cio decemeber 2012 issue

CXO AGENDA

Simeran Bhasin aligns Fastrack to the rules

of social media. Page 54

TABLET TAKEOVER

IndiaFirst Life uses tablets to catch

up with its rivals. Page 48

DECEMBER 15, 2012 | `100.00

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ARUP CHOUDHURY, CIO, Eveready, was elevated

to the strategy team after he spent time

with customers.

A handful of CIOs are getting out there and are meeting end customers. Here’s why you should too. Page 38

KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER

EXECUTIVE COACH: VINAY DABHOLKAR SIMPLIFIES INNOVATION Page 29

Cover_Dec2012_Final.indd 84 12/14/2012 9:12:59 PM

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Vijay Ramachandran, [email protected]

FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

People who do not succeed, seldom find failure.

However, those who experience many successes,

Shall experience many failures.

You must understand this truth of the Middle Way.

—The Buddha

Many moons ago in the pages of this magazine,

author provocateur Michael Schrage ruffled many

feathers by suggesting that “CIOs should stop trying

to do the ‘right thing’ when implementing IT and focus

instead on getting their implementations right.”

Schrage insisted that a CIO’s loyalty lay with the

project and not with either the organization supporting the project or the people working

on its execution. One of the scenarios Schrage raised involved deliberately withholding

important information from the CEO if you knew that its disclosure would provoke a

counter productive intervention in an important project.

Yet, I wonder isn’t a CIO’s role always about gray shades rather than the black and white?

Aren’t you expected to be both a force of control and an agent of change? Aren’t you required

to deliver results and yet not upset your colleagues? Doesn’t your CEO expect you to render

honest feedback, while not being offensive? How do you make IT predictable while keeping

business agile? How do you focus on flawless execution while formulating strategy?

I don’t see either ethical or moral issues at play here. I believe that these are lesser

contradictions than a recognition of the CIO as a practitioner of the realpolitik that

organizations represent. What do you really owe your CEO? The facts or the truth or

merely results? Your response will hold clues to the directions your career, your role and

your department is going to take.

R. Gopalakrishnan, Director, Tata Sons, while launching his book, What the CEO Really

Wants From You, recently said: “To treat your CEO like a boss is incorrect. He is and will be

your customer. And, thus like all customers is imperfect—he may not always recognize

what he wants and when he decides on a course of action he might often change his mind

equally quickly. The trick is to be able to deliver results, build lines of communication,

never forget your core values, while being able to disagree, without being disagreeable.”

Amen.

Who Are You?What do you really owe your CEO? The facts or the truth or merely results?

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission from the publisher. Address requests for customized reprints to

IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027, India. IDG Media Private Limited is an

IDG (International Data Group) company.

Printed and Published by Louis D’Mello on behalf of IDG Media Private Limited, Geetha Building, 49, 3rd Cross, Mission Road, Bangalore - 560 027.

Editor: Louis D’Mello Printed at Manipal Press Ltd., Press Corner, Tile Factory Road, Manipal, Udupi, Karnataka - 576 104.

IDG Offices in India are listed on the next page

PUBLISHER, PRESIDENT & CEO Louis D’Mello ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Rupesh Sreedharan,

Sudhir Argula

E D I TO R I A L

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Vijay Ramachandran EXECUTIVE EDITOR Gunjan Trivedi, T.M. Arun Kumar ASSOCIATE EDITOR Yogesh Gupta DEPUTY EDITOR Sunil Shah ASSISTANT EDITOR ONLINE Varsha Chidambaram SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS Radhika Nallayam, Shantheri Mallaya PRINCIPAL CORRESPONDENTS Anup Varier, Gopal Kishore, Madana Prathap SENIOR CORRESPONDENT Sneha Jha CORRESPONDENTS Aritra Sarkhel, Debarati Roy, Eric Ernest, Ershad Kaleebullah, Shweta Rao, Shubhra Rishi CHIEF COPY EDITOR Shardha Subramanian SENIOR COPY EDITOR Shreehari Paliath COPY EDITOR Vinay Kumaar LEAD DESIGNERS Jinan K.V., Suresh Nair, Vikas Kapoor SENIOR DESIGNER Unnikrishnan A.V DESIGNERS Amrita C. Roy, Sabrina Naresh,

SA L E S & M A R K E T I N G

PRESIDENT SALES & MARKETING Sudhir Kamath VP SALES Parul Singh GM MARKETING Siddharth Singh MANAGER KEY ACCOUNTS Jaideep Marlur, Sakshee Bagri SENIOR MANAGER PROJECTS Ajay Chakravarthy MANAGER- SALES SUPPORT Nadira Hyder MARKETING ASSOCIATES Anuradha Iyer, Benjamin Jeevanraj, Dinesh P PROJECT CO-ORDINATOR Rima Biswas, Saurabh Patil LEAD DESIGNERS Jitesh C.C., Pradeep Gulur DESIGNER Lalita Ramakrishna

E V E N TS & AU D I E N C E D E V E LO P M E N T

SR. MANAGERS PROJECTS Ajay Adhikari, Chetan Acharya, Pooja Chhabra, MANAGER Tharuna Paul SENIOR EXECUTIVE Shwetha M PROJECT COORDINATORS Archana Ganapathy

F I N A N C E & O P E R AT I O N S

FINANCIAL CONTROLLER Sivaramakrishnan T. P SR. MANAGER ACCOUNTS Sasi Kumar V SR. ACCOUNTS EXECUTIVE Poornima MANAGER CREDIT CONTROL Prachi Gupta SR. MANAGER PRODUCTS Sreekanth Sastry SR. MANAGER PRODUCTION T.K.Karunakaran SR. MANAGER IT Satish Apagundi

2 D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 | REAL CIO WORLD

Content,Editorial,Colophone.indd 2 12/14/2012 9:03:15 PM

Networks are complex. Your network performance management shouldn’t be. Decomplexify it with Riverbed Cascade.

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DECEMBER 15, 2012 | VOL/8 | ISSUE/02

VOL/8 | ISSUE/024 D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 | REAL CIO WORLD

72

38

VIEW FROM THE TOP:“If not for technology, we would have exhib-ited an impression of being a mom and pop store to banks,” says Umesh Revankar, Direc-tor, Shriram Transport Finance Company.

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contentsCase Files48 | IndiaFirst LifeMOBILITY As the 23rd entrant in the Indian insurance industry, IndiaFirst Life had a world of ground to cover. But it didn’t believe in catching up; it wanted to get ahead. How? By empowering over 1,000 sales agents with tablets that sell insurance in 30 minutes. By Anup Varier

68 | Sheela FoamRFID Sheela Foam launches an IT-based attack to figure out how its products were getting into the hands of unauthorized dealers, who cost the company about Rs 25 crore a year. By Shweta Rao

70 | Bajaj PowerTELEPRESENCE If Bajaj Power Division wanted to curb its travel expenses and save its revenue, it had only one option: Telepresence. By Eric Ernest

more»

38 | KYC: Know Your Customer COVER STORY | CUSTOMER FOCUSToday, perhaps more than ever, the business needs CIOs to connect closer with customers to help it stay profitable. Some of your peers tell you how to do that.By Ershad Kaleebullah. Edited by Sunil Shah and Shardha Subramanian

76 | Florida Votes for the CloudFEATURE | CLOUD COMPUTING The 17-month story behind how the CIO of Florida’s Department of State moved its election process to the cloud—a journey that would cost him a significant portion of his team. Feature by Thor Olavsrud


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DEPARTMENTS

contents (cont.)

52

52

CXO AGENDASocial CompulsionsSimeran Bhasin, Marketing Head, Fastrack & New Brands at Titan Industries, on how social media is changing the way companies are run.


2 | From the Editor-in-Chief Who Are You? By Vijay Ramachandran

9 | Trendlines Technology | Mannequins Have an Eye on You Security | Move Over Sniffer Dogs, Laser Detects Bombs Robotics | Robots Go to School Automotive | Cruise Control Innovation | DNA Out of a Suitcase Crowdfunding | FundaGeek Funds Your Ideas Mobility | App Stores: Work in Progress Social Media | Now, the Pope Takes to Twitter Popular Science | Tablet Drives Mini-car Energy | Methanol Powers Mobile Networks PR Mgt | 2012’s Top Three Sorry Figures By the Numbers | BYOD? What’s That?

20 | Alert Staff Management | IS Training: A Waste of Money

Cybersecurity | Security’s Domino Effect

80 | Essential Technology Big Data | One-on-One

Big Data Analytics | Big Data for Barrier Reef?

84 | Endlines Innovation | Heart on Your Sleeve

By Lauren Brousell

65 | Innovation Happy HoursFEATURE | INNOVATIONSome organizations give tech workers free time to follow their passions—an innovation time-off. It could result in a new product, a new source of revenue or a new competitive edge. Feature by Howard Baldwin

Columns26 | The Gloves are OffFRANKLY SPEAKING The battle between Microsoft and VMware is heating up and confused customers are caught in the crossfire.Column by TM Arun Kumar

29 | Deconstructing InnovationEXECUTIVE COACH Innovation’s become so much of an abstract idea, CIOs are shying away from it. It doesn’t have to be like that. Here’s the step-by-step on innovation.Column by Dr. Vinay Dhabolkar

31 | Stalk. Prey. Kill.LEADING EDGE A new wave of cybercrime, called waterhole attacks, takes Advanced Persistent Threats to the next level, making it sharper, more efficient, and less detectable.Column by Gunjan Trivedi

34 | Rock Star DevelopersSTAFF MANAGEMENT You want the best and the brightest developers money can buy. Or do you? Here are six reasons you're better served by a group of developers with mixed skill levels who focus on getting the job done.Column by Andrew Oliver

32


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T E C H N O L O G Y Facebook and Google aren’t the only companies with the ability to spy on you. Brick-and-mortar stores can too, thanks to some creepy technology.

It’s no secret some companies track your online browsing activities to figure out what you’re interested in so they can serve you targeted ads that you’re more likely to notice.

Now some stores are employing a new breed of mannequins equipped with facial recognition technology, reports The Washington Post.

The Italian company Almax SpA sells a mannequin called the EyeSee that has a camera built into one of its eyes that ports data into facial recognition software that can tell the age, gender, and race of people walking by.

With such data, retailers can pivot store layouts, displays and promotions to better market to whatever demographic is checking out a certain area. Fashion retailer Benetton is reportedly investing in the EyeSee, which costs more than $5,000 (about Rs 2.7 lakh).

If the thought of mannequins “seeing” you is a troubling thought, you might as well get used to the idea. Online companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple have been using the technology for a while to identify people in photos.

Not only that, the FBI has started rolling out its $1 billion (about Rs 5,500 crore) biometric Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, a nationwide database of mug shots, iris scans, DNA samples, voice recordings, palm prints, and other biometrics collected from more than 100 million Americans and intended to help identify and catch criminals.

The FBI has been piloting the program with several states and by the time it’s fully deployed in 2014 it will have, at its fingertips, a facial recognition database that includes at least 12 million photos of people’s faces.

—By Christina DesMarais

N E W * H O T * U N E X P E C T E DN E W * H O T * U N E X P E C T E D

According to Harb, the device uses mirrors to repeatedly pass through the vapor in a “figure-of-eight” path, which provides a more accurate measurement.

“We can measure the components of TNT very clearly, down to the tiny sub-millitorr pressures, in other words in the parts per billion range in atmosphere,” says Harb.

Harb expects that it would take two years of testing and calibrating the prototype—to detect “unique signatures of other substances and different types of explosives”—before it’s ready for commercial use.

Harb and his team at UNSW began working on the device in 2005 when they were asked by the Australian Federal Police to create a machine that could assist with forensic investigations and detect explosive residue at crime scenes.

Harb says police wanted a machine that could work around-the-clock to “identify the actual type of explosive and check every suitcase passing on a conveyor belt”, something that sniffer dogs can’t do.

—By Byron Connolly

E D I T E D B Y S H A R D H A S U B R A M A N I A N

Move Over Sniffer Dogs, Laser Detects Bombs

Mannequins Have an Eye on You

REAL CIO WORLD | D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 9VOL/8 | ISSUE/02

S E C U R I T Y Scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have developed a prototype laser device capable of detecting tiny traces of explosive vapor, an invention that has the potential to put bomb sniffer dogs out of a job.

The prototype—a pulsed, quantum laser-based, cavity ring-down spectrometer—is being tested at the US government’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The laser machine is “about 100 times more sensitive and 100 times faster than any other detection device,” says Associate Professor Charles Harb from UNSW’s School of Engineering and Information Technology. The laser device could sniff bags traveling along a conveyor belt and instantly alert security personnel if it detects explosive vapors from a passing object, such as a suitcase.

The device could replace intrusive airport security checks such as

pat downs and full body scans and bomb sniffer dogs,

UNSW said.

Trendline_Final_Dec2012.indd 9 12/14/2012 7:42:22 PM

R O B O T I C S Humanoid robots that can see, hear, speak and communicate with humans are being deployed throughout schools in Warwickshire, UK to increase student engagement in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.

The so-called NAO robot, made by Aldebaran Robotics, is a fully programmable, 58cm-tall humanoid robot with a sensor network that includes cameras, microphones and pressure sensors, as well as a voice synthesizer and two high-fidelity speakers.

Users can create and edit the robot’s movements and interactive behavior using Aldebaran’s Choregraphe programming software, which the company claims is easy to use even with no prior knowledge of writing code.

NAO is intended for teachers of computer science, engineering and mechanics to use as a learning aid in lessons, to illustrate abstract concepts and explain mathematical theorems and principles in physics, electronics and ICT.

For example, teachers can explain to students how to write a piece of code that will instruct the robot to walk five paces, and then test out the students’ attempts on the robot itself. If there are errors in the code the robot will fall over, so the code can then be modified.

NAO can also be used in primary schools to introduce children to robotics at an early age. In this case, children can interact with the robot and teach it to perform certain actions using voice commands, or by touching its head, arms or legs.

“So far this year we have worked with thousands of students looking at robotics,” says John Pinkney, consultant at Warwickshire Local Authority ICT Development Service.

“NAO captures the imagination of young people and provides a broad range of learning opportunities. The combination of this powerful technology and the creative minds of young people is very exciting and one which will have a real impression on teaching and learning.”

King’s High School for Girls in Warwick is currently testing out NAO, using a course program developed by Warwickshire Local Authority ICT Development Service

“NAO has brought renewed challenge and excitement to our ICT curriculum and has given students access to cutting-edge technology,” says Pat Prance, Head of ICT at King’s High.

“Seeing their programs come to life through NAO gives them strong motivation and the opportunity to express their creativity. It has also opened students’ eyes to the possibilities presented by an expanding area of ICT.”

—By Sophie Curtis

Robots Go to School

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A U T O M O T I V E Nissan will soon sell cars that drive like a video game, with sensors and software that assist or even take over for drivers in emergencies.

The company said its new technology will be the world’s first to do away the mechanical connection between steering and control of vehicles, replacing it with an electronic one. As drivers spin and twist their steering wheels in the new cars, information will be sent digitally to processors and motors that control the wheels on the ground.

Nissan will launch the new system in cars including its Infiniti brand globally within the next 12 months. Human driving will become one of many inputs in the vehicles, with software providing added control or even taking over in dangerous situations. Tactile feedback will be sent to drivers to make up for the lost “feel” of the road.

The company said digitally controlled cars will mean, for instance, that drivers no longer have to grasp their steering wheels more tightly through rough patches in streets. Cars will also use a camera mounted above the rearview mirror to scan the road ahead and help keep themselves in their lane.

Nissan will also launch an additional “Autonomous Emergency Steering System” that acts to avoid accidents that can’t be avoided by slamming on the brakes. A detection system consisting of several radar units, a front-mounted camera, and five laser scanners arrayed around the vehicle will detect if a collision is imminent, then indicate a clear path to the driver when it is too late to stop.

If the driver doesn’t immediately respond, the car will take over and automatically steer to avoid an accident.

While Nissan is pitching the new technology as an aid to drivers and a form of computer-assisted driving, it is sure to raise safety concerns. Nissan said the electronic control of vehicles will be handled by multiple control units, with backups for when one fails. A “backup clutch” will connect the steering wheel and the wheels on the ground automatically in situations where electronic control fails all together.

—By Jay Alabaster

Cruise Control

VOL/8 | ISSUE/021 0 D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 | REAL CIO WORLD


C R O W D F U N D I N G It’s one thing to have a good idea for a new piece of software, but raising the funds necessary to bring it to life is a different challenge.

A brand-new crowdfunding site has launched in the US that’s focused specifically on software. It’s called FundaGeek, and it may just be the platform software developers have been waiting for.

FundaGeek is “devoted to assisting software developers secure funding for their projects,” explained the company. “All areas of software development—Web applications, games, social media apps, open source, mobile apps, traditional ‘shrink wrap’ software—can use FundaGeek as a resource to help push forward important innovative projects.”

Money raised through FundaGeek can be used for a variety of purposes, including building prototypes, launching a new title, or—in the open source world, for example—adding an important new software feature. “A commercial developer can first market test a new product idea and then fund development,” the company notes.

FundaGeek’s standard fee is 5 percent of the pledge dollars collected, but the optional addition of premium marketing resources increases that to 9 percent. FundaGeek also offers crowdfunding platforms dedicated to other technical areas, including scientific research.

Now, however, if you’ve got an idea for a new app or other piece of software, this new platform could be a resource to check out.

—By Katherine Noyes

I N N O VA T I O N NEC is working on a suitcase-sized DNA analyzer, which it says will be able to process samples at the scene of a crime or disaster in as little as 25 minutes.

The company said it aims to launch the device globally in 2014, and sell it for around 10 million yen. It will output samples that can be quickly matched via the growing number of DNA databases worldwide.

“At first we will target investigative organizations, like police,” said spokeswoman Marita Takahashi. “We will also push its use on victims of natural disasters, to quickly match samples from siblings and parents.”

NEC hopes to use research and software from its mature fingerprint and facial matching technology, which have been deployed in everyday devices such as smartphones and ATMs.

The company said that the need for cheaper and faster DNA testing became clear in the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated much of Japan’s northeast coastline last year, when authorities performed nearly 20,000 samples.

The company said it is aiming to make the device usable for those with minimal training, requiring only a cotton swab or small blood sample. NEC aims to make a device that weighs around 35 kgs, measuring 850mm by 552mm by 240mm, about the size of a large suitcase.

The current version of the analyzer takes about an hour to detect DNA, and NEC aims to lower that to 25 minutes.

—By Jay Alabaster

DNA Out of a Suitcase

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App Stores: Work in ProgressM O B I L I T Y Less than a quarter of Indian companies have private app stores where staffers can get officially supported apps for their mobile devices, although many are discussing it.

44% Discussing internally

33% No plans

13%Implementing

10%Already implemented

Source:CIO Research

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P O P U L A R S C I E N C E Honda will begin tests next year of a small electric vehicle that uses a driver’s tablet for displaying dashboard readings, audio, navigation, and images from its rearview camera.

The company’s new “Micro Commuter Prototype” will also be able to charge its owner’s tablet using solar panels built in to its roof. The prototype is an electric vehicle that seats a single driver and can reach speeds of 80 kilometers per hour, with a range of about 60 kilometers. It is 2.5 meters long, 1.25 meters wide and about 1.4 meters tall.

The car is similar in concept to Toyota’s “Smart INSECT” concept shown at the Ceatec electronics show in October. That vehicle works with smartphones, providing a wireless charging pad and using their wireless connection to access Toyota’s cloud services for cars.

Honda’s concept has a dedicated slot on the dashboard for a tablet. The company has not said which tablets it will support when the car begins testing next year. Honda said tests of the car, which also has a tiny back seat that can

fit small children, “will verify the potential of the vehicle in various uses including supporting everyday short-distance transportation for families with small children and for senior citizens, home delivery services, commuting and car sharing.” The vehicle’s motor, battery and mechanics will fit under the floor, allowing Honda to quickly develop different shells for the various types of customers it targets.

Honda’s prototype can also be used with its home energy system, which can charge its electric vehicles efficiently but also allows them to function as batteries for home use when they are plugged into a home power grid.

Honda said its micro-commuter will be built to fit under standards being developed by the Japanese government for a new category of small vehicles. The company says the new car will also meet the requirements for Europe’s “L7” category for quadricycles, which stipulate that a vehicle’s weight does not exceed 400kg (excluding batteries for electric cars) and has a maximum engine output of 15kW.

— By Jay Alabaster

Tablet Drives Mini-car

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Now, the Pope Takes to Twitter S O C I A L M E D I A Pope Benedict XVI has extended his online presence to Twitter and started answering questions put to him via the social network in English and seven other languages.

The official Papal handle is @pontifex, the Vatican said, adding that the pope can be followed in English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Polish, Arabic and French.

The Pope will respond to questions put to him about faith and belief by Twitter users using the #askpontifex hashtag. Questions will be answered in all listed languages. Other languages may be added in the future, the Vatican said.

“The Pope’s presence on Twitter can be seen as the ‘tip of the iceberg’ that is the Church’s presence in the world of new media,” the Vatican stated, adding that the pontiff ’s presence on Twitter is a concrete expression of his conviction that the church must be present in the digital arena.

