Alert_DEC2011.indd 18 11/17/2011 5:03:11 PM

Vijay RamachandranEditor-in-Chiefvijay_r@cio.in

From The ediTor-in-ChieF

of all the issues in the year, this one is real special. Our third Ones to Watch

program is an exercise that identifies the rising stars of IT: executives who are destined to

become the CIOs of the future. To be recognized, these future CIOs must have demonstrated

project leadership, driven innovation and delivered strategic value to business. They are

people who are on the cusp of heading their own IT organizations.

There are three basic reasons for the Ones to Watch program. For one, we believe that

developing the next generation of IT leaders is essential to IT’s ability to add real and

sustained value to the enterprise. Through this, we also honor those CIOs who foster leaders.

Second, this ensures that we stay in touch with the people who are leading the profession as

they advance in their careers. Finally, it is a way for us to serve our readers by helping them

recognize their key staff in a positive

and public way.

I believe that one of the most

important responsibilities of a CIO is

developing future IT leaders. Yet many

CIOs do not spend enough time and attention doing this. Somewhere between the pressures

of budgets and deadlines the best of intentions go awry.

At some level, this is also a function of how strategic or not a CIO’s role really is. Mentoring

requires vision. It requires leadership. It requires passion. All of which can be in short

supply if you spend all your time in the trenches.

I am so impressed by a Mumbai-based CIO who has proudly mentored winners in this

program all three years running. Don’t get me wrong — only one has ever represented his

organization — the others have gone on to become IT leaders in their own right. It’s that pride

in his ability to groom a leader that we’ve tried to tap in to. It’s that pride in his willingness to

allow his second line to take its place in the spotlight that we’ve tried to showcase.

All Ones to Watch mentors feel that this is one investment that pays off well. After all, if

attrition is your main pain point would you turn down an opportunity to build a motivated

team that knows how to align technology and business and is able to increase your sphere

of influence in the organization?

So, whom are you going to nominate next year?

Mentoring requires vision, leadership and passion, and is indicative of how strategic your role really is.

In grooming a second line lies the key to your growth.

Fosteringthe Future

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Content,Editorial,Colophone.indd 2 3/19/2008 5:13:46 PM

contentmarch 15 2008‑|‑Vol/3‑|‑issue/09

LeadershipP&L MAnAgEMEnt 101 | 22 CIOs who have managed IT and a line of revenue simultaneously offer advice about what it takes to be successful at both.Feature by Martha Heller

Think TankWHAt WOMEn WAnt | 26More young women would choose careers in enterprise IT if CIOs would market them as business, not technology jobs. Column by Laurie M. Orlov

ComplianceSInk OR SWIM | 61If you want to transact business with credit cards, you have to follow the PCI rules. So why aren’t more mid-market merchants already in compliance?

Feature by Michael Jackman more»

Leadership Lessons

COVER StORY | FIRSt AMOng EquALS | 50From this year’s Ones to Watch winners stand out three. With their innovation, business strategy and project driving skills, they have impacted business in a way that’s hard not to admire. Feature by Balaji narasimhan and kanika goswami

OnES tO WAtCH | 29Can you tell a leader when you see one?We recognize tomorrow’s leaders. Photo Feature by team CIOteam CIOt

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50

From the Ones to Watch Class of 2008, three IT executives stand out for the impact they have had on their organizations: George Fanthome of Bharti Airtel, Virender

Pathak of BSES Power and Ramkumar Rayapureddy of Ranbaxy Laboratories.

content (cont.)

Trendlines | 11 Components | Microsoft’s Iconic Literacy Interface quick take | Jethin Chandran on Security Convergence Voices | Dealing with Email Overload Personnel | Gender Pay Disparity Survey | Revamping BI? Don’t Forget Users Opinion Poll | People Tops Alignment Issue Programming | Agile Hits a Wall Work-life | Say Goodbye to Stress Strategy | 8 Mistakes in IT Strategic Planning Study | Vanity Googles on the Rise Alternate Views | General Management Experience

Essential Technology | 65 Blogging| Blogs Clean Up Project Management Mess

Feature by C.G. Lynch Pundit | IT’s Recovering Complexaholics Column by Michael Hugos

From the Editor-in-Chief | 2 Fostering the Future By Vijay Ramachandran

dEparTMEnTs

NOW ONLINE

For more opinions, features, analyses and updates, log on to our companion website and discover content designed to help you and your organization deploy It strategically. Go to www.cio.in

c o.in

2 2

Executive ExpectationsVIEW FROM tHE tOP | 58Arjun Malhotra, Chairman & CEO, Headstrong, says that — over time — IT has changed the reasons why it is critical to their business. Where it was once the fulcrum of innovation, today it bring solidity.Interview by Balaji narasimhan

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AdverTiser index

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Avaya 4 & 5

British Telecom 1

D-Link 7

Emerson 17

Fujitsu 9

GE 21

HID BC

HP 51, 52, 53, 54, 55 & 56

IBM Handbook

Inflow 19

Informatica 24 & 25

Intel 15

Microsoft IFC & IBC

Procurve 3

Transition 13

This index is provided as an additional service. The publisher does not assume any liabilities for errors or omissions.

ABnASh SInGh

Group CIo, Mphasis

ALAGAnAndAn BALARAmAn

Vice President, britannia Industries

ALOk kumAR

Global head-Internal It, tata Consultancy Services

AnWER BAGdAdI

Senior VP & Cto, CFC International India Services

ARun GuPTA

Customer Care associate & Cto, Shopper’s Stop

ARVInd TAWdE

VP & CIo, Mahindra & Mahindra

AShISh k. ChAuhAn

President & CIo — It applications, reliance Industries

C.n. RAm

head–It, hdFC bank

ChInAR S. dEShPAndE

CEo, Creative It India

dR. JAI mEnOn

director (It & Innovation) & Group CIo, bharti tele-Ventures

mAnISh ChOkSI

Chief-Corporate Strategy & CIo, asian Paints

m.d. AGRAWAL

dy. GM (IS), bharat Petroleum Corporation limited

RAJEEV ShIROdkAR

VP-It, raymond

RAJESh uPPAL

Chief GM It & distribution, Maruti Udyog

PROF. R.T. kRIShnAn

Jamuna raghavan Chair Professor of Entrepreneurship,

IIM-bangalore

S. GOPALAkRIShnAn

CEo & Managing director, Infosys technologies

PROF. S. SAdAGOPAn

director, IIIt-bangalore

S.R. BALASuBRAmnIAn

Exec. VP (It & Corp. development), Godfrey Phillips

SATISh dAS

CSo, Cognizant technology Solutions

SIVARAmA kRIShnAn

Executive director, PricewaterhouseCoopers

dR. SRIdhAR mITTA

Md & Cto, e4e

S.S. mAThuR

GM–It, Centre for railway Information Systems

SunIL mEhTA

Sr. VP & area Systems director (Central asia), JWt

V.V.R. BABu

Group CIo, ItC

AdvisorY BoArd

mAnAGEmEnT

PuBLIShER & EdITOR n. bringi dev

CEO louis d’Mello

EdITORIAL

EdITOR-In-ChIEF Vijay ramachandran

ASSISTAnT EdITORS balaji narasimhan

Gunjan trivedi

SPECIAL CORRESPOndEnT Kanika Goswami

ChIEF COPY EdITOR Sunil Shah

COPY EdITOR Shardha Subramanian

dESIGn & PROduCTIOn

CREATIVE dIRECTOR Jayan K narayanan

SEnIOR dESIGnERS binesh Sreedharan

Vikas Kapoor, anil V.K

Jinan K. Vijayan, Jithesh C.C

Unnikrishnan a.V, Suresh nair

dESIGnERS MM Shanith, anil t

PC anoop, Prasanth t.r

Vinoj K.n, Siju P

muLTImEdIA dESIGnERS Girish a.V, Sani Mani

PhOTOGRAPhY Srivatsa Shandilya

PROduCTIOn t.K. Karunakaran

t.K. Jayadeep

mARkETInG And SALES

VP SALES (PRInT) naveen Chand Singh

VP SALES (EVEnTS) Sudhir Kamath

BRAnd mAnAGER alok anand

Sukanya Saikia

mARkETInG Siddharth Singh, Priyanka

Patrao, disha Gaur

BAnGALORE Mahantesh Godi Santosh

Malleswara ashish Kumar,

Chetna Mehta,

b.n raghavendra,

dELhI Pranav Saran, Saurabh

Jain, rajesh Kandari,

Gagandeep Kaiser

mumBAI Parul Singh, rishi

Kapoor,Pradeep nair,

hafeez Shaikh

JAPAn tomoko Fujikawa

uSA larry arthur; Jo ben-atar

EVEnTS

VP rupesh Sreedharan

mAnAGERS ajay adhikari, Chetan acharya

Pooja Chhabra

Vol/3 | ISSUE/091 0 M A R C H 1 5 , 2 0 0 8 | REAL CIO WORLD

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n e w * h o t * u n e x p e c t e d

C o m p o n e n t s Microsoft’s research arm is working on technology that will enable its engineers to build a user interface for the illiterate.

Scientists in Microsoft Research's Bangalore lab have been working on the project since 2005, according to P. Anandan, the facility's managing director. The scientists are building prototypes of the user interface (UI) now but Microsoft has no immediate plans for working it into a product, Anandan says.

"Many people in the world — about 50 percent in India — cannot read and write," Anandan says. "For them, a textual interface where they have to read and write just is not useful. You can show a lot more in a picture."

Anandan says part of the challenge in developing the new interface is to overcome the barrier of using reading and writing to interact with the computer. What it largely comes down to is coming up with better icons.

Different countries, different cultures and even people from different towns respond differently to iconic images. The average image used in the United States for a home would look like two sides of a home and a slanted roof. However, someone looking for housekeeping work in India might see that icon and assume that it was a hut and not a nice home. In India, the icon for a home would have to represent a two-story dwelling, he says.

"Every iconic interface depends on the application you're creating it for and the

community you're focusing on. You have to think of language, the country and the job people do."Creating a user interface for people who are illiterate can also help in the effort to improve more traditional interfaces, as literate people can also benefit from richer and more meaningful icons, says Anandan.

—By Sharon Gaudin

n e w

s e C u r i t y Reportedly, the TJX break-in started when thieves in a van outside one of the chain’s stores picked up wireless data beamed from the stores from registers and handheld scanners. In a world of converging security who is responsible? Who should create policy and who should drive security convergence? Sunil Shah asked Jethin Chandran, Head–IT, Infrastructure Planning and PMO, Wipro Technologies, for his thoughts.

Is the convergence of physical and information security occurring in India?It is picking up at a faster rate in the ITES vertical. This is because there is an overlap between physical and information security. What represents physical security? Surveillance cameras? That is already on IP. It’s symbolic of everything that’s becoming data, that’s entering a data flow.

Do you think it is important for the movement to spread into other verticals? And do you think it will happen?

Jethin Chandran on Security ConvergenceThanks to technology, it will definitely happen. At what pace I don’t know. If you look at most organizations, security is already a single piece. There is a thin line between physical and IT security. Usually it is headed by a single person. And, in the future, I think it will converge further.

Do you see a potential problem in the way the roles of a CSO and CIO overlap in terms of convergence?In a lot of companies the roles are different and I think that is right, they

should be independent. The segregation of responsibility ensures a system of checks and balance. I also think the CSO should drive policy.

What’s impeding the growth of this phenomenon?In other industries, people don’t feel the need. We are ahead because of the kind of business we are in and because of the kind of compliance we need to adhere to. We need to secure our intellectual property. And that’s the big impact.

Jethin Chandran

Quick take

Microsrosr oft's Iconic Literacy Interface

REAL CIO WORLD | M A R C H 1 5 , 2 0 0 8 1 1Vol/3 | ISSUE/09

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Mohan ShenoyVice President, UnIloG Content Solutions

dilip chintaMani chhatre

Corporate Manager It, tata ElXSI

“We have policies in place about archiving and replying to our mails, we also hav e a worldwide implementation of MS Exchange 2003, and that takes care of all our geographies.”

avinaSh aroraDirector-IS, new holland tractors

Write to editor@cio.in

lend your

voice

“We are using Outlook, so we download mails pertaining to projects into one folder. This ensures our mails are not overloaded at all.”

“We depend on security engines.Symantec takes care of an overload at

the gateway level. We have a DS3 pipe which caters to

more than 2,400 users. That doesn’t hamper heavy attachments.”

GEnDEr Pay DISParIty

PUShES WoMEnoff It

Vol/3 | ISSUE/091 2 M A R C H 1 5 , 2 0 0 8 | REAL CIO WORLD

p e r s o n n e l A global study of 63 nations has revealed that women across all industries and age groups are being paid on average 16 percent less than men.

ACTU president Sharan Burrow said the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) report on pay equity revealed the extent of discrimination women still faced around the globe.

"In this day and age the gap is appalling," Burrow said.In reality it is probably even wider than the figures suggest

because developing countries don't keep national records, nor do hundreds of millions of women working in informal and unprotected jobs appear in any records.

The ACTU president said unions are working hard in Australia and in other countries to bridge the pay divide by educating governments, employers and the public.

Professional women in the science, engineering and technology sector do not receive equal pay for equal work, according to a survey by the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia (APESMA), which found more than 25 percent of professional women reported a pay disparity with their male counterparts.

For women with business qualifications and those in senior management positions, the figure was much higher at over 40 percent. APESMA national women's co-ordinator, Erin Wood said female professionals are not getting any closer to bridging the pay divide.

"The trend over the past seven years has not changed. Our research has consistently shown that professional women do not believe they are being equally compensated for the work they do," Wood said.

"It is very disappointing that this problem remains despite an acute skills shortage and high demand for technology professionals." Currently in Australia women make up only 20 percent of the IT sector.

Gartner analyst, Diane Morello, said the poor pay figures are symbolic of the obstacles and roadblocks that are sending women away from IT in droves.

—By Sandra Rossi

i n t e r n e t Heavy attachments, huge files, junk mail. And spam. Sounds like a cluttered inbox? Your email is being bombarded with information that it can barely hold. How do you deal with an email overload? Kanika Goswami spoke to some of your peers and this is what they had to say:

How do you deal with email overload in your organization?

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s u r v e y Want to make sure you're making the right BI investments? Ask your users, says David Hatch, director at research consultancy Aberdeen Group. IT management spends way too much time researching the latest technologies and virtually no time asking users what they want, he says.

