or input that you wouldn't otherwise be privy to? To accomplish this, I recommend using the following process: Thank the client for making the complaint. This may sound counterintuitive but it assists you in making the required mindset change and lets the client know you are interested and that you care. Gather more information. Get into their world and find out all you can so that you can assist them. The goal is to investigate and not interrogate. Apologize even if you don't think it was IT's fault. Show the clients that they are important and they matter to you. Saying something as simple as 'I'm sorry you had this experience' can make a difference in how the client feels about the service they receive. The one caveat here is that you must really mean it and it must be sincere. A false or insincere apology can be worse than none at all. Ask how you can help. This doesn't mean becoming an order taker or being a door mat. It means really listening to the client, finding out what happened, what is making them unhappy and then making a commitment to take steps to rectify it.

experience is like through those interactions, you'll have a good idea of your organizationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s level of service and where it needs to improve. This can range from the tone of your voice and body language to a much broader scale, like revamping all your forms or streamlining your Website interface.

Developing a 'We' Mentality Developing an IT service culture is not an individual effort. A team mentality is important because a service-oriented culture requires consistency with all team members. No matter who a client interacts with, they need to experience the same positive attitude and have the same positive experience. Consistency is also important for developing long term trusted advisor relationships with business clients. Clients will increase their loyalty to an internal IT team, when all the experiences they have with IT team members are positive ones. It's time that IT gets rid of the all too

Clients will increase their loyalty to an internal IT team, when all the experiences they have with IT team members are positive ones.

Make Every Interaction Count This mindset focuses on the daily interactions that IT has with both business clients and IT peers. You need to recognize that every interaction and impression counts. These are the moments of truth. This term was first conceptualized by service management guru Richard Norman and then popularized by Jan Carlzon, a renowned turnaround artist who wrote a book with that title. In a typical organization, hundreds or thousands of these moments take place every day. The first voice they hear at the help desk, the first link they click on the IT Website, the email they receive from IT, every time they encounter a member of the IT staff in the hallway or the lift. If you think about it, if any member of your team was riding in the lift this morning with the CEO, would you be confident and secure in the interaction that would take place? Or do you have certain team members who cause your heart to jump into your throat when you think of this scenario? All these moments can work to IT's benefit or detriment. If you map out all the moments of truth that clients experience with the IT organization and assess what their 22

O C T O B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4 | REAL CIO WORLD

common 'us versus them' mentality toward the business which suggests a separation at best and a combative relationship at worst. IT organizations must realize that they and the business are part of the same whole, the very reason they want to provide excellent service is that they're working with their business counterparts to achieve a common goal. The development of a service process is a continuing strategy, a method, and a mindset. It is not a result. With every day, every moment, and every interaction between IT and its clients, impressions are formed for better or for worse. It is these impressions that will determine the level of hospitality that your clients feel and are critical to the creation of long-term client loyalty. It is service that will raise your IT department above commodity status. CIO

Lou Markstrom is an author and a professional development specialist at DDLS. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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Mike Elgan

SOCIAL MEDIA

The IdentityTrivia Suddenly, major tech companies are flipping out, remaking themselves to be more like their competitors.

guess the grass is always greener on the other side of the corporate campus fence. Four major technology companies announced expensive and risky programs to become less like themselves and more like their competitors.

Twitter Wants to Be Facebook

ILLUST RATION BY T HINKSTOCK

One of the reasons Twitter is the favorite social site for influential singers, actors, technology influencers and industry luminaries, is a set of quirky, minimalist attributes. The most celebrated and obvious is a 140-character limit on the size of tweets. This limitation makes it easy to send a tweet, and super easy to read a stream of tweets. Speaking of tweets, the use of the word tweet is one of Twitter's charms. Others include endearingly antiquated features like the use of @ replies and hashtags. Suddenly, however, all this is in peril as Twitter appears to be suffering a fit of Facebook-envy. Twitter unceremoniously made it possible for up to four pictures to be posted in a single tweet, and up to 10 people to be tagged in each photo. That makes both the posting of tweets and the reading of a stream more burdensome and timeconsuming than it used to be. It'll be like, you know, reading Facebook. The reason for it is at least partly Facebookian as well. All that tagging sends advertising-enhancing "signals" to Twitter. It also forces interactionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;people tagged will be notified, and essentially lured into an engagement with Twitter to see what the you've-been-tagged-in-a-photo notification is all about. We also learned that Twitter is reportedly experimenting with the elimination of both @ replies and hashtags, and the

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Mike Elgan

SOCIAL MEDIA

transformation of the "Tweet" button to say "Share." If those other changes come to pass, Twitter as we know it will be no more. Instead, we'll have a much more Facebooklike Twitter.

Facebook Wants to Be Google Facebook, meanwhile, is suffering from Google envy. While Mark Zuckerberg has been toiling away trying to prevent a general flight from Facebook to smaller social sites by first creating the Poke app to stem the flow to Snapchat and then spending a fortune on Instagram and Whatsapp, he's no doubt looked with envy at all the fun Sergey Brin and Andy Rubin have been having at Google. What does a search engine company want with a gaspowered robotic mule? In Silicon Valley, that's the wrong question. The question is: If a robot mule exists and can be bought—and you've got billions to spend—why wouldn't you buy it? Besides, the future will arrive sooner than you think. The only way to survive as a technology company is to re-invent yourself. You can't wait until the future is clear. You have to buy everything that looks promising and hope for the best. That's the lesson Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg learned from Google. Suddenly, his company is going nuts with the moonshot projects. Facebook this week announced the $2 billion (about Rs 12,000 crore) acquisition of Oculus VR, a maker of virtual reality products useful mainly for total immersion gaming. Sure, Zuckerberg justified the purchase by saying that virtual reality might one day be social, or the platform of the future. But a future in which people socialize by entering shared VR spaces wearing giant goggles on their faces is so far away that acquiring Oculus VR doesn't really give the company an advantage in that future. Zuckerberg also announced something called the Facebook Connectivity Lab, which is a new division of Facebook that's bringing Internet connectivity to the poor using—wait for it!—drones, satellites and laser beams. Why does a social network need a space program? Wrong question! I suspect the real reason for all this is that Zuck is tired of Google having all the fun.

The second is that Amazon always favors low profit margins in order to cut costs to aggressively take customers from competitors. By using a zero- or less-than-zero margin price to suck the oxygen out of a market, Amazon is able to suffocate the competition, then take over. Consider the case of Diapers.com, in which Amazon deployed its sophisticated army of price-undercutting bots to sell diapers cheaper than Diapers.com no matter what. And once the company was near death, Amazon swooped in and bought it cheap. Now, Google is going after Amazon's business of general cloud services, and it's using Amazon's price suffocation strategy to do it.

Amazon Wants to Be Apple Amazon looks to be making a play for the living room to compete against Apple for the future of streaming, on-demand video content. In that area, Amazon would also be competing against Microsoft. And Google. And Roku.

Twitter wants Facebook's huge follower base. Facebook wants Google's moonshot street cred. Google wants Amazon's market share. And Amazon wants Apple's ubiquity. You get the picture. Why would an online bookstore need to sell a homeentertainment system? Wrong question! To a certain extent, all this is happening because technology companies know that technology companies fall after they rise. They fall because they fail to lead the Next Big Thing, they allow themselves to become obsolete, or they allow their competitors to get too big and powerful to fail. That knowledge leads companies to want what their competitors want. Twitter wants Facebook's huge follower base. Facebook wants Google's moonshot street cred. Google wants Amazon's market share. And Amazon wants Apple's ubiquity. Which is fine. But companies need to be careful and make sure that, in trying to thrill people who aren't their customers yet, they don't forget to serve the customers they already have. CIO

Google Wants to Be Amazon Google, meanwhile, appears to have a case of Amazon envy. Sure, Amazon is a killer online retailer. But two aspects of Amazon really stand out. The first is that the company was an early leader in the provision of cloud computing services with its Amazon Web Services offering.

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Mike Elgan writes about technology and tech culture. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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Good

Medicine CIOs in the healthcare industry have all the challenges of their non-healthcare peers— and one additional one: Keep patients alive and healthy. It’s a tough ask, this life and death responsibility, but these CIOs are finding new ways IT can help.