The Vatican already had a presence on YouTube after setting up a channel in 2009, and in 2010 the Pope called on

priests to adopt social media and start blogging to spread the word of God. The Pope’s presence on Twitter is ultimately an endorsement of the efforts of these priests and other “early adopters” such as individual believers, institutions and communities, the Vatican said.

The Vatican couldn’t immediately respond to a request for comment but it said in January that although the Pope will not always personally handle sending messages, he will always approve them.

Twitter users are immediately taking the opportunity to ask the Pope questions, some more serious than others. One Twitter user asked for example: “Could God conjure up a rock so big even he couldn’t lift it?” while another asks: “Who would win in a fight between Jesus Christ and Wolverine?” Yet another user said: “Hey, @Pontifex: Will I get excommunicated if I block you on Twitter? Sincerely, A. #askpontifex.”

But another, a more serious user, asked: “What can teenagers reference to learn

more about how to understand suffering in order to not lose faith in God?”

The Pope will initially address Twitter users on Wednesdays, the same day as his general audiences take place, but his Twitter messages could become more frequent, the Vatican said.

Within four hours of the announcement, the Pope had more than 60,000 followers of his English account. The @pontifex account, however, follows only the Pope’s accounts in the announced languages.

—By Loek Essers

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E N E R G Y Nokia Siemens Networks and Ballard Power Systems want methanol-powered fuel cells to keep mobile networks running in the event of an electricity outage and are working with NTT DoCoMo to test the technology.

The need for base stations to be able to run without electricity was once again highlighted after superstorm Sandy hit the US east coast. Methanol-powered fuel cells could provide an alternative to today’s batteries and diesel-powered backup generators, said Nokia Siemens Networks and Ballard.

The fuel cells are friendlier to the environment, quieter and more economical than diesel, take up less space and weigh less than a comparable battery back-up, the companies said.

The base station and fuel cell combination developed by Nokia Siemens and Ballard provides approximately 40 hours of operation on a single tank holding 225 liters, or about 5.6 liters of methanol per hour.

That compares to a fuel consumption of about three liters per hour for a diesel generator, according to Nokia Siemens. But that comparison doesn’t tell the whole story; diesel generators require much more

maintenance and diesel is three times more expensive than methanol, Nokia Siemens said. The availability of the fuel of choice was a key consideration. In Japan, the partners made sure suppliers were able to provide enough fuel and methanol was the best choice, according to Nokia Siemens.

The driving force between the fuel cell project is Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo, which has evaluated the combined

base station and fuel cell at a research and development test site in Japan’s Yokosuka Research Park. The system has also been approved by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), according to Nokia Siemens.

“This is something we have developed specifically in partnership with DoCoMo. Following particularly the tsunami it is looking at how to build more resilience into their network,” said Ben Roome, head of media relations at Nokia Siemens.

Nokia Siemens hopes DoCoMo’s test will result in a commercial contract, and then it could develop similar solutions for other operators, as well, according to Roome.

—By Mikael Ricknäs

Methanol Powers Mobile Networks

P R M A N A G E M E N T Tech vendors have been as bombastic as ever promoting the magical things their latest smartphones, cloud computing wares and network gear can do. When things go wrong, they’re naturally a little less visible, but plenty of companies have sucked it up and publicly apologized for minor and major customers inconveniences. Here’s a brief rundown of the sorry, sorry action so far in 2012:

*Google When you’re a company as wide-ranging as Google, you’re always good for at least a few high-profile apologies during the year. Among the 2012 offerings: A hoarse-voiced CEO Larry Page apologizing during an analysts’ call in October for the company’s accidental release of its numbers too early (“I’m sorry for the scramble earlier today”), and then in April and June, mea

culpas issued for Gmail outages. In April, Google apologized “for the inconvenience,” thanked Gmail users for their “patience and continued support” and said that it is continually making improvements to its “system reliability,” which the company considers “a top priority.” However, as many as 4.8 million users were affected by another outage in June.

*Apple Apple has a reputation for not apologizing for much of anything. It even twisted a court order in the UK in October into a sort of non-apology apology/advertisement and then a snoozy newspaper ad.

But actually, the company has said sorry numerous times in recent years, for everything from long waits for buyers of the first iPhones in 2007 to the notorious antenna-gate problems with the iPhone 4. This time around, CEO Tim Cook issued

an apology in the wake of the company’s release of disappointing maps technology in iOS 6.

*MotorolaMotorola Mobility in February warned people who bought but then returned Android-based Motorola Xoom tablets between March and October last year that the devices might have been resold by bargain-of-the-day website Woot with the ex-owners’ sensitive data still on them. The tablets were resold by Woot between October and December 2011.

The company issued a statement of apology: “Motorola sincerely regrets and apologizes for any inconvenience this situation has caused. Motorola is committed to protect its customers, and will continue to take the necessary steps to achieve this objective.”

—By Bob Brown

2012’s Top Three Sorry Figures


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COMPILED BY ANUP VARIER

DEVELOP a policy that takes the following into account: Data security, employee demand, and devices that enhance productivity.

BUY-IN from employees will be key to the success of any policy. If their personal devices are liable to be accessed remotely, or wiped they need to have understood the terms and given consent.

STAY up to date on consumer product launches and closely monitor what is being brought onto the corporate network in your own company and your rivals.

Best Practices

1

2BBYOD. BYOD. BYOD. It’s echoing within corporate walls, but IT isn’t listening.

According to a study by research and analyst firm Ovum, over 70 percent of smartphone-toting professionals use their personal devices to access corporate data, but almost 80 percent of this BYOD activity remains inadequately managed by IT.

The survey was conducted on over 4,000 employees worldwide to assess BYOD behavior and attitudes. It found “a concerning level of ignorance by IT professionals about the BYOD trend.” This means businesses are not only at a risk of data loss, but are unable to claim they took reasonable preventative measures. The study indicated that nearly half of the respondents’ IT departments either did not know of BYOD or were ignoring its existence through a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.

IT departments in mature economies had higher levels of ignorance, such as those of Continental Europe, compared to high-growth economies like Brazil, India, and South Africa.

Although, Ovum’s research shows that 50 percent of employees say privacy concerns would stop them from accessing their own personal apps on a corporate provisioned smartphone (or tablet) as it’s not a perfect substitute for a personally owned device. Ovum says this will continue to give momentum to the BYOD trend.

BYOD? What’s That?The use of personal devices for work is stirring up a revolution in enterprises across the globe but IT departments feign ignorance.

3

SOURCE: OVUM

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BYOD: Ignorance Isn’t Bliss

50%Of employees say they prefer personal

devices over corporate ones as they can access personal apps without

worrying about privacy issues.

50%Of respondents’ IT departments

did not know of BYOD or were ignoring its existence.

70%Of employees use their personal

devices to access corporate data.

80%Of BYOD activity remains inadequately

managed by IT departments.

Versus

REAL CIO WORLD | D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 1 7VOL/8 | ISSUE/02


Security and manageability were the

two driving factors behind choosing Windows Azure.

Managing an in-house infrastructure for customer

apps is tedious task.infrastructure for cus

apps is tedious task.

Maruti’s Azure Test DriveRajesh Uppal, Executive Director-IT and CIO, Maruti Suzuki India, talks about the automobile company’s hybrid cloud strategy and why Windows Azure works for the company.

Rajesh Uppal is the Executive Director-IT and CIO of Maruti Suzuki India. Uppal overseas Maruti Udyog’s IT infrastructure and applications. The IT team at Maruti has numerous firsts to its credit including MS Exchange, a SharePoint portal, a vehicle tracking system, and a hosted dealer management system. Prior to joining Maruti, Uppal worked at Bharat Heavy Electricals.

REDEFINING ERA

CLOUD

Large corporations tend to stick to private cloud services. Maruti has

taken a different approach. Why?I believe that the cloud is just like any other technology, it’s not a new phenomenon.

To answer your question, the first phase of our cloud strategy did involve the implementation of a private cloud. In 2005-06, we hosted a private cloud for all our dealers in the country and started providing paid services to them. That first phase was a learning platform for us.

Going forward, we moved to a public cloud. We have a lot of small companies that support our business, and IT solutions had to be implemented for the entire value chain, Maruti’s extended enterprise. This is because a weak link in the value chain could be a disaster for the business. The two areas I have been focusing on very strongly are applications for customers and suppliers. For this, a public cloud is being planned. At the end of the day, a hybrid cloud strategy works best for a company like Maruti.

Why did you choose to move some part of your applications to the

Windows Azure platform? Can you share with us what really motivated you?Moving customer-facing applications to the public cloud was part of the strategy. Also, managing an in-house infrastruc-ture for customer applications is a tedious task. We looked at a platform like Azure where management of the infrastructure was left in the able hands of the experts at Microsoft. The operations team worked

with the Windows Azure team and chalked out a business case to understand the value proposition of using such a solu-tion. Security and manageability were two of the main drivers behind choosing Win-dows Azure.

Using a solution like Windows Azure has resulted in significant savings for Maruti. We were also able to move 23 applications to the Windows Azure platform in three weeks flat.

How should CIOs be looking at cloud and make it part of their roadmap?

Adopting and implementing a cloud strat-egy means that you are embarking on a new journey. You don’t have to move everything to the cloud. Taking one calculated step at a time will work. The application architecture of your business should allow that flexibil-ity to integrate with other business applica-tions. Also, keep an eye on business value at each step.

How did your customers react to the cloud solutions?

An internal benchmarking exercise that was conducted prior to the implementation of the public cloud for our customers re-vealed that there has been a significant ben-efit from moving to the cloud. The bench-marking exercise revealed that customers

were flexible and supported change. This is great for Maruti consider-

ing that we also managed to lower our costs, increase management efficacy, and be more agile during peak loads.

We built Windows Server 2012 based on cloud principles. We now support 64 virtual processors, 1TB

of memory, and 8,000 VMs in a cluster; the largest

in the industry. in a cluster; the largest

in the industry.

At the Heart of the Cloud

Srikanth Karnakota is Microsoft’s India country head for its Server and Cloud Platform business. In this role, he is responsible for P&L, strategy and marketing of Microsoft’s Cloud and Server platform business. In his earlier role at Microsoft, Karnakota incubated start-ups and the venture capital engagement arm of Microsoft India.

Srikanth Karnakota, Country Head, Server and Cloud Platform, India, Microsoft, talks about how the Cloud OS can help CIOs go cloud and simplify IT management.

CUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP MICROSOFT

How does Microsoft help CIOs meet the challenges on their journey to the cloud?

Essentially, when we look at the challenges that CIOs are facing going forward, we can bucket them under four categories: How to embrace the full power of private and public clouds, how to increase the efficiency of a datacenter, how to deliver next-generation applications, and how to enable modern work styles like BYOD.

With Windows Server and Windows Azure at its core, the Cloud OS, which provides one platform across private, hosted and public clouds, expands the role of the OS. The Cloud OS pulls in what have been traditionally separate technologies, such as virtualization, networking, database and storage, to create a modern datacenter without boundaries and provide a platform for modern applications.

The Cloud OS provides a generational leap in agility, delivering a highly-elastic and scalable infrastructure with always-on, always-up services—with more automated management and self-service provisioning. It also enables modern apps, unlocks insights on any data, and empowers people-centric IT, an important element given the popularity of BYOD today

Can Windows Server 2012 make life simpler for CIOs?

We built Windows Server 2012 based on cloud principles to address the needs of a modern datacenter. In terms of scale, the product blows it out of the water. We now support 64 virtual processors, 1TB of memory, 8,000 VMs in a cluster, which is the

largest in the industry. In fact, 99 percent of the world’s SQL databases can be virtualized on Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012

As many customers are starting to learn, server virtualization is simply not enough. You have to move beyond server virtualization. With Windows Server 2012, we’ve built a complete virtualization platform across compute, storage, and networking. With storage—whether you use a SAN or industry-standard hardware—Windows Server 2012 is a no brainer. In the box we deliver new capabilities such as ODX, which offloads large data transfers to your SAN and we also provide the new Storage Spaces feature set which delivers enterprise-grade storage capabilities on standard hardware.

And we’ve taken software-defined networking and put it in the box. With Hyper-V network virtualization in Windows Server 2012, you get multi-tenancy and isolation, built right in. It enables a range of scenarios, including the ability to migrate applications—like decade-old line-of-business applications—on to a common infrastructure with no IP address changes.

Then with the new cluster-aware updating, CIOs can automate server updates across a cluster of servers without impacting the availability of their application. And if a hardware or software failure occurs on a cluster node, transparent failover lets file shares fail over to another cluster node without interrupting server applications as they read and write data on the shares.

And that’s not even a complete list of benefits that Windows Server 2012 provides.

alert

If there’s one myth in the information security field that just won’t die, it’s that an

organization’s security posture can be substantially improved by regularly training employees in how not to infect the company.

You can see the reasoning behind it, of course. RSA got hacked from a Word document with an embedded Flash vulnerability. A few days later the entire company’s SecureID franchise was at risk of being irrelevant once the attackers had gone off with the private keys that ruled the system.

But do phishing attacks like RSA prove that employee training is a must, or just the opposite? If employees and/or executives at RSA, Google, eBay, Adobe, Facebook, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other technologically sophisticated organizations can be phished, doesn’t that suggest that even knowledgeable and trained people still fall victim to attacks?

One of the best examples ever of the limitations of training is West Point’s 2004 phishing experiment called Carronade. Cadets were sent phishing e-mails to test their security. Even after undergoing four hours of computer security training, 90 percent of cadets still clicked on the embedded link.

Fundamentally what IT professionals are saying when they ask for a training program for their users is, “It’s not our fault.” But this is false—a user has no responsibility over the network, and they don’t have the ability to recognize or protect against modern information security threats any more than a teller can protect a bank. After all, is an employee really any match against an Operation Shady RAT, Operation Aurora or Night Dragon?

Blaming a high infection rate on users is misguided—particularly given the advanced level of many attacks.

I’ll admit, it’s hard to find broad statistical evidence that supports this point-of-view—not surprisingly, security firms don’t typically share data on how successful or unsuccessful training is to an organizational body, the way West Point did. But I can

share a few anecdotes from my company’s own consulting work that should shed some light on this problem.

The clients we typically consult with are large enterprises in financial services or manufacturing. All of them have sophisticated employee awareness and security training programs in place—and yet even with these programs, they still have an

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Mobile Security’s Not a Big DealIndian CIOs haven’t devised new weapons to combat mobile threats but almost half of all CIOs believe that mobile computing doesn’t pose a great threat to their companies.

Of Indian companies with revenues between

Rs 2,000-10,000 crore believe mobile computing constitutes only a low to neutral risk to their organizations.

Extremely-somewhat high risk levels

Somewhat high risk levels

Neutral

Extremely to somewhat low risk levels

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average click-through rate on client-side attacks of at least 5 to 10 percent.

We also frequently conduct social engineering attacks against help desks and other corporate phone banks for customers. While each of the personnel in these security sensitive rolls has extensive training and is warned against social engineering attacks, the only thing that stops our testers is technical measures. In other words, if a help desk employee can technically change your password without getting a valid answer from you about your mother’s maiden name, then a company like Immunity will find a way to convince them to do so.

We’ve also found glaring flaws—like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, authentication, etcetera—in the training software used by many clients. This is more humorous than dangerous, but it adds irony to the otherwise large waste of time these applications represent.

Instead of spending time, money and human resources on trying to teach employees to be secure, companies should focus on securing the environment and segmenting the network. It’s a much better corporate IT philosophy that employees should be able to click on any link, open any attachment, without risk of harming the organization. Because they’re going to

ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENTalert

do so anyway, so you might as well plan for it. It’s the job of the CSO, CISO, or IT security manager to make sure that threats are stopped before reaching an employee—and if these measures fail, that the network is properly segmented to limit the infection’s spread.

Here’s what organizations should do to strengthen security instead of wasting time on employee training:

Audit Your Periphery: Websites, back-end databases, servers and networks should be thoroughly audited on a regular basis for vulnerabilities; both by internal security personnel and external pen-testers. They should be rigorously tested against current and most likely attacks. Had Citigroup’s website been tested for basic Web application flaws, it could have avoided the June 2011 attack that compromised 200,000 customer accounts. This is both cheap and easy to take off the table.

Segment the Network: Segment your networks and information so that a successful cyber attack cannot spread laterally across the entire network. Had RSA done this, it might have prevented the theft of its SecurID tokens. If one employee’s PC is infected it shouldn’t be able to spread through the entire system.

Incident Response: Proactively examine important boxes for rootkits.

You’ll be amazed at what you find. And finding is the first step to actually building a defense against Advanced Persistent Threats.

Strong Security Leadership: For a company to have a CSO/CISO isn’t enough. The chief security executive should have meaningful authority too. He or she should have “kill switch” authority over projects that fail to properly account for security, and real say over security’s percentage of the budget. A strong security program should have at least the same budget as the marketing department.

There’s a lot of money and good feeling in running employee training programs, but organizations will be much better off if the CSO/CISO focuses instead on preventing network threats and limiting their potential range. Employees can’t be expected to keep the company safe; in fact it is just the opposite. Security training will lead to confusion more than anything else.

By following an offensive security program, companies can keep their networks, and employees, protected. CIO

Dave Aitel is the founder, CSO, CTO and CEO of Immunity

Inc, a global leader in the assessment and penetration

testing space. Send feedback to [email protected]

[IT ACT MISUSE][ ]


“If you look at the 2006 formulation (of the IT Act)—before it went to parliament—it was far more benign. It was a parliamentary committee which made the law far tighter. Undoubtedly, this was under some degree of pressure from security agencies. We need to drop section 66 A and many other sections of the IT Act.”

— KIRAN KARNIK, FORMER PRESIDENT OF NASSCOM, TO NDTV

ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENTalert

A few months back, Mat Honan, a reporter for Wired magazine, had his digital life

erased after attackers were able to gain access to his Apple, Amazon, Gmail and Twitter accounts. Losing every photo from his daughter’s life was serious enough, but the true shock came from how easy the process was. It all started with someone knowing Honan’s personal domain name. From there, the escalation of steps was simple:

Public ‘whois’ search: Having Honan’s personal domain name yielded a billing address.

Amazon.com: Having a billing address yields a partial credit card number.

Apple: Having a partial credit card number yields access to an AppleID and me.com e-mail (via password reset functionality).

iCloud: Having an AppleID yields the ability to remotely wipe Honan’s iPhone, iPad and MacBook laptop.

Google: Having access to Honan’s me.com e-mail account yields access to his Gmail account (again via the password reset functionality).

Twitter: Having Gmail account access yields access to Honan’s Twitter account (via, you guessed it, password recovery again) that allowed the posting of hate speech.

The attacker finally deleted Honan’s Gmail account including all its contents. Honan’s personal electronic devices were wiped, all his personal e-mails were deleted and his name associated with hate speech on his Twitter account.

You can see that each step above relies on ‘having’ access to one piece of information to ‘yield’ another. The trick is to ensure that you are yielded something a little more important each time. What are the common themes that appear in these types of attacks? Security trust chains have weak links. In these cases, the attackers do not start off with access to

their end goal. They are able to use the fact that each successive level of protection relies on the level below doing its job. Google would never dream of letting a Gmail user login with just their billing address, but in this case that’s effectively what was occurring. There were just a few more steps required in the middle.

Organizations are often so concerned with reducing the impact to a customer from forgetting their password that they sometimes trade away the overall security of the system. The attacker’s end goals were built up with smaller wins along the way. In most cases these smaller wins yielded treasure that the protecting organization didn’t consider significant. It wasn’t until near the end goal that it becomes clear.

So what can people and organizations do to ensure that they aren’t susceptible to this sort of attack?

Are you using a credit card number as a means of authentication? A credit card is for making a purchase, not

authenticating a user. Other organizations might not give it the same protection as you. Do you ask for someone’s birth date as a means of authentication?

Do you know how many people have their birth date on their Facebook

profile? It’s not really information that only that person would know.Let’s take the lessons learnt here to heart. CIO

Dean Pemberton is a technical policy analyst for

InternetNZ. Send feedback to [email protected]

Researchers at the University of South Carolina have discovered that some types of electricity meters broadcast unencrypted information that eavesdroppers with the right software could use to determine whether you’re at home or not.

The automatic meter reading devices are installed in about one-third of US homes and businesses. They make it possible for utility employees to get accurate meter readings by simply walking by a building with a handheld device, instead of physically accessing the premises and recording readings manually. But at least one type of meter sends out a signal every 30 seconds regardless of whether a meter reader requested it, and that creates privacy risks.

Wenyuan Xu, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, said her team was able to capture data from electricity meters at a distance of up to 300 meters (about 984 feet). The data was in plain text and included the meter ID number; the name and address of the building’s owner were not included, but it was possible to figure out that information.

Xu said she was able to pull data from target meters once every two to 10 minutes. With such frequent readings, it’s possible to calculate the rate of power consumption and determine whether someone’s at home or not.

A new generation of meters is supposed to include encryption. But it’s unclear whether the meters already installed will be replaced.

— By Martyn WilliamsTh

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Security’s Domino Effect


The Gloves are OffThe battle between Microsoft and VMware is heating up. Caught in the crossfire, confused customers are wondering whether to buy bottled water from VMware or go for free, normal, water from Microsoft.

Would you pay for something when the same thing is available for free? Or, to put it differ-ently, would you buy an alarm clock, in today’s day and age, when the alarm function comes as

an in-built feature in even the most basic of mobile phones? The answer, I would suspect, would be an emphatic NO.

