Vinod Sivarama Krishnan – CIO Global, Jubilant Life Sciences Limited, India.

Jubilant is a global leader in Pharmaceuticals – specifically Contract Manufacturing and Contract Research, Generics & Specialties. The group also has a significant presence in Food Service, Oil & Gas Exploration and Prospecting and Retail.

Vinod is a Business Technology Leader with over 18 years of global experience in delivering business solutions and creating and leading IT organizations across several business domains.

The Center for CIO Leadership has requested CIO members and other industry experts to answer three questions regarding predictions for the CIO in 2012. Here are my answers to these three questions.

What are your top 3 CIO priorities for 2012?

1. Data to Information using Analytics – In the highly dynamic world we live in with increasingly short business cycles, my businesses need to understand where they stand in near real time and to be able to determine the impact of changes in the environment to their business model and performance and make better decisions based on this information. While we are able to collect more data, we’re certainly not able to process it into useable information quickly enough for businesses to actually use in their day-to-day operations. I expect just the process of working on this initiative to lead to more internal visibility of the key drivers and that the very process of measurement will drive improvement.
2. Flexibility of Infrastructure and Applications – Better analytics will lead to more frequent changes of direction, both strategic and tactical, leading to a need for more flexible infrastructure and applications. This will challenge me and my team to rebuild (or in some cases, build) our platforms in a more granular, more flexible way to allow for these changes and respond to them as quickly as possible. Already the inability to scale (or reorient) our systems emerges as a big constraint in business flexibility, and that concern will have to be taken off the table as quickly as possible.
3. Finding and Retaining IT Management Talent – Frequent changes in direction and scale will require IT leaders with a different set of skill sets – more flexibility, more platform or tool agnosticism with the ability to view business requirements and processes as services to be provided using standard sets of tools. Significant empowerment of business users (by design) to reconfigure their processes within broad controllership lines will be essential, requiring IT to step out of the business of managing simpler aspects of process redesign. This will require a very different mindset, and the challenge will be to find (or build) and retain the right people.

How will 2012 be different from 2011 for you as a CIO?

For me, 2012 will be a year of

1. Broadening (more geographies, more P&Ls) and deepening (more functionality, more interconnectedness) of the standard platforms put in place for the group. I will also need to create appropriate cost-effective support mechanisms for the standard platforms. My team and I will need to succeed in our ongoing implementations, create a track record of successful delivery and ensure that we build momentum for these platforms by measuring and highlighting business impact and benefits achieved. In contrast, 2011 was more about building the base of the standard platforms, creating several quick proofs-of-concept to understand the technology and illustrate benefits and investing in building expertise on these platforms.
2. Increasing uncertainly from the business. I expect more starts and stops as the business responds to market and economic challenges, or moves to address opportunities being created. This will mean an increasing need to find or create flexible business systems. The cost of this flexibility and its impact on the current and future bottom line will need to be quantified and reviewed on a continuous basis. Business units which understand the value of this flexibility and are willing to fund it will reap significant advantages over 2012 itself, and certainly over the next three years, and it will be my job to help them understand this value.
3. Increasing demands on IT. As we move from the more basic deliverables to more evolved needs, demands and expectations will grow. Increasing consumerization of IT and greater understanding of IT in the executive suite will lead to increased pressure to deliver. Now that most CEOs and Directors come from a generation that has grown up with a good understanding of IT, it is significantly harder to expect key technology decisions to be made from within IT or expectations to be set solely by IT. Expected lead times to new functionality (in line with shorter business cycles) will now be significantly shorter, and my teams can expect to work on several smaller projects with defined benefits simultaneously as opposed to larger projects with longer payback periods.

What organizational or industry shifts are you expecting in 2012?

1. As a diversified conglomerate present in many high-growth verticals, I expect several new opportunities and threats, possibly simultaneous, to come out of the current economic conditions. I expect that responses will range from hunkering down to growing aggressively, making common strategies across the group difficult to come by and requiring more nuance to allow for specific market and economic differences globally and across industries. As growth slows in some segments, I expect some consolidation of processes and adaptation to last year’s growth.
2. I expect a shift to basics and more focus on controllership and compliance to minimize the probability of incidents due to rapid change of systems and processes. Specifically there will be a focus on ensuring quality of process, product and service irrespective of internal changes within the organization (which will be mostly focused on efficiency and cost).
3. Rapid increase in customer mobility and the availability of connectedness will call for large-scale redesign of business models, processes and systems to enable shorter reaction times and quicker responses to market and economic conditions. Mobility will fundamentally alter business models in several parts of our business and render some historical advantages redundant – and hopefully create some new advantages for first movers!

Javed Mushtaq, CIO, Pakistan Telecommunication cooperation Limited, Pakistan, Wired and wireless telecommunication.

IT professional, with 24+ years of IT leadership experience in Telecommunication, Financial, Health Insurance, Software House, Petroleum industries and in governance sector. Experience in business-IT alignment, designing, developing and implementation of state-of-the-art IT solutions to support business.

For the last seven years, I have led two telecom operator’s IT department - one for a green field operator and one for the largest and the oldest Telco (130 years) of Pakistan. During this period a state-of-the-art infrastructure was designed and developed, which includes the establishment of a tier III data centre, Security / Risk management, DR site and business continuity procedures. In the area of customer service and agile product development, CRM solutions for wired and wireless products.

The Center for CIO Leadership has requested CIO members and other industry experts to answer three questions regarding predictions for the CIO in 2012. Here are my answers to these three questions.

What are your top 3 CIO priorities for 2012?