Hatch has come to this conclusion after initial research for a survey of about 500 companies on issues surrounding business intelligence technologies and initiatives.

Aberdeen found that about 26 percent of survey respondents rate 'undertaking a proof-of-concept or request for proposal with software vendors' as a top strategic action to reduce total cost of ownership of BI technologies. On the other hand, only 2 percent of survey respondents view 'reducing the cost of end-user training' as a top strategic action.

These figures point to a disconnect between strategic thinking at the senior management level, and the real-world usage and adoption trends among the end-users whose needs are meant to be addressed, says Hatch. "If I have learned one thing in my research, it's that too many projects are mired in failure or poor performance because of a lack of adoption, use, comprehension and buy-in from the end users that were meant to be 'empowered' in the first place."

That's why he recommends periodically conducting an informal, anonymous e-mail survey that asks the following five questions of all employees, and definitely surveying before a significant BI revamp:

1Of the applications listed below, are there any that you simply do not use

at all?

2Which of these applications are most useful to you? Why?

3Which application is so critical that you simply couldn't survive without?

4Which cause you the most problems?

5What new business application or capability, currently not accessible

to you, would instantly make your job easier and improve your performance?

"By conducting along these lines, IT can accomplish more than just gathering useful data. They can exude a sense of empowerment and begin to build the foundation for buy-in among end-users that is crucial to the success of any information initiative," Hatch says.

—By Diann Daniel

Source: Society for Information Management

what’s More importantthan alignment? people.

51% 42% 40%

What’s Your Biggest Concern?

Finding and keeping IT talent

Aligning ITand the business

Buildingbusiness skills in IT staff

IT-business alignment — every CIO’s top anxiety — is now playing second fiddle to the problem of finding and keeping the right people, according to IT leaders responding to the Society for Information Management’s annual survey:

revamping Bi?Don't leave users in the cold

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p r o g r a m m i n g Agile software development processes appear more effective than traditional approaches, but agile seems to have hit a wall as far as growth, according to an IBM official's keynote presentation. Citing survey data, Scott Ambler, IBM practice leader for agile development, said a survey with about 600 respondents found 69 percent were utilizing agile development practices. "The bad news is, this is the exact same number we had last year," Ambler said.

"Maybe there's still some more room for agile adoption, but we don't quite know yet," said Ambler. "The good news is that agile appears to be more effective in practice than traditional approaches. The evidence seems to be growing, at least."

Some organizations, however, cannot adopt agile methods, Ambler said. "It's simply because of their own organizational culture," he said. "They have systemic challenges," said Ambler. "It's a good way to do small projects, at least from my perspective," said Rich Peters, senior software engineering manager at Braxton Technologies. "In our environment, we can't use that technology because we have government requirements about how we do our development. But for internal projects, it would be fine."

Ambler also said research found a disparity in what developers and managers thought was happening with agile; 61 percent of developers thought they were doing agile development while 78 percent of management thought agile development was in use.

Ambler cited issues with agile. "One of the biggest problems right now in the agile community is we've gotten really good at developing siloed systems. That's not useful," he said.

Some challenges to agile development include entrenched processes, enterprise discipline, compliance requirements, team size, and application complexity.

Also at the conference, CodeGear officials said the company would release an upgrade to the company's 3rdRail IDE for the Ruby on Rails Web framework.

Release 1.1 includes support for Ruby on Rails 2.0, offering such capabilities as automatic error identification and support for REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services, said Joe McGlynn, CodeGear director of product management.

CodeGear has been releasing updates to 3rdRail every three months since the first release came out in September.

—By Paul Krill

agile Hits a Wall

W o r k - l i f e there's no telling what surprises the day holds. Very quickly, the mind and body respond to situations and the momentum of stress allows very little pause to course-correct. Instead of quitting your job and heading to an ashram to find relief, there is a lot you can do to enhance your experience and performance no matter how unrelenting your day.Feel BetterIf you're reading this, chances are you are sitting. are your legs crossed? Shoulders slumped? take a moment to sit upright, uncross your legs and slide your buttocks to the back of the chair. With your hands resting on your thighs, exhale and roll your shoulders to the front, then inhale to roll them back several times slowly. this oxygenates your entire body and emphasizes releasing the physical tension in your shoulders and neck. Think Betterare you caught up in the events of the day, running from one place to another with your mind responding constantly to whatever is at hand? notice the rhythm of your breath. as the words you are reading register in your consciousness, keep observing a slow steady rhythm to your breath. notice how calming it is to allow the mind to be active while remaining centered and grounded in your breath. Lead Betterthe next time someone approaches you for answers or solutions to a challenge, challenge them to uncover solutions. If they emerge with an answer immediately, fantastic, but if they need time to investigate and assess, set a time to review their solutions. this transforms your work conversations from burdensome advice-giving to conversations based on mutual respect and coach-like encouragement. the bonus benefit is that you will shoulder one less burden in your day.

—by tevis Gale

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Say Goodbye to Stress

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s t r a t e g y forrester VP and research director alex Cullen has seen all kinds of It plans, the very best and the very worst. and he keeps files of both. avoid these mistakes to make sure your next plan doesn't end up in his bad file.The Doorstop Planthis is not War and Peace. aim for 15 pages, says Gartner VP Dave aron, who saw one It plan weigh in at 250 pages. Consider PowerPoint instead of Word as your medium of choice, says Cullen. It fosters brevity. and limit it to 25 slides.The Shelfware Planthere's nothing as worthless as what aron calls the 'write once, read never' plan. "the strategic plan needs to be a living thing," says It consultant t consultant t laurie orlov. "one CIo I know starts every meeting with a strategy moment: he asks, how will our business win and how does this meeting help?" says aron. "he had to cancel the meeting the first time because no one could answer the question. but everyone thought about it before the next."

The English As a Second Language Traptoo many Itoo many It t strategic plans are written in jargon. you're setting you're setting ya direction for It to support the business. "It people that highlight buzzwords and product names are only doing an Itplan for their own department," says orlov. throw out the Itlingo. Connect your goals to key business drivers.One Size Doesn't Fit AllCreate customized versions of your plan to address the differing needs of the plan's audiences — the executive team, the It department, business unit heads and vendors. at the very least, create a customized introduction or executive summary. the goal, says Cullen, is to have one strategy and several ways of presenting it.Shooting for the StarsKeep it real. "Don't be too ambitious in your first plan," advises Cullen. "Don't try to change everything." When in doubt, underpromise and over deliver.

—by Stephanie overby

Pew Study: Vanity Googles on the rise

s t u d y Self-googling is up by 25 percent since 2002, according to a study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The number of Internet users who have searched for themselves online at least once has risen to 47 percent, from just 22 percent in 2002.

However, 22 percent monitor themselves now and then, while only 3 percent monitor themselves regularly. Seventy-four percent of self-searchers have searched for themselves online just once or twice.

Ten percent of Internet users have a job that requires them to market or monitor their online presence. And those who are required to market themselves online are more likely to do so with a search engine — 68 percent as compared to 48 percent who are not required to market themselves online. Those with a higher education are also more likely

to be expected to do online self-marketing: 18 percent of working college graduates have employers who expect their employees to promote themselves online as compared with 5 percent of employed adults without a college education.

Twenty percent of working adults say their employer has policies about how their employees can present themselves online, including what information can be shared.

Teens are more likely to have some type of access restrictions on their online profiles: 77 percent of teens say their profile is visible versus 82 percent of adults. Still, teens are far more likely to use social networking: 55 percent as compared with 20 percent of adults.

More than half of adult Internet users have looked up other people. Fifty-three percent have searched for information

on family, friends, romantic interests or business colleagues. Eleven percent say they have searched for information on someone they were thinking of hiring or working with, and 19 percent have looked up colleagues or competitors. But users are most likely to use search for lost connections. Thirty-six percent have searched for information on someone from their past that they have lost touch with. The study polled 1,623 Internet users older than 18.

—By Diann Daniel

promote themselves online as compared with 5 percent of employed

Twenty percent of working adults say their employer has policies about how their employees can present themselves on family, friends, romantic interests or

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Eight Mistakesto Avoid in IT Strategic Planningto Avoid in IT Strategic Planning

Eight Mistakesto Avoid in IT Strategic Planning

Eight Mistakes

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B Y B a l a j i n a r a s i m h a nalternate views

GEnERAL MAnAGEMEnT ExPERIEnCEVaried exposure Vs Pure IT competency

Sunil MachadoHead–IT, Trinethra Super Retail

“the CIo, irrespective of whether he has general management experience or not, should still be able to interact with business people in the organization.”

M.D. AgarwalDGM (IS), BPCL

“a CIo who has had prior general management experience is more focused on

the customer.”

yes, it is important. The CIO should remember that first and foremost, he is a business enabler. He should know the pros and cons of implementing the right technology, and this is strengthened by knowledge of business — and this in turn is better gained if the CIO has had prior experience in non-IT domains.

One of the roles of the CIO is to improve the performance of the IT organization and to do this, he has to understand the objectives of the organization and get an insight into the challenges faced. A CIO who doesn’t have general management experience is focused on technology, while a CIO who has had prior general management experience is more focused on the customer. I do not wish to mention names here, but based upon my own experience, I have found that people with general management experience generally do a lot better than CIOs with no general management experience.

Therefore, more than just talking about general management experience and a lack thereof, I would say that the CIO has to be a business man first and a technologist only later.

i would not say that general management experience is essential. I’m not

saying that having general management experience is bad — it helps, but it is not a must-have.

Of course, the CIO, irrespective of whether he has general management experience or not, should still be

able to interact with business people in the organization.If I was the CEO of a shipping company, then I would

prefer a CIO who has expertise in this field. If I don’t get such a person, then I would prefer to hire somebody who

knows all about IT, but has no knowledge about shipping. Let the CIO first know IT, he can always pick up other

things by interacting with business people.In the finance department, you have people who

understand finance. Such people may or may not have domain expertise — this is secondary. It is important that, first and foremost, they are experts in matters pertaining

to finance. You may find a finance person with domain expertise in other areas, and this is good, but will you hire somebody as a senior finance person in your organization

if he knows a lot of domains, but doesn’t have any knowledge of finance itself? Clearly, no.

While I am happy to find a CIO with general management experience, I would not insist upon it. Let

him know IT thoroughly and let him know how to speak to business people, understand their needs, and deliver

the solutions that they want.

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C IOs often yearn for new worlds to conquer. For many, the first step on that journey is to earn the right to manage a P&L. In order to achieve that goal, executives listen to their external customers,

engage with the business, focus on innovation and look for new revenue opportunities. These CIOs build new business models and sell them to their CEOs. In return, they receive the keys to P&L management.

But getting a job and then keeping it are often two different affairs. For those of you who now find yourself in charge of a revenue line, it is time you started thinking about how to manage your new business. To help you prepare for this next stage of your career, I spoke to three CIOs who simultaneously managed IT and a line of revenue about what it takes to be successful at both.

In 1997, Steve Holt joined auto parts manufacturer Accuride as director of IT. He became CIO in 2002. In 2004, Holt recognized that the company would benefit from an enterprisewide strategic planning function, so the company's president added the title VP of strategic management to his CIO role.

Once in that role, Holt investigated new revenue ideas for the company. One was a plan to work with independent engineers to develop new technologies and then offer them as new products to Accuride's customer base. In January 2007, he was formally given the reins to the new business and was promoted to SVP of strategy, growth and technology. In addition to running IT, Holt now manages a P&L and the functions (product development, sales and marketing) that will allow Accuride to commercialize new product technologies. His advice?

Let go of IT. Chances are, your first P&L management role will take place during your CIO reign since the company for

P&L Management 101 CIOs who have managed IT and a line of revenue simultaneously offer advice about what it takes to be successful at both.

Martha Heller LeadersHip

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whom you have delivered first-rate IT service is more likely than a brand-new organization to take a chance on your revenue management skills. While you might be tempted to maintain the same level of IT oversight as before, you will have to let go if you're going to give your new business the attention it deserves.

"I let go of IT immediately," says Holt. "I had people ready to continue the good work of our IT function while I focused on my new responsibilities. In order to do more, you have to let someone step into the void you create. If you attempt to maintain the same grip on IT, you will fail."

Leave emotion out of it. For obvious reasons, most CIOs' first P&L management role involves a technology product. The good news is that CIOs know a thing or two about technology, its product development lifecycle and what customers want out of new purchases. The bad news is that many CIOs, no matter how business-oriented they are, have a deep and abiding love of technology that can get in the way of objectivity.

"When you are in the position of deciding what new technologies to bring into your product line, you need to avoid getting emotionally caught up in a deal," says Holt. "Otherwise, you can fall in love with a technology and what it offers the world before you have constructed a business model that provides the appropriate amount of earnings."

In January 2003, Tim Wright became CIO and CTO of Geac, an enterprise software company. A year later, he was promoted to CEO of Geac's Asia-Pacific, Europe and Middle East operations while keeping his CTO title. Now, as general partner of VC firm GrandBanks Capital, Wright worries less about his own business plan and more about the revenue potential of his portfolio companies, but he remembers well the challenges of running a business. Wright's suggestions?

Use your own customer experiences as a guide to selling. "Selling a license to software was the toughest thing I've ever done," says Wright. "Our customers, CIOs and CFOs, are incredibly risk-averse and I was selling products that could have been considered more of a luxury than a must-have; the sales cycle could be between nine and 18 months."

If your business involves a technology product (and even if it doesn't), Wright advises using your own customer experiences as a guide to what makes a sales approach successful: "Think about the salespeople you've bought from and figure out if there is a pattern to the people who have been effective." And while you're reflecting on the best salespeople you have known, keep your eye out for opportunities to bring them on board. Wright was so impressed with one of his vendor reps that he hired him into his own sales force.

Stay on top of product development. As CIO, you manage an array of professionals and are all too aware of the conflicts that

can erupt between, say, your project management office (PMO) leaders and your head of applications. This is nothing compared to the tensions between sales and product development, says Wright. "The sales guy will tell you the product doesn't work; the product guy will tell you the sales guy is making unrealistic promises to customers just to close the deal, and the service guy will tell you that they're both full of it," he says.

Wright advises new P&L managers to get into all aspects of the product lifecycle to be sure customer satisfaction doesn't fall prey to the classic tension between sales and product development.

In 2005, Steve Beason joined Scientific Games, a lottery systems supplier, as CTO responsible for developing new products for the company's current customers. He quickly saw the need for IT leadership and picked up the function of MIS along the way. In spring 2007, he added sales and marketing to his product development role and was named president of the Lottery Systems group. Beason offers the following tips.