By Stephanie Overby

What CIO would divulge the intimate details of his mobile technology or cloud strategy with a major competitor? Exchange governance tips with his counterpart at a rival firm? Join forces with a archrival to develop a data-sharing platform? Jay Ferro would. So would Jeff Como. Robert Machen, too. And they do. Ferro is the CIO of the American Cancer Society (ACS). Como leads the technology organization for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS). Machen is CIO at ALSAC, the fundraising arm of St. Jude Children’s Research

Reader ROI: What differentiates healthcare CIOs from their peers The pressures of being a non-profit CIO How IT is driving improvements in healthcare

Healthcare

The cancerfighting CIO is a

Hospital. Their non-profit organizations compete for funding, for research attention, for hearts and minds. But the three CIOs have forged an informal alliance to share IT best practices, technology tips, and personal support. “Sure, we’re in competition for the same donor dollars. And maybe it sounds like archrivals Pepsi and Coke getting together and saying, ‘Hey, let’s just split the market,’” says Ferro, who says the three met at a conference for CIOs at nonprofits after he joined ACS two years ago. “But we’re in it for a higher calling.” A similar coalition of likeminded CIOs has emerged among the IT leaders who support the work of the National Cancer Institute’s clinical and research centers throughout the US. Once fierce competitors for major grant dollars and scientific discovery, their organizations now increasingly collaborate as they seek the next breakthroughs in treating a disease affecting one in three women and one in two men. And leading this confederacy of clinics are their CIOs, an increasingly close-knit band of professionals, many of whom have dual backgrounds in research science and IT. “The enemy with this cancer is so awful that it’s bigger than any one of us,” says Patricia Skarulis, vice president and CIO of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the

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nation’s oldest and largest private cancer center. “People have committed their lives to conquering it. But it requires a lot of collaboration because the enemy is such a powerful one.” It also demands a lot of technology, whether it’s nextgeneration DNA sequencing for the personalized cancer treatments of the future, or the latest in mobile, social media, cloud computing and analytics to increase the efficiency and efficacy of the country’s leading cancer non-profits. The cancer-fighting CIO is a unique breed—fiercely committed to his or her work, yet open-hearted with comrades in the battle against the disease. And while each IT leader was drawn to the role for a different reason, they’re all coming together to solve the technology problems that will enable the next innovative treatment, support service or research breakthrough.

A Higher Calling Jay Ferro’s wife Priscilla was diagnosed with cervical cancer in May 2005. She fought the advanced disease, which had not been diagnosed at her annual physicals, with chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. After a six-month remission, Priscilla’s cancer returned. She died in January 2007, leaving Ferro and his

unique breed—fiercely committed to his work, yet open-hearted with comrades in the battle against the disease. Now, they’re coming together to solve common technology problems.

three sons to wonder what might have happened had the disease been detected sooner. Ferro, then the CIO of AIG, immediately set up a nonprofit—Priscilla’s Promise— dedicated to increasing cervical cancer awareness and research. But it never occurred to him that he could use his IT leadership skills more directly in the cancer fight until an executive recruiter approached him about the CIO role at ACS. “I’d assumed what most people assume—that a nonprofit is like a government institution. It’s going to be behind the curve. It’s going to be slow-moving,” says Ferro. “But that couldn’t have been further from the truth.” He received a formal job offer from ACS on the five-year anniversary of Priscilla’s death. “A match made in heaven,” he says. Como had cycled through numerous IT and product development roles over 20 years, spending time at Lockheed Martin, in dotcoms, and doing businessprocess outsourcing. After implementing his 14th child-

support-processing system in his 14th state, he was burnt out. “My mother used to say, ‘Why do you work so hard?’” Como recalls. “’It’s not like you’re curing cancer.’” Since taking on the CIO role at LLS nine years ago, he’s got an answer. “I’d always wanted to apply my skills to something that wasn’t just about building shareholder value or reaping the most profits and then distributing those unevenly,” he says. “I was looking for a way to give back based on my skill sets.” Machen worked for nine years in IT leadership at Hilton Worldwide, where he enjoyed the work and was being groomed for the top spot. But something gnawed at him. He’d spent his childhood summers doing mission work in Honduras. As an adult, he felt most fulfilled when he was volunteering during his off hours. When the CIO role opened up at ALSAC, it was an opportunity to combine his love of IT and helping others.

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Healthcare

The three CIOs with strong commercial credentials each found their calling in cancer non-profits. Today, they’re dedicating their professional lives not just to their own organization’s success, but to each others’. They started meeting annually last year. “The end game is so similar that we thought, ‘why don’t we share ideas,’” explains Ferro, who offered his colleagues the chance to sign NDAs but says no one has taken him up on it; they all agreed to share even nittygritty details. They talk desktop support, project management offices, and data visualization. They commiserate about office politics and the self-imposed pressure. Ferro shared his IT governance methods. Como explained his mobile peer-topeer fundraising technology and offered to give it to the others. Machen introduced his approach to data management. “There are no sacred cows,” says Ferro. “And you walk out the door feeling like you have CIO allies against cancer.” And, says Como, “it’s a lot cheaper than paying a psychiatrist.”

A Radical ROI While their day-to-day IT work doesn’t look much different than what you’d see in any other IT organization, the returns, these CIOs say, are. Machen is focused on three goals: Creating a single view of the donor with a more robust donor-management system, improving donor engagement with mobile and social media tools, and delivering actionable insight through advanced analytics. Substitute the word “customer” for “donor” and it could be a to-do list for any 28

A Dose of IT Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospitals is leveraging IT for patient safety and to make its doctors and staff more efficient. It’s the same story everywhere. You go to a hospital and undergo a battery of tests and wait anxiously for the results only to get a report filled with medical jargon that you can neither understand nor decipher. But Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospitals is changing that. This multispeciality hospital is leveraging a bunch of IT systems that are making life easier for its patients, staff, and doctors. Earlier, the hospital had an HIS system (hospital information system), which the staff leveraged to access patient information with a single click. This system was integrated with an existing laboratory information management system (LIMS) which was used to manage data and documents across the hospital’s 30 clinics and laboratories. But the old system lacked basic functionalities such as multi-layer authentication, preliminary result report generation, and availability of multiple report formats. “We weren’t too happy with the existing solution as it was limited in functionality and our SLAs were not being met,” says Rajesh Batra, CIO, Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospitals. For instance, a preliminary result report generation of a simple blood test such as CellSearch Circulating Tumor Cells (CTC)—that helps oncologists assess the prognosis of patients suffering from breast, colorectal

Fortune 500 CIO. But Machen’s real focus is the St. Jude patient. From his third-floor office, he has a clear view of the hospital. He eats lunch at the on-campus cafe, where he might share a table with a patient, a nurse, a janitor. “You can’t work here and be separate from the mission,” Machen explains. Parents come clamoring for hope when they’ve been told there is none, and we receive them with open arms.”

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or prostate cancer—would take as long as seven to eight hours. The system also suffered from poor response time and its overall performance wasn’t satisfactory, thanks to manual intervention, which also resulted in data entry errors. “We wanted to eliminate all instances of manual intervention at every stage of the testing procedure,” says Batra. Thus, in December last year, the company retired LIMS and invested in a new system and a new reporting tool that would help it streamline the processing of various laboratory investigations such as ordering tests, specimen registration, displaying result trends, and monitoring quality control. On an average, the hospital conducts tests for 1,500-1,600 patients a day. The new system—depending upon the

“The new LIS supports barcode technology and generates automated specimen labels which reduces the chances of error, avoids duplication, thereby improving efficiency.”

It takes $800 million (about Rs 4,800 crore) to fund the institution, and most of that comes from donations of less than $30 (about Rs 1,800). ALSAC is processing about 17 million transactions a year. “Everything we do here is generated by those donors, and the enabler of all that is great technology,” says Machen. When IT implements a new CRM system or rolls out

smartphone check-in for the organization’s 31,000 events, the return is better fundraising to support patient care. Machen met a St. Jude patient’s dad his first day on the job four years ago. He expected a sob story. Instead the man’s eyes lit up, he raised his arms, and declared, “It’s just too good to be true.” He and his family were in their darkest hour, but when they got to St. Jude, they

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Healthcare

Rajesh Batra, CIO, Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospitals, created an LIS system with barcodes and increased efficiency.

nature of the blood tests—generates automated and detailed reports of patients in less than three hours. The new reports are descriptive and visually appealing. For example, it uses colors to depict the different stages of an illness. This gives patients a clear understanding of their ailment. Today, manual intervention is

received world-class care for their daughter, subsidized meals and a place to stay as a family. “My job is about providing something that’s too good to be true,” Machen says. “It drives me crazy when we don’t. And we do miss the mark. But if ‘too good to be true’ is the goal, you get a lot closer to that than you would otherwise.” Ferro gets that. He’s thinking about social, mobile, big data

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less than 1 percent. “The new LIS supports barcodes and generates automated specimen labels, reducing error chances in handling blood samples, avoids duplication, and improves efficiency. Since the implementation, we have been able to ensure high levels of patient safety,” says Batra. —By Shubhra Rishi

and cloud—like any CIO of his caliber. He’s building a serviceoriented architecture. He runs a 24/7 call center year-round. He handles the infrastructure and applications for the ACS’s 800 locations, along with the Hope Lodges where cancer patients can stay during treatment. His IT underpins the largest non-governmental source of funding for cancer research in the country.