But, for the sake of argument, let us take a slightly different scenario. Would you order for bottled water in a restaurant when the establishment serves regular, filtered, water for free? The answer to this would possibly be a yes or a no depending on the kind or quality of restaurant you are visiting, or who you are visiting the establishment with, how paranoid or picky you are about the water you drink, etcetera.

So, this may, in essence, mean that you are sometimes will-ing to pay for something that is available for free—one can obviously justify paying a small amount for the bottled water now rather than risk the prospect of paying a much larger sum to a doctor at a later date.

But you would be wondering, and rightly so, why is it that I am talking about freebies, alarm clocks, and buying bottled water in a restaurant. The reason for the different scenarios and compari-sons is because something similar seems to be happening in the battle between Microsoft and VMware to take control of the vir-tualization market—especially if you look at the arguments and counter-arguments posed by the two firms in question.

With the launch of its Windows Server 2012, Microsoft has upped the ante (to use the trademark Ravi Shastri phrase) and taken the battle to VMware, which hitherto has been sitting atop the virtualization market seemingly unchallenged by anyone.

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Microsoft is touting the Windows Server 2012 as an operating sys-tem that is “built from the cloud up” (in case you understand what that means, please do educate me). It is being billed as the only thing that offers a consistent platform for all your cloud demands; a dynamic, multi-tenant infrastructure that goes beyond virtu-alization—a kind of a panacea for all your datacenter demands. And yes, you don’t have to pay separately for a hypervisor since it’s already built in. So, why pay for something when it’s virtually (pun intended) available for free?

Having suffered constant jibes such as the VMware tax and VM Limited from its rivals in the past, it was inevitable that VMware would stop ignoring and start fighting. And that’s exactly what the company seems to be doing now.

So, VMware hits back by asking customers to get the facts, not the Microsoft hyper-bole (yes, it’s hyphenated by VMware) and handily lists a few “facts”. Chief among them is that VMware deliv-ers greater value and lower TCO. According to VMware, Microsoft looks only at the software acquisition costs, whereas it should be looking at the total infrastructure cost. And since one can pack more VMware VMs on a physical host than Hyper-V ones, VMware would need fewer servers, less datacenter space, less power and cooling, and so on, thus pushing the total cost down.

To prove its point, it also handily comes up with a third-party analysis—commissioned by none other than VMware itself—which shows that, compared to Microsoft, VMware delivers 20 percent higher scalability and 91 percent lower operational costs. See, why you should buy bottled water?

Both companies have certain things going for them. VMware has a huge installed base of customers who, in the past, have tasted the real benefits of its virtualization offerings and so are unlikely to immediately jump to rival solution. At least, not before giving VMware a chance to prove its point. In addition, switching to a rival offering will come with its own set of challenges and complexities, which many may want to avoid.

As for Microsoft, apart from a strong product and a compel-ling proposition, it has pedigree on its side—a pedigree of driv-ing established companies off the market. If there are any doubts, think about Microsoft’s history and what it did to companies like Novell, Lotus, and Netscape. And VMware is fighting to precisely avoid the same fate, that of a ‘has been.’

So, while both the companies are trying to convince the mar-ket, what, in essence, they are doing is just muddying the waters and confusing the customers. And, while the battle continues, there is no sign of a clear winner as yet. However, one thing seems certain. We haven’t heard the last word in this battle as

yet. Meanwhile, you can ponder if you want to pay for your water or not. CIO

TM Arun Kumar FRANKLY SPEAKING

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Arun has covered the IT industry in India since the time 80386

was cutting edge, MS DOS was the predominant desktop OS, and

Internet was still a few years away. Follow him on twitter @aruntm

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Deconstructing InnovationInnovation’s become so much of an abstract idea, CIOs are shying away from it. It doesn’t have to be like that. Here’s the step-by-step on innovation.

Constant innovation is a painful cliché. It crops up in the most annoying manner in meeting after meeting as technologists are asked to innovate to cut costs. But it’s status as a cliché doesn’t make it any less complicated. Defining innovation is like blind men patting different

parts of an elephant and mistaking it to be the shape of the complete animal. Some say innovation is about managing R&D, to others it is about using techniques like TRIZ (a Russian method of problem solving), and even others say it is about taking new products to market.

In my opinion, innovation, in its basic sense, is simply about deviating from existing parameters to create something new, which results in some kind of benefit. Everyone has their own method of approaching innovation but here’s what they all have in common: They all deviate from the norm.

Let me give you an example of innovation from Tata Motors. When Ratan Tata saw a family of four riding a scooter and decided to create a four-wheeler that every Indian middle-class family could afford, he set out an innovation challenge—and created a story that will be told and re-told for generations to come.

In the pre-Nano days, technologists at Tata Motors held car designs close to their hearts and 75 percent of a vehicle’s designs were done internally. Tata Motors’ partners believed that it would never relinquish that control. But, less than 20 percent of Nano’s design was done internally. This transformation in mindset made an idea—which the world believed to be nothing more than a good prototype—fit for real business.

Kicking Off Innovation When I talk about innovation, most CIOs ask me: “Where do I begin?” Beginnings are always challenging. That’s where an innovation

Dr. Vinay Dhabolkar EXECUTIVE COACH

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campaign comes handy. This is essentially a four-to-eight week campaign that a CIO starts off by announcing one strategic challenge and calling for inputs. That’s followed by two or three rounds of narrowing down ideas to pick out the top two or three ideas to pursue.

Prof. Karl Ulrich, who is Wharton’s Vice Dean of Innovation among other things, has another name for such campaigns: Innovation tournaments. An innovation tournament starts by identifying a number of opportunities and using one or more filters to select the best one(s); those which are most likely to result in substantial value. Ulrich recommends four ways to improve the performance of innovation tournaments.

Create a challenge that’s not too broad, nor too narrow. Suppose your start with the question: In what way might we reduce the waiting time in a queue by 20 percent? Now, you may ask: Why do we want to do that? The answer could be: Less time means overall better in-queue experience. Ask a few more ‘whys’ and it may lead to: In what way might we improve the experience of being served? Ulrich suggests using ‘5 whys’ to identify the right level of abstraction to state the challenge, one that is not too broad, not too narrow.

Get many and diverse ideas. Quantity matters! The base rates for how many ideas you need at the initial stage to get a blockbuster may vary depending on whether you are making a molecule or a movie. However, a couple of hundred is almost always better than a dozen. Before Merck came to its blockbuster drug Zocor, it started out with 10,000 compounds.

Stack the deck with proven high performers. Research shows that idea generation is just as much a skill as playing basketball or chess. Some people can consistently generate higher quality ideas. It helps to have those people participate in an innovation tournament.

Apply filters generously early on—and ruthlessly later. Let’s say you’ve gotten 100 ideas as a response to a challenge. Now, how many do you select to go to the next round? As a manager, be humble in the first round. It is very difficult to predict how good an idea is at an early stage. A little bit of prototyping and user feedback goes a long way.

Fostering IdeasOne of the ways CIOs can be better prepared for change is to use a challenge book. A challenge book lists the top five challenges that a CIO thinks his organization faces.

Let’s say a CIO creates a challenge book and starts receiving ideas from team members, peers, and customers. What’s the next step? The CIO will now need an environment where quick experiments or pilots can be carried out to test

various assumptions associated with these ideas. Ideally these experiments are carried out with customers. That, by the way, is exactly the way Google’s Ad Sense was developed.

Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s tech lead, and Marissa Mayer (when she was a VP at Google) were discussing ways to monetize Gmail. Buchheit suggested placing ads. The response to that was that ads would not work, for a number of reasons including privacy concerns.

But Buchheit wasn’t about to give up without first experimenting with the idea. According to the story, when Mayer walked into work the next day she is shocked to see what Buchheit’s done. But about five hours later, as results start pouring in, she begins to like what Buchheit’s done. Just then, Sergei Brin walks in, likes it, and Ad Sense was born.

What to Watch out for CIOs should limit themselves when canvassing for ideas. They, like most functional leaders, are focused on internal efficiencies. They must try to figure where they can make

an impact using technology. For example, the engineering team at Tata Motors did extensive canvassing to get a clearer idea of its customer. Based on that work, they agreed that the Nano project needed a three-pronged focus: The Nano needed to cost Rs 1 lakh, it couldn’t compromise on aesthetics, and it needed to meet safety and environment requirements.

A weak partnership network is also a big drawback. It is unlikely that a CIO’s team can have all kinds of skills required to generate and test ideas to address challenges. CIOs will need a partner network that’s ready to experiment. A partner could be peers in the same organization, or from outside, think vendors, academia, and customers.

Last of all, never stop! No company has all the set processes or allocated resources to justify following up every idea. But it is more damaging to take an idea and not do anything with it—than not look for new ideas at all. To improve constantly, to strive continuously, and to never stop is the most important trait of an innovator. CIO

As told to Shweta Rao Vinay Dabholkar is president of Catalign Innovation Consulting.

He is currently co-writing a book on systematic innovation in

collaboration with Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan. Prior to starting

his consulting business, Dhabolkar worked with Sasken and

Motorola. Send feedback on this column to [email protected]

CIOs should limit themselves when canvassing for ideas. They must try to figure where they can make an impact using technology.

Dr. Vinay Dhabolkar EXECUTIVE COACH


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Stalk. Prey. Kill.A new wave of cybercrime, called waterhole attacks, takes Advanced Persistent Threats to the next level, making it sharper, more efficient, and less detectable.

About three months before Superstorm Sandy pulverized the eastern seaboard of the United States, a new form of cybercrime had already ripped through the metro areas of Washington

D.C. and Massachusetts. The attack took the form of a wave of semi-targeted offensives, in which 35,000-odd unique hosts from about 1,000 companies and government agencies were ambushed in a span of a few days.

The never-before-seen strike pattern is now being called the watering hole attack.

The attack was clearly successful. Over 12 percent of the machines it infected were compromised with zero-day exploits and information-snooping malware. These remote-access Trojan malware were not only capable of performing surveillance and collecting intelligence from inside networks of interest, but they could also clandestinely operate webcams and microphones on compromised machines.

Twelve percent is a staggeringly high number. The average rate of success for infiltration in common drive-by and phishing attacks is pegged at close to five to six percent. In fact, the success rate of spear-phishing is usually a number a tad lower.

The invasion represents a breakaway moment in security. It’s a new phenomenon that threatens to revolutionize the way Advanced Persistent Threats work, making these attacks far more prevalent, efficient, and less detectable.

A New Way to HuntWhile cyber security players were quick off the block to acknowledge and start analyzing this large-scale cyber-espionage operation, they have largely been unsuccessful in IM

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Gunjan Trivedi LEADING EDGE


determining the source nation or identify the actors behind the threat. They have, however, been able to share its modus operandi—and it demonstrates that criminals are getting smarter and are figuring out more sophisticated ways to improve the effectiveness of highly-targeted campaigns.

The watering hole attack mimics the strategy used by lions in nature—they wait by a watering hole and ambush their prey, hence the name. These attacks are fast emerging as the successful link in the chain of run-up from lying in wait at legitimate but compromised websites to identify and infect multiple of visitors that saunter by, and then proceed to single out identified victims with an extremely targeted spear-phishing attack, without complicated social engineering lures.

This is pretty evident with what happened with the victims in Washington D.C. and Massachusetts. For trojanizing, the websites were very carefully chosen based on geographic proximity and relevance to target of interest. Several legit financial and technology services websites, ones that are usually visited by end-users as they go about doing their daily business from within corporate networks, were compromised with zero-day vulnerabilities in either Microsoft XML Core Services or a Java flaw.

These infected websites redirected drive-by visitors to an exploit site, which checked the machines for their versions of Windows OS and the Internet Explorer. The Java client

on the hosts was then compromised and a variant of ‘Gh0st RAT’ malware dropped in, via either a .CAB or .JAR file. This Gh0st RAT is a common Remote Access Trojan that can log keystrokes, remotely operate embedded webcams and microphones, search local files, run arbitrary codes, and transfer files.

A Massachusetts regional financial services firm was the top redirector, where hosts from corporate networks and consumers were compromised the most. Its CSO publicly acknowledged that three zero-day payloads went right through the company’s firewall.

The most disturbing fact is that this was not the only watering hole attack out there. There are close to 300 known variants of the Gh0st RAT espionage tool in the wild, and criminals can constantly add new stealth capabilities to the original code base.

I believe that this new way to hunt may make way for more optimized attack patterns in the future that will evolve to far more sophisticated, highly-targeted and extremely damaging cyber compromises. Be afraid. Be wary. CIO

Gunjan Trivedi is executive editor at IDG Media. He is an award-winning writer, editor, and moderator with over a decade of experience in Indian IT, during which he also ran his own business. Send feedback on this column to [email protected]

Gunjan Trivedi LEADING EDGE

How does outsourcing help manage uncertainties that arise from market dynamics?Godrej is a growing company. We have an aspirational 10/10 vision, in which we plan to grow 10 times in the next 10 years. However, there are some uncertainties that we need to deal with. For example, to fulfil our growth plans we might go in for a merger or an acquisition or even a de-merger. So it is absolutely uncertain when I would have to ready my systems to scale up quickly. I also need to ensure that my IT systems are up to date so that I can seamlessly integrate Godrej’s systems with those of the acquired companies. That's where outsourcing sells. With outsourcing, the advantage is that big outsourcing players have a lot of manpower with technical expertise. So, even if I request for new people skilled in a particular technology—at short notice—I get them immediately.

How does one assess the viability and business practices of an outsourcing service provider?CIOs should ensure that outsourcing providers have the kind of expertise that they are looking for. They also have to ensure that providers have a very good standing in the market, that they are financially strong, their physical facilities are appealing, and that they are reliable in their area of expertise. We also have to keep a tab on their service levels

and check whether they are living up to their promises. For example, when they assure you that a certain service will be provided at a certain time, we should ensure that they stick to it. They should also be able to scale up as fast as we need; be equally responsive and keep us abreast of new technologies in the market, which we could implement to save costs. Due diligence—when selecting a vendor for data security, privacy and compliance—is a must. These aspects help us ensure that our relationship with outsourcers is viable.

Does moving to a services model enable you to really save costs? I don’t think outsourcing actually helps us save costs if you look at it strictly in monetary terms. In fact, chances are that you’re paying your providers a higher amount than you would have invested in in-house expertise but if you weigh this against other benefits that come out of outsourcing, then eventually in the long term, you might be saving costs.

How can organizations mitigate the DR and BCP risks of outsourcing?This is a good question. Because there is an inherent interest in the entire IT primary site —as well as the DR site being outsourced to a partner—we need to ensure that the outsourcing service provider is extremely reliable. This is especially important because if there's a single service provider

maintaining both the primary and secondary sites, then outages at the provider's end will impact business.

How can outsourcing help CIOs with their DR agendas?My entire DR is outsourced to HP Services. It's in the hands of experts and not with my own set of limited technological expertise. While evaluating whether they need to have in-house DR support, CIOs need to think, whether they have the expertise, infrastructure, and ability to prepare for the worst case scenario. If they aren't sure, they should turn to outsourcing.

This interview is brought to you by the IDG Custom Solutions Group

in association with

HP SERVICESCUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP

Shailesh Joshi is Head-Corporate IT at Godrej Industries. With over 20 years of experience in the IT world, Joshi has worked for some of India’s top organizations like Bharat Shell, Lubrizol, K. Raheja Corp and H&R Johnson (India).

Mitigating the Risks of OutsourcingWhen opting for an outsourcing program, CIOs should check the reliability, financial stability, and reputation of their outsourcing service providers.

A big, important project has launched—and abruptly crashed to the ground. The horrible spaghetti code is beyond debugging. There are no unit tests, and every change requires a meeting with, like, 40 people.

Oh, if only we'd had a team of 10 ‘rock star’ developers working on this project instead! It would have been done in half the time with twice the features and five-nines availability. Oh, how perfect that would be.

On the other hand, maybe not. A team of senior developers will often produce a complex design and no code, thanks to the reasons listed below.

Truth no. 1: You can't afford all senior developersMany managers have an unrealistic understanding of the labor market for software developers. Just get 10 extremely senior developers to work on an application, and presto, success! These same managers also generally believe they can hire senior developers for less than the market demands. Best case, you'll get one or two senior developers and eight or nine liars.

Truth no. 2: People do their best work when their head is barely above waterWhen you have a senior developer typewriting JSP pages (read: ASP, PHP, whatever), that person won't actually perform as good a job as a more junior-level developer who hasn't slogged through it 100 times before. A senior developer, even one with good intentions, will phone it in after the first few weeks because he or she is inescapably bored. A junior developer assigned to the same job will work a lot harder.

Rock Star DevelopersYou want the best and the brightest developers money can buy. Or do you? Here are six reasons you're better served by a group of developers with mixed skill levels who focus on getting the job done.

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Truth no. 3: Too many senior developers spoil the codeIf I were working alongside a bunch of other senior developers on a simple project like the one mentioned above, out of boredom, we would come up with a way not to use JSP pages at all. Instead, we'd engineer the most powerful and flexible templating system that was not JSP ever designed.

There would be extensive discussions and architecture meetings. A pretty basic B2B website would become one of the most complex architectures ever created. Why? Because we can. We're smart. We can keep up. We'd definitely do an entirely functional programming design because this is our chance to show our friends it can be done.

Ultimately, we'd run overtime and request "interns or something" because a few "little things" and "bug hunting" still need to be done. After a time, a handful of bright interns would end up doing most of the actual work on the project, while us senior developers exercised our whiteboard brilliance.

Sound far-fetched? I saw it happen on a multi-million-dollar corporate website project that lasted over a year. Not long before, I had led a more complex B2B portal project with a small team of four more junior people—and delivered in about three months. No one ever compared the ROI between the two projects.

Truth no. 4: Most senior developers are not seniorWhile conducting interviews, my company has encountered at least a dozen strong lead developers who didn't actually know how to code. Most developers overrate themselves and align their title with their salary expectations. Knowing how to talk about monads and Hadoop doesn't actually mean you know how and when to use them or, more importantly, when not to. It doesn't even mean you know how to write a simple SQL statement.

Our interview process involves a coding test. It has the world's simplest requirements: "Granny's address book."

Senior developers need to be able to read requirements and create reasonable code that someone can follow. They need to be able to write simple instructions on how to install and deploy the software. Most people we interview write code that throws an exception on startup and instructions that are wrong at best and poorly written and indecipherable at worst.

Truth no. 5: Arrogance goes before the fallI've seen projects that were extremely sophisticated fall down in

production due to very basic oversights. Generally, these were the result of smart people who wrote really ‘smart’ code but who, like the engineers of the Titanic, thought their creation was unsinkable and neglected to try and prove otherwise.

Overconfidence is a dominant personality trait in the developer community, and it doesn't seem to abate with experience. With senior developers, having other people tell you how smart you are can make a bad personality trait worse. We think we can handle the complexity, so we create it. Unproven technology can't come back to bite the likes of us! We don't need to test this one section of code thoroughly. We know it works—because we wrote it!

Talk is cheap. Results speak for themselves—and both method and materials selected by careful judgment bring results. The scientific method requires us to prove what we know. Arrogance and overconfidence cause us to believe things without proof.

Truth no. 6: Individuals aren't the be-all and end-all

Projects are created by groups of people. Groups are organic and dynamic. Interactions inside groups are just as important as the individuals that make it up. The best groups are ones that force members to grow. Developers tend to be incredibly individualistic and always feel underappreciated.

Nonetheless, few learned everything on their own; they benefited from other developers showing them the tricks of the trade. Whether these were formal or informal mentors, they were critical in any long career. Creating a teaching environment is the most important thing a manager or lead can do. This lets you grow your own senior developers.

Senior developers need constraints. Time and budget are obvious—but to some hotshots, they're also elastic, as complexity gets piled on complexity. When junior developers are also on the team, their ability to keep up with the high-falutin' stuff will be limited. That's a good thing, because it encourages simplicity, which is usually your friend.

A mixed team aligns the company's interest with the developers' interests. A mixed team provides a good career opportunity for all: Leadership experience for senior developers and a chance for junior developers to learn new things. CIO

Send feedback on this column to [email protected]

If I were working with senior developers on a simple project, a basic B2B website would soon become one of the most complex architectures ever created. Why? Because we can. We're smart. We can keep up. You don't want that.

Andrew Oliver STAFF MANAGEMENT


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E V E N T R E P O R T

ACCESS, ACCELERATION, ADVANCEMENT:

SIMPLIFYING INNOVATION

Bob Muglia, Executive Vice

President, Software Solutions,

Juniper Networks, believes

that simplicity and

innovation are necessary

to completely re-think

the way networks work

in order to advance

your business.

their part. But this environment needs time to de-velop and become robust enough to be deployed in mission-critical networks,” he added.

TThe New NNetworkk OOrderrNetwork teams are overwhelmed by the rate of change, scale, and complexity in business environ-ments. Networks end up becoming a bottleneck. This makes it much harder for organizations to manage their networks. Legacy network architec-tures will struggle to keep up and, therefore, need to be replaced in order to extract the full value from IT trends like mobility, virtualization, new applica-tions, Internet services, and cloud computing.