Get an MBA. "Earlier in my career, I would sit in a meeting with finance guys and hear them using terms like EBITA and internal rate of return (IRR)," he says. "I knew that if I wanted to run a business, I would have to do some homework."

Steve took an executive MBA program while he was working a full-time job. "It was two years of no family and no fun," he says, "but it was worth it. I cannot fathom performing in my current role without that education." Beason also found that his having an MBA positioned him well when he started at Scientific Games. "The fact that I had pursued an MBA showed my boss that I was serious about running a business, not some geek who thought it would be fun and easy."

Bring in your own finance person. Even with an MBA degree, Beason knew he needed a finance person to help him with the finer points. "What really helped me in the first six months of running this business was sitting down with my finance guy and having him look over my shoulder at the numbers," says Beason. "He would tell me how he thought we should be treating the revenue or calculating IRR. Before I went out publicly with any statements, I needed an internal person to tell me when the king had no clothes." CIO

Martha Heller is managing director of the IT Leadership Practice at ZRG, an

executive recruiting firm in Boston. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

Martha Heller LeadersHip

Use your own customer experiences as a guide to selling. Think about the salespeople you've bought from and see if there is a pattern to those who have been effective.

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Whenever a journalist asks whether or why women hate IT, grumps trot out the usual laundry list of clichés and stereotypes about women's supposed genetic disposition

against math and science, the lack of role models or the profession's geeky image. It is a problem that more women are not choosing technology careers, but I think we'll solve it only if we start asking the right question: why should women want to be in IT?

Enterprise IT is a fantastic field for women, especially young women, to consider, especially now. Why? Because much of the work capitalizes on women's greatest strengths — communication, collaboration and problem solving — and because a looming worker shortage means the supply-demand balance will tip toward more frenzied recruiting. But ask CIOs whether they think the field is adequately marketed and correctly described, and they admit that it suffers from an outdated image, inadequate promotion, and misperceptions about exactly what the work is.

Mixed MessagesOne of the biggest reasons why women don't choose careers in enterprise IT is that the field is poorly defined. Can anyone say what the heck we are talking about when we say ‘IT’? Is it the software industry à-la Microsoft, technology consulting, game design, mapping software, database management, hardware or chip design? Or is it the field of professionals who provide the infrastructure, applications, technology operations and strategy that enable today's enterprises to function and change?

Advocates for boosting the number of women in this large and amorphous tech world (including professional organizations

What Women Want More young women would choose careers in enterprise IT if CIOs would market them as business, not technology jobs.

Laurie M. Orlov Think Tank

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like Women in Technology International, the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, and the National Center for Women & Information Technology) inadvertently blur this distinction. They want to boost the presence and stature of technical women across the board: women in computing, women in science and engineering, and girls who are interested in math and science. To get girls excited about the fun of tech, they talk about science fairs and robotics. For the sake of discussion, let's call that wing of the profession computer engineering.

I agree that attracting more girls and women is a must for the technical workforce that invents new tools, games, devices, software and hardware. But this emphasis on programming, robotics, computer science and engineering won't get women interested in working for your IT organization. In fact, it is exactly that tech focus that obscures the true nature of enterprise IT jobs (which we'll call business technology) and the background and skills necessary to excel at them.

Business technology needs broad-thinking candidates from a broad range of undergraduate and graduate curricula who want to learn how companies — not computers — work; who can work with a global project team, rather than with programming languages; and who can see business process linkages, rather than map out electronic connections.

Meanwhile, the collection of jobs that saddled business technology with its geeky image — network and data center administration, code maintenance, programming and help desk — may soon be centralized, automated or offloaded to outsourcers. The stereotypically inarticulate men with pocket protectors who hold these jobs — and who defined the image of the profession way back in the '70s — will soon retire en masse.

Now you need business analysts, program managers, vendor managers, relationship managers, information architects or process analysts. These jobs (any of which can lead to CIO) demand employees with excellent communication skills that many of the women you know have: the ability to speak, negotiate, influence others, write, analyze, manage projects or programs, and lead cultural change. These jobs are not about writing operating systems or learning programming languages. They are about helping companies change the way they work. "Driving changes that help the business generate more revenue, lower cost or improve customer service — cracking these business problems — that's fun!" says June Drewry, CIO of the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies.

So how do we dispel the stereotype? With better information about what business technology really is,

Laurie M. Orlov Laurie M. Orlov Think Tank

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how women of a variety of backgrounds can be and are successful, and finally, with the explicit support and engagement of the 86 percent of top IT executives who are men.

The Case for Women in Business TechnologyLet's look realistically at the business technology field and why senior women in IT should be promoting this career to young women:

Salaries are going to climb. There may be as many as 1 million net new IT jobs by 2014. Enterprises will be desperate to get candidates, and salaries will rise.

Business technology jobs are already among the highest paying (in the United States.) Furthermore, at the highest levels of the profession, women make the same money as men. According to

a recent survey in the US by Sheila Greco Associates, the average base salary for CIOs in the mid-market for both men and women is Rs 60 lakh to Rs 80 lakh. At Fortune 500 companies it ranges from Rs 1.8 crore to more than Rs 6 crore. The median pay for all managers is Rs 42 lakh, and median base salaries for all business IT jobs have edged up for the first time in several years (although in the middle of the range, women's average salaries are somewhat lower compared to men).

Companies want a diverse workforce. It makes no sense to have an enterprise where the percentage of women in accounting, sales, service, HR or marketing is demographically representative but is shrinking in IT, whose staff spends all of its time working with these other departments. So recruiters are looking — and will continue to look — for women to fill open IT jobs, even when faced with mostly male applicants.

Meanwhile, says Cheryl Smith, former CIO at McKesson, "Corporate diversity goals will make managers more willing to promote qualified women once they have been recruited."

Enterprise IT is about business, not just technology. These jobs offer a unique vantage point for learning how companies work, says Patty Morrison, CIO of Motorola.

"I have a liberal arts degree in math and a secondary education degree," says Morrison. "I started out [doing] market analysis for Procter & Gamble about what sells soap, then went into market research, and then into IT." Michelle McKenna, CIO of Universal Orlando, started as a certified public accountant and worked in marketing and sales before moving into IT.

IT jobs enable work-life balance. Women in senior positions are mobile professionals who can command flexible work schedules. Eileen Gabriel, former CIO of Dick's Sporting Goods, says, "My

experience is that if you were talented, you could write your own ticket, and even put some balance in your life. When I was raising my children, I could always work other hours to make up for day hours." Women who have IT jobs that are measured by deliverables — such as requirements analyses, project updates or vendor contract analyses — know that it isn't when or where you do the work, but the work itself that matters most.

How to Change IT's ImageBoth male and female executives need to stop bemoaning the lack of women in IT and start changing the profession's outdated image. We can begin to update this image by promoting a business technology emphasis in the workplace. CIOs and senior managers can help tech-centric staffers to learn more about business, enabling them to work more effectively with the other

departments in their firms, and identify the career paths that may zigzag to and from the business areas of their firms.

Find new sources of entry-level talent. Instead of worrying about the low levels of computer science enrollment, it would be a better idea to get the word out to women in undergraduate business schools and liberal arts colleges with business programs. There, we can find young women who are sharp, articulate speakers and writers with the ability to learn about business and technology. Recruit them as interns, and show them from the inside where an enterprise IT career can take them. Assign them mentors who will shepherd them.

Market business technology careers to young women. As part of the process of promoting the field, recruiting firms and HR departments should profile women business technology executives who can inspire young women to choose a career that is as much or more about business as it is about technology. The material, which should be distributed to high school girls and college freshmen, can highlight the exciting work experiences these women have had.

I have been thinking about what else (besides a brochure and video interview with an IT exec) to put in the kit for high school guidance counselors to help a young girl get excited about the world of business, business processes and change. Perhaps we can give them an information-based problem to solve like organizing and recruiting for a new hobby group among registered online club members. That would help our daughters see themselves working in business technology. What do you think would help? CIO

Laurie M. Orlov is a former vice president and principal analyst at Forrester

Research. Send feedback on this column to editor@cio.in

Laurie M. Orlov Think Tank

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Both male and female executives need to stop bemoaning the lack of women in iT and start changing the profession's outdated image. We can begin to update this image by promoting a business technology emphasis in the workplace.

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They have already won Their hardesT baTT baTT ba les.They have won the respect of their peers, of the business and of their CIOs. When they talk, business stops to listen. It’s what strings this year’s ‘Ones to Watch’, these 20 future CIOs together — immaterial of industry, gender or background.

It has not been easy getting here. Because respect is easier lost than won, every project another chance to lose it. Respect is about perseverance, it is about excellence on a sustained basis.

Excellence like that comes with a price. It calls for times when risks have to be taken and sacrifices made. Take Moinuddin Shaikh, VP Technology at CFC India Services for instance. What sets him apart is his ability to take decisions with 'ambiguous inputs' — even if it means putting his neck on the line. The Ones to Watch have stood up and offered solutions, when no else had any. They stood forward and made hard choices when no one else wanted to do it — and saved implementations. Like what Shirish Munj VP–IT Operations, Tata Teleservices did to a delayed disaster recovery project.

And this is why we stand up and applaud them. That is why this year’s Ones to Watch program takes a look — closer than we have ever before — at the lives of these future CIOs.

This year we bring to you an understanding of what makes these future leaders tick. What keeps them pursuing their insights, and what inspires them. We also highlight their personal battles and the skills they need to hone in their rise to the uppermost echelons of IT.

For example, the deputy GM for information systems at Hindustan Construction, Mangesh Wadaje, took on the skepticism of an entire organization when he set out to implement an ERP system. But not only did he complete the project, he also re-wrote history when his project marked the worlds highest altitude SAP implementation — 10,000-plus ft above sea level.

Then there are IT leaders like Alok Kumar, senior VP, Reliance Industries. Staffers who have quit Reliance have agreed to return to work — on the condition that they could be on his team.

When it was time to throw names into a hat, these were the people their CIOs nominated to step into their shoes. Here are the 20 men and women who have done their CIOs, their companies and IT proud. CIO

Can you tell a leader when you see one? We recognize tomorrow's leaders.

REAL CIO WORLD | M A R C H 1 5 , 2 0 0 8 2 9Vol/3 | ISSUE/09

Rising Stars

By Sunil Shah

1“Peeyush is a go-getter and is completely dedicated to the project assigned to him. And he ensures that all activities in the process chain are delivered efficiently and on time.”

—Dinesh Kumar, ED (IT), NTPC

The Mentor

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Why he is someone to Watch: Because he’s the one people run to when they need innovative thinking. Because he put together an online system that brought a sigh of relief from user. Because the system is so useful other power companies want it. Because he was part of a Ministry of Power the project. Because the initiative is an effective means of monitoring other power projects. Because getting that sort of insight is hard. Because he is a good listener in a world where everyone thinks they have the answers. Because his work with SAP is ensuring that the power company can slash setup and procurement time. Because he is, with the use of RFID, attempting to introduce better maintenance practices to the company. Because he pulled an important project out of a tight spot and revived it by designing a methodology. Because he can keep his cool no matter what.

Trademark: rarely says i. Especially when it’s time to hand out credit.

Who he consulTs: among others freshly-graduated engineers. “they are more updated with technology.”

Big picTure line: it exists to support the business objectives. it is important to think about the it impact

on business as a whole rather than provide solutions for individual tasks.

cio insighT: Cios need manage expectations effectively. Users at various levels have different expectations from it and it leadership has to effectively handle these expectations keeping in view the business objectives.

i strongly believe that to be utilized effectively, technology must

fit with the users goals.

Peeyush Arya age40 Manager it, ntPC

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Why he's someone to Watch:Because he planned and implemented various strategies for data center management to push the organization’s resources to the best of its capabilities. Because he manages infrastructure so that it provides 99.99 percent uptime. Because he helps the organization work a process that minimizes recurring problems. Because he showed the organization how it could reduce costly errors in production with barcodes — and

that impacted the bottomline. Because he introduced a business service that improves accounts reconciliation. Because he implemented and tested a disaster recovery site that has added significant value in an organization that operates at a global level. Because he followed this up by creating redundancy at every level of the organization’s infrastructure. Because he is a member of a corporate management team and sits side-by-side with directors and business unit heads.

His immediate goal: “to provide a stunning to provide a stunning tand sturdy technical infrastructure to the organization this will facilitate the business to reach remarkable heights.”

signaTure sTyle: his favorite words are ‘facilitate’ and ‘business’ – in that order.

on The Way To The corner office: Proof is in his eight-point program to becoming Cio.

realiTy check: “it is impossible to escape pressure at work altogether, so learn how to manage it.”

noT your average projecT champion: When he attempted to implement a new business service, he was forced to convince business partners, external internet service providers and vendors.

“Amit has vision, he can see where the organizationis headed and positions himself to help get it there.”

—Daya PrakashHead - IT, LG Electronics

The Mentor

Amit Bajaj age29assistant Manager – it operationslG Electronics (Pune)

Rising Stars

safe landing: he turned a delayed project on its head by focusing on the creation of a business blueprint and formed teams for master data management.

ground realiTies: his eye for details and a never-say-die attitude to implement projects on time has proved essential for the organization.

advice To his juniors: never blow your own trumpet; instead spend your time putting yourself in the business users’ shoes and see the world from his angle.

long Term goal: on the personal front, he wants to push himself to be a better human being.

Why he is someone to Watch: Because he reworked the entire aeronautical revenue system to make it flow through the ERP to ensure that accounts are better controlled. Because this avoided revenue from leaking out of the company. Because he handled the ERP implementation for a Rs 10,000

crore project with utmost responsibility, enhancing the processes within the organization and increasing transparency in all transactions. Because he led a critical SAP ECC 6.0 implementation project which streamlined all processes. Because this ensured that all revenues generated out of IT are captured on the system.

everything is possible only if you work as a team — not as

an individual.

The Mentor

“Sandeep is good at translating business process into technology applications. He also has the human skills to back it up.”

—T P AnantheswaranHead-IT, Mumbai International Airport

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Sandeep Bharade age38dGM systems, Mumbai international airport

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Rising Stars

Why she's someone to Watch: Because she created a log system, which can track user requirements, see them through subsequent processes and their closure. Because the system reduced response time and brought transparency between users and IT team. Because she conceived and executed a project that shrunk procurement cycles by 50 percent. Because she has her

eyes trained on user benefits all the time. Because she created a self-help desk which allows employees to access information pertaining to them and has brought them closer to HR. Because she implemented a tool that drastically reduces data capture delays and provides more accurate data for planning. Because she can convince new hires to work with higher commitment and more innovation.

hoW To poinT her ouT in a croWd: People know her as the person who entered a stormy hrsystems implementation (on new turf), recognized the multiple problems, and fixed it by getting people to change the way they work.