Certainly Ferro measures his progress partly in the traditional way. By streamlining and standardizing IT systems, he’s cut this year’s budget 20 percent from last year while boosting customer service numbers. But those dollars and cents add up to something more. “We measure ourselves in lives saved,” Ferro says. For every IT decision he makes, he calculates how

many donations it will cost. “Governance is a huge part of what we do,” says Ferro. “Which initiative will generate the most income, which funds life-saving research and programs? Which will save the most money, which leaves more funds for life-saving research and programs?” That metric creates a different feeling from the one Ferro had at previous jobs. “A cervical cancer researcher I know says there are three ways to look at what you do: Some people have a job, some people have a career, and some people are on a crusade,” Ferro says. “We’re on a crusade. And that’s difficult to recreate if you’re selling widgets.” At LLS, Como applied technology to help the organization better manage its portfolio of research efforts. As a result, LLS is now funding efforts in biotech and pharmaceutical companies in addition to academia. “It’s all about the best science,” he says. “And to heck with the rest.” He’s testing analytics to improve revenue and field operations and exploring how the organization might analyze patient genomic information to figure out how to deliver the best outcomes. “We’re dealing with a very complex set of diseases— over 145 blood cancer diseases that all react differently to different treatments,” Como says. Como, who also cut $5 million (about Rs 30 crore) of annual cost by streamlining enterprise IT, laughs when people say nonprofits don’t have a bottom-line orientation. “That’s not true,” he says. “The bottom line is even more in-your-face. Every dollar you don’t spend goes to the mission.”

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Healthcare

Munender Soperna, CIO, Dr. Lal PathLabs, improved turnaround time by moving the patient registration process to the cloud.

Como was initially surprised by that added pressure, but it’s just elevated the role of IT. “Our needs are plentiful, but our ability to meet those needs is limited,” says Como. When a commercial enterprise needs more money, it sells investors on the promise of future return. At LLS and other cancer non-profits, says Como, “we have to sell hope.”

Fighting Cancer With IT In the 19th century, the use of the microscope to study the pathology of disease led to the birth of modern oncology. CIOs working in the cancer field today say we’re on the verge of a similar revolution. Two hundred years ago, “they realized there were things that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye that could explain how the disease progressed,” says Skarulis of Memorial Sloan Kettering. “It’s that type of change we’re experiencing today in terms of being able to see things we couldn’t see before.” Next-generation sequencing of DNA is the microscope of the 21st century. More streamlined and affordable technologies for studying the DNA of cancer cells are highly expected to speed up the development and implementation and quality of improved and personalized cancer treatments. Such sequencing methods are much faster than their traditional forebears, producing millions or billions of sequences at once. And the cost is plummeting. The Human Genome Project needed $3 billion (about Rs 18,000 crore) and 13 years to sequence our DNA. Today, researchers can sequence a genome in 10 days for $5,000 (about Rs 3 lakh). 30

Speedy Recovery By migrating its patient registration process to the cloud, Dr. Lal PathLabs increased efficiency by 15 percent, and made it possible for patients to be registered in 40 seconds. Enterprises in the healthcare sector are going all out to ensure customer satisfaction by automating certain crucial business processes. And Dr. Lal PathLabs (LPL) is one of them. Dr Lal PathLabs is a 65-year-old healthcare company with a rich experience in pathology testing. With over 150 Labs and over 2,000 centers across the country, it offers the largest test menu and caters to over 12 million customers every year. Despite its envious presence, process automation existed only at lab locations and was captured in the ERP directly and moved to LIMS for analytical processing. Patient information was being captured manually at collection centers, which form a major share of LPL’s total business. Collection center executives used to fill the Test Requisition Form (TRF) manually at their location and send it along with the sample. This arrangement created a number of challenges like pre-analytical errors, revenue leakage, and inefficiency, which in turn, increased turnaround time. “We are growing at a rate of 30 percent a year and our sample load is increasing day-byday. It becomes difficult to manage business critical processes. Manual processes need a lot of manpower and attention in the business value chain,” says Munender Soperna, CIO, Dr. Lal PathLabs. So, in November 2013, the company decided to invest in an e-registration module, a standalone application hosted on the cloud. Now it hardly takes 40 seconds to register a patient and provide him with a cash receipt. “Unlike earlier, when the manually-captured TRFs were registered in the system at lab locations, now our executives register patients at their respective locations, and the data transfers automatically to my ERP location. When the sample reaches our lab, we can directly send the sample to the required department for processing. This has reduced the duplicacy of patient data entry and turnaround time drastically. As mentioned earlier, the sample does not wait for the data entry process which sometimes could take 30 to 35 minutes. This has increased our efficiency by 15-20 percent,” says Soperna. Today, the application has been rolled out in about 900 locations, and is leaving a lasting impression on customers and the company’s business. —By Ishan Bhattacharya

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Healthcare

“In the next few years, you’ll be able to get a full genome sequence of your DNA for $500 (about Rs 30,000),” says Sorena Nadaf, associate director and CIO of the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). “Pretty soon insurance will cover it like another blood draw.” In the near future, “every patient that comes in the door with a cancer diagnosis is going to get clinical-grade, next-gen sequencing,” says Warren Kibbe, CIO of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and director of the NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology. “In fact, it won’t even be called nextgen sequencing soon.” That creates incredible IT demand. “It drives huge computational needs,” says Kibbe. “It’s exciting, but it’s challenging because the environment can change overnight.” Cloud computing holds promise, particularly for far-flung and smaller institutions. “There is a sea change in the way we operate

as IT professionals,” Kibbe says. “The ability to achieve true interoperability and utilize infrastructure- and platformas-a-service in clinical research will revolutionize our ability to determine optimal treatments for new cancer patients.” When working with the scientific community, Kibbe is dealing with evolving problems and new technologies to find solutions that weren’t possible yesterday. Those research systems are as far from enterprise IT as you can get, intimately tied up in the particular research of an individual lab. But as the science matures, Kibbe must figure out how to make those one-off solutions scalable for the rest of the community. That adds a dimension to the CIO role. “I have to deliver an awful lot of basic services like every other CIO—networks, storage, file services, security. But I have this really exciting additional mission to take into account,” he says. “On one side, it’s the classic CIO blocking and tackling. On the other, it’s how do we interface with the scientific community to further our mission.

Dr. Lal PathLabs

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There’s opportunity to do better on both fronts.”

Very Big Data Jack London, director of the informatics shared resource at the Kimmel Cancer Center, says he’s been in medical informatics since before it was called informatics. A version of the first mainframe he worked with could be a museum piece. He’s seen technology tools evolve to keep up with the demands of cancer research and treatment. For the last few years, he has focused on personalized cancer medicine. “If you go back to the 1950s until very recently, the way we treat cancer is to give people a set of toxic drugs that kill the rapidly growing cells, and you adjust the dose so you don’t kill the patient at the same time. It’s the brute-force approach,” London says. “But cancer is a genetic disease.” From an IT perspective, that means not only analyzing very large sets of genomic information, but also managing specimen banks and their associated clinical data and correlating that with the latest research. “You get [up] to terabytes of data in a very short time,” London says. Then you have to figure out what to do with those terabytes. The goal is clinically actionable results. “You have to get to point that you can put it in an electronic health record and communicate that to the clinician who is treating a patient today,” London says. “That’s what everyone is working very hard on.” At Memorial Sloan Kettering, physicians have been archiving samples of patients’ cancer cells, along with their clinical histories, for 30 years. Skarulis

oversees one of the largest single-organization data warehouses for patient care and clinical research in the country. Sloan Kettering’s secure, Web-based system contains more than a million cancer patient records and is the basis for research into the complex mechanisms that cause cancers to form or progress. Such investigations have resulted in more effective therapies and diagnostic tools for some lung, colorectal and skin cancers. Next-generation sequencing will take that to the next level. It “can spew out data at a rate that’s incomprehensible, but that data has to be stored, processed and made available to doctors,” says Skarulis, whose team rolled out a system in May to do just that. “We’ve been meeting with many, many people from the institution—experts in everything from computational biology to sequencing itself— working together to pull this off,” she says. “I couldn’t be alive at a more exciting time in cancer research, and we’re helping to get that to the bedside.” Both the technology and the science are advancing rapidly. “The explosion in technology is enabling us to examine things we couldn’t look at before,” Skarulis says. “One is enabling the other.” “Data,” says Nadaf, “is driving change.”

A Team Science That explosion of data is also fostering closer relationships among CIOs in the research and clinical area. “In the last 20 years,” says Kibbe of NCI, “it’s become clearer and clearer that cancer research is a team science. My job is very much the facilitator of that.”

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The US government paved way in 2004 for collaboration with the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (CaBIG), to develop an open-source, openaccess information network for cancer research. “Before that, everyone was working in silos,” says London of the Kimmel Cancer Center, “and not only working in silos, but competing for grant dollars.” As a result, groups at various institutions might have been getting funding to work on similar or duplicative projects. “They knew they needed to get them to share their data, and they seized upon the IT infrastructure as a way to do that,” London says. Ultimately, the CaBIG program was retired, but not before “it got us all working together,” he says. London and other biomedical informatics leaders in the NCI system are cooperating in various areas to better support the scientists and clinicians at their institutions. Kibbe and Nadaf launched Cancer Informatics for Cancer Centers, a national non-profit that holds in-person meetings and conference calls on topics such as intellectual capital and cloud computing. Much like the group of cancer organization CIOs, each IT leader brings his areas of expertise to the group. London, shares his approach to delivering clinically actionable results. Kibbe would like to see the alliance go worldwide. “If we want to dive deeper into solutions to our problems, we can’t do it alone. That doesn’t benefit the patient at all,” Nadaf says. “The more we collaborate, the more of a difference we make.” 32

for Cancer

The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is training Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, to offer courses on cancer treatment based on historical data.

