Transition phase of IT

Traditionally, IT has long burdened itself with the tag of ‘business enabler’ and even that was a kind euphemism for an organizational function that works in the background. Clichés of IT-business alignment have really suffered a reality check with the recessionary headwinds of 2008 and subsequent years have forced CIOs to ask hard-hitting questions which had got sidetracked for its elementary genre. That question has started haunting them back. In one of the Gartner reports, GM’s CIO puts it across without any bells and whistles – ‘how do we help in selling more cars’!!Boom. There you are. With all the fancy paraphernalia of disruptive technologies and cutting edge voodoos, just one explanation is begged of IT head honchos – how do you help me sell more, how do you increase my top-line, how do you make me grow organically.

We have seen process innovations that have helped in reducing the cost incurred in procurement of IT assets. Not to mean operational optimization has become any less significant but at the same time it is sort of IT putting its own house in order that reaching out for impacting business development. If an organization’s IT spend were to be bucketed into before the sale, during the sale and after the sale categories, only minuscule dollars and inputs find way to during the sale and before the sale dimensions.


Cursory analysis of key IT contributions across industry verticals for past decades will be along supply chain automation, business processes optimization ,accounting, inventory control, purchase order and several related sub-activities. Though critical, these capabilities relegated IT to an uncelebrated contributor to overall business. Another study proclaims more than 80% of an enterprise’s IT budget goes to running the ‘Business as usual’ (support & maintenance)and only 20% find way to innovative projects that can actually optimize the way IT conducts itself and may align more visibly to selling process. With the advent of cloud computing, IT has a real chance of bringing its investments in line with business demands but more than the cost element it would be the value propositions of agility and responsiveness that IT department must push for. Saving 2 penny in IT expenditure will slowly become a hygiene factor and if IT helps me in selling 5 pennies more, that’s when business will take notice.


With my limited understanding, I feel a CIO can thump up the table in a boardroom if he can just get the mojo of mobility and social networking right. Cloud for sure is a big differentiator and will change the operating model fundamentally. Yet, on the sales front, when IT starts powering the sales application, products are displayed on tablet, giving the feel of interface and usability, inventory is checked real-time, delivery schedules vetted , POs are generated on the fly, that will herald the true enablement of man on the field and bring back rave reviews for IT. The ergonomics of tablets and smartphones will need power of mobile business productivity applications to unleash their true potential in enterprise context. Companies have started owning up the concepts of Bring your own device where employees are promoted to use their authorized gadgets to access corporate applications. Not just it eliminates the capital expenses on assets but also allows employees not remain tethered to their desks. As more and more taskforces derive resources from diverse teams and functional units, collaboration regardless of geographical distance and disparate applications would determine how productive they are in their joint endeavors. Mobility is one idea in enterprise sphere whose implementation will allow real time communication and increase responsiveness and visibility across the value chain.


Closely related to the idea of collaboration is emergence of social media which has radically changed the way consumers connect for their personal communications however smart enterprises should appreciate the great pace at which tools of Facebook and twitter have invaded the consumer psyche and a grudge against service provider or product vendor finds disproportionate reverberations. None of the media had so far been successful in establishing a duplex communication in a way new 21st century portals have. The other day one of my Facebook pal had his under-service airtel number reassigned to some random guy. In all issues ranging from my-dog-is –so- happy to what-was –mayawati-thinking he shot his outage on Facebook and within a day he had detractors of Airtel liking the past and narrating similar woes in comments section. If Airtel PR thinks they can sit over such tid-bits events for long they should stop smoking whatever they are now. During my brief stint in Technical Support Services presales I had come across workflow of support department actively mining millions of tweets for outage specific keywords and establishing direct contact with the aggrieved party post verification of entitlement. Here’s the thing, in the age of fickle customers with power of snapping back with tweets and posts you really can’t afford them terrorizing your existing customers and prospects. And make no mistake, way way back in 70-80’s when Zukerberg’s father was a jobless youth, Intel was forced to recall million digital calculators which had a floating point approximation error that too recurring after several million calculations. The impact of the apparent flaw was insanely disproportionate to the outrage building against Intel in the media and academician. Just to reiterate, the elements of brand promise and brand performance are shaken by apparently trivial events. The multiplier effects of social media if leveraged thoughtfully can spring big positive surprises. For a CIO, opportunity lies in marshaling his analytics resources to gauge the indicators trending the market and give actionable insights to business units.

In my next article on the same topic I would try breaking these macro-trends into sub-components with a ground-level commentary of how some leading enterprises have institutionalized the paradigm of new age data center.