Brand loyalTy: she has worked with arvind Mills for 11 years.

TWo ThumBs up: her Cio calls her people skills outstanding. the proof is the growth of her juniors, and the praise she receives from business heads.

advice To her juniors: Enjoy the work you do, it will show in your output. be receptive to new concepts, constantly learn and welcome responsibilities .

The Mentor

“Business understanding, technical insight, people management, good communication skills and good managerial skills are the qualities that will make her a good CIO. ”

—Bhupendra ShahHead-Systems, Arvind Mills

Focus: it is only technology, it's the people manning it that make the difference.

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Rising Stars

The Mentor

“An eye for detail, quick learning, and his leadership traits are the qualities that will make him a good CIO. ”

—Dr. Jai MenonDirector (IT & Innovation) & Group CIO,

Bharti Tele-Ventures

Why he's someone to Watch: Because he created an ‘accounts payable’ platform that is expected to increase the telecom giant's income by quite a few crore. Because he followed it up with an ‘accounts reconciliation’ platform that saved the telecom company a lot of money. Because he did both of these in his first six months. Because he developed a data warehouse solution (with over 60 parameters) that

provides intelligence on internal attrition. Because his systems reduced attrition from over 40 percent to 30 percent. Because he led a ‘Kill Bureaucracy’ initiative. Because he can be trusted to do M&A due diligence. Because at a previous job he walked in an organization’s manufacturing plant that had just one PC and walked out two years later leaving them with an online system that managed materials, sales and invoicing.

Sizing him up: He’s responsible for Rs 300 crore.

iT philoSophy: In most cases, “IT need not be so complex or cutting-edge. Business needs can be met with something much simpler.”

how To become him: “Keep focused on business needs. Look for innovative ways to provide solutions, quickly — one has to keep up with the speed of change. IT is a ‘front end’, now more than ever before.”

liTTle known facT: His personal battle is getting to a single digit golf handicap.

Advice on deAling with stress: Don't take it home,

don't take it to heart.

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George Fanthome age40vP – Chief solutions Engagement(Mobility), bharti airtel

how She geTS her exerciSe: by criss-crossing the country and staying on her feet as she trains users of various iFFCo units to use the plant maintenance management system.

Supreme belief: in it. “it can penetrate any area of activity and improve its efficiency.”

her manTra: “be innovative and generate new ideas in order to achieve higher goals.”

when The STreSS levelS go inTo red: she “resorts to meditation and self-introspection.”

Why she's someone to Watch: Because sitting in the middle of nowhere she calls enterprisewide shots, including how fertilizer gets shipped around the country — complete with data for marketing, and various levels of reporting required in the government. Because she designed, developed and executed a spare parts inventory system that saved the co-operative Rs 20 crore. Because she’s the one people run to when they want anything from connectivity to the running of the database server. Because despite these demands on her time, her

focus is still better end-user satisfaction. Because she makes her organization look good by ensuring that financial reports and reports on factory performance get to the Dept. of Fertilizers, Govt. of India on time. Because her work helps engineers do cost-performance analysis of equipment and analyzing the causes and the frequency of their failure. Because this helps engineers to plan better, a vital process at IFFCO. Because she burnt some serious shoe leather mobilizing local suppliers to believe in an e-procurement system. Because she managed to sell the concept to people who had little trust for computers.

The Mentor

“Seema Gaur is a patient listener and she possesses most of the team building and inter-personal skills needed to be a good CIO. ” —S.C. Mittal

Executive Director (MS & IT), IFFCO

to become cio: I need to take opportunities to shoulder higher responsibilities. i also need to

broaden my horizon.

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Rising Stars

Seema Gaur age40Chief Manager (systems),aonla Unit iFFCo

Why he's someone to Watch: Because he was assigned a western hub which had a very low score for customer satisfaction (IT services) and was also rated the weakest from an IT standpoint. Because he’s the man the company called on when they needed something fixed. Because in six months he improved that score from 1.3 to 4.5 on a scale of 5 and brought the hub to number one in the country. Because he consolidated applications and infrastructure across six circles in the western region. Because in doing so, he

brought down multiple instances of data warehouses, document management systems, Citrix, mail, Internet proxy to one and this resulted in improvements in performance, greater Opex and Capex savings and enhanced the availability of systems. Because he enables Airtel to better its sales penetration during a time when they need it the most. Because with automation he made prepaid activation a differentiator. Because he opened a new stream of revenue for the company and a presence in the US. Because he showed Airtel a way to change the way it does business.

The Mentor

“His dynamism and dedication in sortingout difficult situations makes him a valuable asset. ”

—Dr. Jai MenonDirector (IT & Innovation) & Group CIO,

Bharti Tele-Ventures

yippee! momenT: When he implemented a tool for data-crunching and Mis that increased productivity by 97 percent.

people ThaT depend on him: 3000+.

happy beginningS: in a short while, he will be moving to bharti's retail business after 10 years in the telecom vertical.

Tough guy Talk: “in searching for advice, i have always tried to go to the person who is the expert, irrespective of level or function.”

on hiS manTle Top: the chairman’s award for business excellence.

hiS liTmuS TeST: “if we undertake a task, which does not have the customer as the first and foremost beneficiary, we might as well not take it up.”

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cios need to become students of their business, learn the company's products, its competitors and its current challenges and opportunities. this is the language of ceos, not talk of erP and crm.

Sanjay Kotha age39vP (it&i), bharti airtel

Why he’s someone to Watch: Because he conceived and implemented the idea of consolidation of IT teams across the organization resulting in the formation of Reliance Infosolutions. Because this brought all the IT manpower across the group under a single umbrella. Because he initiated an application consolidation exercise with improved features, availability, and reach to users bringing tremendous business value. Because he led a team

that developed a knowledge management system to harness the ‘idea-capital’ of RIL. Because the initiative won them an award. Because he gave management insights into their business. Because he understood that managing an IT portfolio with more than 2,200 employees and over 900 projects needed measuring and monitoring. Because he devised a project management system — a single point for project reporting, tracking and billing. Because his people will follow him no matter what.

direcTor’S cuT: one of ril’s directors commented: “With alok around, we can expect results without an overworked team.”

and The award goeS To: alok Kumar. no prizes for guessing. in two years, he has received 15 awards.

hiS manTra: he believes in enjoying his work and practices yoga and meditation to combat stress.

a ‘novel’ idea: With a book already in the stands, he is working on his father’s biography and scripting a book on defining success.

The Mentor

His mentoring has paved way for several potential leaders. There have been times when employees who have quit have returned if they could employees who have quit have

if they could employees who have quit have

work with him. if they could

work with him. if they could

—Ashish ChauhanCIO, Reliance Industries

there is no substitute to hard work, but working hard is of

no consequence if it does not deliver results.

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Alok Kumar age38senior vice President, reliance industries

Current battle: Learning to keep a balance between the professional and personal fronts.

The Mentor

“He will make a good CIO because he influences users to own their solutions and ensures IT costs are kept within budget. ”

—Avinash AroraDirector-IT, New Holland

Why he's someone to Watch: Because in an organization that’s decidedly entrenched in manufacturing, he has made Web services sexy. Because he tied together multiple Web applications and gave uses a single way to access them. Because he can do all this with a staff of three. Because he encouraged the organization to work in real time when he automated the back-ups of its Web database servers. Because he removed little tumors of processes that were not adding value. Because he gives people in the field a break. Because he loves empowering sales folk. Because he can simplify complexity. Because when he commits, he will deliver.

This year’s hair puller: Implementing a sales incentive project. Business kept re-evaluating even as the project was entering its completion phase. The project’s critical delivery schedule made matters worse.

WhaT he sTill needs To conquer: Learning to take tough decisions at the appropriate time.

Who Trumps The Technology-business debaTe: Technology. It’s more important because technology can accommodate any complex business procedure.

his (and adidas’) Tagline: IT can make things possible out of the impossible.

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Deepak Kumar age35Manager-IT, New Holland

momenT of reckoning: He implemented MedTrak in a newly built hospital in Jaipur — starting from ground zero — in less than a month. He was bestowed with the title of ‘IT Guru’, which he still proudly holds.

Trademark: He is always on the look out for the latest technologies and implements them with zest.

his nh 18: With more than 18 years of experience in the healthcare sector, he has crossed many a milestone in his remarkable journey. And is still going strong!

personal chill pill: He indulges in morning walks, yoga, swimming and badminton to unwind.

driving produCtivity: if we demonstrate confidence in our

people and provide clarity of expectations, then they will

deliver more than expected.

The Mentor

“He grooms people and is loyal. He is involved in business decisions, pricing,infrastructure, apps, customer-facing initiatives, training, testing, etcetera. What more do we want in a CIO?”

—Manish GuptaCIO, Fortis Healthcare

Why he's someone to Watch: Because he introduced an innovative online payment gateway for Escorts website for OPD appointments, diagnostic and pathological tests. Because this not only made life easier for patients but also generated over Rs 1 crore for Escorts. Because he took up the initiative to collect and organize master data, set up workflows, train users and build required interfaces so that all inventory

figures are readily available. Because he changed the face of the institute by carrying out extensive research and finding an ERP MedTrak that paved the way for a centralized system to support and simplify operations. Because he is a self-starter. Because he took upon himself to simplify a complicated Oracle implementation by dividing it into modules thereby training 2,000 people and implementing it at one go.

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Pankaj Mathur age40Head Technology, Escorts Heart Institute & research Centre

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Tough gal Talk: I wish to create faith in the business that a CIo can become CEo.

business or Technology?: It is more important to be business-focused and explore appropriate technologies to meet business strategies and objectives.

biggesT learning: The importance of IT processes. Implementing IT processes cuts across business processes and results in meeting the expectations of stakeholders and excellence in business.

Why she's someone to Watch: Because she’s the person everyone turns to when they want process. Because her organizational mind helps the power company deal with high customer expectations better. Because she plays an important role in planning over 16 major customer-facing applications and she’s only been with the company for a year. Because as part of the team that’s responsible for project closure, she's on

the last line of defence. Because she is responsible for garnering user acceptance. Because in a country where not paying electricity bills and stealing power are rampant phenomena, she is part of the solution. Because the innovative solution, an automatic reading meter system, is a first in the country. Because the solution has already been implemented on a base that accounts for 70 percent of the company’s revenues and will save them lakhs.

adviCe to juniors: Be professional and innovative. understand customer requirements and earn customer satisfaction by meeting those requirements.

The Mentor

“Anjana Mishra will make a good CIObecause of her abilities to lead, develop, train, monitor and motivate IT teams to deliver quality services. ”

—Akhil PandeyPrinciple Executive Officer,

North Delhi Power

Rising Stars

Anjana Mishra age36assistant Manager-IT, North delhi Power

What’s next: My immediate challenge is to convert It operations into a profit center.

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Why he's someone to Watch: Because he drives multiple projects across people, process, product and partners in order to significantly improve IT operations. Because his initiatives have increased the level of satisfaction among IT users from 3.12 to 4.43 on a scale of 5. Because when he speaks, business listens. Because he opened his door to business and asked them to review the performance of his services. Because he created an ecosystem where IT can host workshops and reviews with business and partners to continuously improve their operations. Because he ensures that best practices in one circle are replicated elsewhere. Because he turned around a delayed disaster recovery project by making quick and hard decisions. Because he led a team that finished 18 yellow belt and 2 green belt Six Sigma projects that have delivered substantial operational efficiency and saved much revenue.

man To go To: He supports over 10,000 users and 700 IT staffers report to him.

WhaT he hasn’T Tried his hand aT:Little. His experience in both IT consulting and service providers and now in the enterprise means that he’s covered pretty much the whole spectrum.

The differenT pulls in his life: Managing the ever-increasing volumes in the telecom business while continuing to meet business SLas and keeping the overall cost of infrastructure under control.

achievemenT in progress: Building IT teams for three new circles.

admission: Unlike many of his peers who say being business-oriented is important (because it’s what’s expected), he isn't shy of saying technology is just as important.

Why you can’T Take him by surprise: Because he believes that change is the only constant and his success depends on how quickly he can adopt.

Where you can caTch him WiTh a furroWed broW: on a Mumbai local on the way to work as he plans out his day.

his sTrengTh: defining a stretched target and then motivating teams to ensure success.

The Mentor

“He has used every failure as an opportunity to improve processes, technology and team competency.”

—Navin ChadhaPresident-IT, Tata Teleservices

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Shirish Munj age40Vice President–IT operations,Tata Teleservices

Advice to his juniors: Plan before execution. Give space to learning new things and implementing them and demonstrating your prototypes to management. Bridge all communication gaps.

For the cio chAir: He says he needs more space to utilize his skills and demonstrate the merits of IT to be able to fit into a CIO’s shoes.

Yours trulY: He swears by IT because he feels that IT can make a 360-degree change in business practices and individual efficiency.

his de-stressing tool: He believes that being friendly with his colleagues and enjoying his work help him win over stress.

Planned work and proper efforts management help execute any project and beat deadlines.

Why he’s someone To WaTch: Because he took it upon himself to update a business user data backlog by making SAP function online. Because this has been instrumental in easing the process of trade-tracking. Because he implemented EXIM (export-import) document management which —

integrated to SAP. Because this has gone a long way in standardizing documents. Because he has taken online information directly to the decision maker’s table. Because he has provided external support for his CIO that has resulted in a revenue-centric IT desk. Because he has integrated his team to derive maximum throughput.

The Mentor

“He has an understanding of technology and tools, with many years of experience behind him. He has the skill to manage and enhance data.”

—Pankaj ShahDGM Systems, Adani Wilmar

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Arun Parmar age39Deputy Manager-systems, adani Wilmar

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The Mentor

“He has shown tremendous commitment and strives to improve himself and IT as a whole. Virender is an excellent contender for the CIO’s post.”

—K.B. SinghHead-IT, BSES Power

rule oF thumb: He says that if you want to do good work, the sky is the limit.

Advice to his juniors: Take a deep interest in whatever job is assigned. It will automatically become interesting. Do the smart work and recognition will follow

techie-tAke: He says between technology and business, focusing on technology is more important because business follows superior technology.