Before the term SDN was in vogue, Juniper Net-works recognized the need for a new, simpler ar-chitecture. About three years ago, Juniper Networks announced its New Network Initiative focused on innovation, automation, and optimization. “It’s all about removing the person, and deploying applica-tions easily for the business,” said Muglia.

everal new trends—such as mo-bility, social media, big data and cloud computing—are impacting corporate networks in unprece-dented ways. In order to help CIOs find ways to keep these new tech-nologies from choking the net-

work, CIO in association with Juniper Networks, conducted an Inner Circle event. At the event, Bob Muglia, executive vice president of Software Solu-tions, Juniper Networks, shared how enterprises can create a flexible and programmable network. He also threw light on how this would help orga-nizations provide innovative services, optimize in-vestments, and scale as needed.

“Organizations continue to add mobile devices and new applications, increase their use of server virtualization and build cloud environments. This creates a much more dynamic IT environment. Vir-tualization technologies are well established in the server and storage domains, but they tend to be lacking in the network space. As a result, many ex-isting networks struggle to keep up with rapid pro-visioning, self-service, and mobility associated with dynamic cloud computing platforms,” said Muglia.

TThe Prommisee of SDNNA fairly new industry initiative, software-defined net-working (SDN), has incredible potential to better the future of networking. The promise of SDN is very ap-pealing to organizations struggling to keep pace with major IT initiatives such as BYOD, new applications, highly virtualized, and cloud environments. “Accord-ing to Gartner, SDN is currently on top of the hype cycle, and we will soon see this becoming a reality,” said Muglia. However, as with most new technology deployments, organizations need help determining where and how to get started. Very few organizations have the budget to upgrade their entire network end-to-end. But this doesn’t negate the benefits of SDN.

Ultimately, the promise of SDN is the ability to manage large and complex network environ-ments efficiently and effectively. “While SDN has a tremendous amount of potential for the future of networking, organizations need solutions that can be deployed today to solve real problems, while enabling them to evolve their network into a full SDN environment in the future. The SDN eco-system is in its nascent stages, and both network vendors and software providers are lining up to do

This event report is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group

in association with

“While SDN has a tremendous amount of potential for the future of networking, organizations need solutions that can be deployed today to solve real network problems.”

BOB MUGLIA, Executive Vice President-Software Solutions, Juniper Networks

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JUNIPER NETWORKSCUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP

Cover Story Innovation

K N O W Y O U R C U S T O M E R

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Cover Story Customer Focus

REAL CIO WORLD | D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 3 9REAL CIO WORLD

By Ershad Kaleebullah

Edited by Sunil Shah and Shardha Subramanian

That the customer is king isn’t new. But what exactly are CIOs doing to align the role of IT with the needs and demands of the end customers?

Little.Ever since CIO magazine started

monitoring the amount of time Indian IT leaders spend with customers and external business partners back in 2009, the needle hasn’t moved much. That wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that Indian CIOs spend very little of their time with customers—it’s hovered steadily at 12 percent over the last three years (despite the economic volatility that’s forcing other parts of the business to connect closer with customers.)

Our surveys also reveal that spending time with customers has consistently been the lowest priority for CIOs, compared to spending time with business executives, IT staffers, vendors, and others.

The question is: Can this state of affairs continue? No, not really. Not if the business isn’t bluffing about the need for its executives to get closer to customers. Not if the state of the economy doesn’t improve. And not according to C.V.G. Prasad, CIO, ING Vysya Bank.

“If you believe in true partnership with your business, then listening to

the problems of end customers—either by meeting them personally or other means—is vital. It has to become a part and parcel of IT’s change agenda,” he says.

There are many channels through which a CIO can initiate interactions with customers including talking to customers directly, training the IT staff to collect customer feedback, or poring over customer surveys. The challenge, however, is making time for such an initiative.

It isn’t all bad news. For CIOs who have gone down the customer-centric path, there are plenty of rewards. These include the ability to help the business run more efficiently, the opportunity to help their organizations make more money—and greater respect from their peers. Arup Choudhury, CIO at Eveready, for instance was bumped up to the company’s core strategy making group after he spent time talking to customers. According to CIO research, 27 percent of Indian CIOs say that calling on customers was one of the five ways they elevated IT’s relationship

with business in 2011. If you want some of

that action, read on to find out how some of your peers are dealing with the challenges and the benefits that come from meeting with customers.

Today, perhaps more than ever, the business needs CIOs to connect closer

with customers to help it stay profitable. Some of your peers tell you how to do that.

Reader ROI: Why it’s important for CIOs to meet customers

The benefits for organizations—and their CIOs—when CIOs talk to customers

What to watch out for




Some CIOs get a kick out of how large their offices are, others, the cost of their cars, Arup Choudhury, CIO of Eveready, is proud of the time he spent cooped up in a delivery van.

And he should be—it’s what got him into the core team at Eveready, the one that formulates the business’ strategy.

Sweet.Between September of 2006 and

March of 2009, Choudhury and his IT team made 10 visits every month to the company’s direct customers—its distributors—to figure out how they could help. The best way to get to the distributors was to accompany Eveready’s delivery vans, something that’s hard to imagine other CIOs doing.

“Basically, somebody from the IT team, including myself, would go into the market with sales officers and area sales managers and interact directly with distributors. The objective was to understand what Eveready could do to make their business function better,” says Choudhury, who rates the need of meeting customers as very important, an eight out of 10.

Their forays unearthed long-standing issues among the company’s distributors. A standard complaint, Choudhury says, was that Eveready’s claim settlement process was very slow. According to his interviews, it could take the company between six and eight months to settle distributor claims.

Choudhury took up their complaint with Eveready’s commercial team and

asked them for the reason behind the delay. That’s one of the first lessons in collecting feedback, he says. Keeping an open mind and giving both parties a chance to air their views is critical or you could find yourself charging into a challenge that doesn’t really exist. “It’s vital to separate negative feedback from hoaxes,” he says.

That can be harder than it seems, especially for CIOs or IT staffers who meet customers for the first time. The adrenalin rush that comes from meeting with live customers—compared to poring over feedback forms or listening to their peers give them a lecture—and having the ability to do something about a customer’s complaints can sometimes make IT leaders forget that there are two sides to every coin. Some go as far as making promises to customers to fix the problem—something anybody who has watched medical dramas knows you should never do.

“[CIOs or IT staffers who talk to customers] should be careful of not jumping the gun. They should not make promises on the spot without engaging

in a detailed discussion. There could be repercussions to the organization. Maybe, the problem is something that an organization doesn’t intend to solve. They should totally avoid ‘spot-fixing’ also because there is a chance that distributors could feel the company has made a lot of promises but hasn’t delivered on them,” says Choudhury.

Back at Eveready’s headquarters, Choudhury pieced together the challenge of the claims delay. Eveready subsidized the cost its distributors incurred from running trucks or vans from the distribution center to retailers. To claim the subsidy distributors needed to inform Eveready how many kilometres their vans had done in a given month. The process, Choudhury learnt, used a paper-based approach, which was part of the reason it could take up to eight months before a claim was processed.

That was certainly something IT could do something about.

But there are times when the IT department can’t do something about a customer’s problems, and that’s something IT has to accept. In Choudhury’s case, for instance, because he doesn’t tell them he is from the IT department, one of the first complaints he gets is about margins. His standard reply is that he will pass it on to the business.

To get around the claims challenge, Choudhury and his team created a sales force automation software called ‘eFact’ and hosted it on a public cloud. Now, sales folks could input a claim for a distributor using SMS or a pre-installed Java application. This cut the time it took the company to turn around a claim to just a month.

That made distributors—and Ev-eready’s management—happy. “After I started interacting with customers we got feedback that they were happy with Eveready’s eagerness to help them. Busi-ness relations improved and that’s when I also got into the strategic role. Other than handling the IT function, I am now part of a core team that formulates Eveready’s future business strategy. We set short-

elivery Strategy Company: Eveready Customer Connect: Arup Choudhury,

CIO at Eveready, travelled in delivery vans to personally meet distributors.

Since 2009, Indian CIOs have

consistently spent only 12 percent

of their time with customers. They spend more time

with all other stakeholders

including business executives, IT staffers, and IT vendors.

Source:CIO Research


term (one-three-year) and long-term (seven-10-year) goals for the company.”

eFact also fulfilled another need: It kept a tally of how much a retailer sold, and monitored how much inventory a distributor had in stock. This was one of the primary reasons Choudhury decided to go out to the field in the first place. Prior to 2005, Eveready’s secondary sales data was compiled by sales personnel on the field. Because they used manual processes, business got sales reports later than it wanted. To get around the problem the IT team introduced a more integrated solution.

But the business realized that despite the new system there were discrepancies between primary and secondary sales data. As a result, “there was an unnecessary stock build up happening at the distributors end. That’s when we decided to go take a look at the market to better understand how secondary sales worked,” says Choudhury.

Today, eFact allows Eveready to have an accurate and almost real-time report of what’s selling and what’s not. Apart from that, the exercise of meeting distributors face to face, also provided a great learning ground for his IT staffers,

says Choudhury. Initially, he remembers, his team did not know how to approach distributors because they had never spoken to customers directly. Choudhury told his team to think of distributors as internal customers. “When you meet customers, you have to be a very patient listener. You talk less and listen more. Just turn into a blotting paper and soak in all the information,” he says.

Little did Choudhury know then that his greatest challenge wouldn’t come from his staffers.


Arup Choudhury, CIO, Eveready, was bumped up to the company’s core strategy group after taking an interest in Eveready’s customers.



CIOs Fixing Customer Service

When Humana CIO Bruce Goodman added chief service officer to his title in 2002,

there were few archetypes for combining executive-level roles in IT and customer service.

But that’s beginning to change. Today, he has plenty of company.

As the customer takes center stage at many companies, CIOs are taking over

marketing, customer support, and other areas that may have seemed a poor complement

for IT in the past, but that now benefit from an IT leader’s unique perspective. Running a

customer-facing function can make a lot of sense for CIOs, says Goodman, because they

“have an awareness of the challenges, knowledge of the [technology] solutions, and can

put them together to create a much better customer experience.”

Brandywine Realty Trust CIO Robert Juliano volunteered to take over marketing after a

corporate re-organization left the CMO position empty. He asked to be given six months

to turn the struggling group around. Three years later, he’s still on the job. “My primary

objective was to help the team better leverage resources, influence internal customers,

develop a clear focus, and improve project planning and delivery,” explains Juliano. He set

himself up for success as marketing chief by using the budgeting, planning and project-

management disciplines of IT, an understanding of social media platforms, and his seat at

the senior management table.

Better Business ProcessesShipping line APL India had a solid customer-service function when then-Director of IT

and Customer Service Chandra Shekhar Jajware took over that department in 2007. But

it had to be improved so the company could charge customers a higher premium. Jajware

was best positioned to lead the effort, which required APL India to collect and distribute

real-time customer-service data throughout the company.

It was hard to change deep-rooted processes at the 160-year-old company. APL

India’s external clients were more diverse and demanding than its internal users. Jajware

picked the brains of customer-support veterans and met with customers every week.

“Luckily we did not have that much change going on in IT,” he says. “But we slowed

down on a couple of projects,” frustrating some business users. The work was worth

it—customer satisfaction and margins rose. And Jajware applied the experience to his

current role, heading IT and leading a huge SAP implementation at Khimji Ramdas, a

conglomerate of 46 varied companies.

For Juliano, marketing was a challenging, but welcome, change of pace. “CIOs too often

live in a world of binary answers,” he says. “Marketing represented greater use of the other

side of my brain. The creative aspects, the personalities, the motivations are very different

from IT.”

The dual role doesn’t work everywhere. “Industries with traditionally strong marketing

groups are less likely to see CIOs with shared responsibility for customer-facing functions,”

says Nigel Fenwick, VP and principal analyst with Forrester Research. And CIOs without

business experience are more likely to struggle with the urgency of customer interactions.

But the most important job requirement may be enthusiasm. “It is a challenge,” says

Goodman. “CIOs have to ask themselves if they really have the passion for it.”

—Stephanie Overby

Business Pushback For a CIO, part of the challenge of meeting customers face to face is the fact that it’s someone else’s job. That makes toe-treading a very real possibility.

That’s exactly what happened at Eveready and it ended Choudhury’s three-year customer interaction initiative.

What triggered the beginning of the end was one visit Choudhury made to a distributor that had been doing business with the company for 25 years. The distributor complained that the company’s sales people were pushing him to buy new stocks of tea (Eveready also has a tea business)—despite the fact that he had old stock the company wasn’t taking back. If tea is more than six months old, retailers won’t put it on their shelves.

“A distributor actually showed me stock as old as one-and-a-half to two-years old. The distributor complained that his money was being blocked and that he wasn’t able to invest in other lines of business,” says Choudhury.

When Choudhury brought this up during a feedback session, the branch manager and area sales manager were contacted and were asked to explain the situation. It was the last straw on the camel’s back.

“A lot of negative feedback that was discussed during meetings was taken in the wrong sense. The sales guys started thinking that we are infringing on their territory. The resistance from the sales team meant that we had to stop it,” says Choudhury.

But Choudhury is undeterred. In his mind, 2009 was also time for the company to be more internally-focused—a cycle, he knew, that would make a full circle.

“Our customer focus had to stop because in the last two-three years our managers were focussing on product diversification. As a result, discussions had to focus on internal solutions than external ones. Now, when these products are being launched, there is a high possibility that we will start meeting customers again,” says Choudhury.

And Choudhury will be ready.

Companies are turning to CIOs to lead customer-facing functions because of their expertise with business processes, enterprise data and social media.




Harnath Babu, CIO, Aviva Life Insurance, believes that CIOs should spend about 20 percent of their time with customers or customer facing staffers.

When Harnath Babu signed up as Aviva Life Insurance’s CIO in mid-2011, he probably wasn’t aware that he’d soon be standing at the center of a three-way intersection. Rushing at him in thick and fast from one side, were complaints from Aviva’s internal users. Then, there was the increased pressure that the business put on his team as it saw new levels of competition. Finally, Aviva’s end customers demanded that it keep up with a world dominated by mobile phones.

“When I joined, there was a lot of noise in the organization in terms of IT. By noise, I mean internal employees were not very happy with our services and how IT responded to their problems. My first focus was to change that situation. I had to build a rapport with the last mile guy,” says Babu.

That last comment, almost an after thought, is what makes Babu special.

It’s obvious that there was plenty of work on the boil when Babu joined Aviva 18 months ago. And in that sense, Babu is similar to many of his peers who have to deal with a greater number of project requests ever since the economy lost steam two years ago. But, his decision to fix the problems of Aviva’s customer-facing employees—the “last-mile guys”—first; to prioritize their needs above the melee of demands coming his way, puts him in a more rarefied field of his peers. In a 2011 survey CIO carried out, only a third of Indian IT leaders said that “external customer focus” was one of the leadership competencies that they thought their organizations needed the most.

“If you want to continue serving customers and ensuring that your

organization moves forward, it should be mandatory for CIOs to spend at least 15-20 percent of their time talking to customers,” says Babu. “It’s critical for CIOs and IT teams to interface with customers.”

It’s hard to say whether Babu actually spends that much time with end customers; the average CIO spends much less, and at a recent CIO roundtable over 90 percent of Indian attendees vehemently disagreed

with the need to interface directly with end customers. But, there’s no denying that Babu ensures Aviva’s IT team is focused on the external customer. One of the ways he does that is by creating a task force he calls the ‘IT Connect’ team. Their job is to get into the shoes of the folks who have the customer’s ear—including Aviva’s agents and customer representatives—and give Babu weekly reports of the various challenges they face. From that list he identifies the top five issues of the month.

T Staffer Connect Company: Aviva Life Insurance Customer Connect: Harnath Babu, CIO,

Aviva Life Insurance, got IT staffers to talk to agents and customer reps to get feedback.




The decision to create the ‘IT Connect’ team couldn’t have been easy, since it needed to be carved out from his existing IT team. Babu’s IT Connect team comprises four regional managers from four metros, who have other full-time responsibilities, and supporting staff, who are outsourced resources.

What works in Babu’s favour is that his organization puts the customer at the center of things. Aviva has multiple ways of interacting with end customers and its agents. It deals directly and indirectly with them using established methods. One of the primary channels it uses are customer satisfaction surveys, which is measured using the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

This ecosystem softens the resistance that many IT departments have with talking to customers on a prolonged basis. “CIOs talking to the outside world may not really be an exciting proposition. It is important to cultivate the culture within the organization. Subsequently, CIOs and IT teams will also talk to the customers,” says Babu.

For other IT departments who want to create time to meet with customers, the lack of time and resources is a real-world challenge they will have to get around. It’s even harder for CIOs who are constantly grappling to deal with IT budgets, vendor challenges, and resource crunches. “Every day,” says Babu, “is a new fight.”

For Babu, making time to focus on end-customers—and the people interfacing with them—means shaving time off other major activities, including architecting and finalizing solutions, talking to vendors, building relationships with business users, and doing team reviews.

His task force, he says, discovered some interesting trends. First, more end customers were demanding mobile solutions so that they could transact without being tied to a PC or a laptop. Another was that the company’s agents were losing customer leads thanks to the way Aviva stored information.

Both discoveries had incredible bottom-line impacts.

“There were customers who complained to agents regarding the difficulty they found in logging online or talking to agents every time

they wanted to know about a new plan or get the status of an existing policy. They were looking for mobile solutions,” says Babu.

So that’s what he gave them. Babu’s team created mobile apps for various platforms which are already available in Apple’s iStore, Blackberry apps store and Google Play, allowing customers to check how their funds are performing while on the move.

Babu also got his team to create a lead management solution that runs on smart-phones and more basic mobile phones. The idea he says was to stem the amount of leads the company’s agents lost—leads Aviva paid for—because leads were allocated manually using Excel sheets and conversations were recorded on a notepad or Excel sheets.

“This system helps an agent maintain the lifecycle of a customer from lead to conversion,” says Babu. It also ensures that a sales lead can be re-allocated—if any of Aviva’s agents decide to leave the company—which increases both customer and agent satisfaction. In addition, it allows agents to carry e-brochures, instead of rummaging around for a hard copy, which helps them make a sale.

“We produced a result of 95 percent plus positive results for Voice of Customer (VOC) through the IT Connects program. Management was very happy. Also, when

I joined I used to get between 400 and 450 mails a day regarding escalations. Today, I don’t even get two,” says Babu.

Getting Organized About KYCBabu’s IT Connect team is not a flash in the pan. It’s not a one-time exercise to figure out what IT can do to keep the end customers happy.

That means there’s a constant barrage of suggestions coming in.

There’s a danger right there. Listening to every suggestion and trying to solve every problem could easily overwhelm a CIO and his team. It’s one of the reasons CIOs, who are already over-burdened, try to avoid talking to customers.

“When you talk to a lot of customers or agents, you will inevitably gather a lot of feedback. It’s important to have your antennas up constantly. Customers might expect a fancy solution from your company but you have to check how viable it is for the business. It is very critical not to fall into the ‘fulfilment trap’,” says Babu. “Devise a proper feedback collecting mechanism to record and analyse problems so that you can present your business case to management. It is also important that you do a proper cost benefit analysis before proposing a solution.”

He also suggests that CIOs who send out IT staffers to collect customer feedback try to control the conversation. “With technical guys you can have some communication challenges. You have to structure the way the communication happens. Our team was provided with a preset questionnaire made by the solutioning team and they are supposed to stick to the script. I’d like to invest in technology which would automate customer connections and make the job easier for us.”

Finally, he says, that it’s also important for CIOs to slow down. “CIOs are known to be emotional. As a matter of fact, all technical guys are emotional, which is evident from the fact that they jump to a solution before even listening to a problem.” says Babu. “It’s important for CIOs to listen.”


In 2012, only a quarter of Indian

CIOs said that interacting with

external business partners or

customers was one of the top five things they spend the most time on.

Source:CIO Research



REAL CIO WORLD | J U LY 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 4 9VOL/7 | ISSUE/09

BSES companies at Delhi of Reliance ADA Group pride itself on providing electricity to two-thirds of Delhi’s population—that’s 32 lakh customers—which makes its ingrained culture of customer centricity useful.

“For an artist, the appreciation of the audience is most important. Similarly, for BSES, appreciation from the end beneficiary is very important. I personally visit our customer care offices to talk to customers,” says K.B. Singh, VP, BSES Reliance ADA Group.

That’s how, for instance, he discovered that a customer had been wrongfully blamed for power theft. “The customer said he wasn’t stealing electricity. Somebody else was hooking cables from the electricity box,” says Singh. As a result of that conversation, Singh checked on the success rate of BSES’s theft detection initiatives. What he found surprised him. Out of every 100 theft cases that were raided by BSES, only 10-15 people were actual power thieves, the rest were innocent.

“We made changes to the systems by bringing in exhaustive offline analytics which logs a customer’s consumption pattern, creates flags for thefts, and any manipulations of supplied electricity. BSES analytics team found miscreants from looking at these analytics, made a list, and sent it to the enforcement team. We also use cameras and other recording equipment to capture information electronically to weed out corruption in the form of enforcement agents asking for bribes in return for a get-out-of-jail-free-pass for implicated customers,” says Singh.

By the time he was done, the accuracy rate of BSES’ theft detection initiatives rose to between 85 and 90 percent.

ower to the Consumer Company: BSES Reliance ADA Group Customer Connect:

K.B. Singh, VP, BSES Reliance ADA Group, meets end consumers at BSES’ customer care offices.