Researchers, physicians and analysts at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have been training Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, for more than a year to turn it into a decision-support tool that helps medical professionals choose the best treatment plans for individual cancer patients. The goal is to improve quality of care for cancer patients no matter where they are located by giving their doctors access to the same up-to-date research as doctors at the nation’s leading cancer centers. “Here at Sloan Kettering, our people are all sub-specialists. If you treat lung cancer, that’s all you treat and you become very good at it,” says Patricia Skarulis, the institute’s CIO. “If you are doctor in a smaller community, you might see lung cancer one day, then breast cancer the next week, then a thoracic patient after that. It’s hard to stay up-to-date on everything you need to know. We want to export our knowledge to the rest of the world through technology.” Ultimately, Watson will import data about a patient—pathology and radiology reports, vital statistics, initial consultation, and any other pertinent information about the patient’s health— correlate that with the current research and protocols, and come back with suggestions. Watson might tell the doctor that there’s a 60 percent chance that treatment A is best for the patient and a 50 percent chance that treatment B is best. The supercomputer might also suggest additional tests that will enable it to offer better probabilities. “Changes in technology such as cognitive computing are increasing our ability to go in and look at things we haven’t been able to look at in the past,” Skarulis says. “We’re on the cusp of some of the most exciting changes in medicine.” —S.O.

The Mission Continues “One of the things I’ve learned from St. Jude patients is that while survival is incredibly important, what’s equally important is to thrive with every day that we’re given,” says Machen on the morning he was to attend the memorial service for an 8-year-old patient who had become a dear friend. “One of the most beautiful things in the world was to see how much she cared and loved others at a time in her life where she could have been self-centered.” That patient focus is something Nadaf of UCSF picked up when he was starting out. “We had the very first gene therapy protocol in the

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country for advanced lung cancer,” he recalls. Nadaf would accompany Carbone on grand rounds and tumor boards weekly, and he saw patients suddenly slip away. “I saw how fast patients died, and it was troubling to me,” says Nadaf. “Today, I know the difference can be in the data. My job is to continue to bring out as much as I can from the data to help each patient.” Given the prevalence of cancer, CIOs don’t have to go far to see the impact of their work. “We’re not doing something for some remote benefit, something that might do some good in the future. We see on a day-to-day basis how what we do effects

people’s lives,” says Skarulis of Sloan Kettering. That creates a sense of urgency in IT. But that pressure to do the best possible work is selfimposed and ultimately a positive force, says Skarulis, pointing to the fact that Sloan Kettering’s employee engagement numbers are “off the charts.” The mission of IT leaders at these nonprofits might sound odd. “Our goal is to end cancer,” says Ferro. “If we’re out of business because of it, we’d love it.” CIO With inputs from Ishan Bhattacharya and Shubhra Rishi Stephanie is regular contributor to CIO. com. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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Case File | NABARD

The CLOUD Goes Rural

How NABARD introduced cloud computing in rural India and revolutionized state and co-operative banks. BY SHUBHRA RISHI

Case File | NABARD

aishali, a district in Bihar, is known as the birthplace of Bhagwan Mahavir, the 24th Jain Thirthankara. But its historical significance aside, not many know that it’s one of India’s most backward districts. Despite its backward status, you will be amazed to find that Vaishali houses a District Co-operative Central Bank (DCCB) which runs its banking operations on a cloud-based core banking solution. So how such a small district co-operative bank with only six branches manage to get on to such a latest technology platform– is nothing less than a wonder. Enter National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (NABARD), a financing agency that looks after providing investment as well as production credit for promoting various developmental activities in rural areas. It is also one of those organizations that regulates and refinances financial institutions such as state co-operative agriculture and rural development banks, state co-operative banks, regional rural banks, commercial banks, and other financial institutions approved by RBI that provide financial help to rural folk.

Bumpy Road Ahead

In Uttarakhand, when last year’s flood washed out a branch of the district co-operative bank, NABARD’s CBS on the cloud ensured that the bank did not lose a single day’s data.

Three and half years ago, NABARD commenced the last leg of its ambitious financial literacy and inclusion programme. Its aim was to improve financial awareness and make banking products available in rural areas. There were 201 state and central co-operative banks with 6,940 branches in 16 states and three UTs that were operating either in a manual or a partially computerized environment. This reduced efficiency. “We wanted to make sure that these financial institutions have proper IT systems in place which will help them improve their everyday banking business and market the launch of new banking products,” says K.R. Bhat, GM-IT, NABARD. Initially, NABARD gave these 201 state and central co-operative banks an option to select their own IT system—a banking solution—which would streamline their processes and systems. “For a bank to invest in a core-banking solution is a huge cost that involves buying the software, paying licenses, owning a datacenter, and a disaster recovery solution, as per RBI guidelines,” says Subrata Gupta, CGM, NABARD.

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And, even if a bank buys the software, it needs to pay an annual maintenance cost to the solution vendor. So, the question is whether a small bank like Vaishali DCCP with just six branches could afford such a solution? Not really. Also, all of the 201 state and central co-operative banks weren’t prompt in submitting their half-yearly and annual financial reports to NABARD. As per Section 29 and 30 of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949, the state and district central co-operative banks are required to prepare their balance sheets and P&L accounts and get the same audited by statutory auditors. The banks are also required to submit their balance sheets along with the auditor’s report and its copies need to be furnished as returns to the RBI as well as NABARD within six months from the end of the financial year (that is, by September 30). However, these banks were taking about six months to complete audit. And thus began NABARD’s IT excursion to regulate the banking operations of 201 state and district

co-operative banks by helping the co-operative banking sector move to a single cloud-based core banking solution. It was also one of its biggest initiatives towards institution-building where both business and IT teams collaboratively made decisions for its success.

Greener Pastures In order to ensure that it’s successful, NABARD’s IT team had to identify the right solution which was not only scalable but also accessible by all 6,940 branches from 16 states and three UTs. For 103 banks, the team selected one vendor while for the other 98 banks, the REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

Case File | NABARD

software is managed by another vendor. The infrastructure facilities within their branches, head office, and other service equipment such as PCs, printers, branch servers, UPS, LAN, and switches, along with regular maintenance are handled by the co-operative banks, themselves. A certain amount of language localization was also necessary. Therefore, NABARD gave banks the option between two languages: One regional and Hindi or English. “We chose an opex model barring the branch infrastructure in order to give these state and district co-operative banks access to a cloud-based platform on a minimum monthly subscription fee,” says Gupta. Despite maintaining an outcome-based SLA with the vendors, NABARD wanted to get rid of a few apprehensions. One of the major concerns NABARD had was warranting bandwidth availability and data connectivity at the banks. At certain remote places, where lease lines weren’t available, NABARD wanted to ensure that the vendor was able to provide either VSAT or CDMA connectivity. The other concern was IT support. NABARD guided the banks towards obtaining specifications of infrastructure facilities such as LAN, PCs, UPS etcetera. “Every bank would identify a local IT staff that would be trained by the vendor on simple skills such as locally running backup, and performing day-start and dayend processes among others,” says Bhatt.

Cash Cow As of today, NABARD has managed to bring 200 banks and 6,939 branches on the CBS platform. This includes 114 new branches which were directly opened on the CBS platform. “It was one of the biggest cloud implementations in India, when it started and continues to function even when some districts and states are in darkness,” says Bhat. “One of the biggest benefits of the project is that it ensured data transparency, regular settlement and balancing of books of account, as well as improvement in data quality,” says Bhat. The reports are generated automatically by the systems and as a result, almost all the co-operative banks are able to submit their annual reports within 10 days of annual 38

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“The cloud CBS has taken us closer to our goal of financial inclusion in rural India.” —K.R. Bhat, GM-IT, NABARD

closing in March. Additionally, Bhat says that the shifting of deposits and remittances to commercial banks is avoided and the credits are available to beneficiaries immediately. Instead of finding their own solution, the banks can utilize services offered by NABARD. “By adopting the CBS platform, the co-operative banks have saved huge costs, and as a result, the banks will now have more time and money for finding business in rural areas and attracting new customers,” says Gupta. NABARD has ensured that even smaller banks that could not afford to have their own solution now have access to basic banking facilities such as Any Branch Banking, NEFT, RTG, mobile services and ATMs, thanks to CBS. For instance, today, a DCCB in Etawah in Uttar Pradesh can provision distribution of salaries of school teachers at the same

time. This has automatically improved efficiency and created customer delight. In Chattisgarh, whenever money gets credited to a farmer’s bank account from the sale of paddy, the farmer receives an SMS as soon as the money gets transferred to his account. In Uttarakhand, when a district co-operative bank’s branch was washed out in the floods, the CBS platform ensured that it did not lose a single day’s data, all the accounts were operative from the bank’s other branch next day onwards. “We are happy that the CBS project has taken us closer to our goal of financial inclusion in rural India,” says Bhat. CIO

Shubhra Rishi is principal correspondent. Send feedback to shubhra_rishi@idgindia.com

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IT Strategy

BUYING FROM A ST STARTUP Get ready for radical changes in software purchasing.