Anti-stress WeApon: Taking interest in his job and sharing difficulties with his seniors help him fight stress.

Why he’s someone To WaTch: Because he conceived, designed and implemented a task tracker module to keep on top of different IT projects. Because this initiative helps in analyzing performance management of all personnel in the department and allowed top management to view all reports online. Because he automated the process of pre- and post-audit of energy bills resulting in a reduction of faulty billing and improved customer satisfaction. Because he conceived of an innovative e-bill: sending energy bills to consumers over SMS and email. Because this went a long way in bringing a new dimension to customer care and increased customer satisfaction. Because he implemented a single window application for different business apps. Because this gave consumers from any zone an instrument to use BSES’ services from anywhere in Delhi.

Practical knowledge can be gained more through interaction and discussion with everyone. You have to be receptive with or

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Virender Pathak age39Team leader (software & IT Process Designing), Bses Power

The Mentor

“He is comfortable managing the big picture but can get down to basic operations. He should be a good CIO within the next 18-24 months.”

—Arun GuptaGroup CTO, Shoppers Stop

Why he's someone To WaTch: Because Purshottaman joined as a senior officer in charge of a loyalty program two years ago and — in the words of his CIO — will be ready to fill his shoes in two years. Because he implemented a system that drove up sales by 48 percent. Because he is part of the team that formulates plans for store rollouts in a time when competing retail chains are expanding at a rate like never

before. Because in retail — where time is measured by the shelf life of spinach — he saw the need for a communication system that would bypass all the shortcomings of phones and email. Because he is part of the brains that brought Indian consumers scanners that are attached to shopping carts. Because he helped the organization get one step closer to retails’s holy grail: one view of the customer. Because in his own words he will not use advice he does not believe in.

WhAt he hAs eArned: according to his CIO, his position at the management table. Thanks to his ability to contribute continually with a judicious mix of business and technology ideas.

the roAd AheAd: Opening seven new stores this fiscal. The challenge is ensuring a smooth rollout given that a geographic spread will not allow them to rush to the stores to fix problems.

deFining moment: When he took over a troubled project and proved wrong an english IT team’s perception that the Indian IT team was incompetent and incapable of handling a system that would support multi-channel retailing.

stress buster: not surprisingly, retail therapy.

his pAssion: His kids riya and rikhil.

I try to imbibe the culture of working 'with' the business team rather than working

‘for’ them.

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Veneeth Purshottaman age38Head Technology, HyperCITy retail

RealItY check: It’s important to remember that in most companies It is a service provider.

The Mentor

“His business sense, commitment to continuous learning, ability to communicate at all levels, and his ability to motivate people will make him a successful CIO.”

—David BriskmanCIO, Ranbaxy Laboratories

Why he's someone To WaTch: Because he is has a methodical and analytical mind. Because he looked at the workings of 15 sites and 20,000 major activities and told himself he needed to fix the mess. Because the dashboard he created helped the organization figure out problems before they become problems. Because the dashboard was so successful it’s now a critical project management tool for other complex projects. Because he is quick on his feet. Because he developed the IT strategy and requirements for the

separation of one of the divisions into a new company — while its business plans were still in a state of flux. Because he is adaptable yet stays within project goals, is dynamic but doesn’t overwhelm and is accountable to the T. Because he keeps an eye out for developments in his space and in the business’. Because he can talk past multiple cultural barriers and get the job done in time and below budget. Because in every role he has performed to date he has earned the trust of the business leaders and the respect of the IT team that works with him.

WhAt gets his cio’s nod: His global experience.

recent holY molY! moment: After 18 years in the US , the realization that there’s a subtle difference in the way things are handled in India.

FAcing the heAt: “I have learned to step back and reassess the situation whenever the stress levels go up.”

his ingredients For An eFFective decision: Look at different perspectives and the big picture.

clAss Act: “If I had advice for my juniors it would be to maintain their integrity.”

in his Free time: Overcomes his fear of bungee jumping.

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Ramkumar Rayapureddy age39Director, ranbaxy laboratories

Why he's someone to Watch: Because he decongested a huge bottleneck by proposing a cult concept called ‘Operation Freedom’ which improved system efficiency by 90 percent. Because he conceived and executed this project and ensured that DTDC could maintain its 22 percent growth rate. Because after that he went a step further and gave his organization’s competition

a run for their money by creating ‘DTDC Plus’ — which has features like money-back guarantee and SMS/e-mail alert on delivery. Because within four months of its launch DTDC has crossed 40,000 bookings per month. Because he has been instrumental in creating a state-of-the-art data center with power, maintenance and criticality. Because his active involvement has helped DTDC get ISO certification.

Hiccups on tHe way: Resistance from end users while changing existing operational process left him thirsty, but he has always taken it as a challenge.

poster wortHy: Don’t see a dream for which you need to sleep. See a dream which will not let you sleep till you convert it into a reality.

anotHer featHer in His cap: He wants to challenge himself to achieve 100 percent centralization of IT architecture and control.

I always consult my seniors as well as juniors because I believe ‘united we stand, divided we fall.’

The Mentor

“He has the strength to go deep into a subject and look beyond. This rare ability has helped us to decide better on critical subjects.”

—Mrinal ChakrabortyGM-IT & OPS Process

DTDC Courier & Cargo

Rising Stars

Satyajit Sarkar age32AGM IT & Network, DTDC Courier & Cargo

The Mentor

“He is a taskmaster. He focuses on the inputs — how ever ambiguous they may be — and the desired results.”

—Anwer BagdadiSr VP & CTO, CFC India Services

Why he's someone to Watch: Because he was part of a project that put together the technology, the architecture, and the SLAs that allowed the parent company to grow 100 percent year-on-year. Because he can templetize success, as he did when he took the same approach (as the previous project) and used it for other services. Because his company grew from a 100 people to 4,500 sites in four years and he took it in his stride. Because he looked at the company’s incredible expansion and figured what it needed the most was a method to keep its multiple services healthy by centralizing its problem/resolution center. Because his system is robust enough to deal with 12,000 tickets that come via e-mail, Web and voice. Because he is willing to work with incomplete inputs and will not run around asking people for clarifications that they cannot give him. Because as hard as he pushes his people, they still want to be on his team.

tHe number of people tHat depend on Him coming to work:4,600.

His leap of faitH: Among the lessons he learnt from his boss: approach a problem with a win-win attitude, put in your 100 percent and things will turn your way.

management guru line: Today's CIO must create the capacity for IT to do more for the business through two very basic strategies: IT must ensure they are doing the right things (effectiveness), and doing them right (efficiency).

two-pronged approacH to problem solving: “Practice an 'inside-

out' approach. Start with yourself, and then develop your personal development plan. Next go from top down and ask: 'How do I add value to the organization? How do I do my job and provide extra benefits?

face to tHe world: “Walk the talk. It isn’t easy but it demonstrates your integrity, personality and above all your character.”

wHat makes Him feel in control:Completing one task before going on to the next one, even if it means a lack of variety.

wHo He likes talking to: His three-year-old daughter. He fields a lot of questions, he says.

As a CIO, it is important to think beyond point-to-point cost delivery or saving and to start

looking at positive revenue impact.

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Moinuddin Shaikh age32Vice President (Technology)CFC India Services

Why he's someone to Watch: Because his contributions have dealt a severe blow to a power company’s deadliest enemy: electricity theft. Because he pulled together various business applications onto one platform for the power company, including modules for new connections, metering, billing, inventory, and human resources. Because by integrating these systems and giving them a single sign-on, he has not only improved Torrent’s customer satisfaction indices but has also

increased employee productivity. Because Trivedi also heads a newly-formed communication cell, which watches over all new technical implementations including GIS, SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), etcetera. Because on his watch IT strength has reduced from 67 to 27. Because his work has helped the company project sales better, thereby allowing it to comply to the Electricity Act of 2003 better. Because he has done his bit in reducing the gap in the demand and supply of power in the country.

bragging rigHts: His work has contributed to making the AT&C losses (aggregate technical and commercial) of the company one of the lowest in the county.

redefining smootH-talker:It took him four months to fix an ERP implementation that a well-known consultant was running 18 months late. The project was to be scrapped due to user non-acceptance.

brand loyalty: In an era of the five-year CIO, he’s already stayed loyal to his company for four years.

moment of epipHany: If you want to solve a problem then “don’t keep it with you. Share and discuss it.”

His personal devil: The need to take more calculated risks.

WAys tO AvOId prOCrAstInAtIOn: Freeze a product if it is capable of future enhancement and implement it — instead of indulging in endless evaluation.

The Mentor

“The caliber of Jagdish’s team building is outstanding. He is accepted as a team leader across the team leader across the team leadercommunity of IT and the business users.”

—Jyoti Bandopadhyay,VP-IT, Torrent Power

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Jagdish Trivedi age40AGM-IT, Torrent Power

Why he's someone to Watch: Because he’s probably among the first Indian IT officers in the construction business to convince his management of the need for a world-class EPR system. Because as the project manager for Project Sankalp (a SAP ERP implementation), his work has become international reference material in the construction industry. Because he is only one of three Asians on SAP’s Global Industrial Advisory Committee (for advice on product improvement). Because he doesn’t sit in a cubicle and win his battles: project Sankalp for instance required him to motivate employees to use the system. Because he dogged his management into entering a profit-making business until they agreed.

wHat He took on: 98 percent of the organization was skeptical about project Sankalp’s success.

How to point Him out: The guy who re-wrote history: his ERP project is the worlds highest altitude SAP implementation at 10,000-plus ft above sea level. And made HCC the first Indian construction company to have world-class ERP

otHer contribution to tHe organization: Creating an open work environment that ensured the highest employee retention ratio within the organization.

cHaracter mark: Not averse to taking risks.

His rules: “IT teams need to contribute beyond implementations and until value extraction starts.”

advice to tHe youngsters: “Any assignment that you take up, assume that it is your final test and you have to give more than 100 percent to make it happen.”

personal battle: “CIOs create brands for themselves that opens doors for a lot of opportunities. I need to be more outwardly looking and create a brand for myself.”

MOttO: top class attitude is what will take you to the top.

The Mentor

“Mangesh will make a good CIO because he commands respect among business users at various levels.”

—Satish PendseCIO, Hindustan Construction

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Mangesh Wadaje age39DGM Information Systems,Hindustan Construction

EvEn among a stEllar crowd, it is possible to find the few who rise head and shoulders above their peers. The people whom we feature in our ‘Ones to Watch’ program have one thing in common: they've earned the respect of their CIOs, their peers, and business leaders. They understand the woes of their users, and use IT to address them. To a man (and woman), they have what it takes to rise to the top.

But even among such people, it isn't hard to find some who go far beyond what is required of them. These are people who test the boundaries of their job role, find that

they can do a lot more, and pester their bosses until they are allowed to do it.

Such people are essential, nay, critical. Once, IT was viewed as distinct from business, and CIOs were asked to align the two. Tomorrow’s CIOs will have to do a lot more — they will have to weld business and IT into homogenous coherence, and have a say, not just in the IT department, but also help define business strategy.

This is no pipe dream. In fact, at Computerworld’s (a sister publication of CIO) recent annual Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference in the US, Anthony Hill, CIO of the Golden Gate

By Balaji NarasimhaN & KaNiKa Goswami

From this year's Ones to Watch winners stand out three. With their innovation, business strategy and project driving skills, they have impacted business in a way that’s hard not to admire.

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Cover Story | Leadership Lessons

EquaLS

FirStAmong

University, said that “We need to change the dialogue to really eliminate the lines between IT and the business.”

Hill is not alone. Peter Walton, CIO at Hess, has banned IT staffers from referring to business units as customers. Instead, Walton wants his team to treat their fellow employees simply as 'company-mates and peers'.

But, is it reasonable to expect CIOs to play a vital role in business strategy? The words of George Bernard Shaw come to mind: 'The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'

Of course, once the unreasonable man achieves something, then reasonable men can be expected to agree that it was quite reasonable all along. But more than reason and the lack thereof, the chief reason why the CIO of tomorrow should lead change is because of a horizontal view — in fact, attendees of the Computerworld conference said that CIOs and other IT executives have a unique horizontal view of how their organizations, and how changes in one unit could affect others. Managers of business units may know the most about their own fiefdoms, "but they never see what [another unit] is doing," said Richard Gius, CIO at Atmos Energy.

So, what's so special about the Ones to Watch? To give you an idea, we have chosen three people who stood out. Read on to find out how these people have gone from strength to strength by showing innovation, project leadership skills, and the ability to formulate business strategy.

thE BuSinESS StratEgiStgEorgE FanthomE likEs to bEgin Early. Many years ago, in his first job in a large organization, he walked into a manufacturing plant that

had just one PC, which was used for word processing. Two years later, every floor of the plant had a PC and many tasks, like the management of plant and machinery maintenance, materials management, sales order, and invoicing, were handled with the aid of IT.

Such implementations no doubt helped Fanthome to get a good idea on how useful IT implementations were. This was to help him later, when he developed an accounts reconciliations service offering that delivered huge cost savings by reducing headcount. Explaining how Im

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George Fanthome had 36 hours to migrate a system that handled provisioning for 12 million mobile users. He finished 11 hours ahead of time.

Cover Story | Leadership Lessons

he achieved this, Fantome says, “The accounts reconciliation service offering was reengineered around a best-in-class IT platform which automated multi-way matching for reconciling accounts. It provides a GUI-based workflow for resolving unmatched items and extensive MIS, thereby enabling the business to track and monitor open items.”

For Fantome, the key challenge of this implementation revolved around account structures and writing matching rules. “The solution simplified manual tasks required to reformat account structures to enable matching and automated the actual manual matching being done at an item level,” he points out.

Another of Fantome’s successes was an enterprise data warehouse solution for attrition management intelligence. He created a system that monitored 20,000 employees on over 60 parameters and identified high attrition risks. This helped bring down attrition by around 40 percent. “The details of the attrition management module are a closely guarded recipe and a source of competitive advantage for the organization,” he says when asked for details. But, broadly speaking, he says that employees were tracked on a large number of parameters derived from statistical analysis. Dashboards were created to enable managers to receive advance warning of employees with a high likelihood of someone quitting.

But business strategy goes beyond just ensuring cost savings. Fantome has also lead an initiative to kill bureaucracy and inefficiency in his organization.

Explaining, he says, “As an organization grows rapidly, a number of processes are formalized, and this leads to a certain amount of delays and bottlenecks, which hamper the speed of execution.”