K.B. Singh, VP, BSES Reliance ADA Group, created a system using analytics to ensure fewer BSES consumers were falsely accused of stealing power.



Singh’s customer centricity stems partially from a company-wide focus to meet with customers, an ideal that goes all the way back to when it started in 2002. One of the ways BSES interacts with customers is a forum called ‘gyan abhiyan’—a brainchild of IT that has since been taken over by the customer care division. Under gyan abhiyan BSES staffers meet with Resident Welfare Associations around Delhi to understand their problems. Singh says that he ensures that, off and on, IT is represented at these meetings.

Singh’s focus on ‘end beneficiaries’ (he doesn’t like using the word users or customers) has led to many of the initiatives that have given BSES the reliable, pro-active reputation it has. Take for example how BSES informs its customers of pre-planned maintenance schedules, a.k.a power cuts. Most Indian consumers have gotten used to their utilities not informing them of brown outs, apart from the basic newspaper announcements. In comparison, BSES also sends SMSes and e-mails. Today, Singh says, 50 percent of BSES’ customer base has registered their numbers with the company.

Another conversation with a customer brought about additions to BSES’ feature-rich online portal. “Earlier, if an anomaly was detected in the bill of a customer, our customer care representative would scan through the system for errors and try to address the problem. Our eureka moment occurred when we realized that this information could be made available directly to the customers. The online portal was then fleshed out to include more information. Customers can now check their consumption patterns and various other types of information own their own. As a result the number and the kind of requests that they have logged on the portal have come down,” says Singh.

In doing so, Singh and the BSES, have raised the bar on what consumers expect from their utilities. More power to him.

When C.V.G. Prasad, CIO, ING Vysya Bank, tells people that his IT team is part of the business’ pre-sales team, most people have one of two reactions: They are either appalled or amazed.

If you’re appalled—like many of your peers—you’re probably thinking: Why, why should my team talk to customers? It’s not their job. But if you’re amazed then you’d fall into a smaller bracket of CIOs who are scouting for opportunities to better customer service and partner with the business—like Prasad. “If you believe in true partnership with your business, listening to the problems of end customers—either by meeting them personally or other means—is vital. It has to become a part and parcel of IT’s change agenda,” says Prasad.

Which is why, at ING Vysya Bank, when a prospective client meeting demands the attention of the IT team, Prasad ensures that they are present with the business team.

For example, if the wholesale banking team wants to sell a new payment product to a prospective customer, they would probably want to understand the bank’s technology platform, its systems, and potential security issues. “As a result, the IT team forms part of the pre-sales team of the business,” he says.

Not many CIOs believe that. For the most part, supporting the business has been the primary function of CIOs. Meeting external customers and interacting with them to understand their pain points was never an IT leader’s priority. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be. Ask Prasad and he’ll tell you why CIOs and their teams can no longer be back-end boys tinkering with the nuts and bolts. “Today, there’s fierce competition. CIOs and IT teams need to be much more attuned to the needs of the customer,” he says.

To get a head start in that direction, Prasad turned to a feedback collection mechanism that ING Vysya Bank uses called the Net Promoter Score, which distils positive user responses from the negative ones. “With this process, we identify a set of customer touchpoints, and whenever an event occurs, feedback is taken immediately.” It was the net promoter score approach that pointed to the need to change one of the banks’ vital processes: Issuing new debit cards and PIN numbers. Titled ‘Customer First’, the initiative was rolled out after the company’s call center was submerged by requests to block lost debit cards, and re-issue new PIN numbers. New cards and PIN numbers were issued about a week or so after a complaint is registered at a call center. This was a time-consuming and cumbersome process.

“We wanted to fix that and make it more customers friendly. We analyzed customer complaint data and tried to find a solution to speed up the process. We introduced ‘insta-card’ and ‘insta-pin’. Now, a customer can walk into a branch and get a new debit card or a PIN across the counter and its activated by the end of the day,” says Prasad.

The new process cut service request fulfilment cycle times by over 90 percent.

That’s one upside of listening to customers. Sometimes, it could lead to the

anking on Feedback COMPANY: ING Vysya Bank Customer Connect: C.V.G. Prasad, CIO,

ING Vysya Bank, ensures the IT team participates in meetings with prospective clients.


27 percent of Indian CIOs say calling

on customers was one of the five ways they elevated IT’s

relationship with the business

in 2011. Source:CIO Research



the process, ING also wanted to eliminate the need to visit a bank to open a fixed deposit account. The Bank’s product and IT teams quickly got down to the job and figure that the best way was to take the mobile route.

Now, opening an FD account is a simple process. All customers need to do is send an SMS from a registered mobile number with their account number to debit, amount and tenure to book an FD instantly. FD+ was successfully launched earlier this year.

creation of a new product, that holy grail of competitive advantage. For ING Vysya Bank, that came in the form of Fixed Deposit Plus or FD+. This idea also came about from the net promoter tool.

Anyone who has ever tried to open a fixed deposit knows that it can take a long time. ING Vysya Bank’s customers weren’t kicked about it. So, apart from speeding up

This was only possible because the IT team was involved from the beginning. “The IT team was involved in the entire product design because we need to know the entire end-to-end process of our products so as to understand the nuances,” says Prasad.

Yet all of that is secondary. What’s more important for CIOs and their teams to talk to customers. Ask Prasad how he rates it on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the highest, he says, “I would rate it 10. Ours is a completely service-based industry. Whatever money we make is driven by the deals our customers make with us. It is important that we constantly listen to their feedback.”

To ensure good customer service, the bank also provides customers with a plat-form to give their feedback to open-ended questions. Collating this data, they figured that new customers weren’t happy with the bank’s online portal and wanted more fea-tures and functionalities. For example, some customers wanted the bank to improve the traditional mode of getting usernames and passwords for the online portal by courier.

“We took that feedback and simplified the process by moving to a self-registration mode,” says Prasad. Now, a customer can register for Internet banking with ING Vysya Bank himself by using the credentials that he already has such as debit card, registered mobile number, and debit card pin.

There’s no doubt that interacting with customers and taking feedback seriously has its benefits, but Prasad stresses on a defined process. “Without a defined process if you let everybody and anybody talk to the end-customer, you will lose clarity and there is a chance of confusion. Divided accountability could lead to a lot of problems.”

That said, Prasad swears by involving the IT team when talking to customers. And he is planning to jump on the social media bandwagon to talk to customers. “In the future we might leverage the capabilities of social media to harness customer interaction,” says Prasad.

If you still think it’s not your job, it’s time to change loyalties. CIO

Send feedback on this feature to [email protected]

C.V.G. Prasad, CIO, ING Vysya Bank, believes in focusing on the customer so much, he’s made sure that parts of his team act like pre-sales staffers.



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As the 23rd entrant in the Indian insurance industry, IndiaFirst Life had a world of ground to cover. But it

didn’t believe in catching up; it wanted to get ahead. How? By empowering over 1,000 sales agents with

tablets that sell insurance in 30 minutes.

BY A N U P VA R I E R

4 8 D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 | REAL CIO WORLD VOL/8 | ISSUE/02

TABLETTakeover

big case.indd 46 12/14/2012 8:34:41 PM

Imagine you’re visiting your aging relatives in some remote part of the country and need to provide them with insurance cover—something you’ve been putting off just to avoid the hassle of getting one. What if the very next morning—while you’re sitting with your feet up on a couch, sipping coffee, and reading your favorite book—a gentleman walks up to you, swishes out a fancy tablet, takes down your details, and hands you a print-out of a life insurance policy—in just 30 minutes?

If wow is the word that came to your mind, then that’s exactly how IndiaFirst Life Insurance aspires to make its customers feel. A joint venture between Bank of Baroda, Andhra Bank, and the UK’s Legal and General, the com-pany is all set to change the way insurance is sold in India.

But a few months back, its sales agents weren’t anywhere close to achieving that. The company’s sales agents—called Business Development Managers (BDMs)—had to lug around and fumble through sheaves of collateral, application forms, and other customer documents. It was a process that was manual, cumbersome, and time-con-suming. And it was time IndiaFirst couldn’t afford to lose.

Squeezed under the pressures of low volumes, grow-ing competition and price sensitivity of customers, indus-try reports say that a player in India’s insurance sector can only hope to break-even in 13-15 years. This, clubbed with the increase in the number of lapsed policies, an overall decline in sales—and the fact that, according to industry reports, the profit margins on life insurance policies sold in India are the lowest in Asia—can make it look like one of the toughest industries to operate in. That, it is.

The Scheme of ThingsBut while there are many who’d look at a challenge and run in the oppo-

site direction, IndiaFirst was willing to look at it as an opportunity.

With a share capital of Rs 475 crore, IndiaFirst fol-lows the bancassurance model and has about 1,000 BDMs to cover the over 5,000 branches of Bank of Baroda and Andhra Bank. The company has clocked a growth of 39 percent at the end of March 2012 and man-aged to cap its operating expenses at 19 percent of new business premium. “As a new entrant, we have been able to grow at a rate faster than the industry average. But it will be difficult to keep doing so on a larger base. So we are focusing on improving our processes, our product suite, and enhancing customer delight,” says Dr. P. Nan-dagopal, MD and CEO, IndiaFirst Life Insurance.

This becomes especially important in an industry where one doesn’t deliver a product but a promise in return for the money invested by customers. “To enhance customer delight, it is an imperative to deliver on that promise in a fashion that is credible, instant, and efficient,” adds Nandagopal.

But considering the push-sales dependent nature of the industry, such a vision is easier said than achieved. BDMs would have to indulge prospective customers with multiple visits and subsequent deliberations before they could hope for a sale. And even then, owing to manual processes, there was a lack of standardiza-

tion in the sales process and hence a lot of scope for mis-selling.

This lack of standardization was visible in the way BDMs approached customers and their needs. “There was no way of knowing if all of the nearly 1,000 employ-ees across the country were following a standardized process for selling our prod-ucts. Or whether they were performing need-analysis for customers, recommend-

Case File | IndiaFirst Life Insurance

Reader ROI:

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The benefits, challenges and impact of a mobility initiative

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he company’s sales agents—called Business Development Managers (BDMs)—had to lug around and fumble through sheaves of collateral and other customer documents. This sales process was manual, cumbersome, and time-consuming. And it was time IndiaFirst couldn’t afford to lose.

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big case.indd 47 12/14/2012 8:34:42 PM


ing the right product, generating a benefit illustration for that product, and getting the application form filled correctly before collecting the premium,” says Mohit Rochlani, Business Head-Bancassurance and Retention, IndiaFirst Life Insurance.

Due to the bancassurance model that it operates in, IndiaFirst doesn’t have dedicated offices or branches and couldn’t hope to standardize sales processes by gathering people at one location for training. “Despite our online learning management system and monthly tests, the understanding of product plans among sales personnel is not uniform,” says Vinayak Khadye, Head-Project Management and IT Excellence, Indi-aFirst Life Insurance.

Moreover, the bank branches that the BDMs operated out of wouldn’t have provisioned for a BDM to use the branch as his workplace. This would cripple BDMs who, despite being equipped with a laptop, needed to access scanners and the Internet to upload documents. Also, they didn’t have an integrated application on their laptops to pull out product audio-visuals that need to be shown to the customer when pitching a product.

All this added to the growing heap of problems.

Ask, Apply, Get?The company’s issues multiplied when it found that its manual processes interfered with a BDM’s ability to execute the Ask, Apply, Get (AAG) strategy. An over the counter policy issuance model, AAG is designed by IndiaFirst on the criteria of pre-underwritten prod-ucts based on age range of the customer, sum assured, need for medical check-ups etcetera. A closer look at IndiaFirst’s portfolio will reveal that a majority of its policies fall under this process and had the potential of getting closed on the spot. “Our portfolio is 90 per-cent non-medical and these could get covered through AAG. But due to our paper-based process, BDMs couldn’t help customers with necessary information for them to make a purchase decision,” says Rochlani.

It would also take longer to spot mistakes in cus-tomer applications. For example, a discrepancy with respect to personal details or policy elements like pre-mium amount or sum assured would only be identified after it reached the Mumbai corporate office for manual underwriting. This would take at least two to three days to reach Mumbai—from major cities—and up to five to six days from the remote parts of the country. “In case of the incumbents—or established players—this is handled by one of the thousands of branches closest to the sales person,” Rochlani adds.

But this wasn’t possible for IndiaFirst’s BDMs placed in rural areas. They won’t have access to the same information as their peers in metros and would have to wait till they get response from the central com-mand to address customer queries.

Opening more branches across the country would have helped the company, but that would, for one, render its bancassurance model irrelevant. The bancassurance model has allowed IndiaFirst to save on infrastructure costs and invest in new-age products and solutions that would give them the opportunity to grow faster than the industry. The model also accounts for eas-ier access to customers, provides far warmer leads than any other channel, and gives a quicker time-to-market as it is inherently more agile.


A One-Man Show

See, Spot, RunIndiaFirst Life Insurance’s sales

agents use the tablet’s camera to click a photo of customer documents—needed to qualify for an insurance

policy—and send it to the corporate office to check for inconsistencies. Earlier this used to take two to six days. Now, the company can spot

inconsistencies almost instantly and inform sales agents.

If there are none, an insurance policy is issued immediately.

Tablet-totting sales agents of IndiaFirst Life Insurance have donned the avatar of a walking-talking mobile branch.

Time in their Hands Now sales agents can hand out policies

to customers in just 30 minutes, thanks to a mobile office application sitting in their

tablets and a portable printer.

Feet on the StreetToday, the company has equipped

over 1,000 sales agents with tablets to sell insurance on the spot—making

agents a walking-talking branch. The company is in the process of

expanding the facility to 4,000 agents.

big case.indd 48 12/14/2012 8:34:43 PM

As a three-year old organization, IndiaFirst wanted to build on this freedom and establish a digital channel that wasn’t just limited to a Web portal. This, it was sure, would help address initial sales and post-sales service requirements of the customer far better than a brick and mortar interface. “As the 23rd entrant in the Indian insurance industry, we were determined to invest more in technology rather than setting up branches,” says Nandagopal.

Khadye couldn’t have asked for more.

On Auto-PilotEnthused by Nandagopal’s faith in technology, Khadye decided to build a comprehensive solution that is avail-able to the field force so that BDMs can interface with all the business processes within the organization. To avoid errors inherent in a manual process, Khadye started off by creating an end-to-end automation solution.

So the IT team got together to evaluate the options that could enable this. They started off by listing out key features and decided they needed a device that is small enough to carry but still has a good display. They also figured that it would have to be flexible enough to handle a fair bit of processing if it was to support client-based applications. Eliminating POS devices—being used largely in the micro-insurance sector—they decided to choose between laptops and tablets.

Since they were already on a laptop model, they were aware of the constraints it imposed and weighed this against the risks and benefits of going for a reason-ably untested technology: Tablets. “We thought, why not use tablets, build an app for it, and make the entire (sales) process paperless,” says Khadye. This, along with a portable printer, was all that was needed to set up the mobile office for IndiaFirst.

Once it was decided to take the tablet route, identifying the OS for which they needed to build it wasn’t a tough decision to make. “The only real options at that time were iOS and Android. And considering the multiple device options and the lower cost per device, we decided to go with Android,” says Khadye. Having the flexibility to run this app on multiple devices was important to IndiaFirst because it knew that in order to realize the full potential of mobility the company will need to equip both its senior management and extended enterprise of agents in the near future.

Khadye had a long way to go.

Operation AppDevKhadye and his IT team figured that developing the application from scratch would be a tedious and time

consuming affair. So they decided to go for a mobile enterprise application and development platform instead of a completely custom-built solution. Based on their requirements, they chose Acceltree’s FRED as their preferred platform.

Leveraging the capabilities of the platform—in both the development and run-time environment—the pro-grammers used the integrated development environ-ment, along with a simple tablet-based tool enabled by the platform vendor. This was done to define the user interface and build business and workflow logic and the logic for connecting to enterprise systems.

This entire logic is stored as business objects in XML format. At run time, the application on the tab-let sends a transaction request through the messaging layer to the relevant business object that runs within the high performance transaction engine. The backend integration too is taken care of by the platform server’s ability to interact with varied data sources and mul-tiple enterprise systems simultaneously.

The underlying logic necessitated the break down of enterprise workflows into relevant chunks. “We looked at our organizational processes and packaged them in four modules: Customer, distributor, employee and corporate. In the hands of the employee, the tablet becomes a mobile office,” says Khadye. The customer


e thought, why not use tablets, build an app for it, and make the entire sales process paperless. In the hands of the employee, the tablet will become a mobile office.” — Vinayak Khadye, head-Project Management and IT Excellence, IndiaFirst Life Insurance

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module which automates the entire customer facing process—from lead management to after sales sup-port—is the first module in the suite that has been made live. The other three modules are under development.

The application flows in a step-by-step process. BDMs have to input all the mandatory information before they can move on to the next step. The important steps can’t be skipped and it also ensures transparency with the customer. There are in-built validations for calculation of premiums and sum assured that help avoid mistakes. “The mistakes that BDMS were committing either due to carelessness or a lack of knowledge are now getting addressed,” says Rochlani.

The application is designed to work equally well in both online and offline modes. Once data entry is done

and supporting documents are captured via the tab-let’s camera, the data and documents are synced with the backend servers either in real-time or whenever the 2G/3G/WiFi connectivity is available. 3G is recom-mended but it works fine on 2G as well. Just that the syncing of documents which are captured as image files might take a little longer. Once all the documents are in place and checked, an insurance policy is issued—all in 30 minutes.

To tighten device and data security, Khadye has also leveraged Mobile Device Management (MDM). “We have also equipped ourselves with the ability to trace the devices in the hands of our users. This enables us to acti-vate and deactivate applications, perform over-the-air updates, and wipe data on a lost device,” says Khadye. He has also added security features to make sure that data and documents are encrypted not just when it is within the application but also during transmission.

The end result of the company’s IT team and Kha-dye’s efforts is a tablet—aptly called the Magic Board—in the hands of each of IndiaFirst’s over 1,000 BDMs. And the company doesn’t plan to stop at that. It is already charting a course that would enable them to equip each of its over 4,000 agents with a tablet.

The Magic of the Magic BoardToday, the Magic Board has worked like a charm.

“With Magic Board, the sales process has been stan-dardized to a great extent and a policy can be issued on the spot,” says the company’s business head-Bancas-surance and Retention, Rochlani. Though it’s only been three months since the application has been launched, it is evident that BDMs no longer have to run around chasing documents and arranging for those to be couri-ered to the corporate office. Nor do they have to wait till it reaches and gets verified by an underwriter to check inconsistencies that might have crept in.

If the form has some deficiency, both BDMs and cus-tomers can be appraised of the same—almost immedi-ately. “They can’t fill up a different sum assured and can’t sell a product meant for a particular age group to a per-son who does not fall into that age range,” says Rochlani.

The Magic Board has also added a dash of élan to a BDM’s image and helps build a sense of trust and cred-ibility with the customer. He is no longer the clumsy guy fumbling bundles of paper, but one that sports a ritzy tablet. CIO

Anup Varier is senior correspondent. Send feedback on this fea-

ture to [email protected]


s a new entrant, we have been able to grow at a rate faster than the industry average. But it will be difficult to keep doing so. That’s why, we are focusing on improving our processes, product suite, and enhancing customer delight.”— Dr. P. Nandagopal, MD & CEO, IndiaFirst Life Insurance

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Thought Leadership

Cloud Connect: Collaborating with Cloud Providers

CLOUD CORNER

VMWARECUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUP

BALAKRISHNA RAOCIO, Manipal Universal Learning

The understanding of cloud computing—and its benefits—both at the vendor as well as customer level, is important.

T. SRINIVASANMD, VMware India & SAARC

A key factor that a CIO should consider while migrating to a cloud is the vendor’s SLA. This should meet all needs of data security, availability, and uptime.

With an optimal SLA, the organization can ensure that it has better control over service levels, compli-ance, organizational policies, and regulations. A key factor that a CIO should consider while migrating to a cloud is the vendor’s SLA. This should meet all needs of data security, availability and uptime.

While evaluating, CIOs must consider whether the service incorporates multi-level, auditable security, and if it complies with the internal IT environment. While VMware doesn’t supply public cloud ser-vices directly, we do something equally important. Our VMware Service Provider Program partners build public clouds on the industry-leading VMware

vSphere virtualization platform—already deployed by more than 400,000 companies worldwide. We test and certify these partners to assure the highest standards for security and performance. Only then, can our partners offer customers public cloud ser-vices co-branded with the VMware name.

VMware virtualization solutions accelerate an or-ganization’s transition to the cloud, by abstracting complexity and creating an elastic pool of compute, storage and networking resources. By virtualizing all assets in the IT infrastructure, CIOs can cre-ate a private cloud that leverages the world’s most trusted virtualization platform, VMware vSphere.

