In Today's intense economic scenario where cutthroat competition is rife, business agility has become an essential survival skill. This is specifically true for businesses such as telecommunications which posted a dismal 2.5 percent growth in 2009-10 due to intense tariff war unleashed by the new entrants.

Businesses face unique challenges today. For a moment, if we concentrate on telecom industry, the service providers are grappling with issues ranging from industry consolidation to decreasing margins to lower Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) to  leveraging New Generation Network (NGN) to ever-changing customer needs. For CIOs of companies such as these, the biggest challenge is to converge the existing portfolio of services, networks and content (voice, video and data) to deliver an integrated user experience.

If we go by popular estimates, by 2015, the world would be far more connected than today. The customers will have access to whatever information they want, whenever they want, on the devices of their choice. I believe that to enable such a change, we, as CIOs, have to look at institutionalising enterprise-wide changes that can affect cost reductions, boost business performance and enable faster time-to-market.

It is predicted that by 2012 approximately 20 percent businesses won’t own any IT assets and that India-centric companies will represent 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators.

In light of these facts, we, as CIOs, need to think of moving away from monolithic systems to federated and scalable architecture. The only way by which we can have sustainable growth now and in the future is by keeping our organisation agile.

Besides, we need to change our focus, transforming from the current business-centric view of value to customer-centric view of the value chain. Along with that we must evaluate new markets, customer segments and product areas for profitable growth. As also look at leveraging analytics for pro-active relationship management and up-selling/crossselling to increase customer value. Finally we must build innovative, integrated and scalable service delivery platforms for future growth.

BY ALPNA DOSHI CEO, Reliance Tech Services & CIO RCOM THE AUTHOR has almost two decades of experiences in IT, Offshoring, Communications, Media and Entertainment, Operator, SI, and supplier businesses.