A few years back, the CIO of a large Indian government bank brought about major changes in the way the IT unit functioned within the organisation. The CIO reduced costs, streamlined and upgraded the IT infrastructure and demonstrated to the management that IT was an essential component in running the business.
But the management was not impressed at the performance. Reason—the IT budget focused only on maintaining the operations of the bank and had no provision for innovation and adding business value. Secondly, the technology operations and investments were not in sync with the bank’s future business strategies.
So the above tech savvy CIO who thought that aligning IT with business goals would fetch him accolades, was in serious trouble, without even realising it.
The job profile of every CIO has become complex and each one of them acknowledge this fact. Today (and also in the future), IT has become an integral part of the business and it cannot be looked at as a separate entity that needs to be aligned with the business. CIOs need to treat the processes of IT decision-making and business decision-making as a single integrated decision-making process.

Changing time, challenging times
The ongoing economic slowdown has left no country and no sector untouched. In these critical times, the role of the CIO has become more critical and IT is looked at and expected to play a saviour’s role to bail out enterprises out of the current crisis.
For example, in some businesses the impact may be higher due to reduced sales so the CIO of the company would emphasise on cost reduction while there would be other CIOs who, even in a downturn, may be investing and preparing themselves for an upturn in the future.
These times demand that the CIO plays a business leadership role and become proactive rather than wait for the diktats to come from the management. Even today, some enterprises look at IT as a money drain, so being proactive and showing what can and cannot be done is a better approach.
According to some of the leading research and analyst firms, the CIO’s dilemma consists of two forces pushing the role and the business benefit in opposite directions.
The first force is simplifying what used to be challenging. More and more technology becomes standardised, plug-and-play, and commonplace. Software-as-a-Service and cloud computing are demonstrating that technology infrastructure requires no expensive, dedicated set of resources to deliver or manage.
Vendor consolidation and technology industry convergence, which is the second force, confirm that core technologies are becoming commoditised—able to be handled by consultants, contractors, or even the vendors themselves. So with most of the IT being managed by these set of people, the traditional role of the CIO to manage enterprise IT is disappearing.
Although the business environment is constantly changing and the role of the CIO in an organisation has evolved over the past ten years, the basic tenets of leadership are timeless. By better understanding the implications of classic leadership strategies on this changing role, CIOs can both provide better direction to their teams and become better strategic advisors to their companies’ top leadership.
In recent times, many CIOs are building systems to create information assets and intelligence in the existing systems and ensuring these assets are managed like physical assets. This realisation has led to a significant enhancement of the role and responsibilities given to a CIO and they have ended up being a part of the core strategy-forming groups for the business. To a large extent, enterprises have realised that the value of IT lies in the ability of managing the information assets better.
Many in the industry opine that the changes in the last decade would seem mild when compared with those of the next five years. CIOs—and the senior executives they work with—will face unprecedented pressures, making success as a CIO even more difficult to achieve than it has been in the past.

The new generation
Industry leaders suggest that it is time for CIOs to step up to the new responsibilities of an IT leader and should delegate or shed some operational duties and spend more time helping business leaders identify and use technologies that will help companies innovate.
Others go a step further and opine that communication with all employees and at all levels, must also increase so as to involve users and start working as a group rather than in silos. This is because a people-centric business capability would greatly influence the performance of the company with respect to the "The next generation CIO: A new journey" current market conditions.
Customers are not bothered about which technology is deployed or how it is implemented. So for CIOs, it is important to understand what the business imperatives are and how can those be delivered.
Measuring IT effectiveness is another area that has gained importance with many CIOs and would continue to be a part of their future IT strategy. IT effectiveness is linked not only to what a CIO delivers but also more importantly, how it is delivered.
Measuring IT effectiveness means how much business value it creates and how many business problems it has solved coupled with the acceptance or adaptation of a particular technology by business users. All these are important to consider. Ultimately it is the user who will come back and inform whether technology is working for them.
Many CIOs have started to look at IT effectiveness from two perspectives. First, from a new initiative perspective where there are different milestones. They ask themselves whether they are adhering to these milestones, are there are variances in terms of time and cost?  The second
perspective would be from an operational angle with uptime as the parameter to measure the performance delivered to the organisation, the degree of effectiveness at which IT churns out change requests from the users, etc.
With these things in place, the CIO understands that the IT function has always perched on a unique position of having a perspective of the entire organisation as compared to his peers in the sales or marketing department who are limited to their own departments. A
correlation with various departments puts the CIO in a better position to drive things within the organisation and deliver business benefits.
We spoke to a few such CIOs who have embarked on the transformation journey. Here they share their thoughts and views on the Next Generation CIOs.

