Now this is what I call innovation! I recently met a senior CIO at his office in Gurgaon. What caught my attention was a large LCD at the reception, similar to the ones at the airport, displaying arrival and departure times. The CIO later explained it was a fleet management system. Deployed six months back, it had radically transformed the way his enterprise managed internal (employees) and external (fleet vendor, in this case) customers. You, as technology leaders, can scarcely overlook its importance today. With emerging markets adding more than a billion customers to the global economy, CEO s worldwide have turnedtheir attention to our home turf.

The inherent cost-advantage that we have could be shortlived. The only way forward is to innovate for competitive advantage in the short-term and sustained growth and viability in the long-term. One way to fuel innovation could be to find an idea seeded anywhere and giving it an opportunity to expand.

The CIO who deployed the fleet management system didn’t tell his team to focus on just the project and its deadline. He gave them the freedom to think beyond the project. Ideas flew thick and fast, and the result was there for all to see. They say in Google, employ- There was no more sticking paper sheets on walls, and no more endless waits. The GPS would track the exact location of the cab, and any delay intimated through SMS. By developing an app for iPad, they could immediately log in the details once
the journey was completed.

This saved the vendor the hassle of sending invoices. In essence, it made life easy for everyone. We, at CTO Forum, have over the years been staunch proponents of such innovative IT. Google Employees invest 80 percent of their time in day-to-day work and the remaining 20 percent time is spent in ‘thinking’ not necessarily related to their work – a great way to incubate innovation. I believe for India’s CIO s these tough times are a blessing in disguise.

The time is ripe to herald innovation in their enterprises, and in the process display business and leadership mettle. This issue’s cover story is yet another small step on our part to strengthen the spirit of innovation, and our way of acknowledging technology leaders who have implemented innovative IT. Let the ‘I’ in CIO stand for Innovation. No idea is a bad idea and every idea deserves a chance – but the one that succeeds is
clearly the ‘right one’!