Cloud implementations in the education industry may have been slow but they are happening. Sea-sonal demands and its niche customer profile are the two key characteristics that make the cloud relevant to the education sector. Two years back, we realized that we needed to deploy high volume workloads in the cloud and thereby effectively man-age peak hours. We did this because investing on infrastructure to cater to the high volumes of sea-sonal peaks wasn’t feasible. Cloud computing fit the bill as it offers scalability and flexibility without the hassle of periodic tweaking. Also, our business caters to global campuses in Antigua, Nepal, Ma-laysia and Dubai. We have created a private cloud to

run our business solutions and enterprise systems. MeritTrac, India’s largest testing and assessment company—and a MaGE unit—provides examination process and assessment solutions to educational institutions, PSUs and corporates. MeritTrac sys-tems handle an average of a million tests a year, both in offline and online mode and most workloads operate from the cloud. Moving enterprise solutions to the cloud has its own challenges. Integration is one of them. The understanding of cloud comput-ing, both at the vendor and customer level, is im-portant and when we deployed the solution this was still in its nascent stage. Today, we have significantly evolved and have a mature cloud strategy.

Social media is changing the way businesses interact with—and create marketing assets for—customers, says Simeran Bhasin, Marketing Head, Fastrack & New Brands at Titan Industries. It’s time others got on board too.

5 4 D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 | REAL CIO WORLDVOL/8 | ISSUE/02

BY E R I C E R N E ST

SOCIALCOMPULSIONS

SIMERAN’S AGENDA: To align Fastrack to a world dominated by social media.

CXO_agenda_final.indd 60 12/14/2012 8:38:07 PM

CIO: What new trend do you see in marketing that you wish more CXOs were aware of?

Simeran Bhasin: One big trend is that digital media is becoming an increasingly important part of our lives, especially if you work in the youth segment. And that means that we need to change the way we do business, whether it is the way we select and work with agencies, the way we structure our teams internally, and the kind of functions and departments we have internally.

How much has changed? What’s really changed? Digital media represents a huge change from say

five years ago. Before, there was only indirect contact with the customer for the most part. You met them mostly through research, and when you did meet them directly it was through focus groups and things like that. When social media broke out in India, we immediately got onto it. Prior to that, when Fastrack was launched, the only way to get an initial feel was to go into the market ourselves to do research.

What this means is that the customer’s voice has become much stronger than before, and it’s able to reach us directly, without any filters. So you get absolutely honest feedback from consumers, who on their part are much more confident and aggressive, and not afraid to give their opinion. This puts pressure on companies who now have to monitor how responsive—and how connected—they are to their customers.

Social media has become a means for us to engage and have a two-way conversation with the consumer. That wasn’t possible earlier. I think access to the brand has become much larger with social media. Consumers didn’t have access to us and we didn’t have access to the consumer’s voice unless you did traditional research. We now don’t believe in traditional research at all. We just believe in keeping in direct touch with our consumer. So all our insights, everything that we want to know actually comes from observing what’s happening on our social media pages, Facebook in particular.

That’s why I think the entire digital space has been extremely important for Fastrack; it has been a big part of our journey in the last seven years.

When your customers contact you directly through social media, how do you respond?

We respond to them on our Facebook page or we

respond to them in the form of a message, or we take them offline. Where we need more details we take it offline. We take their number or their e-mail id and engage with them directly. That’s how we stay in touch and engage with our consumers.

How has social media changed media planning?

The lesson we have learnt is that there are a huge number of youth spending their time on social media, the highest compared to any other

media. And with very minimal spend you are able to reach out to consumers in a way that you aren’t through standard print plans or through conventional TV plans. You can no longer look at effective media planning like that. Effective media planning can be done at no cost if you have a strong social media community—that’s been our biggest learning.

That sounds like a lot of customer input. What’s the organizational learning curve like?

For us the learning curve has literally been vertical. And it has been that way for the past several years.

The learning curve is much faster because we have a large fanbase on Facebook that is constantly reacting in real time to whatever we are doing. I think brands that don’t use social media to understand and gain insights into their consumers will have a much slower learning curve. Theirs is the learning curve of the traditional world, where you got in touch with your consumers only as many times as you did research with them. And you reached out to much fewer people. Now you are reaching out to 4.5 million people and you have access to them at any point of time.

What else has social media changed for organizations?

Social media has certainly made us a lot more answerable to consumers than we were ever before. It’s consumers who are forcing this change. We can no longer hide in our glass towers saying we don’t know what the consumer is saying; now the consumer is going to force you to know what he is saying.

What’s the next step for marketing people as far as social media is concerned? Will it remain a Facebook page play?

What is important for marketers to do is to listen and learn. You can’t assume that what happened on

CXO Agenda | Social Media


The number of Facebook likes

Fastrack has, making it one of the most

popular Indian brands on Facebook.

4.8million


Facebook three years ago is what is happening on Facebook today. Let’s talk about our consumer profile, for example. The consumer profile that used to be on Facebook in its early years, about two to three years ago, used to be that of an ‘aspirational’ consumer, a very discerning, English-sp eaking consumer. What we have noticed over the last couple of years is that the consumer base has grown on Facebook and that there has been a huge change in consumer profile.

Today, the consumer is not as affluent, is not an early adopter; the consumer now is predominantly mass consumer, and is coming in from smaller towns. They tend to be followers rather than early adopters. The language that they speak is not English and therefore the quality of comprehension of campaigns that we have put out has dramatically dropped.

That’s exactly what happened on Orkut as well. As Orkut grew the consumer profile changed, from a more affluent, discerning, English-speaking, early-adopter consumer to a more regional kind of consumer, by people who tend to be followers, a more

‘mass consumer’ consumer. And the same thing is happening on Facebook today.

Given this whole ‘massification’ of social media, what you do with your campaigns then needs to change.

How have you adapted to this change?That’s a big challenge right now. Earlier, edgy

campaigns were very well appreciated. Now, you suddenly have a lot of people calling you and cribbing about the campaigns you’re putting up. This is simply because their sensibilities are more conservative compared to the original set of early-adopter consumers. We have to respond to these consumers. We have to be careful and make changes to our

marketing plans and decisions. And we are finding out that we have to be very careful in terms of the decisions we take because they can easily change brand strategy.

We’ve covered a lot of ground. What’s your one big social-media related challenge?

One of the challenges we face is to be able to create campaigns for social media. I don’t think there are agencies out there that are good enough to marry traditional creative processes with this new-age media. Most traditional advertising agencies don’t know how to think digital—they just simply adapt a print campaign or a TV campaign and use it on the digital media. That is the biggest challenge we face today: To find the people who know how the technology works, who know how social media and digital media work, and who then can think

creatively within that. India has a huge dearth of such kind of talent.

Is there a danger of being Facebook dependant?We had thought that Google+ would become the

next Facebook, but that’s not happening. I don’t think Google+ has been able to gain much traction. Today, Facebook is still large but with the digital media something new can come up any day and take over. That’s something all marketers need to watch out for. They need to have their fingers in many multiple pies because you can never tell when Facebook might die and something else will rise. We have to constantly keep our ear to the ground to figure out what is happening and where it is happening. CIO

Eric Ernest is correspondent. Send feedback on this interview to

[email protected]

CXO Agenda | Social Media

“We now don’t believe in traditional research at all. Everything we want to know comes from observing what’s happening on our social media pages.”

5 6 D E C E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 1 2 | REAL CIO WORLDVOL/8 | ISSUE/02


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Businesses struggling in a down economy, IT battling with new technologies, and IT executives fighting inadequacy: The EMC Forum couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. With a promise to help IT leaders transform business, IT and themselves, the Forum brought together some of the most influential speakers, top CIOs, and the biggest solution partners. Here’s what you missed.

ContentsEMC Transformer Awards The 50 winners of the EMC Transformers award were innovative, perseverant, and change agents for their organizations.

SnapshotsSome records set, some songs hummed, and some leadership lessons learnt. Catch a glimpse of the highlights of the EMC Forum 2012.

Keynote Steve Leonard, Corporate Senior VP, Office of the Chairman, EMC, and Par Botes, Corporate VP & CTO, APJ, EMC, say the incredible growth of data is not a challenge, but an opportunity.

Panel DiscussionTwo high-powered panels set the stage for debate and discussion on how emerg-ing technologies like cloud computing are transforming the CIO role and how smart companies are winning customers in a dynamic business environment.

Interview Rajesh Janey, President, India & SAARC, EMC Corporation, says the character of information has changed the IT landscape, thanks to big data and cloud computing.

quires highly-competent individuals. Citing the example of Formula One as an ultimate data driven event, he said that there are more than 750 million pieces of information be-ing generated and analyzed to improve the performance of an engine. This can make a huge difference in a race. For this, you need data scientists, and India has an opportunity to build a platform of data science expertise.

“Big data is the new normal,” said Par Botes, corporate VP, CTO, APJ, EMC, who joined Leonard on stage during the session.

Providing an example of how publicly-avail-able information can help create an accurate personal profile, Botes said that personalizing experiences between businesses, between individuals, from businesses to individuals creates efficiencies and better outcomes, and that is the promise of big data.

“In 2000, the world generated two Exabyte (1 Exabyte = 1 billion GB) of new information. In 2011, it generated five Exabyte of new infor-mation every day”, remarked Steve Leonard, Corporate Senior VP, Office of the Chairman, EMC, during his keynote presentation at EMC Forum’s third edition in India.

To keep pace with this growth, enterprises need 10 times more servers—but the num-ber of skilled professionals will only increase 1.5 times, he said. In such a scenario, the cloud, he said, was the solution. It provides an opportunity to build a nimble and flexible infrastructure. “This is what makes cloud computing very real,” he said.

Leonard also talked about data analytics. “Data analytics is more than a buzz word; it’s going to be critical in the future,” he said. Interpreting and understanding the data re-

Big Data and Cloud Computing Can Transform India Inc.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

The incredible growth of data is not

a challenge, but an opportunity say Steve

Leonard, Corporate Senior VP, Office of the

Chairman, EMC and Par Botes, Corporate VP & CTO, APJ, EMC.

STEVE LEONARDCorporate SVP, Office of

the Chairman, EMC

PAR BOTESCorporate VP & CTO, APJ, EMC

S P E C I A L E V E N T C O V E R A G E

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

Growing Business in the New Environment

One of the questions organizations face is whether to scale up and gain com-

petitive edge during a slowdown, or play it safe. A high-powered panel consisting of

senior IT leaders and moderated by Vijay Ramachandran, Editor-in-Chief, IDG Media, attempted to answer this question. It also sought to understand the current business

landscape and how smart companies are winning customers by building the right products and services.

With the gap between leaders and follow-ers widening, more companies are open to taking risks. Growth and risk aren’t re-ally different things, said Snehal Gambhir, COO, Aviva Life Insurance. The growth of a company is crucial for its survival, and not just for expansion, added Sunil Kapoor, VP- Supply Chain India, Fortis Healthcare.

Organizations must innovate and plan their growth according to their strengths, said Devesh Mathur, COO, HSBC India. “A lot of IT effort goes towards understanding our customers and analytics is playing a key role in this,” he said.

To move IT beyond automation and into value creation, CIOs must look at creating efficiencies and outcomes, said Par Botes, Corporate VP, CTO, APJ, EMC.

Transforming the Role of the CIO, the Cloud Way

There’s no doubt that cloud computing demands more respect in Indian orga-

nizations today than it used to. As it evolved from an IT need to a business imperative, it also transformed IT—and the CIO’s role—from a cost center to a competitive dif-ferentiator. At the EMC Forum, a panel of some of India’s leading solution providers discussed how the cloud is changing busi-ness dynamics and how CIOs are increas-ingly turning to cloud computing to create new avenues for business.

“It’s true that cloud is helping CIOs mea-sure cost per unit of IT and its effectiveness. Ultimately, it’s the CIO and his IT team that needs to deliver this business imperative,” said T. Srinivasan, managing director, VM-ware India and SAARC.

Pushing the case for cloud computing isn’t that hard anymore, thanks to the tech-nology’s obvious benefits. “Earlier, a CIO had to build a business case, but now tools and analytics have enabled them to build a

and Public Sector, Cisco India, counters that problem with another benefit. “The more you do with less, the more leveraged you become. The cloud will allow CIOs to take existing re-sources and use them for other projects and become more business relevant.”

business case automatically,” said Rajesh Janey, president-India and SAARC, EMC.

On the flip side, CIOs are going to be in-creasingly responsible for working with re-sources that are no longer within their con-trol. Janesh Moorjani, president-Enterprise

Panelists (From L-R): T.Srinivasan-VMware Software, Vijay Ramachandran-IDG Media (Moderator) Janesh Moorjani-Cisco India, Rajesh Janey-EMC

India’s top solution partners got together to exchange views on how cloud computing is changing the CIO role.

Senior IT leaders discussed how smart companies are winning customers in a slowdown.

Panelists (From L-R): Devesh Mathur-HSBC India, Sunil Kapoor-Fortis Healthcare,Vijay Ramachandran-IDG Media (Moderator), Snehal Gambhir-Aviva Life Insurance, Par Botes-EMC

IDG CUSTOM SOLUT IONS GROUP

EMC TRANSFORMERS AWARD WINNERS

ANIL VEER ARICENT TECHNOLOGIES

MANISH CHOKSI ASIAN PAINTS

AVINASH VELHAL ATOS INDIA

HARNATH BABU AVIVA LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY

PRATAP GHARGE BAJAJ ELECTRICALS

ANIL KUMAR KAUSHIK BHARAT PETROLEUM

PRIYA NARAYANAN CAIRN INDIA

SUKUMAR RAJAGOPAL COGNIZANT TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

AJIT PANICKER COX AND KINGS

RAMNATH IYER CRISIL

B.M. NANDA DENA BANK

JAYANTHA PRABHU ESSAR GROUP

SACHIN JAIN EVALUESERVE.COM

Honoring the Architects of

The EMC Forum isn’t just a technology showcase event. It’s a platform to applaud and encourage individuals who leverage technology to transform business and their organizations. To that end, EMC felici-

tated 52 Indian IT leaders across industries with the EMC Transformers awards and two organizations—Xentrix and NIC—with the EMC Forum Special awards. The honorees exhibited innovation and perseverance—in creating new ways to deal with pressing business issues—and positively changed the way their organizations work. The winners were selected by a grand jury and were honored by top executives from EMC and its partners.

S P E C I A L E V E N T C O V E R A G ES P E C I A L E V E N T C OO V EE R AR A G EG E

BALJINDER SINGHEXL SERVICE HOLDINGS

PRATAP POLKAMFINANCIAL TECHNOLOGIES (INDIA)

SHAILESH JOSHIGODREJ INDUSTRIES

KISHORE HIRANIGUJARAT GAS

MANOJ KUMBHATHCL TECHNOLOGIES

ANIL JAGGIAHDFC BANK

VIJAY SETHIHERO MOTOCORP

N. NATARAJHEXAWARE TECHNOLOGY

SACHIN VYASHIGH MARK

VIMAL GOELHPCL MITTAL ENERGY

CHANDRASHEKHAR NAINIHUTCHISON GLOBAL SERVICES

MUKESH KUMAR JAINICICI BANK

JOYDEEP DUTTAICICI SECURITIES

S. RAMASAMYINDIAN OIL

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MANDAR MARULKARKPIT CUMMINS INFOSYSTEMS

AJIT AWASARELARSEN & TOUBRO

SURESH A SHANMUGAMM&M FINANCIAL SERVICES

GIRISH RAOMARICO

MAYANK DESAIMICROINKS

DEEPAK K. SINHANATIONAL INSURANCE COMPANY

CHANDRASEKHARA REDDYNATIONAL REMOTE SENSING CENTRE

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DHINAKAR A.H. NIRMAL BANG

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MANOJ SHRIVASTAVASISTEMA SHYAM TELESERVICES

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PRASANTH PULIAKOTTUSTERLITE TECHNOLOGIES

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UJWAL GHATAKTATA POWER

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ARUNABHA BASUTPDDL

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Datacenter Solutions


ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSIONS

Bridging the Gap Between Business and IT StrategyThe EMC Forum brought together some of the brightest minds from some of India’s largest organizations to find solutions and share insights on some of the most pressing IT issues.

W hile the EMC Forum was about recognizing pioneers in the storage space, it also witnessed several discussions focused on specific issues from a strategic perspective. These discussions, attended by IT leaders

from some of India’s most prestigious organizations covered everything from security, IT infrastructure, and staff management to big data and cloud computing.

When it comes to big data, it’s a fact that almost every organization has to deal with huge amounts of data—like customer information, transactions, e-mails and so on—and new sources of unstructured data ranging from documents, web logs, and videos to social media. The discussion on Transforming Business with Big Data: From Blueprint to Reality revolved around what CIOs expect of big data and how they are planning to achieve their big data goals.

Many CIOs were of the opinion that businesses that exploit big data to improve their strategy and execution can distance themselves from competitors by using new insights from data that was formerly invisible, discarded or could not be processed due to technology limitations. It was noted that CIOs need to focus on the three pillars of big data: Infrastructure, analytic tools, and business intelligence.

Manoj Chugh, regional president, Global Accounts (APJ), EMC, moderated a few roundtables, held on the sidelines of the event.

CIOs from some of India’s top organizations shared ideas and insights on IT issues that impact their business.

IT leaders threw light on various topics across 12 roundtables. Big data and cloud computing were hot topics in these discussions.

But CIOs need skilled staff to leverage the potential of big data. As data growth accelerates, information storage becomes a central function in IT infrastructures. Befitting its elevated status, it is imperative that companies place the same level of focus on managing storage as they do with other elements in the IT infrastructure. The problem is that IT professionals with information storage skills are hard to find. Predictably, the skills gap will widen as data growth continues and information storage and management complexity increases. This was discussed at another roundtable—titled Cloud and Big Data: Bridging the Skill Gap for Indian IT Industry—with professors from renowned engineering colleges.

Manoj Chugh, regional president, Global Accounts (APJ), EMC, who moderated the roundtable, said that even though institutes are producing a good number of IT graduates, organizations need to invest significant time and effort to carve them into billable resources. “Today, our customers are demanding skills in cloud computing and big data for two reasons: The cloud is changing IT and the way it was built and big data is changing the way we do business by creating predictive models,” Chugh said.

Another roundtable titled IT-as-a-Service: The Reality of Cloud Implementations delved into the area of cloud-based services. Cloud computing is a disruptive transformation. While the public cloud may seem attractive and cost effective, current offerings can create security holes and quality blind spots while potentially eroding enterprise IT’s perceived value.

All CIOs were unanimous that to become internally agile and efficient, IT must go beyond just virtualizing servers to provide elastic, on-demand private cloud services. At the same time, IT needs to transform itself into the master of a dynamic service supply chain, driving smart sourcing decisions and orchestrating how internal, external, virtual, and traditional resources work together to optimize business value.


KEY HIGHLIGHTS

An author, a motivational speaker, and a mountaineer, David Lim is all this and much more. Partially disabled, Lim enthralled the audience with leadership lessons from Singapore’s first ever expedition to the Mount Everest—one of the 15 expeditions that he led.

The EMC Forum was attended in large numbers by the CIO community. Over 1,500 IT leaders, IT managers, and solution partners from India’s top organizations graced the event.

With over 3,500 jingles and songs in 11 languages to his credit, KK is arguably one of the most versatile singers in the Indian music industry. His foot-tapping music and melodious rendering of some popular numbers prompted audiences to shake a leg.

The EMC Forum saw one of the largest gatherings of IT executives. EMC, IDG and event management company Showbiz decided to make the most of this opportunity. They entered the Asia Book of Records with the largest number of high-fives at one point of time.

EMC’s partners also leveraged the platform to showcase their products. As many as 14 stalls were set up at the venue. Apart from exhibiting their products and solutions, partners also gave demonstrations and networked with CIOs.

SNAPSHOTS: EMC FORUM 2012

1 5

2

3

4


INTERVIEW RAJESH JANEY

foundational layers for big data and they are: A scale-out storage infrastructure that grows with your data, using data storage that is enterprise-class and can scale out to PBs. A database and file system built to extract value from your structured and unstructured data.

Third, a unified analytics platform that helps you collaborate. Then, a new set of custom big data analytic applications. Finally, data scien-tists, who live in the business and in IT.

Has cloud adoption gathered momen-tum among enterprises or is it still in

its infancy?Cloud adoption is a reality today and it’s growing fast. An EMC Zinnov study estimat-ed India’s cloud computing market at $400 million in 2011 (about Rs 2,200 crore), a fig-ure that’s expected to grow ten-fold by 2015.

Cloud computing is being driven by the need among enterprises to transform their IT infrastructure to deal with the digital in-formation explosion. To put things in context, while digital information will grow 60-fold in India, enterprise investments in IT and staff-ing will grow only in single digits. The cu-mulative effect is driving CIOs to transform traditional infrastructures into the cloud.

For the full interview, visit www.emcforum.in

“The Character of Information has Changed the IT Landscape”

While digital information will grow 60-fold in India, enterprise investments in IT and staffing will grow only in single digits.The cumulative effect is driving CIOs to transform traditional infrastructures into the cloud.”

h Thi d ifi d l i l f h h l

RAJESH JANEYPresident, India & SAARC, EMC Corporation

An industry veteran with over 27 years of experience, Janey has led companies to leadership positions across diverse business segments. He is responsible for accelerating EMC’s growth in India and enhancing relationships with partners and alliances.

What would you say to CIOs who dismiss big data as just another

buzzword?Data is the ‘Digital Wealth’ or ‘New Oil’. Big data has datasets so large that they break traditional IT infrastructures. This is not a problem but an opportunity. Today, the vol-ume, variety, velocity, and complexity of infor-mation have changed the IT landscape. We all know how to do structured information. But the moment you add unstructured and semi-structured information, life changes. This is where the value is for organizations today. Ac-cording to Gartner, big data is forecast to drive $34 billion of worldwide IT spending in 2013.

