A: What has happened is that people like us find audiences, and by writing things that we are writing or saying things that we are doing we influence them, which is the behaviour of a tribe. What is important about this behavior is that, it’s happening in several tribes at the same time. There are places where I am part of a tribe, there are places where I am the leader of a tribe and this is changing the way marketing is going to happen. I find a gadget, say for example a pen. I wrote about it in my blog. And I went to some meeting 6-7 people already had that pen. I write about the books that I read on my Facebook and someday I hear people that tribes of my community bought and read that book. This is effective virtual marketing.

The second thing that happened to web was interruption marketing. It interrupted the person and told “this is who I am, buy me”. With the advent of social networks and their popularity is challenging this form of marketing. I don’t buy anything anymore until someone in my tribe talks about it or recommends it. I also recommend things to others; Today, I am very much opinionated about what I read on the Internet. I don’t depend on newspapers or other such media for information. Today’s CRM system is a form of interruption. They appear to be very intruding. CRM in its current for will die.

A: I am talking of similar techniques, which are aimed at building relationships and not transactional relationship. I am just dreaming. In the first instance, I will have to know who you are. If you are a magazine and you want me to subscribe to it - a first time interruption is allowed to start the dialogue. From the second time you will entice me. You would say if you write me back, I would send you two magazines free, and I write back and I get two magazines free. Then you say, if you want eight magazines free, you write this and do this. Completely different! It’s more Eastern type of relationship building than Western. We all like relationships and all want to go into relationships and that’s what’s happening. But the existing CRM systems have to change the way they deal with customers. They need to engage more.

A: Look, I have the kindle. They say that Apple will come out with a tablet PC in a while, which means, that somehow, someone, maybe Apple, Amazon or Google is going to come with one tablet where I can get all the information, I can write, store and do whatever I want. Some day Internet will not be Internet. Rather, I will be the Internet. I don’t believe in websites anymore. Very difficult to explain today, but the Internet will be something you don’t feel today. You write movies, you get movies, you write books and you would get the books you want.

A: According to me the market for application is going to grow exponentially because we are going to change them. I think the transaction-based computing is coming to an end already. We are now in the middle of that transition. Till today applications like CRM converted data into transactional processing with no element of relationship in it. With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other such web-based applications we are going to go back to real relationship management. I have no idea how it’s going to look, but we have to find software that works the way we want them to - more than the way it’s doing today.

A: Innovation is something that a CIO can do. Creativity comes with the person. A person is either creative or not creative. Creativity means that s/he is willing to see ‘out-of-the-box’. He sees things differently and is willing to fight for them. An innovation is the ability of a manager to allow creative people to do new things. Buts you cannot innovate unless you are creative. And no two people are brought up the same way or are the same. Each one is different so creativity is different.

A: Ok, so now I would say something which is not politically correct. If the CIO finds that he is spending more than 50 percent of his time in being the computer manager of the company, something is wrong.

A: No! Because I think, most of his time should go in giving strategic inputs and he has to have someone under him who can do that the tactical jobs. If he wants to be a part of the management he has to deal with the strategic part effectively. Nobody has gotten salary increase by having a good accounting system. Lot of people have been fired because accounting system doesn’t work. So it’s important to look into this. He has to build the next generation systems and see that he has people under him who can run the accounting system. Simply, no company has a competitive advantage because it can get its invoices out.

A: I see technologies coming out that are going to be like bricks. Like you build the house, you would build these computer centers. Some of them would be inside your own company, some would be outside. A combination private, public clouds and a hybrid model will win.