Ten priorities of the new CIO

From research conducted with thousands of companies and CIOs, here is a picture of the new, more proactive CIO. Call it the new CIO leader’s top ten.
Lead, don’t just manage. Leadership and management are not the same; they are complementary. You need to both manage and lead. Leading is about change and influencing others to change. To do that, you need a personal vision and a point of view about how information and IT can make your enterprise more effective. True CIO leadership requires two important abilities. First, you must lead with your business colleagues to set expectations and to identify what is valued by enterprise leaders. Second, you must lead your IS team to deliver on that—to provide cost-effective services.
Understand the fundamentals of your environment. You need to know your industry and your competitive environment and be able to engage key decision makers and stakeholders on their terms.
Create a vision for how IT will build your organisation’s success. As a CIO, your enterprise knowledge must be matched with the ability to envision how to better IT-enable your business or agency. This is why you are a CIO and not some other executive position or a mid-level IS manager—you must have a vision for achieving your colleagues’ business goals using technology.

Shape and inform expectations for an IT-enabled enterprise. This is the heart of your role as a CIO. You need to work with your colleagues to identify the key business needs, strategies, drivers, and so forth, and then articulate the IT guidelines necessary to address those needs.
Create clear and appropriate IT governance. Governance is really the secret to your success. Effective governance enables you to weave together business and IT strategies and to consistently build credibility and trust.
Weave business and IT strategy together. Your IT strategy is the content of key IT domains—IT maxims, infrastructure, architecture and application strategies, "The next generation CIO: A new journey" and investment prioritisation—and their implementation over a defined period. IT strategy means developing and actively managing your IT portfolio to deliver success as measured by your colleagues.
Build a new IS organisation. An organisation that is leaner and more focused than its more traditional predecessor. Like the new CIO, the new IS organisation must change some of the key ways it operates to achieve success. Three primary issues here are introducing process-based working, strategic sourcing of IT services, and putting IS on a sound financial footing.
Build and nurture a high-performing team in your IS organisation. Many of the competencies required of the IS team are different from those you might have recruited for previously. You need to know the competencies required for the new IS organisation—one that relies much more on internal and external relationships—and to recruit and train for effectiveness.
Manage the new enterprise and IT risks. These IT-related risks are much more pervasive and potentially damaging than in the past. Think of issues of information security, data privacy, and cyber-terrorism and the need to ensure compliance with new regulatory structures. Business leaders have to be aware of these risks and need help managing them across the enterprise—and you as a CIO will lead this process.

Communicate IS performance in business-relevant language. You must know and communicate how IT is contributing to shareholder value and the IT value indicators that are directly linked to business value measures. Today, how IT operates in your enterprise is crucial to the conduct of your business.

“CIOs should keep innovating”

Amrita Gangotra
CIO-Mobility and IT Operations Bharti Airtel 
The Next Generation CIO has to be someone who is part of the business and sits on the board of directors of an organisation. He is a person who influences strategies of the business and focuses on critical areas such as cost saving and revenue generation. Having technology knowledge coupled with business acumen is not only important, but an entry barrier to the function itself. The CIO of the future needs to have a thorough knowledge of the finance function as well. He needs to work closely in tandem with the CFO of the organisation.

Simply put, the role of the CIO, which was very back office focused yesterday has moved to that of the innovator and strategic leader today. The role is evolving and transforming to touch the other end of the spectrum—the customer. The logical culmination of this evolution is when the CIO will be an inseparable part of the business transformation process. 
The CIO will be the catalyst for cutting-edge innovation. He will be increasingly called upon to come up with solutions that will shore up the company’s performance.
Coming back to my organisation, Bharti has focused on a lot of consolidation "The next generation CIO: A new journey" and virtualisation. The company has been through a number of mergers and acquisitions—and technology consolidation strategies have helped us to integrate better (as individual units in the group). IT has also helped us scale up operations. Our revenue-sharing model has also helped us keep the business operations transparent—along with controlling costs and increasing project efficiencies.
Information Technology plays an integral role in our organisation—and our reliance on IT is only bound to go up in the future. For example, it is mandatory for the company to get address verification done for every new subscriber. Because we are spread out across the nation, earlier it would take us anywhere between three to seven days to get the entire exercise of tracking, storing, retrieving and processing the documents as it was done manually. Now we have completely automated the whole process wherein scanned copies are used and stored, quality check takes place and the documents are easily retrievable. This has tremendously helped us in increasing the speed of this exercise as it has reduced the number of locations from where we would receive the forms. We have been able to do a lot of consolidation and create shared services and can now complete verification in one to three days.
Technology changes rapidly, and the Next Generation CIO has to keep abreast of these changes. What’s more, he has to keep in mind the ever-changing needs of his business and tailor solutions accordingly. The CIO of the future needs to understand the way business works—right from the products and services being marketed to customer support, extending right to the P&L accounts of the entire unit. I stress again that financial acumen is a critical aspect for tomorrow’s CIO.
The Next Generation CIO has to be a well-honed personality. For example, his job will require him to also focus on negotiation, presentation and communication skills.