Reader ROI: Why should enterprises buy from startups The risks and rewards of buying from a startup The importance of CIOentrepreneur relationship

O C T O B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4 | REAL CIO WORLD

By Howard Baldwin

he idea of buying an enterprise application from a startup company might sound like anathema to a CIO. But Chris Laping, CIO of restaurant chain Red Robin, based in Greenwood Village, Colo., disagrees. He believes we’re in the middle of a significant shift that favors startups—moving from huge applications with extensive features to task-based activities, inspired by the apps running on mobile devices. Mirco Mueller concurs. He is an IT architect for St. Gallen, Switzerlandbased Helvetia Swiss Life Insurance Co., which—having been founded in 1858—is about as far from a startup as possible. He recently chose a SaaS tool from an unnamed startup over what he calls “a much more powerful but much more complex alternative. Its list of features is shorter than the feature list of the big companies, but in terms of agility, flexibility, ease of use and adjustable business model, it beat” all of its competitors. The biggest advantage of startups, in Mueller’s opinion? “They have no technical historical burden, and they don’t care about many technical dependencies. They deliver easy-to-use technology with relatively simple but powerful integration options.” There’s certainly no lack of applications available from new players. At a recent conference focusing on innovation, Microsoft Ventures principal Daniel Sumner noted that every month for the last 88 months, there’s been a $1 billion (about Rs 6,000 crore) valuation for one startup or another. That’s seven years and counting.

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IT Strategy

But as Silicon Valley skeptics like to point out, those are the ones you hear about. For every successful startup, there are at least three that fail, according to 2012 research by Harvard Business School professor Shikhar Ghosh. So why, then, would CIOs in their right mind take the risk of buying enterprise applications from an untested entity that may be short on experience, money and maybe even time? Because the world has changed. “The model we’ve used to buy on-premises software for 20-plus years is shifting,” insists Laping. “There are new ways of selecting and vetting partners.” Part of that shift is simple: The business side sees what technology can do, and it’s banging on IT’s door, demanding...what? Not new drop-down menus in the sameold ERP application, but rather state-of-the-art, cuttingedge, ain’t-that-cool innovation. The landscape is wide open: Innovation can come in the form of new technologies, such as the Internet of Things, or from mobility, the cloud, virtualization—in fact, from anywhere an enterprise vendor isn’t filling a need. The easiest place to find that? Startups. The fact is that every technology giant today exists because

someone took a chance on them, the way Disney took a chance on Bill Hewlett when it bought eight oscillators at $71.50 (about Rs 4,290) each in 1938, the year before Hewlett-Packard was founded. Recent examples of 21st century ventures that hit it big include Palantir (est. 2004), Workday (2005) and Dropbox (2007). It may not be so smart to bet on a startup that thinks it’s going to dislodge Salesforce as the go-to CRM application, suggests Patrick Sullivan, Managing Director of the Oracle technology practice at Accenture. “But startups can focus on the right gap in enterprise applications. The startups that find niches and innovate have done okay.” He cites Kony (a mobile application development tool) and Splunk (which logs machine-generated data) as two examples of startups that found their niche.

Upside of Buying from Startups CIOs who’ve bought from young ventures acknowledge the risks and the rewards and are eager to share best practices in making a startup partership work. First and foremost, CIOs have to find the value in the new venture. “It’s got to be something worth taking the risk,” says Jonathan Gardiner, VP-IT customer solutions for DHL Supply Chain APAC in Singapore. He acknowledges that it may be difficult to find that little niche where startups fit, but he also notes that a number of startups originate “from people who were in the corporate world and who understand what an enterprise-level app

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needs to be”—and not just from the newly minted engineering graduates that come to mind when people think “startup.” For Oliver Binz, an independent management consultant for IT and risk management, startups for CIOs aren’t any different than startups for investors. “They’re always going to have higher risk than an established company, but you invest in one because the return is likely to be greater.” But that also means you must apply other safeguards. “To take the analogy further, don’t invest in a startup if you can’t afford to lose your money or live

with the consequences if it fails.” Multiple aspects of new ventures appeal to CIOs. Startups are hungry. To use a word that comes up a lot, they’re nimble. They’re also focused and responsive. CIOs may legitimately ask why they can’t simply build what they need themselves. “Creating a startup within a corporate setting is a great way to innovate, but there will be distractions—the processes, the sheer legacy of the organization,” says Brian Gardner, executive director of the mobility COE of Kaiser Permanente, himself a veteran of two startups. —Howard Baldwin REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

IT Strategy

The Risk-reward Ratio Like Laping, Karl Galbraith believes that the time has come for enterprises to consider startups. Currently a principal at security-and-audit-focused Galbraith and Associates in Ottawa, he was previously a CISO and acting CIO at various enterprises, including the Bank of Canada and the Canada Post. “The number one reason to consider a startup is that the current landscape of Magic Quadrant vendors is not serving a critical need. That’s a problem.” Especially in security, he says, some of the solutions from traditional security vendors are so unwieldy that “even after months and a lot of money invested, they never worked.” The same concept applies to startups beyond security. Faced with an inability to get what they want without

Startups Face the Talent Crunch Research found out that lack of talent causes startups to fail as they fail to execute new and innovative ideas. The Startup Institute, a career accelerator that aims to equip individuals with the skills required to work in a start-up, revealed in a survey today that more than 79 percent of start-ups are struggling to find the right talent, with 41 percent of start-ups citing this as a reason for failure. The study, found that staffing issues are holding start-ups back and causing them to fail because it means they lack the skills to execute on ideas. The second most popular reason cited for start-up failure was a lack of funding, with 26 percent of respondents citing this as their main issue. Web development was cited as most sought after skill, with 38 percent of respondents saying this was the most important recruitment area for them, and demand for technical roles was higher than demand for nontechnical roles. Indeed, 60 percent of those surveyed said they were 42

looking for people to fill technical roles, while 40 percent said they were looking for staff to fill business development and sales positions. Startup Institute founder Aaron O’Hearn said: “It is alarming to see the extent of staffing challenges in the start-up community. While there is much talk about start-up hubs thriving, there is a real danger they won’t reach their full potential because the talent pipeline is not strong enough. “Short on time and resources, founders are struggling to find new recruits who can add immediate value in fast-moving teams. This is a worrying trend and it’s important to bring this to the public’s attention as highgrowth technology companies continue to play a bigger role in the economy. Governments are thankfully taking note and I hope initiatives such as the Year of Code in the UK will be successful.”

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—R. Sam Shead

buying extensive solutions from established enterprise vendors, proactive CIOs started looking for tools with a new willingness to take risks, to listen to people who are more aggressive. With startups, Galbraith says, “CIOs get a view of next-generation technology. Whenever there’s a paradigm shift, you want a startup to give you feature agility.” Ravi Belani is managing partner at Alchemist Accelerator, a Palo Alto, California-based venture-backed initiative focused on accelerating startups whose revenue comes from enterprises rather than consumers. He says, “The innovation that used to come out of big software houses isn’t there anymore, while the pace of innovation in technology is accelerating.” He acknowledges that there has been a longtime concern with startups about the ability of their applications to scale, but given startups’ ability to build their software on robust infrastructure platforms using IaaS or PaaS, and then deploy them via SaaS, “scalability isn’t as big a deal as it used it be. It costs $50,000 today to do what you needed $50 million to do ten years ago. That means it takes less capital today to create the same innovation. Ten years ago, that was a moat, a barrier to entry, but software vendors don’t own that moat anymore.” The confluence of offshore programming, open source technologies and cloud-based infrastructures has significantly lowered the barriers to entry of launching a new venture—not to mention all those newly minted tech millionaires willing to be angel investors. Another knock against startups: The potential that they won’t be around in a few years. Laping disdains that notion. “In the new paradigm, [most software] implementations are so much shorter, you don’t have to think about that risk. You’re not talking about three years and $20 million (about Rs 120 crore). You’re talking about 75 days and $50,000 (about Rs 30 lakh). You implement little modules and get big wins along the way.” Besides, he argues, there are related risks to bigger vendors. “We worked with one startup that got acquired because they represented innovation to the bigger company. They had been a small company with rapid product cycles, but the next four release cycles were nothing but integrating their software with the big company. That gave me no benefit.” “It’s a huge risk to go with a startup,” acknowledges Arthur Lozinski, CEO of Oomnitza, a Mountain View, Calif.-based developer of asset-tracking software founded in 2012. “But startups can give enterprises attention to detail and fast turnaround times. We’re not doing anything else” except thinking about our product, he says. “There’s a lot more intensity and energy at a startup,” agrees Brian Gardner, executive director of the mobility

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IT Strategy

center of excellence at Oakland, Calif.-based healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente. Kaiser has tested a number of niche startup applications over the last few years, purchased a few and tested some it never pursued, according to Gardner. Startups’ focus “is on one product. [In IT] we’re working on multiple products at the same time with multiple stakeholders, and having to balance that through the workweek and quarter. They don’t have the distractions that we do.”