As examples, he cites the need for a large number of approvals that are required for procurements, the delays caused by multiple parallel approving authorities, and an incident-based system as opposed to a policy-based system. Regarding the method he used to tackle this, he says that an

organizationwide campaign was run to receive suggestions of such bottlenecks and how to solve them. “These were received directly by a senior business leader without any filtering. A cross functional management team met every month to take on the spot decisions on changes required to implement corrective action.” Based on this, support functions like finance, procurement and IT were asked to reexamine processes and simplify them.

hErE’S Your DEaDLinE

A focus on business strategy doesn’t mean that Fantome doesn’t pay attention to coordination and deadlines.

A recent project involved the migration of a production system that handled customer care and provisioning for over 12 million mobile subscribers. “This was a complex migration that involved a high degree of coordination between multiple teams like the technology team, the IT projects team, the operations team, customer service and finance. Technically, terabytes of data were involved, along with a database schema change — all of which needed to be done in a limited production downtime window.”

To ensure that this was done, a new version of the application was installed on a new hardware platform, and this involved migrating from Sun to AIX. Discussing the operational details, Fantome says, “All the data was backed up and then restored in the new environment. The data was then loaded into the new database schema and the entire system tested before being released to the users.” All this had to be done in a 36 hour window, but Fantome and his team reduced the downtime and ensured that the system was handed over 11 hours ahead of schedule to the users.

Understandably, Dr Jai Menon, group CIO & director (IT and innovation), Bharti Airtel, is proud of Fantome. “George is a recent addition to the IT team at Bharti. In a short span of six months he has built credibility for himself in the organization. He has picked up business domain knowledge rapidly and has been contributing to the organization with high impact project deliveries,” he

To qualify for the 2008 Ones to Watch honor,To qualify for the 2008 Ones to Watch honor,T candidates had to be nominated or sponsored by a CIo. Candidates could either be deputy CIos or top It lieutenants but not yet full-fledged CIos.

ones to Watch honorees had to demonstrate expertise in a wide variety of areas, including expertise in a range of business and Itfunctions, experience in leading a large project or conceiving a new business product, and the ability to turn around a troubled project or organization. they needed to have a list of on-the-job accomplishments in their backgrounds and had to be business strategists, project drivers or innovators.

After a due-diligence review by CIo’s editorial team, 20 honorees rose to the top — our ones to Watch for 2008.

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How we CHose tHe winners

Cover Story | Leadership Lessons

points out, and goes on to add that “An eye for detail, quick learning, and leadership qualities are the traits that will make him a good CIO in his career path.”

TIp: hit hard, hit early. if you want to know what business wants, look at business users for your answers.

thE innovator in thE Four yEars that Virender Pathak, Team Leader (Software & IT Process Designing), has spent in power company BSES, he has proved that innovative thinking can put life back into the most old and tired systems. His strengths in process design and IT implementation, backed by innovative thinking have stood by him. Of course, it helped that he was able to handle wide-ranging interfaces efficiently at various levels. In the view of his boss, K.B. Singh, “He thinks afresh and brings unique as well as efficient solutions. That’s what impresses me the most. He is planned, systematic, articulate and drives projects in a professional fashion.”

And Pathak showed innovation in an area that service companies like BSES need the most: customer care and billing.

Typically, meeting the constantly evolving and varied expectations of consumers is the weakest link in an utility services company. Earlier, customer care was not really one of the strong points of BSES and neither was its billing process. As BSES took on more customers the bills on hold mounted, costing the company huge amounts every month. In addition to their challenges were the problems that faced every utility company in India: rampant power theft. And doing billing the manual way was not helping to resolve the issue. In many cases, BSES officials who wanted to clean up the system were being held back by a lack of data.

“We have consumer related applications, which are very sensitive especially for a utility company like ours. It’s known that, till now, customer services at BSES has not

really been up to the mark,” confesses K.B. Singh, Head IT, BSES Power.

“Pathak designed a system that is completely customer-oriented. It has one interface for the customer helpdesk, another for the call center, another on the website. Consumers can go and use the application anywhere. They can check out the status of their applications and follow up what action has been taken, understand their bills, see their meter readings, etcetera.” Evidently, this is a big leap from the old system, where customers never had access to any of this information with remotely any ease.

Virender Pathak created an online billing system that reduced BSES's non-payment exposure from about Rs 50 crore a month to Rs 2 crore.

Cover Story | Leadership Lessons

ELECtriFYing Show

And it has given the power company to show up its competition. A 2007

survey commissioned by the Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC) revealed that consumers of BSES’ services were happier than those who used the services of its competition. The study also showed that BSES fared better on inflated billing than its competitors, a problem that was third on the list of issues consumers had with power companies. What really made cusotmers happy? That their bills were always delivered on time.

The fact that there were more happy customers even got the attention of Delhi’s chief minister, Shiela Dikshit. “Delhi has been the finest success story of the power sector reforms,” she said towards the end of July last year.

Having their billing and customer tracking system online has added value in more ways than one. “Earlier there were corrupt practices, people getting together with consumers and bills being generated wrongly,” Singh says. The bills on hold, claimed to have been generated wrongly, amounted to almost Rs 5 crore a day.

To help find the organization out of the mess Pathak created a process, which set up checks and balances. “Today, whatever input goes, there is a bill generated on the system, making the inputs completely foolproof,” says Singh. “Now we are holding only about Rs 2 crores of hold bills in a month.” Pathak himself says the process can track customer complaints online, with a provision to escalate the job. This, he says, also helps utilize resources optimally.

Pathak did not only focus on the external customer. He also conceived, designed and executed a task tracker module which was later named Project Repository Module. The project helped track different IT projects in execution. The implementation gave IT total control and the ability to monitor the different projects. Importantly, it offered top management complete visibility — online. This went a long way in analyzing performance management of personnel in the department.

Another system that Pathak put in place was an automated process for pre-audit and post-audit of energy bills. It has stringent checks with different parameters to gauge the accuracy of the bills being generated and has no manual intervention whatsoever. The biggest advantage of this process — in addition to accuracy and timeliness — is the fact that manpower cut by 30 percent, eliminating various layers of resources. Now these processes bills are generated as e-Bills that can be

dispatched over SMS and e-mail.“Earlier meter reading was outsourced and it cost Rs 5

per meter,” Pathak points out. “After this process was put in place, there is a solid saving on that account.” If figures are to be believed, the amount saved for reading almost 22 lakh meters that BSES serves, would work out to almost Rs 11 crore a month.

In addition to his inherent abilities, Pathak, in Singh’s opinion, is handling a very important area of the process study, process improvements, process compliance and process automation for efficient and better operations. His interface ranges from the lowest user level to the CEO. “He manages this very well, and of course, gets full support for his team,” says Singh.

From hEight to hEight

This is not to miss the fact that Singh has groomed him to be good at what he does, and as Pathak agrees, “I have

tremendous support from my superiors. Due to Mr Singh’s grooming, I have become very confident. Five years ago, I was hesitant to talk to people. Since I have been under his grooming, I feel I am in charge of my work. I used to think I was following someone but now I have some leadership skills. And more confidence.”

For a technocrat to become a CIO, the ability to align business with IT is a must. Pathak’s innovative projects for front-end operations in BSES already speak about his ability to think like a businessman. But, in addition, he is applying

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Cover Story | Leadership Lessons

himself to find ways to better use the resources the organization has.

“We create all our software in-house because we have the choice to optimize our resources. Given our limited resources, I worked on how best we can use IT to streamline processes. We have developed a meter reading system software so it completely eliminates manual readings.”

As a result of his business-meets-technology-halfway approach, BSES is saving in every aspect of operations: wastages, bills on hold, manpower and even illegal use of power which was a drain on resources.

Pathak’s innovative skills stand him in good stead for growth in his field of operations. And as for his march towards CIO-hood, both he and Singh feel that he could add value by working on communication abilities. Confidence, Pathak has in plenty, but what he thinks he also needs to learn is to utilize implementation tools better, then, he says, his confidence will hit the high limits.

TIp: sometimes the best answers are those that beyond the parameters of normal problem-solving. Be ready to look at the big picture from a new perspective.

thE ProjECt LEaDErsomE pEoplE work up the ranks in a work up the ranks in a work upsingle company and attain the position of CIO, while others are hired because they already possess these traits. Ramkumar Rayapureddy falls in the latter category.

“His last role before Ranbaxy was as director of automation and computer system validation at Schering-Plough,” says David Briskman, CIO, Ranbaxy. “In that role he was responsible for implementing process automation systems across all manufacturing plants in Schering-Plough.”

In fact, when asked for Rayapureddy’s single most significant accomplishment, Briskman cites his past before joining Ranbaxy. He recalls a project to monitor and create order across 20,000 major activities and 15 sites. Briskman says that the multiple challenges, including a vast number of systems, number of sites involved, along with different cultures, time and budget pressures as well as the strict regulatory requirements make the project

one of the significant achievements of Rayapureddy’s career.

Giving more details, Briskman says, “This project demonstrated his leadership skills including but not limited to perseverance, good communication, team work and accountability. He demonstrated the right mix of flexibility while not deviating from the project goals to ensure different cultural sensitivities were addressed. He also aided in breaking down barriers between different groups, leading to better

team work.” Briskman also praises Rayapureddy for effectively communicating with the project team members as well as site management to ensure continued local as well as global business unit support for the project. He feels that the most significant achievement of this project was the continuous improvement process built into the project methodology, which ensured that lessons learned

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Ramkumar Rayapureddy created a dashboard to monitor a complex project covering 20,000 major activities across 15 sites.

were quickly implemented, thereby leading to project delivery below budget without compromising on quality. Talking about his own role, Rayapureddy says that when the project for the single development methodology was initiated at Schering-Plough, the company had multiple methodologies, one methodology that focused on SCM, one for R&D, one for sales team, and so on. “The argument for these had always been that each area is different and they all cannot follow the same methodology,” he states.

Rayapureddy was tasked with heading a cross-divisional team of 21 people to develop a single software development methodology for the company. It took him almost a year to develop the process, but he did it.

It was while working on this project that he realized the importance of people in a project. “One of my initial reactions was 'I can do this faster on my own',” he recalls. “However, my mentor explained to me that the team will collectively deliver a better process.” Rayapureddy took this advice to heart and shifted his focus away from the project and towards the people. In order to get the team to work as an integrated unit, he set up a one week offsite meeting to improve bonding. “The initial days of this meeting were rough. However, once we came to an agreement, the team quickly completed the outline of a new process.”

Along the way, Rayapureddy also developed leadership qualities, and today, he leads the R&D IT business council at Ranbaxy, which includes the president of R&D as well as his direct reports. Here, he reviews new IT projects, monitors ongoing ones, and measures the value that finished projects deliver.

But is managing people the only ingredient that makes Rayapureddy ready to be a CIO? Rayapureddy takes pains to point out that one of his main strengths is the fact that he came from the business side to the technology side. “I can clearly understand what the business owners are saying because I have worked in their shoes before,” he says. “This helps me to closely relate to their needs and this assists me in developing the right solution for them.”

This skill was useful when Rayapureddy had to develop an IT strategy for the separation of one of the divisions of his company into a new company. Here, one of the challenges was ensuring that the technology implemented was scalable for future requirements. The big issue was that this had to be achieved without exceeding the budgets for the new company. “We resolved this issue by generating a scalable plan where existing applications from the company were initially shared with the new company, allowing the new company

to buy their own applications as their business grew,” says Rayapureddy.

One of the reasons why Briskman sees Rayapureddy as an 'Ones to Watch' candidate is the latter’s business strengths. “Successfully managing uncertainty is a core competency of any senior manager,” he feels. He says that his team has to constantly work with business leaders and identify what they really need and determine the strategic needs of the business. He says, “This requires active dialogue with the business and creativity to think outside the box on technology solutions and roadmaps.”

Briskman also points out that Rayapureddy has a very good sense of the pharmaceutical business because he initially worked on the business side before moving to the technology side. He feels that a strong alignment with business will ultimately enable success and points out that having a mix of business skills and IT skills is essential for most IT leaders.

“Rayapureddy has the characteristics of a successful CIO. He has shown the ability to lead and motivate teams through difficult projects. His approach of gaining a thorough understanding of business needs before deploying a solution will help him become a good CIO,” he concludes.

TIp: Get yourself a stint in general management. living the problems of your users is among the best ways to understand what their priorities are and will help you drive projects smarter. CIO

Assistant editor Balaji Narasimhan can be reached at balaji_n@cio.in

Special correspondent Kanika Goswami can be reached at kanika_g@cio.in

Cover Story | Leadership Lessons

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StabilityComes Home

CIO: How is innovation driven in your company?

Arjun Malhotra: To me, innovation is very simple — if anything changes my quality of life, then that's innovation for me. I drive innovation by asking people what they have done to change someone’s quality of life — be it your boss, your colleague, somebody reporting to you, or your customers. We keep it at a very grassroots level because it has to have an impact on an individual. When you put your head to pillow on a Friday night, you have to figure out what you have done in the week that made a difference to somebody's life. If we can't answer this simple question,

then why are we wasting our time doing what a million other people can do?

One of Headstrong's innovations is integrating rules and object-oriented methods. Can you give us an example?

Our clients want us to deliver solutions that are different, better, and implemented in a way that has not been done before, so that they can get an edge. We have developed systems for rule-based trading — if a particular stock dips below a threshold, then sell it. If you take objects

Arjun Malhotra, Chairman

& CEO, Headstrong, says

that — over time — IT has changed

the reasons why it is critical to

their business. Where it was once

the fulcrum of innovation, today

it bring solidity.

1975. Six engineering graduates from IIT, Kharagpur, without a background in business, start what will be India’s answer to leading international technology brands: Hindustan Computer (HCL). 1998. One of the six, Arjun Malhotra, decides he wants something of his own and started TechSpan, a global Internet consulting company.2003. TechSpan merges with Headstrong — a global consultancy and financial services provider. One thing strings three separate successes: Arjun Malhotra and his ability to create templates for success. Today, Arjun Malhotra, chairman and CEO of Headstrong, still has the magic that made HCL: innovation. Here's his definition.

By Balaji NarasimhaN

View from the top is a series of interviews with CEOs and other C-level executives about the role of IT in their companies and what they expect from their CIOs.

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View from the Top

and integrate them with a rules engine, you get something unique, something nobody else has done. It gave a client of ours a very efficient solution.