“CIOs should be able to articulate and manage risks”
Sumit Chowdhury
CIO, Reliance Communications 

The Next Generation CIO has to be part of the business leadership. He has to realise that he is not just managing a bunch of IT people but is responsible for the business - generating revenue and profit. He has to align the mission and vision of the IT organisation with that of the business and the customers. The future CIO has to be a change agent and enable the business to think ahead. He has to be future thinking and anticipate where the business is going to go and change the organisation to be ready when the business reaches there. He also has to be a proficient people manager. He has to motivate people to innovate, to do more with less. Next Generation CIOs need to be able to manage risks and be able to articulate risks.
When I say ‘align with customers’, it is important that companies learn to innovate and deliver to the customer at the least possible management overhead. Let us take the example of self service. We know that Internet connectivity usage is going up and we want to create a multi-mode self service channel so that the cost of serving the customer goes down and the customers know that there is another channel through which they can deal with the company. The CIO should investigate and implement everything that makes it easy for the customer to interact with the company—regardless of the channel they are talking to. We need to align our IT systems with that of the needs and delight of the customers. This might also mean that we make significant improvements in the lives of the people (employees) who work directly or indirectly with the end-customers.
CIOs have to do more with less, not only during an economic slowdown but this has to be done all the time. This is part and parcel of what a Next Generation CIO should be doing. There was a lot of excess when people had large budgets and business exigencies introduce a lot of wastage. The CIO has to become part of the leadership team that prevents these excesses at all times.
At Reliance we have done succession planning in almost all teams. We have tested it out over the last year and a half. We have removed people from their roles and moved them up to governance roles and other people have come up to take those positions. We now have a very strong IT governance structure with different committees looking at various issues. In the wake of the latest conditions and happenings it is extremely important for organisations to have strong governance in place.

“CIOs need to deal with intense relationships”
Hilal Issar Khan, Head-IT, Honda Siel Cars India

Be it the Next Generation CIO, CFO or CEO, they will have to perform in a very challenging environment. But at the same time they will have more opportunities to prove their capability. Next generation not only means the younger group that will enter the community but also the need for existing CIOs to have a Next Generation outlook. We all agree that a CIO needs to hone business skills and understand every aspect of his own business along with that of his competitors and customers. Simultaneously, the CIO should also become a relationship manager. CIOs of tomorrow will have to "The next generation CIO: A new journey" deal with intense relationships with internal customers, partners, vendors as well as external customers. They cannot survive by just executing transactions as is the case today. Next Gen CIOs will have to consolidate relationships so that business is transparent to both parties involved and they can create an IT roadmap that is agile and flexible and can respond quickly to changing business needs.
Another quality that will be crucial for CIOs in the future is the ability to take risks. The pressure of time is always prevalent and hence it will be challenging for CIOs to explore new technologies. Today, though we talk about need to become more technology savvy to stay ahead in the race, the Indian mindset is still hesitant to embrace new technologies.
Like any other company, we are also feeling the effect of the economic slowdown. IT heads all over are under pressure to cut costs and at the same time CEOs and CFOs are demanding tangible and intangible business benefits from those limited investments. We are consciously making efforts to meet these expectations.
For example, for our vehicle quality checks we have recently deployed a RFID-based system which helps in proactively taking care of any difference or defects in cars at the assembly line. To quantify it, this would take 12-24 hours earlier and we had to wait till until the shift ends to deal with the problems but today with this system these issues can be addressed in real time in a much more efficient matter.
Also, since I am able to capture the entire data and maintain a repository, my ability to respond to market defects is much lesser. So ultimately my customer
satisfaction index is going up, my time to attend a particular call is becoming less as the ability of a technician at a dealership to deal with a problem is reduced.
Besides that, we have tried to knit our forecasting, planning and allocation systems for finished goods. We manufactured cars on the basis of forecasting and every car that we made and kept in our yard costs us a certain amount. But now we are taking the forecast from
dealers on a real time basis and the production plan is based on that forecast and is fixed in nature and I am not over-producing at all. So there is no cost now to my business of retaining additional inventory at any given point of time.