Making It Work When you’re taking risks, never underestimate the importance of relationships. CIOs and entrepreneurs alike confirm that it’s easier to connect when there’s a trusted middle conduit. Red Robin’s Laping says, “As openminded as I am, I won’t take a cold call.” He only meets with startups he’s met through a “matchmaker” called Trace3 that brings together CIOs, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. That’s important, he adds, because when you’re looking for a startup, “it’s not like you’re going into a bar to pick someone up. I rely on my peer network or partners to tell me about someone they’ve run into” who can meet a specific need. Pedigree counts too. That means looking at what venture capitalist firms or angel investors are backing the startup, or simply checking out the top executives’ resumes. Notes Accenture’s Sullivan, “The guy who started Nest came out of a well-established product company called Apple. It had processes, it had quality control and he took that knowledge along with some of its employees.” Along the same lines, Oomnitza’s Lozinski spent several years at SAP Labs. Sometimes to make the relationship work, CIOs need to apply special dispensation. In a previous position, Peter Bowen, who now manages a team of consultants at Bedford, UK-based Telesperience Consulting, bought a billing application from startup Centenary Services (which has since been purchased by another company). Bowen’s company promised to make payments on faster terms than it did to other suppliers in order to help the startup avoid cashflow issues. “Basically, we micro-managed the whole process,” he says. “Buying from a startup can be good, but you need to make sure the fledging does not get killed before it has learned to fly. You should be prepared to provide a helping hand.” One of the biggest issues both CIOs and entrepreneurs cite relates to product support—something that can overwhelm the startup and leave the enterprise frustrated. At Red Robin, Laping engaged San Francisco-based Firespotter Labs, which had developed an application for iPads named NoshList. It’s essentially a self-service waiting list that texts walk-in customers when their table is ready. Though such a capability is more common today, Laping

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Startups have no technical historical burden, and they don’t care about many technical dependencies. They deliver easy-to-use technology with relatively simple but powerful integration options. says, he believes that Red Robin was one of the first national chains to tackle this. Even though he had “never had a support issue” with Firespotter, when Red Robin launched the NoshList pilot, Laping initially made it available to only 50 restaurants, with the proviso that the restaurant staff itself had to be prepared to provide support. Laping insisted that the employees use the chain’s internal social network to share support questions and answers among themselves, rather than banging on his IT staff. Another method: Let the startup train IT staff to provide tier 1 support, while still relying on the startup for tier 2 support. It’s also a good idea to protect yourself through various methods of acquiring the code for an application in the event a startup fails. These include setting up escrow accounts for the code, or—if the startup decides to take the company in a different direction—setting up a plan to acquire early versions of the code so, if needed, the enterprise can integrate it itself into its own ecosystem. CIOs may have to even go so far as to determine how working with untested companies may affect their reputation. “Think about whether it fits with your brand,” advises consultant Galbraith. A conservative bank that’s found to have used a security startup but still suffers a breach is not a story a CIO wants to see in the press. “But if you’re the Canadian space agency and you’re using a grid-computing startup, that’s okay,” Galbraith says, “because you’re supposed to be leading edge.” CIO

Howard Baldwin writes about business and technology. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

casefiles REAL PEOPLE

* REAL PROBLEMS * REAL SOLUTIONS

SMART

PRESCRIPTION How a mobility-based CRM system on the cloud helped Biocon increase productivity and customer satisfaction. BY MADHAV MOHAN The Organization: In 1978, when biotechnology—a branch of science where biology meets engineering—resided in the realms of science fiction for most ordinary mortals, Biocon had already started its journey with biotech in a rented garage in Bangalore. With a seed funding of Rs 10,000, the company is now worth a whopping Rs 3,000 crore, and has become a force to reckon with in the pharmaceutical industry. Biocon remains faithful to innovation and addresses the global challenges of affordability and access to healthcare. The Business Case: Biocon’s business model demanded dynamic integration of fieldlevel activities of medical representatives (MRs). Toward the end of 2012, the company was on the lookout for a solution that could provide it with the capability to integrate multiple functionalities and streamline business needs. “The customized tool then was being effectively used by 400 MRs. At a 1,000 MRs, the system slowed down, and with another 500 MRs it stalled,” says Radhakrishnan G., VP-systems, Biocon. The problem was further compounded by the absence of flexibility in handling multiple functional requirements. “There was no pre-defined tour program configured on it. For instance, during travel, medical representatives had to calculate expenses and allowances manually. Also, the system wasn’t mobile compatible and worked only on PCs and laptops,” says Radhakrishnan. The old system also didn’t contain details of doctors. “The information and accessibility to doctors in real time is crucial for effective functioning of MRs. Its absence resulted in unproductive visits to the doctors office,” says Radhakrishnan.

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The tool stood as a stumbling block as it lacked offline flexibility. The capturing of daily field reporting was fractured and unevenly distributed. The system was rigid and couldn’t meet the evolving business requirements. “We were looking at a mobile-based system that could upgrade and optimize existing functionality, and help us customize the system to suit our business requirements,” says Radhakrishnan. The Solution: To overcome these challenges, Radhakrishnan had to find a solution that would make the lives of MRs at Biocon easier. Therefore, he zeroed in on a vendor to deploy a mobility-based CRM system on the cloud. As a result, SMART (sales management and reporting tool) came into being—a SaaS-based app that provided a seamless, and integrated solution. The new application helps the company integrate details like leave requests, notifications, visits to doctors, and calculation of expenses. It captures other vital information that empowers the MR to be more effective. The app can function on all devices with java compatibility on multiple OSes. “The tool is user-friendly and flexible. It gave us the much-needed value and scalability,” says Radhakrishnan. Also, the new application ensures collation and updation of interactions in the server for reference. It also helps MRs to connect better with doctors. “It is very important for MRs to establish a personal bond with doctors. With this app, one can get information on past interactions with a particular doctor,” says Radhakrishnan. The SMART app does not need a smartphone. “Even a Rs 1,500 phone can serve the purpose,” says Radhakrishnan. The push and pull data, based on the SMART interface works perfectly both online and offline, and even on low bandwidth.

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Radhakrishnan G., VP-Systems, Biocon, was able to increase productivity by creating a mobilitybased CRM solution on the cloud.

The Benefits: The duration of the project from ideation to go-live was three to four months. It went live on May 2013. Biocon has benefited from the improved communication with business units, and achieved faster decision-making capability and higher productivity. Customer satisfaction and the compliance level of reporting has dramatically improved. Also, SMART

got integrated with the existing ERP within three to four months of its deployment, and has been able to scale up to a strength of about 1,500 MRs. And with the app, Biocon has added another feather to its cap. CIO

Madhav Mohan is trainee journalist. Send feedback to madhav_mohan@idgindia.com

REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

Samarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Agenda: To use social media to engage with consumers and take United Breweriesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; business ahead.

CXO Agenda | Marketing

The Social Media

Brandwagon

B Y I S H A N B H AT TA C H A R YA

Samar Singh Sheikhawat, SVP-Marketing, United Breweries, talks about why businesses should get on social media and how it can enhance a brand’s relationship with its consumers.

ess than a decade ago, you’d be considered famous if you ‘made the headlines.’ But in the social media world, unless you’ve gone viral you don’t exist. That’s how significant the platform has become in no time. Consider this: Last year, India recorded the highest growth in social media—the number of active users in social networking sites grew by 37.4 percent—according to research conducted by eMarketer. Although conventional ways of branding and marketing still thrive in the country, large business houses are gradually shifting their focus to social media marketing. One such company is United Breweries. Samar Singh Shekhawat, SVP-marketing, United Breweries, talks about why corporate leaders should take social media seriously and how it can enhance business-consumer relationships.

CIO: Why should CIOs and CXOs take social media more seriously? SAMAR SINGH: One needs to extend personal as well as their brand’s presence in all social media platforms. Most leaders in Indian corporates are very hesitant to have a large presence in social media because they are unsure about the way it will pan out. Anyone who is a marketer or in a position of leadership in any field should recognize the reality of social media and understand how to leverage the digital world to take their businesses ahead. Through social media, one can interact directly with consumers, brand evangelists, loyalists, and even critics. What works for the brand works for its leaders. So having a presence on social media is highly recommended.

Social media must be generating a lot of data for your company, how do you analyze it? There are a variety of tools—like listening tools, monitoring tools, and engagement tools—to analyze data. One needs to establish what the requirement VOL/9 | ISSUE/12

REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

CXO Agenda | Marketing is and decide what needs to be measured. For example, a device to measure the amount of sugar in your tea would mean nothing if your audience drinks tea without sugar. It is important to decide what you want to measure. There are various factors that can be measured—engagement, people talking about your product, shares, tweets, likes, click streams, time spent in viewing a particular thing, sentiment analysis, so on and so forth. You need to determine what you want to measure before you decide what platform to use. Once that’s done, there are tools and technologies to measure what you want to measure in a more accurate manner than traditional media.

