Today, succession planning for all key positions has become an established practice in large organisations. As organisations increasingly use information and communication technologies to differentiate themselves in the competitive marketplace, the role of the CIO has only grown in importance.

Hence, an effective planning process is needed to identify and create the next pipeline of IT leaders in tune with the organisation’s priorities and requirements. Traditionally, in end-user organisations, the MIS function had end-to-end responsibility of not only managing the IT infrastructure (back offce), but also of identifying and designing IT solutions for business needs (front offce).  With the increasing complexity of IT infrastructure, a large part of MIS resources’ time and effort in these end-user organisations is being spent on managing back offce activities thereby leading to a possible dilution of focus on implementing new business value-adding IT initiatives.

"An effective planning process is needed to identity and create the next pipeline of IT leaders"

So as to have adequate focus on all activities that the IT department can possibly enable, the IT team in ITC has been divided on the lines of front offce and back offce functions of a services industry like hotels. The IT front offce (demand-side IT) engages in customer facing activities and is staffed with people adept at business understanding and client servicing skills. The IT back offce (supply-side IT), comprising IT infrastructure support and ERP application support resources are hardcore technology specialists.

Demand-side IT resources are domain savvy business process experts responsible for delivery of IT services to ITC’s businesses while supply-side IT resources are responsible for developing, deploying and maintaining IT services and solutions on 24x7x365 basis.

ITC’s IT team is 600 plus strong catering to 11 businesses of ITC that range from FMCG to hospitality, from printing and packaging to paperboard manufacture and from retailing to agri-businesses.  The ratio of demand side IT team vis-à-vis the supplyside IT team is approximately 1:2. The demand-side IT team in a business is lead by the Divisional CIO.  To assume the role of a Divisional CIO in ITC, it is important that the prospective candidate should have sound business knowledge of all our business processes and at the same time he or she should be able to leverage emerging IT trends and technologies for business advantage.

As the Group CIO of ITC, I am the apex coordinating point for the IT organisation. Along with the HR team, the Group CIO creates the career progression chart for every IT resource deployed in ITC. We ensure that all employees in the IT organisation get exposed to various facets of ICT technologies. Based on employees' individual performances, future goals are set. The HR team facilitates the process through setting up of necessary frameworks, standards and provides inputs on development of individuals through internal and external training programmes.  

Having a wholly owned IT subsidiary in ITC Infotech India Limited gives ITC access to a large IT talent pool and this makes us very different from other end-user organisations. This extensive talent pool allows for resource fungibility between in-house ITC IT projects and assignments for global customers – both offshore in India and onshore abroad. This helps us better retain IT resources while keeping the pool up-to-date on the latest technological developments.

V V R Babu, Group CIO, ITC Limited and Senior Vice President, ITC Infotech