For example, one of our clients wanted to check all the trades for compliance for which there were around 16,000 rules. The engine was taking almost five seconds, but they wanted to do it in real time. With a billion trades, how do you check on 16,000 parameters for each of them? To solve this problem, we suggested a BI system that is hardware-based so that it can work fast.

Over 60 percent of your revenue comes from the capital markets sector. Will you continue this focus?

It's actually gone up. Today it is probably 75 percent. Over the next three years, we want to take it between 80 and 85 percent. Why? Because I have something unique. We have domain expertise in capital markets and we do domain consulting. We can tell you how you can run your business more efficiently.

Did the Headstrong-TechSpan merger face integration issues?

Headstrong's focus was consulting while Techspan focused on capital markets. To understand how we managed the merger from an IT perspective, you have to understand how New York works. You have various businesses in the capital markets space with a business head for each. People understand business, not IT. Also, most of them have legacy systems along

Arjun MAlhotrA expects I.t. to:

create stability

Deliver innovation

Be business-driven

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with modern ones, which makes integration tough. But we defined the backbone for IT and said that we would use this database, this middleware, and so on. Then, business managers worked with that mandate.

In a merger there is always confusion created by a lack of communication. People were told that Headstrong was acquiring Techspan, but the management team ended up being 80 percent Techspan. This left people wondering if Headstrong was acquiring Techspan or vice-versa. Sharing a vision and getting people to buy in on it, that creates a seamlessly integrated unit.

When I took over as the CEO, I sent out a broadcast e-mail about myself. I received messages from 50 people who thanked me for my email and said that in two years no one from the corporate office had done something like it. That was when I realized the biggest problem with this company: communication. I decided I would issue an update every month. I started in January 2004 and I'm still doing it.

What's your brief to your CIO and how has it changed over time?

Our requirements are a little different. When we started, my brief to the acting CIO at that time was that I wanted technology to be my cutting-edge. So, we took a lot of risk with IT. As the company grew, I realized that I had to provide my customers with stability. Now we do our planning differently. We have a 24/7-support center at our Manila office and they manage our network. We have outsourced network connectivity because that is not our core competency. IT is critical for us, we use it a lot, but I don't think that I need to build core competency in this field because I'm not using IT to differentiate myself.

Should CIOs sit on a managing council?

Yes, I think that the CIO is not just an IT person. He is more of a business person today.

He must understand my business. In my company, we don't call him a CIO; we call him a technology head. This person does not hold a permanent position— he is chosen by rotation among our senior management. We have this system because I think that knowledge of business is far more important than knowledge of technology. Since the person is chosen from my management council, he is always on my management council.

What is your advice for CIOs who want to justify RoI to their managements?

If you understand the business, then you will find a way to justify RoI, because that is what the business sees. If the CIO concentrates on how he can make a difference to his business, he'll get RoI. For instance, if you can generate information in 30 minutes, and you can optimize your query and reporting system to get an answer in 15 minutes, the question is: whom does it make a difference to? If it doesn't make any difference to your

business, then there is no RoI to be gained by this optimization.

Do enterprises in India pay enough attention to risk assessment?

Risk has many facets like business continuity, DR, client migration risk, and so on. By and large, we in India are not as good as the US, partly because our traditional management style is based on trust. We will have to change, because as we do business for US companies, we will face a very different cultural mindset.

Their way of working is different from how we look at things here. I'm not saying what we do in India is wrong — I actually prefer the Indian system because then I feel that I have to I live up to that trust. Sometimes, you are cheated — I believe that 5 percent of the people you do business with are going to take advantage of you. That's okay; just don't deal with them again. But don't let that 5 percent decide how you are going to live your life with the other 95 percent.

What is your vision for the company and how far have you been able to achieve it?

The vision of the company is to be the leader in the capital markets space. But you can't be a leader with a turnover of $200 million. When we get to $500 million — and I think that we will in three years — then we can say that we are a half-a-billion-dollar company.

We think that we have a good chance being leaders because our competition has been bought over. So, there is no one our size today in that space. We also have a solid reputation with our clients. We have the top 20 investment banks as our clients, and we offer them services that they can't get from most other vendors.

But in the end we don't want to be the biggest; we want to be the best. CIO

assistant editor Balaji Narasimhan can be reached at

balaji_n@cio.in

View from the Top

“If you understand the business, then you will find a way to justify RoI, because that is what the business sees.”

—Arjun Malhotra

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or

A year after TJX Companies suffered what is believed to be the largest identity theft to have hit a retailer, credit card companies

are laying down the law for any merchant who transacts business with plastic: all businesses that handle between 1 million and 6 million credit card transactions a year (primarily mid-market companies) must comply with the payment card industry's new Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Companies that fail to comply with the standard's 12-point specification risk

thousands of dollars in fines (from Visa the equivalent of Rs 2 lakh to Rs 10 lakh a month), though it's hard to predict what non-compliance will really cost because the penalty structure is complex. Ultimately, Visa, MasterCard and the other payment card companies could revoke merchants' rights to make credit card transactions — a mortal wound for any consumer-oriented business. And yet, despite the threat of penalties, experts believe that most mid-size companies won't make the deadline (larger companies with a higher transaction volume are already supposed to be compliant).

By Michael JackMan

If you want to transact business with credit cards, you have to follow the rules: the payment card industry security standards. Companies that don't comply face fines or worse. So why aren't more mid-market merchants already in compliance?

Reader ROI:

Security requirements for credit card transactions

Challenges to compliance

Security:

SinkSwim

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Compliance

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Compliance

Compliance is hardly rocket science — or is it? Directives to use firewalls and change vendor-supplied default passwords are simply security best practices. But in other areas, merchants struggle to interpret the standards, haggling with auditors, consultants and the PCI Council over exactly how to protect cardholder data. And they often have to reach deep into cash-strapped pockets to come up with the funds for conducting a top-to-bottom security review.

Brian Shniderman, a director at Deloitte Consulting, estimates that 40 percent to 45 percent of merchants in the US might need to overhaul everything from access management, ID control and physical security, to infrastructure, firewalls and antivirus measures.

"The industry is not sitting in a stable position with regard to PCI standards," he says.

leSSonS from TJXVersion 1.1 of the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS 1.1) was on the books in January 2007, when TJX Companies — operator of A.J. Wright, Bob's Stores, HomeGoods, Marshalls and T.J. Maxx — announced that hackers had breached its network. Estimates of the damage vary, but data thieves may have copped anywhere from 45 million to more than 100 million user accounts, from customer transactions going back to 2003.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the thieves may have begun their odyssey in a van parked near a Marshalls store, at which they pointed an antenna and picked up wireless data beamed across the store from registers and handheld scanners. The intercepted data allowed thieves to hack the main network in Framingham, Massachusetts and allowed them to download megabytes of stored customer records. At least three class-action lawsuits seeking damages on behalf of customers and banks are pending. (TJX is awaiting court approval of a proposed settlement with customers worth an estimated Rs 1,024 crore. On November 30, 2007, the company announced a Rs 163.6 crore settlement with Visa through which it would pay banks for their claimed

losses, provided banks agree not to pursue further legal action.)

Among the 11 security deficiencies with which TJX was charged: it failed to comply with the PCI standards for data and computer security. This global security standard is a product of the PCI Security Standards Council, created in September 2006 by the five major card brands: American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa. According to Bob Russo, PCI's GM, the council's main goal was to create one answer for all five brands.

It also seeks to educate companies and has taken on the vital tasks of qualifying and managing the auditors who must certify merchants' compliance (known as qualified security assessors or QSAs), and qualifying approved scanning vendors (ASVs), who test system security by running simulated customer transactions. The council is also building a lab to test and validate the security of pin-entry devices.

Despite any relief merchants may feel by only being held to one merged standard, DSS remains a throbbing toothache for many CIOs in charge of payment card transaction systems. Compliance, verified by stated deadlines, is mandatory. Fines threaten, but it's hard for merchants to predict just what they might cost because

they are levied by the individual card companies who have their own rules and rates (Visa may fine one amount and MasterCard another). Complicating matters further, these fines are not directly charged to merchants but to their card-processing banks. The banks then choose to either pass them along, absorb them or, in some cases, even increase them.

Other punitive measures are possible, including having card processing privileges revoked or, as in the TJX example, justification for lawsuits.

Most analysts agree that the majority of companies are not yet certified, though the exact numbers are hard to pin down. In an October news release, Visa announced that 65 percent of the largest merchants had been verified as compliant. Shniderman of Deloitte Consulting puts the level for midsize merchants at only 40 percent to 45 percent.

common SenSe STandardSSo merchants have little choice. But how good is the standard and how bad are the obstacles to achieving the sought-after verification? Hans Keller, CTO of the National Aquarium in Baltimore since 1999, says that most of the requirements are common sense. "A lot of pieces of PCI

Lloyd Hohenstein, VP of Schwab Technology, warns CIOs who need everything customized about SaaS. "Don't expect something unique," he says.

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are things you should be doing." The PCI council's Russo concurs. "There really isn't anything mysterious about these standards. They are all security best practices."

Those who gritted their teeth over earlier standards, such as Visa's Account Information Security and Cardholder Information Security Program, or MasterCard's Site Data Protection — and who then found the first version of the PCI security standard confusing — should at least find the latest incarnation much improved. Russo says that among the issues solved by version 1.1 are inconsistencies in terminology and language. For instance, words like the vague ‘periodically’ and ‘regularly’ have been replaced with specifics, such as annually, quarterly and monthly. Other changes ironed out distinctions between cardholder data, which merchants store and must protect, and data so sensitive that it should never be stored.

implementation ChallengeSUnless you run a large business, you'll face several implementation challenges.

Tight budgets. While larger companies (which PCI calls Level 1) often have dedicated security resources, midsize merchants may find themselves in that jaw-clenching budget bind.

Complex enviroments. Cathy Hotka, a retail technology consultant, says even mid-market merchants may be running more than 500 applications at a time in "highly customized environments with hand-written code" that has been around for years. Old code is often poorly documented, and even small changes are complicated — just as they were to fix the Y2K bug. The DSS standards are more comprehensive than replacing two-digit years with four-digit years, and they constantly change. Hotka compares complying to PCI with "fixing the windshield of a plane while it's in the air."

Conflicting interpretations. "The auditor you bring in today will tell you something different than the auditor you bring in next week," says The National Aquarium of Baltimore's Keller. Disagreements can arise over the proper way to divide up networks and secure them with firewalls.

facing pci Fear FaCTorThough it qualifies as a small merchant, The National Aquarium in Baltimore (which earns about Rs 162 crore in annual revenue) has encountered most of these mid-level difficulties. Reporting to the CFO, Keller oversees an IT staff of 10. He's responsible for application development as well as support for 500 users and 300 PCs. Keller devotes approximately one percent of his annual Rs 10 crore IT budget to PCI compliance.

The aquarium's road to compliance began in September 2006, when its merchant bank asked for an update. Merchant banks process payment cards and are the middlemen between the payment card companies and the merchants.

The 12 top-level standards quickly subdivide into finer levels of detail. For instance, 'Requirement 8: assign a unique ID to each person with computer access', contains five sub-steps, with step 8.5 divided into 16 more. In response to this requirement, Keller moved his admissions system away from one common ‘extremely restricted’ login used by everyone working the ticket booth, to separate IDs for each

Compliance

Who would question the assumption that retailers should protect their customers' credit card data? the retailers. as businesses that take credit cards have embarked

on the costly trek toward the payment card industry's (pci) compliance, some members of the national retail federation, an industry trade association, are wondering why this security effort has fallen into their laps.

last october, David Hogan, cio of the nrf, challenged the basic assumption behind pci's new Data Security Standard (DSS) — that retailers need to keep credit card data at all.

in a letter to the pci Security Standards council general manager Bob russo, Hogan suggested that if credit card companies didn't force merchants to store this information in the first place, then merchants wouldn't have to invest hundreds

of millions of dollars annually and jump through extraordinary hoops to protect it.

instead of keeping ‘reams of data’, Hogan writes, retailers could store just the authorization code given at the time of sale, along with part of the receipt: stuff no data thief could possibly want or use. With no credit card data to steal, hackers would look elsewhere. merchants would still retain enough evidence of a valid transaction to serve their customers. to credit card companies and their member banks, Hogan says that they should take responsibility for their data.

in a statement, the pci Security Standards council said that the request needs to be taken up with the card companies themselves, though the council said it would respond after reviewing the letter.

—m.J.

the retail industry advocates keeping a bare minimum of customer financial information. Just enough to still serve your customers without providing potential thieves what they need.

Why Should merchants Keep Credit Card

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employee. Internally, he now tracks users by PC as well as by their job function, so that their network access across the system can be logged. As required by PCI, passwords change every 90 days. Keller also added an intrusion detection system and revised information security policies to make them more easily understandable.

Keller decided to do his own compliance work in-house, but it wasn't his first choice. First he approached consultants specializing in PCI DSS, but he had difficulty finding a firm willing to take full accountability for its decisions.

Many consultants claim to be working

on behalf of PCI, but "none of them will sign next to you on your audit questionnaire," explains Keller. "So, if they won't stand behind me and sign on the line in case of a breach, why should I pay them any money in the first place?"

Keller does use an approved QSA, Fishnet Security, for the quarterly security scans and penetration testing required by PCI for all merchants with more than 10,000 transactions a month. The results are forwarded to the National Aquarium's merchant bank. As the company develops new applications, the QSA consultant will also analyze the code for security

compliance as part of the development process.

When it came to interpreting the standard, one area in which he and the auditors disagreed was with the proper way to secure a proprietary wireless bridge between two buildings.

"Some auditors will say even though there's no credit card traffic passing through that, it still needs to be segmented off with hardware firewalls. And to me, I cannot see a valid need for doing that when the wireless network itself is proprietary. So I think there are opportunities where the standard can be taken a little bit too far."

Despite the difficulties, Keller seems satisfied with the standard and the process. "PCI gave us a great security checklist and a great place to start. And by going through the 12 different requirements, it allowed us to ensure that we have adequate protection around the data that we have."

neVer-enDing deadlineSEven after your company meets the current standards and sets up the quarterly cycle of scans and reports, you can expect new requirements to address new threats. And with them, new deadlines.

Russo explains that the PCI Council will "make changes in the standard on the fly" as a way of responding flexibly to new threats. How long merchants will have to respond depends on the type of change. A simple patch might be required immediately. Major changes, such as the new Web and enterprise application code audit requirement due June 30, 2008, will get companies a year to 18 months' grace period. "The object of releasing a new standard is not to put anyone out of compliance when we release it," assures Russo. While penalties are the stick of PCI, brand confidence may be the carrot. In the event of a security breach, you have your customers and your brand suffering a tremendous amount of damage. Or so runs conventional wisdom.