For example, Facebook has the luxury of longer, personalized, and detailed messaging. In comparison, the attention span on Twitter is much less. That’s also because brands typically are not big on Twitter, personalities are, while on Facebook both brands and personalities have a presence. But the audience on Twitter is more evolved. The messaging needs to be similar, you just need to customize your messaging according to the channel you are using.

How do you use the data generated by social media? Our main focus has been on getting consumers to contribute to the brand story and spread our message. For example,

What is the biggest challenge in social media marketing? The biggest challenge is that since the concept of social media is in its nascent stages in India, it’s hard for agencies, brand marketers, and professionals to understand this medium. The actual number of people who understand social media and use it to further their brand messaging is very limited. Corporate professionals are also experimenting with these platforms. I know people who are using Facebook for business. India’s experimenting a lot with that. But there will be a shakeout before this actually gets firmed up. Where do you see social media marketing 10 years down the line?

Anyone who is in a position of leadership in any field, should recognize the reality of social media and understand how to leverage the digital world to take their businesses ahead.

Do have different social media strategies for different platforms like Twitter and Facebook? There is no clear line of distinction. It’s like saying you have a different marketing strategy for radio, television, and print. A leader needs to look at a marketing strategy in its entirety and determine what to do on Facebook and Twitter. A technology or platform shouldn’t dictate what you are doing. First, leaders need to decide the brand positioning and messaging and then choose the appropriate social media platform to promote it. Every social media platform has its own pros and cons to explore and that should be kept in mind. 48

O C T O B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4 | REAL CIO WORLD

through our events on social media—like The Beer Olympics and Beer Premier League—city-based consumers decided what their brand team name should be. They decided team logos, voted on it, and finalized it. This ensures that consumers get more and more involved in our brand story. When you are creating something for a brand that you love, then hopefully you foster brand advocacy, evangelism, and loyalty for a lifetime. So we would like to believe that we are involving consumers and giving them what they want. That could be in the form of a new idea or new promotion or a new event they would like us to create or attend.

Social media would have evolved much more. There will be a lot more social media experts than we have today. Social media marketing will be seamlessly integrated into mainstream media and everything we do, 10 years down the line. I see much more e-commerce, I see much more buying and selling, banking, insurance, planning holidays, movie tickets, buying durables through the digital world in much larger numbers in the coming 10 years. I see virtual reality, holograms, and augmented reality doing much better. CIO

Send feedback on this interview to ishan_ bhattacharya@idgindia.com

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BUILD A DEVELOPER TALENT PIPELINE

In the digital era, it is important to build a talent pipeline of software developers to drive business and ensure greater success. When was the last time you bought a product or a service as a result of a cold-call from a salesperson? In the digital age, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s far easier to make a sale when potential customers are already familiar with and engaged with your company and the products and services you offer. The same goes for hiring software developers. Building a sales pipeline of potential customers can help ensure greater success in closing deals and driving new business, and the same

By Sharon Florentine Reader ROI: The need to build a talent pipeline How to measure a developerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attributes Challenges for a developer

Staff Management

goes when you’re looking to hire elite software developers and programmers, says Vivek Ravisankar, founder and CEO of HackerRank. “Hiring developers is a lot like sales in that you have to build a pipeline to close ‘deals,’” Ravisankar says. “Sure, you can go to a recruiter right now and have them do ‘cold calls’ to developers, but what you don’t know is are they decent? Do their values and talent align with your company? Are they interested in your company’s success as well as their own? That’s hard to discern,” he says.

Measure Developer Aptitude and Attitude Dan Pollack, senior vice president at Modis, an IT staffing and recruiting services firm, say aptitude and attitude are two of the most difficult attributes to screen when hiring developers, especially when balancing the need to move quickly when hiring. “Companies have to move quickly to avoid losing candidates in the hiring life cycle. The general rule of thumb is for every week past the fourth week, 20 percent of the initial candidate pool will have accepted another position,” Pollack says. Because developers often have numerous offers on the table, you have to move quickly and aggressively to secure top developer talent, he says. “We are not talking in terms of months or weeks—it’s more like days and hours,” says Pollack, if companies want to bring elite developer talent on board. You can use online technical tests in the beginning of the qualification process to determine if a candidate should be brought onsite for an interview, says Pollack, and many companies already have developers fix broken code or “whiteboard out” a solution to a problem, in real time, with the interview team, he says. However, an online test and white boarding alone cannot determine a developers abilities,

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Building a sales pipeline of potential customers can help ensure greater success in closing deals and driving new business, and the same goes when you’re looking to hire elite software developers. and many times, the best developers won’t respond to cold calls from recruiters or hiring managers, especially if they’re not familiar with your company. “The best and truest test is to have a developer candidate sit with a current developer at the company and work alongside this person for two to four hours,” says Pollack. “In this type of peer partnering scenario they are solving problems together, and the candidate can walk the company’s developer through the steps they would take if employed to tackle the current challenges the company is facing. Essentially it is the equivalent to a real-time, live, developer role play,” he says.

Entice Developers to Show Off Their Skills The peer-partnering scenario assumes that the developer candidate is already engaged in the hiring and screening process, Ravisankar says. HackerRank was born to address a problem he saw all too often when hiring developers for

Amazon—how to automate and accelerate the skills screening process even before the interview process begins, and to identify and attract elite developers before they even know they want to work for a company, he says. In his role at Amazon, Ravisankar says he’d spend hours conducting phone interviews—many of them cold-calls—only to discover that approximately seven out of 10 potential candidates’ skills just didn’t match up with organizational needs. What Ravisankar says he needed was a way to get talented, elite developers interested in companies voluntarily and give them a medium to showcase their skills before the hiring process began. “I wanted to find a way to develop interest and engagement with companies and to build a meritocratic recruiting process. But the differentiator is that the choice would be theirs because they enjoy coding and want to prove they’re the best of the best,” Ravisankar says. HackerRank works with hiring companies to develop and advertise REAL CIO WORLD | O C T O B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

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coding challenges and attract developers to solve these coding problems. In return, programmers can indicate whether or not they’d be open to recruitment opportunities with the hiring companies, says Ravisankar. While HackerRank isn’t officially a candidate sourcing tool, Ravisankar says companies are effectively using the platform to attract high-caliber developers and programmers that are actively engaged with the developer community and who want to work for their company, he says.

Challenging for Developers “There are many developer communities around that offer these kinds of challenges— like GitHub, StackOverflow, and others,” Ravisankar says. “Our differentiator is that we offer the opportunity for a ‘Phase 2’ that could lead to these developers being hired,” he says. To that end, HackerRank offers tools for hiring companies to design and developer coding challenges specific to their domain expertise. For instance, a major online payments company might develop a challenge that could test applicants’ skills and knowledge as it related to finance, security and compliance. Or, he says, a security firm might want to post a challenge relating to intrusion prevention or intrusion detection to ensure potential hires were well-versed in security. “Every feature, every challenge that goes on the site is thoroughly vetted, too,” says Ravisankar. “This ensures that programmers enjoy what they’re doing and that the challenges will represent the level of skills, knowledge and expertise needed to work at the hiring company,” he says. HackerRank’s code challenges also include a built-in code checker and a QA screening process to make sure developers’ code is functional, clean and follows best practices, he says. HackerRank also has a full suite of analytics and reporting tools for both developers and hiring managers, Ravisankar says. It provides consistent interviewing tools to ensure there’s common ground and that all candidates are being judged on the same criteria. 52

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Demand for Software Developers Remains High Software developers are in demand again and employers are looking for some niche programming skills in a developer. Software developers are in high demand, as employers double down on the need for foundational technologies and core systems and ramp up for future technologies such as robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable technology, according to recent research from Dice.com. Dice examined searches of its candidate database and found 40 skills topped the list of desired software skills. “Many of these searches revealed employers’ need for longstanding, core technologies and a continued focus on providing basic services and maintaining existing infrastructure,” says Dice.com’s president Shravan Goli. “At the end of the day, these skills are essential to the success of any company, regardless of industry, whether they’re in retail, IT, finance, education, healthcare.” A lot of emerging software skills are in demand. But statistics can be misleading, as they don’t reflect the hottest emerging tech skills, says Goli, only the highest volume of searches. Recruiters and hiring managers are also looking for developers to address new challenges in IT, including embedded systems and IoT, robotics and wearable technologies, just to name a few, he says. “These top 10 are measured by volume of searches only, based on the number of available positions within each company,” Goli says. “Combined together, yes, skills like Java, .Net and C++ will make the top 10, but we also have to consider where technology is heading and determine what the hottest new skills are, even if talent is hard to find at this time,” he says. Goli says that according to Dice.com, the hottest and most in-demand skillsets are for candidates with Hadoop and/or big data experience; those familiar with mobile technology and the Android operating system, wearable technology, IoT and robotics, but since those technologies are much newer, talent is more difficult to find. “Some of these skills are going to take the market by storm, just like mobile and big data did,” Goli says. “It’s important not just to focus on core foundation technologies, but also emerging tech so that companies can either attract and retain this talent or identify and grow those skills internally before it gets too expensive,” he says.