What steps should CIOs take to get ready?

Big data is more than just data storage. Big data is about new ways to store, analyze, and take action on data—at petabyte (PB) scales and including publicly-available data—so that one can achieve new agility, efficiency and business breakthroughs. There are five key


If you’ve used a Post-it note lately or sent a message from a Gmail account, you’ve been the beneficiary of a corporate innovation program that gives employees time to be creative—and, while they’re at it, sometimes invent products that go on to become wildly popular.

Google is well known for its “20 percent time,” which gives employees a day a week to follow their passions, but it’s hardly the first company to have such a policy. For decades, 3M has allowed employees to devote 15 percent of their time to innovation—a policy that led to the creation of the now-ubiquitous yellow sticky note, among other products.

Dan Pink, author of the best-selling book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, says hard numbers on corporate innovation programs are difficult to come by, but interest is on the rise. “I do know that more organizations are looking at the companies that are doing it and that it’s becoming more popular.”

By Howard Baldwin

Reader ROI: The importance of mandating innovation time-off

The pros and cons of innovation time-off

How to gear up for an innovation time-off program


Some organizations give tech workers free time to follow their

passions—an innovation time-off (ITO). That could result in a new product, a new

source of revenue or a new competitive edge. Would you raise a toast to ITO?

INNOVATION

ggginimmmmm

NNNNOOONOOIIIOTTTATTAAVAA

Feature_Inovation.indd 51 12/14/2012 8:40:50 PM


IT Strategy

Why? Because otherwise, innovation doesn’t happen. “The CEO may say innovation is one of the company’s top three priorities,” says Doug Williams, a Forrester Research analyst, “but there’s always something happening in the short term that pushes the long-term innovation off.”

When innovation gets postponed for too long, companies languish—witness RIM’s reversal of fortune and Microsoft’s vilification in the mainstream media for its failure to innovate. “Innovation programs remove the constraints that accompany traditional work and offer a safe space for failure,” Pink says. “That lets people try riskier things.”

Sometimes known as innovation time off, or ITO, creativity programs aim to battle stagnation in multiple ways. For one thing, by giving employees the freedom to explore and be creative, they can improve morale and help make individuals more productive in their day-to-day work. And when inspiration strikes, the end result can be a product or internal tool that boosts companywide productivity, increases revenue or both.

Creativity programs also represent a new way to help retain employees in today’s competitive labor market. “The old motivational techniques have run their course,” says Pink. “We’ve oversold the carrot-and-stick and undersold quieter forms of motivation.”

“It’s energizing for employees to take a break from their day-to-day business and think creatively about solving other problems or using technology in a different way,” says Williams. “Employees recognize it as something valuable.”

None of which is to say there aren’t downsides to such programs. For some managers, it’s hard to let staffers spend even an occasional half-day on an outside project without expecting immediate results. For employees, it can be hard to shift focus and take up something amorphous when real-world deadlines loom.

But some people who have participated in such programs say the potential for positive results is worth it.

“When I started here, one of the first things I heard was that the IT department had lots of ideas, but few saw the light

of day,” says Mamatha Chamarthi, vice president and CIO of business technology solutions at Consumers Energy, an electric and natural gas utility in Michigan. “Having a 20 percent program lets ideas bubble up,” she says. “Sometimes you need to unleash a grass-roots level of passion to generate more innovative and transformational changes.”

How Much Time Is Enough?When setting up an innovation program, one of the hardest decisions to make is how much time should be devoted to it. There is little consistency on this score among organizations that have such programs. The time allotted ranges from a few days per year to one day each quarter to one day per week.

One thing is clear: Because Google’s program is so well known, “20 percent time” has become something of a guiding principle for the way innovation initiatives should be structured, but that’s a gold standard that not many employers are able to match. “Some companies simply don’t have the luxury to give employees 20 percent of their week to work this way,” says Williams, noting that 10 percent—about an afternoon each week—may be more reasonable.

And even less-frequent programs can deliver tangible results.

Take the Exploration Days program at the University of Pennsylvania, which was created by Robin Beck, the school’s vice president of information systems and computing, to give employees a chance to come up with IT-related improvements of their choice.

“We want to foster innovation and creativity, but the day-to-day reality of delivering IT gets in the way,” Beck explains. Officially setting aside time for such efforts shows that innovation is a priority.

The twist? Exploration Days is a three-day event that takes place just once a year. The process begins with IT staffers posting ideas and, if interested, recruiting collaborators on an Exploration Days wiki. Teams and individuals work on their projects on one of two days (in order to provide flexibility). On the third day, dubbed

ITO Program:

Thinking of starting a Google-style “20 percent time” innovation time-off program in your department? Here’s some advice from CIOs who have paved the way:

Decide what percentage of time the program will include. Twenty percent?

10 percent? Less? There are no hard-

and-fast rules, and you have to balance

employee productivity with the less-

restricted idea of innovation.

Get management buy-in. For any program

that consumes a half-day per week or more,

get management buy-in because that would

represent a 10 percent cut in the amount of

time employees spend on “real work.”

Make participation voluntary. Not

everyone in your IT department may want

to play.

Extend participation beyond developers to the entire IT staff. Atlassian’s biggest

payoff came from an idea generated by a

QA analyst.

Consider how you’ll support collaboration. Will you use digital tools,

such as wikis for asynchronous discussions,

or actual physical facilities, such as

conference rooms where teams can meet

in person?

Be sure to track all projects, not just the successes. An idea that didn’t bear fruit

initially might be worth pursuing later.

Consider whether you want to set up a rewards system. True, you’re already

paying people to do their jobs, but you might

want to think about bonuses if an innovation

project results in a huge payoff—like

Atlassian’s Bonfire did.

Manage your own expectations and those of senior executives. Supporting

innovation may not deliver immediate results,

and you should feel free to tweak the program

based on feedback by the participants.

—Howard Baldwin


source of “hundreds of small improvements to business processes,” he says. The 20 percent time initiative, on the other hand, has yielded fewer results, but those results have had a big impact.

How big? One 20 percent time pro-gram evolved into an open-source JavaS-cript-based graphic manipulation tool called Raphael.

And in another 20 percent time project, a quality assurance engineer—not even a software developer—built a prototype of an internal bug-tracking system for the company’s JIRA software, which tracks software development projects. The result was so impressive that Atlassian turned it into a product, Bonfire, which started shipping in July 2011. Total revenue at last tally: $1 million (about Rs 550 lakh), and the QA engineer is now its product manager.

But not all innovations pay off quite so handsomely, or yield any monetary return at all—nor are they designed to.

At Detroit-based online mortgage lender Quicken Loans, CIO Linglong oversees a program called BulletTime (so named because the projects are quick and targeted). The idea is for all 750 IT team members to take time to work on personal projects every Monday from 1 pm till the end of the workday.

Notable BulletTime projects include an internal application called Qwicktionary that lists all of the abbreviations used by the company; a mortgage calculator for clients; and an iPhone app called NorthStar that indicates the location of the company’s 100-plus conference rooms. “NorthStar had a positive impact on meeting productivity, because people aren’t late to meetings anymore,” says He.

Report Out Day, there’s an ice cream social and participants give presentations about what they’ve achieved.

Beck and her team considered both monthly and quarterly programs before deciding to start with an annual event. The first took place in August of 2011, and a second one was held this summer.

Participation isn’t mandatory, but Beck reports that most of her 300 employees participated last year, and last year’s projects have borne fruit. One team tackled the problem of configuring students’ personal devices for the university’s wireless network. It developed a simpler process that saves time for both students and IT staffers.

Atlassian, a Sydney-based maker of collaboration software, has two innovation programs: A 20 percent time initiative and one called ShipIt, which takes place quarterly over 24 hours.

ShipIt starts at 4 pm on a Thursday and goes to 4 pm the following day. “The idea is to give employees the opportunity to itch something they wanted to scratch,” says company president Jay Simons, adding that employees can work solo or in teams, usually of no more than five.

Projects can be a prototype of a new feature or a fix to an existing product, but whatever it is, it has to be completed in 24 hours. “By compressing the time, it made the innovation target more bite-sized and achievable,” Simons explains.

Another key requirement: The results of ShipIt work must be presented to co-workers in a five-minute demo. “Even if someone tried to build a widget and failed, they have to give a presentation,” says Simons. “Because then, five people will go up to that developer afterwards and offer ideas.”

Only about one-third of the company’s 500 employees—mostly engineers—participate in the 20 percent program “because it’s hard to dedicate a day a week to something,” says Simons. “Products have to ship, and sometimes development takes longer than estimated.”

PayoffsThe benefit of having two programs is that each serves a different purpose, according to Simons. The ShipIt program has been the

IT Strategy

Set ParametersAllowing something as amorphous as time out to innovate may be anathema to some IT organizations and managers, but supporters say techies are uniquely suited to such programs. “Innovation and creativity are an important part of what any IT organization does,” says Penn’s Beck.

That said, ITO programs need guidelines. Consumers Energy has internal communications tools, such as Yammer, that employees use to post ideas and form teams. Chamarthi and her staff meet weekly to review the ideas. If the business side likes a project enough to fund it, it has to reduce the priority of another project. The underlying message to the IT team: 20 percent projects have to have business value.

And no matter what the goal, CIOs advise patience when it comes to implementing innovation programs. “You have to set the

expectations that this is an experiment and it may change along the way,” says He. “You also have to build flexibility in. Too often, technology leaders want to build a perfect solution from day one.”

Finally, warns Beck, if innovation and creativity are not part of your existing culture, you’re not going to instill those qualities in a single day. “It has to be something you encourage on a consistent basis,” she says. “Be patient. You’re planting seeds, and it can take time for ideas to germinate.”

And when they do, IT departments will be celebrated. So say cheers to new ideas! CIO

Send feedback to [email protected]

s y



A year ago, if you were on the lookout for a quality mattress in any part of India, chances are that Sheela Foam was trying to get your attention. However, if you fit that profile, you probably weren’t listening to what Sheela Foam had to say. What’s worse, there was a possibility that you were buying one of its mattresses from an unauthorized dealer, who offered no support for a product that Sheela Foam guarantees for 10-15 years.

Unsurprisingly, this annoyed Rakesh Chahar, CEO of Sheela Foam’s Sleepwell brand and head of sales, plenty. Not only because his customers were being misled, but also because unauthorized dealers drove customers away from Sleepwell’s products and into the arms of its competition. Unauthorized dealers, according to the company, lost Sheela Foam between 5 and 7 percent annually in sales—about Rs 25 crore.

“Unauthorized dealers either converted customers to other brands or local products by bad-mouthing Sleepwell. They also offered heavy discounts on Sleepwell products, which discouraged authorized selling,” says Pertisth Mankotia, head of IT at the company.

The question Sheela Foam wanted to answer was: How did its mattresses get to unau-thorized dealers in the first place?

Sheela Foam isn’t the first—nor will it be the last—company to bump heads against this problem. Tracing inventory downstream in order to protect a company’s brand is a challenge many manufacturers face. One example is the pharmaceutical industry’s battle against the fake medicine industry. But it was a problem Sheela Foam, a leader in home comfort products with a 40-year legacy, wanted to end.

The operations team’s initial response was to try and curb the illegal sales by buying back its own products from the unauthorized dealers. But that didn’t solve the problem.

casefiles

GOING TO THE

REAL PEOPLE * REAL PROBLEMS * REAL SOLUTIONS

MATTRESSESBY SHWETA RAO

Sheela Foam launches an IT-based attack to figure out how its products were getting into the hands of unauthorized dealers, who cost the company about Rs 25 crore a year.


Case_Files_Dec2012.indd 56 12/14/2012 8:43:54 PM

So they decided to sniff out which of the com-pany’s 4,500-plus authorized dealers and distributors were responsible for feeding unauthorized dealers with its products.

The quickest way to do that was to use the serial numbers on the products they had bought back. With the number they could trace the product’s path down the supply chain and pinpoint where it left the hands of an authorized dealer or distributor. Then they could shut down that illegal channel.

They quickly found out that the bad guys were one step ahead of them.

“We have unique product serial numbers imprinted on the MRP labels of our prod-ucts. But, rogue dealers tampered with them making it impossible to track a product and identify how it was sold to an unauthorized dealer. To nip the problem in the bud, we had to identify and stop the unauthorized deal-ers’ supply source,” says Mankotia.

By April 2011, the company’s operations team turned to Pertisth’s team to find a fix to the challenge. Working together, they decided that RFID tags were the solution they needed. The operations team found a way to work RFID tags into Sleepwell’s products during manufacturing and the IT team integrated them with the company’s home-grown ERP system and linked them to existing serial numbers.

“We implemented an internal project called “controlling unauthorized dealer sales with RFID” with the main objective of strengthening Sleepwell’s retail brand identity,” says Mankotia.

Now, with the RFID solution, Sheela Foam’s team could use mattresses they bought back from rogue dealers. “Until the RFID solution, such purchases weren’t fruitful because a product’s serial number was tampered with. But now with RFID tags, product serial numbers of every product available in an unauthorized dealer shop can be read by the RFID readers carried by our sales people,” says Mankotia. “Once the serial numbers are collected, the dispatch history of a product is known very easily.”

Also, using RFID readers, Sheela Foam's sales representatives can now detect which products an unauthorized dealer is carry-ing. “Once the serial numbers are collected, the dispatch history of the product is known very easily,” says Mankotia.

The RFID solution also helps Sheela Foam with its product guarantee. Customers generally lose invoices and product guar-

antee cards, making it difficult to determine how old a product is and whether it is still under guarantee. RFID makes that problem history. In addition, the project increased the satisfaction and motivation levels of the company’s authorized dealers. CIO

Shweta Rao is correspondent. Send feedback on this

feature to [email protected]

Pertisth Mankotia, Head-IT, Sheela Foam, used RFID to help the

company track how its mattresses got

in the hands of unauthorized dealers.



If Bajaj Power Division wanted

to curb its travel expenses

and save its revenue, it had

only one option: Telepresence.

The Organization: The Bajaj Power Division has made a significant contribution to the Indian power sector and is gearing up to do more. Now a privately held organization—previously a subsidiary of India’s largest sugar firm, Bajaj Hindustan till March 2012—the company recently set up five power plants in Uttar Pradesh. The Business Case: Poised to set up power plants with a capacity of over 4,500 MW, Bajaj Power Division, is also working on a number of other power projects in parallel. With so many different projects hap-pening at once, the ability to manage and monitor them effectively—during their construction, operation and maintenance phases—is of prime importance in the power business.

This meant that top executives—including the vice chairman—and some junior employees needed to travel to these sites, which drained the company’s coffers. It also delayed decision-making.

Also, employees at remote sites faced challenges in communication and project execution due to their isolated locations. “We needed to find a solution that would save time and costs—and reduce travel at the same time,” says Dinesh Kumar, CIO, Bajaj Power Division. Kumar knew what he was looking for.The Project: Kumar realized that only Telepresence could help him kill two birds with one stone. He turned to Polycom’s Real Presence video solution.

Though getting the project off the ground wasn’t easy, Kumar handled it tactfully. Since most of the company’s sites were in remote locations, connectivity could be an is-sue. To tackle this, Kumar set up an MPLS network in just a month—when it usually takes two to three months. Another potential threat in a telepres-ence project is convincing management to invest in the technology. Fortunately for Kumar, that was a bullet he easily dodged. That’s because, he says, the entire process of obtaining the telepresence solution had the backing of the company’s Vice Chair-man Kushagra Nayan Bajaj. Bajaj ensured that funds were available for the project.

Today, the company runs two Realpresence systems and seven full HD executive collection video conference systems that provide im-mersive telepresence. The IT team has also implemented

video clients on iPads, desk-tops, laptops and mobiles. The Benefits: Armed with telepresence, senior management at Bajaj Power Division has been able to monitor the developments at its sites without visiting the plants, saving costs and enabling faster decision making. This has helped the company cut travel costs by 70 percent.

The solution also helps the company train its staff and recruit people. Also, a record utilization of the system—128 hours a month—has encouraged the company to expand the scope of the solution.

The system is also used to interact, collaborate and communicate with vendors and other companies of the Bajaj group. Video phones have also been installed in the homes of key personnel of the company to aid faster decision-making.

More importantly, users of the system are enthused. The solution, believes, the company's vice chariman Bajaj, has made his life very smooth and productive. CIO

Eric Ernest is correspondent.

Send feedback on this feature to

[email protected]

casefilesBAJAJ POWER DIVISION * BY ERIC ERNEST

Dinesh Kumar, CIO, Bajaj Power Division, reduced the company's travel costs by 70 percent by turning to telepresence.



The BFSI sector has been wary of the cloud for sometime now. But that’s changing and CIOs in the sector are gradually exploring opportunities in the private cloud.

This event report is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group

in association with

PRIVATE PRACTICE: BANKING ON THE CLOUD

g p g pp p

When it comes to the cloud, CIOs should be leaders not followers. They should choose a use case where benefits are visible to get buy-in from business.ANUJ VAID GM & Head-BFSI Vertical, Wipro

in the midst of a major technology refresh so we wanted to invest in a technology which would last for the next five years. We could foresee mobility, tablets and consumeriza-tion of IT making inroads into the enterprise space. So this was a good event to launch a cloud strategy and hence we went to the cloud. New applications drove us to deploy it,” he said.

Irrespective of the reasons to move to the cloud, one thing was clear: While the public cloud has a long way to go, private cloud seems to have made an impact in the BFSI sector and is continuing to win more followers.

There’s no doubt that cloud comput-ing is beginning to make its pres-ence felt in Indian organizations. So much so that conventional sec-

tors like BFSI are smelling opportunities in the cloud. In order to understand the level of interest in the private cloud model, CIO in association with Wipro and Cisco gathered IT leaders in Mumbai from some of India’s most prestigious organizations in the BFSI sector.

Amit Sethi, senior president and CIO, Yes Bank, is certain that the cloud makes a compelling business case. “It’s a misnomer that banks are not adopting cloud. We don’t own a single part of our ATMs as they run on a cloud environment. It works in an elas-tic mode and I get charged on the basis of a transaction model or on the basis of per ATM order and payment,” he said.

Narrating his journey to the cloud, S. Raghunatha Reddy, SVP-IT, UTI Asset Man-agement Company, stated that his orga-nization adopted private cloud in 2008-09 and accrued business benefits in the form of cost of provisioning and time to market. The company started small with the cloud and then scaled up. He leveraged the cloud for applications like learning management system and campaign management for the company’s external sales force.

Some CIOs on the table felt that organiza-tions shouldn’t move to the cloud for cloud’s sake. Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, president and CTO, Reliance Capital, raised the issue of identifying the right trigger for a cloud implementation. “All major technology changes are event driven. You can’t take an existing system and put it on the cloud. When we deployed the VDI project we were

We need to build some standardized architectures for the cloud. This will help in rolling out infrastructures easily and quickly.

AVINASH PURWAR, Senior VP-Financial Services,Cisco India & SAARC

WIPRO & CISCOCUSTOM SOLUTIONS GROUPE V E N T R E P O R T

You started your career with STFC in 1987. What are some of the key transformations you have seen at the company? Umesh Revankar Well, back then, we were like any other finance company or private money lender. Most of the loans

we disbursed were based on the assets we were financing. For instance, depending on the value of a particular truck, loan would be sanctioned. But it wasn't about maintaining a customer track record or building a relationship with them.

Today, our business model has transformed from just asset-based

Umesh Revankar, Director, Shriram Transport Finance Company, says if there was no IT, the company would have been one-fifth its current size and a few steps behind competition.

Behind the wheels of loud, multi-hued trucks—that invariably sport words of wise men—sit small truck owners that rule over Indian roads. As many as 80 percent of trucks running in the country are pre-owned or bought by these small truck owners. And there’s a good chance that a majority of this 80 percent are happy customers of Shriram Transport Finance Company (STFC).

As India’s largest vehicle financing NBFC, the company has 1.8 million customers that enjoy its commercial vehicle, tractor, and multi-utility vehicle finance services, among other things. Under the aegis of its Director Umesh Revankar, the company is focused on strengthening relationships with customers and banks, managing loans better, and disbursing loans on time. An alumnus of the Harvard Business School, Revankar has been in the company for over 24 years and took over as director in April 2012.

In this interview, Revankar talks about how IT is helping STFC transform and why he is leaning on IT for the company’s growth.

BY SHUBHRA RISHI

What do CEOs and other C-level executives expect from you? Read all about it in VIEW FROM THE TOP. Visit www.cio.in/ceointerviews

VIEWTOPfrom the


Thriving

on IT

VFTT_Shriram Transport.indd 86 12/14/2012 8:45:38 PM

PH

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to relationship-based and now, to an information-based one. So there's been a big change in the way we finance our customers. We recognized the need for a relationship-based model and that’s why, apart from our core business, we also offer services like life insurance, vehicle repair, change of tire, and aid in case of accidents.

The information-based model has enabled us to leverage technology and settle claims quickly. Five years back, claims were settled in 7-8 months but now they are settled in just 40 days.