But customer confidence proves to be notoriously fickle. Take TJX. Following its data breach disclosure, the company reported two consecutive, highly successful quarters. To some observers, the fact that TJX has not suffered serious consequences makes the carrot of customer confidence a harder sell. Says Keller: "Think of the PR, especially for an organization like ours. What if we have this huge data breach? Yet here's TJ Maxx, a well-known brand. They have this huge breach and yet they have one of their best quarters ever."

Shniderman cautions IT leaders to be careful of how they interpret TJX's good fortune. "You can read a couple of things into that," he says. "Some consumers are willing to increase their vulnerability to get a good discount," he says.

TJX might have changed their pricing or promotions during the period after the breach, or they may simply have addressed the crisis effectively, continues Shniderman. "If you have a fraud-compromising event, it's a moment of truth. The trust level goes down significantly if you don't address it well."

Whether or not customer confidence can be managed after a breach, it's a safe bet that no company wants to suffer one. And while PCI DSS 1.1 will not plug all potential security leaks, it's now a necessary cost of doing business. CIO

Michael Jackman writes frequently about computer

security. Send feedback on this feature to editor@cio.in

Build and Maintain a Secure Network install and maintain a firewall. change vendor-supplied defaults for system

passwords and other security parameters.

Protect Cardholder Data protect stored transaction data. encrypt data transmitted across open,

public networks.

Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program Keep antivirus software updated. Develop and maintain secure systems

and applications.

Implement Strong Access Control Measures restrict access to cardholder data by business

need-to-know. assign a unique iD to each person with

computer access. restrict physical access to cardholder data.

Monitor and Test Networks track and monitor all access to network resources

and cardholder data. regularly test security systems and processes.

payment card industry security standards provide a list of best practices

Common Senserequired

Compliance

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Blogs Clean Up Project Management MessBy C.G. LynCh

Blogging | Eugene Roman, group president of systems and technology at Bell Canada, knows how to play a blog. An enterprise blog, that is. And he has taught his employees to play a blog so well that they often have ‘jam’ sessions — an internal blog forum where groups of employees discuss new products and work to streamline efficiencies at the Rs 72,000 crore telecom. "It's like grabbing some instruments and going into a garage," Roman says.

Except, Bell Canada's garage is virtual and lives on the corporate intranet. The primary instrument, a lightweight enterprise blogging tool, lets coworkers blog about topics from figuring out ways to cut energy costs to conceiving new products for Bell Canada, whose distributed workforce stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Roman's embrace of blogs shows that he understands an ugly secret that IT departments all over North America don't want to admit: e-mail, used by itself, just doesn't cut it anymore for project management and interoffice communication. "There's definitely a dark side to e-mail," Roman says. "We've all had it for 20 years, and you'd think we could get it right." But most companies haven't gotten it right, and recent research indicates they're looking for

Enterprise users get lost in storms

of ‘reply-all’ e-mails while trying to

manage projects or collaborate.

Blogs make a better answer.

technologyEssEntiaL From InceptIon to ImplementatIon — I.t. that matters

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alternatives. Forrester Research revealed that 54 percent of IT decision makers expressed an interest in blogs. Of the companies that had piloted or implemented blogs, 63 percent said they used them for internal communications. Fifty percent said they used blogs for internal knowledge and content management — and these companies are leading the way of the future, analysts say.

If you're just now preparing to take the blog plunge, changing decades of work habits for a generation of information workers tethered to e-mail won't be easy. Blogs also remain a tough sell for traditional IT leaders who value a command-and-control, top-down hierarchy when it comes to their infrastructure. "Traditional enterprise solutions were designed to keep IT happy," says Suw Charman, a social software consultant who helps companies understand the use of blogs and wikis in business.

For implementation success, say analysts and practitioners like Roman who have championed the technology, you'll need

enterprise-worthy blogging tools and test group members who become believers and ideally will evangelize the technology. If successful, blogs could be the first critical building block in a group of Web-based applications to help spawn horizontal collaboration across the enterprise.

The Reputation HurdleOne starting hurdle: blogs still suffer a reputation problem within large enterprises (and even small and medium-size businesses), analysts say. Many people carry a narrow view of what blogs

can accomplish. "People are hung up on this concept of the blog as a diary and as an external marketing medium," says Charman. "There are actually very practical uses for blogs internally."

At a large company, the people most likely to have this narrow view of blogs are the C-level executives themselves. How can you combat this misconception? In the beginning of a blog effort, Bell Canada's Roman says, companies should consider avoiding the word blog altogether and use a euphemism. "Calling it something like an idea board can be good start," he says. "That's less threatening than saying, 'I want to start a virtual water cooler where people can blog and discuss new products.'"

It's also important to address security and compliance issues from the start, Roman notes. Bell Canada addressed those concerns by building the blog behind the corporate firewall. Remote workers can access it only through the corporate intranet using a VPN. "The executives are immediately concerned about legality," he says. "So you lay out what the rules of

engagement will be. That makes them more comfortable with going forward."

Start SmallWhile blogs are typically most useful when many users participate, you're better off to start small. Blogs work well when they catch on virally, and you need to introduce the idea to the right test group.

Sometimes, that test group has already given up on enterprise tools, as Dr. Mark Greenhalgh recently learned. Greenhalgh, a family physician, sought a test group for his social networking portal (which includes a

blogging feature) launching as part of an initiative funded by the United Kingdom's department of health. The best candidate turned out to be what IT managers would call a ‘rogue IT’ group (one that seeks out a consumer-grade technology to help do its jobs when enterprise tools disappoint).

The Public Health Commissioning Network — a group of 200 physicians who allocate scarce funds for drugs, technology and research — had taken to using a Yahoo discussion forum to avoid long, tangled e-mail threads. "They have pretty sensitive talks and they need to keep it reasonably quiet," he says.

The public health commissioning network and two other groups will serve as a test group for Greenhalgh. "I'm giving them a platform that's more dedicated to their needs," he says. "We need to then bring people into these communities so they can gain momentum."

Bell Canada's Roman also successfully used pilot groups for his blogging platform and other Web 2.0 technologies. "The test group is very critical," he says. "You need a friendly test group. You want them to give you the critique, but they also become the champion and say, Wow, this is cool, and tell their colleagues."

This blog effort, dubbed ‘ID-ah’ by Bell Canada, was first used by a few hundred employees in 2006, with a full rollout companywide in early 2007. The ‘jam sessions’ started in 2007 as well.

To date, more than 1,000 ideas have been submitted by employees, 3,000 comments shared about the ideas, and 15,000 employees (out of 40,000 Bell Canada employees) have voted, Roman says.

Curing the E-mail AddictsFor all the hype about Web-based technologies permeating the enterprise, not all employees love consumer IT. Some people clutch to their corporate e-mail boxes as if they were cigarettes: they're hopelessly addicted. "The primary communication medium is still e-mail," says Jonathan Edwards, a Yankee Group analyst. "We're

Blogs exemplify a different way of looking at information. It isn't realistic to organize data into folders. Instead, the new challenge is to remind users to tag their posts with keywords.

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all so accustomed to it. You can't change the way people work overnight."

One way to wean employees from e-mail communications: don't fight it entirely. The sister technology to a blog, real simple syndication (RSS), can help. At Bell Canada, when a manager decides to start a blog jam, he or she uses an RSS feed to push an invite message to the desired participants' e-mail inboxes. In the e-mail, employees can click on a link that leads them to the jam session. The message also says they have 48 hours to comment on the topic, making it harder for them to throw the invite aside.

Roman also has very specific guidelines for how people conduct themselves. One of the drawbacks to online communication formats like blogs is that they encourage passive-aggressive behavior and other kinds of what's now commonly called Web rage. "There won't be any slamming on our blogs," Roman says. "We make that very clear when people log on for the first time."

The benefits of a safe blogging environment can be huge for employees who have difficulty expressing themselves in more formal forums.

Tag It or Bag ItTeaching employees to use blog-editing tools isn't hard, since they essentially look like a lightweight word processor. Instead, the challenge comes in reminding them to tag their posts with keywords that will help with later search and discovery needs.

Blogs exemplify a different way of looking at information — asking users to accept that information stores will become so vast that taking the time to sort items into folders isn't realistic. Employees (and IT managers) need to learn how to let go. "Instead of organizing it into nice and tidy folders, they'll need to learn to let the data be messy," Charman says.

A blog post has to have keywords assigned so it will get indexed and then found when someone later enters the relevant topic into a search engine. The aggregation of the tagged search terms is known as a taxonomy, and building a good

one is critical if your blogs are to have long-term success in the enterprise space.

Tags can be formulated in ways that best suit your organization. "You can have a tag associated with a person, a sales team, a region or a product," says Yankee Group's Edwards. "It's really up to you. But establishing a proper taxonomy is so important for these tools to be effective. It gives you a smarter search engine. Without it, you will fail."

No's Not a Good AnswerRemember, if companies don't adopt blogging technologies for the enterprise, line-of-business heads are just a credit-card purchase away from a hosted offering.

Dr. Greenhalgh chuckles when asked about his relationship to the IT department at the department of health. "It's nothing mean spirited," he explains. "I've just never seen eye-to-eye with the senior information people." Greenhalgh wouldn't mind getting

IT's blessing, but he doesn't need its blessing or funding. His new information portal, centrally funded by the department of health, runs via a hosted offering. He just needs user names and passwords for the test groups and he's on his way.

For his part, Roman has prevented rogue IT uprisings by staying on the progressive side of the fence. He keeps an eye on what's happening on the public Internet and has his development team make changes accordingly. "The younger employees live off this stuff," he says. "It's what they're conditioned to using. Now, typically, guys like me in their fifties look at this stuff and go hmmm. But I want to stay 18 for the rest of my life. This is cool stuff." CIO

C.G. Lynch is staff writer. send feedback on this feature to

editor@cio.in

The nitty-gritty implementation of a blog isn't all that hard. neither is navigating the

selection of tools. In fact, line-of-business leaders who want to start a blogging effort without getting

It involved at all, need only a credit card and a Web browser to deploy a hosted blogging service

(from a vendor such as automattic) to their staff.

For companies taking the more proactive approach to enterprise blogging, says Jonathan Edwards,

a Yankee Group analyst, pure-play blogging vendors like Six apart (known for its movable type

products) make a natural starting point. Blogging is bread and butter for these vendors, and they've

made their livelihood in the past few years building enterprise-grade blogs and related tools with

simple user interfaces, data integration and strong security. also in this group: blogtronix, a platform

that integrates blogs with wikis, RSS, communities, analytics and corporate social networking, and

Jive Software's Clearspace suite, which includes blogs, discussion and wiki tools.

For customers who don't want a hosted solution because of compliance concerns regarding

business communications, some of these vendors also offer on-premises solutions.

It's just a matter of time, Edwards says, before traditional vendors like Microsoft and IBM capitalize

on their blog capabilities by pairing them with a suite of Web 2.0 applications. "It wants a more

integrated communications and collaboration suite," he says. today, IBM offers a blog function in

its lotus Connections suite of Web 2.0 inspired technologies, and Microsoft's Sharepoint contains a

blog template.

that said, Edwards warns against your ruling out the blogging specialists right now, since they've

held the keys to innovation and have developed user-friendly interfaces.

—C.G.l.

Blogging toolbox

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IT's Recovering ComplexaholicsThe first step is agreeing that you have a problem. The road to simplicity is not hard. By michael hugos

Pundit

Project LeadershiP | There’s a standing joke that business people never have to ask IT how long something will take and what it will cost because they already know the answers: it always takes a year and costs millions — and that’s just for the simple stuff.

If you don’t find that funny — and why would you? — then you are going to have to own up to the fact that we in IT are addicted to complexity. And our addiction to the complex, the expensive and the clunky is increasingly indulged at our own peril.

That’s because business people have discovered that consumer IT is better than

corporate IT. It has more features and is more responsive, easier to use, faster to install and a whole lot cheaper to operate. I’m talking about things like e-mail and Web hosting services from companies such as Yahoo! and Google, and the low- or no-cost office productivity and workflow software that companies such as 37signals and IBM provide.

What is our objection? That it’s not scalable in the enterprise? That it’s not robust? Or that it doesn’t feed our addiction for complexity? I think it’s the latter, and I think you need to stand up and say with me, “Hello, my name is Mike, and I’m a recovering complexaholic. I’m interested in new ways to get things done.”

Consider this scenario: you’re the CIO at GlobalCorp, a rapidly growing company run by some whip-smart business guys with a knack for deal-making and spotting opportunities ahead of everyone else. They run operations in North America, Asia and Europe, and are expanding into Africa, Australia and South America. They move into new markets and new countries by buying companies and growing them. They exit markets by selling off business units in those areas.

The COO and the CFO ask you to prepare a presentation for the CEO and the board on how IT can help streamline financial

reporting and increase the visibility of operations around the world. Some big deals are pending, and they think IT can make a difference. If you’re still feeding your addiction to complexity, a little voice in your head says, “Wow, this isn’t a simple project; it’ll take more than a year and Rs 4 crore — maybe more like three years and Rs 400 crore.” If you’re a recovering complexaholic, that little voice says, “These guys are moving fast; they aren’t willing to wait three years. What else can we do to meet their needs?”

If you’re a complexity addict, you round up a group of the usual suspects and put them to work grinding out a long-range

development plan. You set a go-live date that’s three years off, and you figure that in the meantime everything will just continue to operate as it always has.

If you’re recovering from this addiction, you bring together a small skunk-works team of business and IT people and tell them to cast off all pre-conceptions. You give them time frames to deliver usable systems to business people within 30 to 90 days. You tell them everything is on the table, including things that have more in common with consumer IT than corporate IT. Under your guidance, they develop a strategy that relies on a collection of readily available

IT components such as Web portals, dashboards and alerts, instant messaging and e-mail, data warehouses, spreadsheets, software-as-a-service offerings, and small programs that can be quickly coded, tested and put into production.

I think it’s clear which CIO is going to thrive in a company like GlobalCorp. But think about this: in today’s global, hyper-competitive business environment, isn’t the agility that GlobalCorp displays becoming the norm? CIO

michael h. hugos is the author of The greatest

innovation since the assembly line . send feedback

to this column to editor@cio.in.

Think about this: in today’s global, hyper-competitive business environment, agility is becoming the norm.

essenTial technology

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