— Sharon Florentine

Developers Call the Shots “The key to all of this is that it’s voluntary,” Ravisankar says. “The choice is with the developers—if they enjoy coding, if they want to prove their skills and knowledge to others in the community. This is a way for them to do that while having the added benefit of making themselves available to potential employers, if they wish,” he says.

“And that works great for hiring companies, too, because they’re building a developer pipeline. You can see that person’s code, see their abilities, and that can speed up timeto-hire,” he says. CIO

Sharon Florentine covers IT careers and datacenter topics for CIO.com. Send feedback to editor@cio.in

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technology IMAGE BY MASTERFILE.COM

MOBILITY

Here’s what you can do to make mobile computing attractive and easy for employees and foster mobile collaboration.

The Mobile Revolution BY JENNIFER LONOFF SCHIFF

COLLABORATION | According to research firm IDC, the number of mobile workers worldwide is expected to reach 1.3 billion (37 percent of the global workforce) by 2015, with more than 153 million of those mobile workers in the United States and Canada. While many organizations now allow employees to use their own mobile devices like smartphones and tablets at or for work, getting workers to regularly communicate and collaborate, with each other as well as the office, via their smartphones or tablets still poses a challenge. So what can you do to make mobile computing attractive and easy for employees and foster mobile collaboration? We asked dozens of mobile computing and work collaboration experts to find out how to effectively implement the concept of bring your own device. Below are their top eight tips for improving mobile collaboration.

Ensure Cross-device/Platform Compatibility “Make it easy for employees to collaborate and share files on any device—PC, Mac, iPad, Android, or BlackBerry,” says Ryan Kalember, chief product officer at WatchDox, the provider of enterprise file sharing and mobile content management solutions. “If employees aren't able to access, work with, and collaborate on a document with their preferred device,

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mobility falls short. Having to convert file types or use multiple apps to edit or annotate a document disrupts workflows and decreases productivity.” “Make sure your office workers and mobile workers have compatible software,” says Peter Poulin, vice president of Marketing, Motion Computing, a provider of integrated mobile technologies. “Mobile workers and office workers need to share reports, customer files, in-voices, and work orders across devices. In an age of BYOD, one can't assume all devices will support the same software.”

Embrace Video Conferencing “The cost of video conferencing has come down significantly,” says Kenneth Leung, director of Enterprise Marketing, Avaya, a provider of business communication solutions. “In fact, users can download a video conferencing client or app on virtually any device, smartphone, tablet, laptop or PC/MAC, and with a single click simply enter the video conference from

which is why collaboration from a mobile device is beneficial,” says Rocky Mitarai, senior product marketing manager for Adobe Connect, Adobe's mobile and webconferencing solution. “To ensure immediate mobile collaboration, companies should deploy a mobile web-conferencing solution that offers a persistent virtual meeting room with a unique URL that is available all the time,” Mitarai says. “Having a readily available virtual meeting room eliminates the time necessary to create a room and makes it easier for meeting participants to join, knowing they don't have to keep track of constantly changing meeting room URLs.”

Cloud-based Project Management Tool “Using a centralized online workspace to track everything from deadlines and deliverables to budgets is the most efficient way to keep team members in the loop,” says Brent Frei, executive

Not everyone is well-versed in effective mobile collaboration. Provide proper training so that everyone understands how to communicate through mobile tools. where they sit,” he says. “No need to go to a special room or have special equipment.” And if your budget doesn't allow for an enterprise video conferencing product or service, “[hold] meetings on Google Hangouts, which allows many people to conference at once and will switch to highlight whoever is talking at the moment,” says Kiki Schirr, marketing director at Fittr, the developer of mobile workout and fitness tracking apps.

Host a Virtual Meeting Room “Collaboration often happens unexpectedly, 54

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chairman and cofounder, Smartsheet, an online project management solution. Just “make sure the tool has a mobile app so it's accessible anywhere—from desktops, tablets or [smartphones]. This allows on-the-move employees to stay up to date on project details.” “Basecamp [a popular project management app] makes long-distance collaboration (and note-sharing) easy," says Fittr's Schirr. “Its five dollars (about Rs 300) per month per user right now, and that has been worth it, even for our bootstrapping company. If you cannot afford

45%

Of Indian CIOs say that they will undertake mobility projects this year. that, use Google Docs. It's a surprisingly capable program.”

Deploy a Group Chat Solution “A few years ago we started using Campfire for almost all of our instant message communication,” says Avin Kline, cofounder & CEO, Web Success Agency, a web design and marketing firm. “Campfire allows you to setup ‘rooms,’ which we use for different departments. We also have a ‘Water Cooler’ room where we talk about anything from weekend plans to what we're listening to right now. We all feel connected.” As opposed to individual instant messaging, this is a great solution.

Integrate Mobile Phones into Your Phone System “The ability to use any phone and have it function exactly like the one in your office is crucial,” says Brian Crotty, COO, Broadview Networks, the provider of a VoIP business phone system. “Your mobile phone system should be the same as your normal phone system—with the same phone number and seamless access to important contact information,” Crotty says. “Mobile twinning allows you to have calls seamlessly routed to employees’ mobile phones, and mobile softphone apps give team members the ability to make calls from their iOS or Android device as if they were in an office, using the same business phone number and calling features.”

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IMMOBILE MOBILITY

Train People on Mobile Collaboration Tools “Not everyone is well-versed in effective mobile collaboration,” says Aliza Sherman, digital marketing strategist, Mediaegg. So before officially rolling out any mobile collaboration tools, “set up step-by-step processes, establish guidelines and provide proper training so that everyone on your team understands how to communicate through digital and mobile tools,” she says. Also, understand “that not everyone is up to the challenge of virtual communications.” Similarly, go over mobile device best practices. “Working off mobile devices creates concerns of battery life, connectivity and information security,” says Michael DeFranco, founder & CEO, Lua, a mobile workforce communication app. “Having employees understand the best way to mitigate these concerns greatly increases their productivity,” he says. “Ways to optimize battery performance include turning off location services, [using Wi-Fi whenever possible] and reducing display brightness.”

Instruct Employees on Mobile Etiquette “A single noisy user disrupts everyone else on the conference call,” says Chris Thompson, vice president, enterprise product marketing, at wireless headset provider Plantronics. To remedy that problem, mobile workers should “have a good headset. Sit somewhere quiet. And learn how to use their mute button,” Thompson says. Another no-no: typing on a keyboard while on speakerphone. To alleviate that problem, “keep keystrokes to a minimum or make sure you are wearing a good headset.” CIO

Mobile Dead End ENTERPRISES| If your business hasn't heard about the mobile revolution by now, well, you might want to crawl out of your cave and enjoy the sunlight with everyone else. Mobility is what the business consultants call “transformative” technology that affects nearly every company in every industry. To be fair, the problem isn't that enterprises aren't aware of the impact of mobile technology. The problem is that many companies aren't doing mobility right. Only two out of five companies have made good progress in their mobility efforts, according to a recent Accenture survey of nearly 1,500 C-level executives. The rest, not so much. “It's taking companies more time to get to that level,” says Terri Rinella, managing director at Accenture Mobility. On the bright side, companies know the value of having a mobile strategy. In fact, 87 percent of respondents said they have a formal mobility strategy, which is up from 58 percent last year. CEOs are jumping into the mobile fray, too. At 35 percent of the companies, the CEO plays a role in mobility strategy development. Unfortunately, a mobile strategy may be full of holes that stymie mobility benefits. A whopping 86 percent of respondents have not yet seen their mobility initiatives pay for themselves, according to the Accenture report. Shortcomings related to the actual rollout of mobile capabilities are likely preventing two-thirds of companies from making greater progress. A mobile strategy faces many challenges. For instance, a mobile strategy might not be fully adopted across an organization resulting in a lack of standards in, say, mobile app development. Business executives and CIOs might bicker over who owns the mobile strategy. Top leadership might not throw their full support behind the mobile strategy. A mobile strategy can suffer from overlap in mobile funding or in app usage—that is, employees might be using different apps that perform the same function. — Tom Kaneshige

Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

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ROBOTICS

* BY SHARON GAUDIN

Harvard University scientists have built a soft robot they say can function without a communications and power tether. The four-legged robot can literally stand up and walk away from the people who built it. The development team called the machine, which is about a foot-and-a-half long and can carry more than seven pounds, a huge step forward for robotics. It has the potential to complete life-saving tasks like squeezing into the crevices of collapsed buildings to search for victims, send their location and images to rescuers and provide them with water and medicines. "I'm very excited about this," said Michael Tolley, a research associate at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a member of the project team. "I think it's really a milestone towards these types of robots becoming more useful in the real world. On one hand, it seems like a relatively simple thing to just cut the cord but a lot of things that have to come together to make it happen." The team of researchers from Harvard and its Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering restructured a standard soft robot design so it could carry the equipment it needs to functionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;micro-compressors, control systems, and batteriesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;on its back. Harvard said the research team tested the machine in snow, submerged it in water, walked it through flames, and even ran it over with a car. It was unscathed after each test.

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IMAGE BY THIN KSTOCKPH OTOS.IN

Robot to the Rescue