1. Cost Rationalization

Year 2012 will continue to see IT cost rationalization due to the financial crisis and political instability around the world. The IT industry will transform from CAPEX model to OPEX model of spending, with more of a revenue share model than a typical customer- vendor relationship model. Hardware and Software services will become more commoditized and will be consumed as service, rather than as company assets.

2. IT Commercial Lab - Cloud Computing

IT will be taking a more proactive role in the area of product development than before as a business enabler; IT will transform from fulfillment role to concept to market role for the organizations. Especially in the telecommunication sector, where the conventional revenue streams are drying up, more ICT products are required for stickiness and revenue enhancement. For ICT projects, IT will take the lead on concept to market the product process. During this process IT will implement the product in their labs, mature the process of marketing/selling and supporting the product for commercial use, with IT department being the first customer of the product/service. One of the examples is public cloud.

3. Security / Business Continuity

The enhanced role of security will be seen in the next years; security will not be limited to securing the network from hackers, but will also be extended to ensure operational continuity with agreed SLA with business, in order to manage business expectations.

How will 2012 be different from 2011 for you as a CIO?

IT will be the differentiating factor for the business, more process agility/automation and more business intelligence will be required to compete in the market by business. CIOs will need to prepare themselves and the IT department for this transformation.

What organizational or industry shifts are you expecting in 2012?

Convergence will happen between the products, technologies and roles. With reference to telecom post- and pre-paid will be converged and payment method will only be the differentiating factor, with all other factors common like customer care/tariffs etc. The communications and information technologies will be truly converge under ICT one domain.

Arun Gupta, Customer Care Associate & Group Chief Technology Officer, Shoppers Stop Limited, India

You can read more about Arun on his blog Oh I See ! (CIO Inverted)

The Center for CIO Leadership has requested CIO members and other industry experts to answer three questions regarding predictions for the CIO in 2012. Here's my approach to answering thse questions.

Like the sun goes down in the west every day, the earth goes round the sun, people make New Year resolutions and the IT industry makes predictions for the coming year. These lists offer hot technologies, CIO priorities, business priorities, technologies that will not last the year, ad infinitum. So what kind of list am I going to create ?

Every CIO already knows his/her current priorities, for the next year, and over the next 3 years (broadly) that fits in somewhere in the organization long-term strategy. These are dependent on many factors, some are (though not limited to) industry, size of the organization, geopolitical situation, global market dynamics, consumer sentiment, organization dynamics, profitability of the company … The broad collation of priorities through research conducted is generic enough to statistically fit over 80% of the CIOs globally and is available free or paid depending on whose list it is. So I will not pursue this line.

Different matrixes once again based on widespread research and opinions will tout waves, quadrants, hype curves, scatter charts, bubble charts and so on about disruptive technologies that would matter in the future. Stay with the bleeding edge or lose competitive advantage is the mantra. Some remain emerging technologies for decades like a solution searching for a problem to solve, while many remain niche or never get out of the lab to be adopted in mainstream business. I do not believe I understand enough about these esoteric technologies to offer predictions.

Having been a CIO or equivalent for more than decade and half across 7 different industries, I think I do understand the CIO travails and tribulations. To me every industry brought new opportunities for learning as well as new paradigms on how existing or new technology can be used. Every slowdown or black swan provided a platform to introspect on successes and lack of some. The next decade and half will bring disruptions unimaginable today. So here is my list for 2012 and beyond; can’t predict that all of these will be applicable to everyone, but statistically over the year you will find some connect.

1. CIOs globally will continue to be challenged on operating budgets. Capital investments will become relatively easier; operating expenses will need to be controlled very tightly.
2. BITA (Business IT Alignment) will fall off the priority list for many as it will no longer be an issue. Business will acknowledge IT contribution and will work with IT to plan business goals. There will be no separate IT goals.
3. Attrition will not be the problem, retention will be; with economic and political uncertainty, staff will hang on to their respective jobs. CIOs will have to take some hard decisions.
4. Clouds will be the first choice for deploying apps for the mobile workforce. The rest will continue to access applications behind the firewall. Hybrid clouds will remain experimental as CIOs figure out that it really does not save money. CIOs will no longer build data centers.
5. Lead by Consumerization, mobile devices will be out of IT control (for good) and the personal device will find a way to get inside; resisting CIOs will have to provide equivalent additional device, which eventually the Business will turn down. Managing multiple screens will become a pain for the Executive who will challenge IT to make it simpler. The phone as a corporate device will thus be replaced by the tablet over the next 2 years.
6. CIOs will or be forced to challenge the cost of sustaining big ERP (licenses, support, etc.) as it keeps growing; alternate support vendors will gain market share. Usage will shift out from the office to using marketplace supplied micro-apps thereby challenging the existence of big ERP in 5 years.
7. Social media fatigue will set in and even marketing teams will be asked to create ROI for expenses and investments on such initiatives. CIOs will need to manage expectations around social analytics while Consultants will thrive with maturity models and make loads of money.
8. The CIO will continue to be tasked with managing information security with the CISO reporting into him/her. A few cloud bursts (cloud security breaches) will make matters worse before things settle down over 2013 and beyond.
9. Big Data will remain high on hype with vendors pushing and CIOs scratching their heads if it really gives the benefits promised.
10. Custom development of solutions will wane with ocean of micro-apps promising to enable business processes as effectively. At the same time appliances will replace generic hardware.
11. Many CIOs and research analysts will not agree many with the above points.

I could have gone on and on but will stop now. I thought 11 is good for now; why 11 and not 10 ? According to Hindu scriptures it is an auspicious number and if you don’t believe in such things, then I would ask why 10 ? I know Moses had something to do with it !