“The five buckets of a CIO’s role”
Prasad Dhumal
Area IT Head-South Asia, DHL Express India

Business growth has definitely slowed down and there has been a focus on curtailing costs. We are looking at ways to cut the running costs of IT, to be able to do more with less and to optimise our IT landscape in terms of reducing complexity. We cannot stop innovation just because times are bad. At this point of time there is a need to be tactical rather than go for a long-term strategy because we don’t know how the economic slowdown is going to change in the next 12-18 months. It is situations like this that are factors which chart out the role of the Next Generation CIO.
There are five essential buckets into which the Next Gen CIO’s role falls into:
Business focus: The importance of business acumen cannot be overstated. A CIO not only needs to have deep understanding of his own business but his customer’s business.
Customer orientation: In a dynamic market place where competition is so intense, the needs of the customer is extremely important. It is critical for the CIO to listen to his customer and use business technology to innovate ways and means to deliver as per their requirements.  He plays the lead role in ensuring that the customer is always kept on top of the organisational priorities.
Innovation: In the past, there were standard technology solutions, which was just a buy and plug situation. But the CIO of tomorrow has to constantly innovate these solutions to meet the expectations of the business and his customer. He plays a key role in imbibing innovation as the culture across the enterprise - not just the IT department.

Cross-border thinking: We have different divisions that use different technologies and we work across different geographies. It is important for a Next Generation CIO to be able to work with his counterparts in various locations to provide a wholesome experience to customers and enable organisational goals such as reduce costs, increase productivity and enable business growth. So cross-border thinking is an imperative skill.
Focus on execution: Execution of organisational strategies to ensure smooth and effective delivery of services and faster time to market is a key requirement of the CIO function. With the dynamic requirements of the customer, CIOs today cannot "The next generation CIO: A new journey" afford to spend 12 to 18 months in designing and developing a solution, because the business needs them as of yesterday.
We have promoted the use of VoIP within our organisation. From our call billing reports we have identified all the locations from where we have majority national and international calling—within offices and externally. Internally we have adopted VoIP solutions like Skype, PC-video concept, etc. which are lower in cost when compared to video conferencing and or tele-presence solutions. We have ensured that while this cuts out travel and accommodation costs, it does not have a negative impact on our business. These initiatives have helped us reduce our costs by 15-20 percent in the last 12 months.


“CIOs should focus on corporate governance”
Jason Gonsalves, VP, Corporate Planning and IT, Kansai Nerolac
The Next Generation CIO should have sound
business understanding and create value through IT applications to achieve business goals. The other area that CIOs would need to focus a lot on is on the corporate governance front. In addition, CIOs should continue to innovate and develop a strong information supply chain.
In our company, we have a system where managers are given the opportunity to work in different functions and groom themselves in the process. This makes for well rounded business leaders exposed to various facets of business and gives them an understanding and appreciation for it. Not that I chose IT, but I went through this process and developed a tremendous respect for it. Not only has it helped me become a better manager, but also a better human being.
CIOs should know how to effectively put forth their ideas and suggestions and make efforts to understand the business point of view. The future CIO has to figure out how to optimise the infrastructure because a lot of CIOs have a problem with legacy, duplication and reuse.
Gone are the days when the CIO would just be an EDP manager or a systems manager. Today he has honed his business acumen and hence is best suited to lead an enterprise. More than other top-level executives, a CIO understands IT and how it enables business strategy. CIOs have mastered the art of bridging the gap between business requirements and the ability to deliver solutions to fulfill those requirements in a timely and efficient manner.
Over-dependence on IT to run the organisation will force the Next Generation CIO to wear multiple hats. The CIO will be required to be able to influence and inspire internal and external business units to work toward a common goal in a coordinated fashion. This requires the CIO to be a leader in developing a clear vision for IT and motivate executives and all employees to pursue this vision.
Technology is being increasingly used to challenge assumptions about the traditional ways of doing business. There is a strong need to develop and deploy workflows and controls within the IT environment. The flow of information should happen at faster speeds and in real-time.
Personally, I regard myself as a business manager. IT is basically an enabler; it doesn’t own anything. IT fundamentally executes the task which could be an enterprise application, networking, etc, that the business needs to function effectively. It helps if you have a business head looking after IT because he is able to understand the strategic intent of the business and in turn, put it in the system.
For future CIOs, I’ll say that the function’s core responsibility is to align IT with business, understand business strategy and comprehend what the organisation needs. Even if he doesn’t possess a technology background, but grasps all the aforementioned and builds up a good team, the CIO is on the path to success.