There was also a need to build relationships with banks and reduce dependence on retail funding. Fifteen years back, the RBI tried to restrict the public deposit raising ability of NBFCs. And, bank funding to NBFCs was not available. We were dependent on retail funding. Hence, slowly we started building relationships with Citibank and UTI. We securitized our portfolio with banks. As their experience became better, more and more banks started buying out portfolio through securitization (pooling various types of contractual debt such as residential

mortgages, commercial mortgages, auto loans or credit card debt obligations and selling this consolidated debt as bonds to various investors).

This brought banks into the picture. Formerly, 90 percent of our assets used to come from retail. At present, while 22 percent of our income comes from retail, 78 percent comes from institutions, banks and mutual funds. This has been a huge transformation. Since 2001, STFC not only raised its liability, but it established partnership with more than 65 banks.

UMESH REVANKAR EXPECTS I.T. TO:

Help manage loans better

Infuse flexibility to adhere to regulations

Quicken turn-around time



You took over as MD just eight months back. What’s it been like?

There were a lot of challenges when I took over. The NBFC sector was going through a transition and the RBI had revealed new securitization regulations. According to the new guidelines, assets should conform to a maximum interest rate of eight percent above the bank’s base rate for it to receive priority sector status. This questioned our ability to grow.

But, the good news is that despite the competition from banks—which investors fear would reduce our growth—we are still going strong. We are undisputed in the space of used-vehicle financing. While new-vehicle financing has faced stiff competition from banks in the past, we still haven't given up our market share. We don't believe in buying market share. We would rather upgrade our used-vehicle finance customers to become new-vehicle finance customers. We have also extended our business to financing passenger commercial vehicles, multi-utility vehicles, three wheelers, tractors, and construction equipment.

At Shriram, we have been able to adjust to fresh demands, nuances of environment and RBI regulations, and our performance has been consistently outstanding.

And would you have achieved that without IT?

If not for technology, we would have exhibited an impression of being a mom and pop store to banks. Also, we would have achieved only one-fifth of our present magnitude. Technology has helped us manage loan books better. It ensures timeliness in sending information (monthly reports, portfolio behavior, and performance ratio) demanded by banks.

In the last 15 years, we have built everything in-house. We never outsourced anything. We never believed in buying software because we felt it was very expensive. We chose .Net technology—

because it’s more flexible—when other NBFCs and banks preferred Oracle. Our team of 270 people has been very successful in delivering products internally. This includes the hardware team which is spread across 513 branch offices. When we started seven years back, STFC had assets under management (AUM) of Rs 5,000 crore, today, it is the largest asset financing NBFC in India with AUM worth Rs 45,000 crore. We have also increased our IT spending which was miniscule in the beginning.

What are two of the big business challenges that your industry is facing?

There are two big business challenges in our industry. One, it's the financial inclusion of people who have not been formally part of a banking system. A lot of our customers are in the business of cash-and-carry. They suffer from a disadvantage. Therefore, building a financial discipline is one big challenge.The second challenge is communication with our customers. The only medium

of communication is oral which may not be the most effective way of conveying the right information. At STFC, our field officer is the official representative who talks to the customer. If our customers don't comprehend our products and services, we would lose business. We need to bridge this communication gap.

Can IT help beat those problems? How?

Yes, IT's certainly going to be of great assistance. It's already starting to help. In the last 12 months, we have setup call centers to provide information about our product and services to our customers in local languages.

Since the communication from our field officers may not be sufficient, we have initiated SMS-based communication in local languages, filling in customers about their periodic payments, advising them on repayment charts, and introducing new products and services. We will only be able to ensure full communication when STFC launches a query-based application on mobile phones.

Going forward, how is STFC’s IT strategy designed to increase its efficiency?

At STFC, we calculate efficiency on the basis of the number of customers a field officer can manage and serve. Fifteen years back, the ratio was 1:75. Today, the ratio has become 1:150. This only means that our ability to service a customer has also doubled. We are hoping to extend this ratio to 1:200 in the next two years. We are creating usable dashboards which will assist 8,000 officers on the field to increase their efficiency. This also helps us improve our relationship with over 900,000 individual customers (1.8 million user accounts). CIO

Shubhra Rishi is correspondent. Send feedback on

this interview to [email protected]

View from the Top

“If not for technology, we would have exhibited an impression of being a mom and pop store to banks.”

—Umesh Revankar




By Thor Olavsrud

VOTES

Feature_Florida_Elections.indd 50 12/14/2012 8:51:46 PM


provider BizBanc, Aultman took on the mantle of CIO of the Florida Department of State in June 2011 with a broad mandate to overhaul IT. At the time, the department consisted of the Office of the Secretary and five divisions: the Division of Corporations, Division of Cultural Affairs, Division of Elections, Division of Historical Resources and Division of Library and Information Services. Each division had its own IT staff.

Aultman’s task was to break down those silos and build a new division, the Division of

People in the Sunshine State stood in line for hours to exercise their franchise, in some cases six hours or more after the polls had officially

closed. Numerous causes have been cited, from a shortened early voting period to a 10-page-long ballot with 11 state constitutional amendment questions to massive voter turnout and a large number of absentee

ballots. Whatever the reason, it was days before anyone could project the winners in the state.

But while everyone else was wondering how Florida had managed to make itself a spectacle again, Larry Aultman, CIO of the Florida Department of State, and his team were witnessing success after 17 months of hard work.

“From my point of view, it was kind of boring,” Aultman says. “We had the whole staff on hand, but we didn’t have any failures. I was very pleased with the way the election ran from a technical standpoint. I don’t make the votes, I just count them.”

IT Breaks Down SilosFresh from a nearly 16-year stint as the president and CEO of financial services

The 17-month story behind how the CIO of Florida’s Department of State moved the state’s

election process to the cloud—a journey that would cost him a significant portion of his team.

Reader ROI: Why government agencies should turn to the cloud

The importance of re-skilling government employees

The benefits of governments turning to the cloud

Administrative Services, which would provide IT to the other five divisions.

“The first thing I did was to consolidate all five divisions into a single division so I could get my hands on what was going on and so I could figure out what kind of talent we had, what projects were in the works, that sort of thing,” Aultman says, noting that he came in at the end of three years of compounded budget cuts and staff reductions. “We were really feeling the strain.”

At the same time, he had 17 months to overhaul the Florida Voter Registration System, the electronic repository of all registered voters in the state. The system is also responsible for collecting all election data as it comes in from the counties. Aultman notes that Florida law requires the counties to provide

Cloud Computing


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Cloud Computing

the Department of State’s Division of Elections with election data as it occurs, which is then presented to the public in real time through the Florida Election Watch website.

“In the past, the counties pro-vided data when they wanted to and pretty much how they wanted to,” Aultman says. “The legislature has put new controls in place that caused them to pro-vide good data in real time.”

The Election Watch website had been built by a contractor in 2009, but it experienced signifi-cant issues during the subsequent gubernatorial election in 2010.

“In June of 2011, when I came to the Department of State, Secre-tary Browning told me, ‘I do not want the system to go down,’” Aultman says. “He did not want the system to be unavailable to the public. He wanted redundan-cy and failover and, of course, high availability. He wanted the system to have accountability within it and automation to the highest degree so we could work with the counties to get the data in good form. He did not want the election system to provoke a call from the governor to find out what was going on.”

Finding Cloud Success Seventeen months later, on election night, Aultman knew he was witnessing the success of his plan. He and his team had built a 100 percent cloud-based system, and it was performing perfectly. At 8 p.m. (an hour after the polls had officially closed, though those who had been in line by 7 p.m. would continue to wait for hours be-fore casting their ballots), the Election Watch website was

sustaining 11,000 simultane-ous connections, about 70 per-cent of which were new views every minute. It climbed to 23,000 simultaneous connec-tions throughout the night and was still at 18,000 active con-nections at midnight. It was still at 5,000 the next morning.

“We didn’t miss a beat,” Aultman says. “Our error rate was 0.01 percent. The system had automatic retries, so all customers got their pages. It was a very good experience. We served the public very well from a technical standpoint. Also, all the counties were able to upload their files. We ran a separate system for the Supervisors of Elections to upload their files and we didn’t have any errors at all during the evening.”

Electing .NETAchieving that success was no simple matter.

“That system was 20-years-old when I came in and was losing all vendor support,” Aultman says of the system that supported the Division of Corporations, the most active corporate filing entity in the US, which maintains in excess of eight million records. “I looked at that and realized I was going to have to rewrite the Division of Corporations and rewrite the Voter Registration System in an election year and support all the other divisions as well.”

And the problems didn’t stop there. Just about everything in Aultman’s purview had been written in COBOL, DB6 and antiquated languages and few if any people under him had modern skills.

“The first thing I did was to get $100,000 from the Secretary of State’s office to put my staff into classes,” Aultman says. “I brought in consultants

to teach them to program in a modern coding language.”

He had his staff of 40 spend eight hours a day for five days learning object-oriented programming, primarily in the Microsoft .NET framework. After the week-long crash course, he had them spend half of their day for another six months getting their skills up to snuff.

“There were a whole bunch of non-believers,” he says. “I heard every excuse under the sun. And I lost 15 to 20 percent of the staff to taking their retirement or moving to another agency because they couldn’t or didn’t want to learn what we had to learn. I told them you either learn or we don’t need you.”

Agility in the CloudIn the meantime, Aultman had been thinking about what needed to be done. He knew that to succeed in the tasks that had been set before him, he needed to take the Department of State into the cloud.

“I didn’t have any intent when I got there to take them to the cloud,” he notes, even though he had been responsible for bringing BizBanc into the cloud.

“My intent was to fix what was there. But the money situation, the coding situation, the whole cost of trying to fix what was there and do it in a timely fashion just did not allow me much choice. Looking at the money and the time and the talent, it seemed like a reasonable way to go. I knew how to do a cloud project. I’d done it before. I knew what it could save if done correctly and I knew it could not save

At 8 p.m. on election night, an hour after polls had

officially closed, Florida’s Election Watch website took

on 11,000 simultaneous connections. Before the night was over it climbed to 23,000

simultaneous connections.

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anything if done incorrectly,” Aultman says.

The more he looked at it, the more he knew taking Florida’s applications to the cloud was the best choice. Government, he says, particularly Florida’s government, takes a monolithic approach to software. It wants to plan the software, construct it and then maintain it like a concrete building.

“Software just doesn’t work that way anymore,” he says. “You need agility. You need the ability to change with the times as technology changes. You need a way to provide applications that are less monolithic and more product-like. But that’s counter to what the state does. It creates applications that run for a very long time doing things that seemingly don’t change. But the law changes practically at every session. The judges rule on various things that force change on the system. The laws for corporations change. This happens very, very frequently. We need a way that applications can be changed without so much cost, without so much testing, without so much human input.”

Aultman decided Microsoft’s Windows Azure was the

platform he needed. His staff now had the .NET skills they needed, and the platform provided a great deal of ready-made code that he wouldn’t have to replicate.

“I did hire some top guns to help me write the core set of services,” he says. “The notion was that I would build a set of services on top of the cloud plat-form. It uses the platform, but it abstracts it so that if I needed to move it somewhere else, I could without a wholesale rewrite.”

The system has provided a number of benefits, not the least of which is decoupling storage from compute, allowing IT to provision those resources at need rather than building for peak utilization.

$1 Million a Year Savings The cloud-based Voter Registration System has not provided any savings to date, Aultman notes, though that’s primarily because he’s required to keep the old legacy systems up and running during the transition.

“Next year, I intend to retire the old database,” he says. “Our licensing and support costs for that runs us about $1.5 million (about Rs 8 crore),

not including personnel and contractors. I expect over the next three years, we’ll save $1 million (about Rs 5 crore) a year roughly in just licensing and operations costs.”

Perhaps more importantly, the higher degree of automation allows him to run a leaner ship. He notes that he’s already down to a headcount of 30 from the 40 people that he started with 17 months ago, and he expects he’ll be forced to cut back his staff by another 10 percent to 15 percent in the next few years.

“That’s significant,” he says. “I don’t know what next year will bring. Before I got here we lost all our network support and infrastructure support people due to datacenter consolidation. The consolidation of all our IT services was partly as a result of loss of staff. The whole change to application development and moving to the cloud is an attempt to provide the same level of service with fewer people.”

For now, it’s working, he says.“They have really, really

come so far in the last year,” Aultman says of his staff. “You’ve got to get the combination right. You can’t just go to the cloud. It doesn’t make any sense by itself. You’ve

got to do the other things. You’ve got to think about how you recognize projects, how you implement them, how you plan for their retirement. Our method is to pair people up with people who have different skillsets. We’re working on real code reviews, not beating each other up, but more of a training thing. I’m making it something you want to do. You want to have a code review and learn from that. We’re putting people in small teams of three, not six, and changing those teams frequently.”

Over the next 12 months, Aultman’s plan is to continue to modernize the Voter Registration System to make it even more resilient. Also, he wants to provide edge connections that will allow the data to be checked by the county software before it gets to the Division of Elections, kicking back errors for corrections in a much more timely fashion. CIO

Thor Olavsrud covers IT security, big data,

open source, Microsoft tools and servers

for CIO.com. Send feedback on this feature

to [email protected]

Cloud Computing

“The first thing I did was to get $100,000 from the Secretary of State’s office to put my staff into

classes. I lost 15 to 20 percent of them because they couldn’t or didn’t want to learn what we had to learn.

I told them you either learn or we don’t need you.”— Larry Aultman, CIO of the Florida Department of State

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Big Data: One-on-OneBIG DATA | With the tremendous growth of electronic data that is being captured through social media, locating systems and internal enterprise systems, many industries are on the lookout for tangible benefits that they can reap from big data. In industries such as financial services, fraud detection and risk assessment rank among the tangible insights that organizations have been able to extract from their big data.

Through many surveys, executives have identified that big data initiatives rank high on the projects lists for 2012 and 2013. It's not surprising, since the promise that big data can improve and streamline presentations, gain insights to consumer purchasing habits and, in the healthcare industry, even help save lives is simply too important to ignore.

However, several key questions must be answered. There are four that dominate most conversations. Here are the answers.

What Data Should You Consider?Data comes in three formats—structured, semi-structured and unstructured. Structured data is organized in a way that both computers and humans can read. The most obvious example is a relational database. Semi-structured data, which includes XML, e-mail and electronic data interchange (EDI), lacks such formal structure but nonetheless contains tags

Big data holds much promise

for organizations seeking ways to

improve business processes. Before

that, you need to know what data you'll need, how you'll get it, how you'll use it and

what you expect to learn from it.

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that separate semantic elements. Finally, unstructured data refers to data types, including images, audio and video, which are not part of a database.

The foremost challenge is the need to unlock the data and gain access to it so you can store it and use it. This allows for the information to stay in its raw format, where it can be analyzed and reported on as it streams real-time into an analytics system. For structured data, this process is fairly straightforward. When working with unstructured data, on the other hand, advanced algorithms and powerful engines are needed to process the incoming data.

How is Data Captured?There are countless data sources available to you, and they likewise provide countless types of data. Ultimately, it boils down to the combination of data that needs to be collected.

One of the most commonly discussed data sources that today's companies use to gain insight into their consumers and brand following is social media. This is possible because Facebook, Twitter and the

other major social media sites all offer some sort of data access through an application programming interface (API).

The next significant data source pertains to location and movement patterns. As RFID, infrared and wireless technology gets smaller and more affordable, companies will have more assets, employees and customers reporting their location to the appropriate business application.

As organizations capture data from these sources and combine it with the structured and unstructured data they are storing on site and in the cloud, they must ensure that it is being used in a way that it pays off.

What are Big Data'sTangible Benefits?In most market verticals today, the majority of the information needed for a big data initiative is already available; however, it may, in some cases, lack volume and standardization. Many organizations face the challenge of quickly implementing the right platform to capture and extract data from the different business application siloes and make it available for data analysis.

Today's marketing firms and internal marketing departments face the challenge of leveraging data to first generate more leads and then accurately measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. With many consumers discussing brands on different social media sites, it can be a daunting task to attempt to track Tweets, user reviews, and Likes throughout

the Web. However, with many social sites offering the ability to pull data, organizations can leverage big data to get customer insight and real-time analytics.

There are numerous online data sources that retail can use. Much of it relates to consumer browsing behavior and overall brand sentiment. As noted above, data can be extracted using APIs from social media services, as well as from Google and Web

server logs. In addition, many retailers captured data within their stores, whether it's tracking physical shopping carts or using customer rewards cards to monitor customer shopping patterns.

Healthcare can utilize data stored in electronic health record systems. Finally, wearable medical devices and mobile health applications are gaining popularity. Both the devices and the apps generate a continuous flow of data, which healthcare organizations are preparing to capture and use in the name of improving patient care.

Advances in medical research have enabled drug manufacturers to create highly targeted pharmaceutical testing for patients with specific genetic markers. This has been accelerating with the overwhelming scale of data that scientists can utilize, with that data further shared through international efforts such as the Annotated Human Genome Data project.

For the global logistics industry, which deals with supply chain management and control of goods, big data originating from numerous sources—GPS technology, EDI messages from suppliers and shipping vendors, pallets and cases of goods, mobile devices with customer data, internal ERP systems and social media sources—can provide significant insight and support to the re-engineering process.

Enterprise finance institutions such as Citigroup have begun the journey toward a big data initiative. The focal point here is reducing fraud and ensuring that patterns ordinarily hidden within data sets can be brought to the surface, and expose activity

Big data brings into the mix additional information, such as social media behavior, which was previously unavailable to users of a siloed warehouse—and now that data can be stored and managed in the cloud for a fraction of what it once cost.

45%Of Indian CIOs say that big data is currently a buzzword.

SOURCE: MID-YEAR REVIEW SURVEY 2012



ESSENTIAL technology

such as money laundering and ensuring compliance. Of course, many industries in addition to these can take advantage of big data to help drive change and improvement.

Can You Measure ROI?While some vendors may claim immediate ROI on big data, you will need to identify the different aspects of the data they have access to and what value it will provide to your organization.

In most ROI scenarios, you must tie a cost-benefit analysis to the proposed project. In the case of a big data initiative, there are typically several non-measurable aspects. Since you're looking at large volumes of data with the intent to discover insights into potential changes to business processes, it's hard to predict the value of what can be discovered.

That said, there are a couple of rules of thumb to keep in mind.

The cost of a big data initiative is unlikely to increase as data volume increases, since big data technologies tend to be highly scalable. In addition, although data comes in different formats (structured, semi-structured and unstructured) at ever-increasing growth rates, the implementation and maintenance of platforms that support Hadoop can help make it much more cost effective. That's because newer solutions can run on commodity hardware running open-source software.

As with any new trend, hype surrounds big data. In the past, many organizations used large data warehouses for data analysis and evidence-based decision making. As we know it today, big data brings into the mix additional information, such as social media behavior, which was previously unavailable to users of a siloed warehouse—and now that data can be stored and managed in the cloud for a fraction of what it once cost. To make the most of that data, it's critical to find out what big data means to your organization and what you want your big data initiative to accomplish. CIO

Send feedback on this feature to [email protected]

BIG DATA ANALYTICS| A report in the Sydney Morning Herald had the following

shocking story: "Half the Great Barrier Reef's coral has disappeared in the past 27 years

and less than a quarter could be left within a decade unless action is taken, a landmark

study has found. A long-term investigation of the reef by scientists at Townsville's

Australian Institute of Marine Science found coral had been wiped out by intense

tropical cyclones, a native species of starfish and coral bleaching."

Can big data help save the Great Barrier Reef?

Going by the advances made in the field of big data, it would seem possible as far as

help from big data-based monitoring technology is concerned.

And scientists in Australia are already using this technology to better understand the

ocean environment. Since 2007, Australia's marine and climate scientists have banded

together in the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) to collect and share

terabytes of data emerging from a network of sensor floats, underwater autonomous

vehicles, scientific monitoring stations, remote satellite sensing, and animal tags (such

as the one on this elephant seal, above). "You don't win by locking up your data and

storing it away," says IMOS program director Tim Moltmann. "You win by putting your

data out there and collaborating with others."

So how does it work? This data is continuously captured and then it integrates that

information into IMOS's massive database of the movements of individuals or species.

Similar information is gathered about ocean salinity, temperature, currents, carbon

storage, and animal migration.

More than 300 researchers are currently involved with the IMOS project, an effort

that has resulted in an unprecedented 1,000 scientific studies being published each

year. And IMOS hasn't attracted only scientists: Every day Australians, from fishermen

to fans of yachting races, check the program's public sites to follow currents and

migration patterns.

—By Zafar Anjum

Big Data for Barrier Reef?

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You know you’re sweaty after a workout. But do you know much else? Now a sensor equipped athletic shirt, developed by seniors at Northwestern University, can record data bout your exercise habits.

The project was meant to teach engineering and graphic students about working with other disciplines, and was led by Mark Sivak, a visiting instructor in the college of arts, Media and Design, and Constantinos Mavroidis, a professor of engineering, with some help provided by the Bouve College of Health Sciences. Called Squid, because its sensors look like tentacles, the shirt wirelessly transmits information from your muscles to an Android app and accompanying website.

The sensors capture details like heart rate and number of reps and can provide instant feedback by vibrating when an exercise is done wrong. Sivak says Squid is unique in its ability to quantify the progress you make. “We’re trying to focus on a singular workout and add data that provides a large context over time.” The school is now considering commercializing the product. “There’s a lot of interest,” says Mavroidis.


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