It was a pleasant evening at Pune, as I sipped my chilled beer while having a casual discussion with Suneel, the CIO of a major automotive component player. As the number of beers increased, the discussion got more and more interesting.

After a small pause, I asked Suneel what he was thinking about (midway through our second drink), and he very sadly opened up about his second-in-command’s desire to join another IT company – one less hit by the recession – for almost 30 percent more pay. Said Suneel, “How the hell do I keep someone like him motivated enough in order to retain him.”

By the fourth drink I pretty much got a picture of the top challenges of this CIO, who is among the more respected in the community. While training and retaining his IS team is a major challenge, alignment of the IT goals to the business is another of his key concerns. He said, “You know it isn’t as easy as people say. While I understand the business implications of technology investments, it is not the case with most of my team. They feel there is no sex factor in it. They are more interested in doing the virtualisation project that is underway right now.”

I remember having a similar discussion with him almost a year back. He had then mentioned the challenge of managing his IT resources as his top worry, and that according to him was “keeping him awake all night”.

Today he has a different problem altogether. He feels that now he is more or less able to manage all his IT resources, and most of his critical business processes are tech-enabled. Now the challenge is to convince his management of maintaining this infrastructure and putting more money into staffing the maintenance team with the right people. While this may be critical for the success of running the business smoothly, the board feels that the money needs to be spent in building more flexibility into the present system.

A partly drunk (after his seventh drink now) Suneel now slurs, “The overall organisation strategy is not about putting in more systems, but leveraging the present infrastructure to increase speed and agility within the systems.”

Priorities change. They may change for good or bad, but that’s an individual’s perception. It makes you wonder that as more and more organisations try to cope with dynamically changing market conditions, more and more stories unfold. And you spend another night of challenges, beer and a few vagaries!