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CIO’s take on strategic technologies

Vinita Gupta talked to CIOs and solicited their opinions regarding the top 10 strategic technologies for 2008 as identified by Gartner

Gartner had identified the top 10 strategic technologies for 2008 at the beginning of the year. These technologies included Green IT, Unified Communications (UC), Business Process Management (BPM) and Virtualization 2.0, etc. Half-way through the year we decided to find out what CIOs were doing in these areas, their take on these technologies and the challenges faced by them in implementing the same.

Satish Pendse, CIO, Hindustan Construction was of the view that these technologies would be adopted in different industries to differing extents. Some of them would also be adopted at different levels in different continents. He said, “While the awareness and pressure for Green IT is greater in the West than it is in India and China, I think that it will gain as much importance in India during 2008.”

Arun Gupta, Customer Care Associate and Group CTO, Shopper’s Stop revealed that in the Indian context, of the 10 technologies mentioned by Gartner, not many had gained recognition as yet. They continued to remain trends which were yet to create an impact. Organizations had taken up the ‘green’ cause in the last few quarters, though with limited intervention within IT. The rest had been selectively explored, primarily virtualization and BPM. He was not including organizations that were pure play Internet companies that would have been influenced to a greater extent by the Web and social computing.

Green IT

While IT was helping organizations become more efficient and effective, it did have a certain negative impact on the environment.

Vijay Sethi, VP-Information Systems and CIO, Hero Honda Motors said, “Green IT has both a business advantage as it reduces the overall cost of ownership of equipment and also helps us fulfill our corporate social responsibilities. We, at Hero Honda, are governed by the philosophy of our Chairman Brijmohan Lall who said that we must do something for the community from whose land we generate our wealth. Starting from our IT policy where we specifically give focus to Green IT, we are taking significant measures to reduce the impact of IT on the environment.”

In a small way SCL-TVS Group had started adopting Green IT. It had taken the following initiatives:

• Measurement of power spent on the data center
• Conversion of all desktop monitors to TFT displays
• Consideration of power consumption and heat dissipation as criteria while selecting servers
• Consolidation of servers

T G Dhandapani Corporate CIO, SCL-TVS Group said, “Although power consumption in the data center is not significant enough to prioritize in a manufacturing company, as ideal IT professional we would like to monitor power consumption and reduce it wherever feasible.”

UC: Channels of communication

Unified Communications was expected to provide various channels of communication using available infrastructure to facilitate more effective collaboration within organizations.

“The geographically dispersed nature of our industry (construction) is providing ample opportunities for the utilization of UC. We operate out of extremely remote geographies of the country and hence various means of efficient and effective communication are always a business facilitator. We, therefore, leverage channels of communication (leased lines, radio, VSAT, etc.) in multiple ways (Internet, SAP linkage, chat, e-mails, Live Communications Server, digital notice-boards, live tracking of project progress, etc.),” stated Pendse.

Hero Honda was using e-mail (workplace and mobile), IM (instant messenger) and VoIP. Dhandapani mentioned that UC was a productivity tool and hence SCL-TVS Group had the taken the initiative to deploy the same.

BPM to leverage SOA

BPM would help organizations manage their business processes more effectively by using IT solutions. It would leverage the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and allow organizations to dynamically choose the appropriate components of software of appropriate business processes/process components. The companies would not have to tune their business processes around the software that they had chosen; instead they could choose software components to best suit their business processes. Changes to the business processes too would be easier to manage.

“BPM helps organizations focus on processes to improve agility and operational performance. As part of our move towards SOA, we at Hero Honda are currently evaluating BPM/BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) solutions,” added Sethi.

Virtualization 2.0

Virtualization 2.0 would take forward the concept of virtualization and help optimize the investments made in building IT infrastructure.

As part of its initiatives in virtualization, Hero Honda took the step of building ‘high availability’ into all of its applications. This helped not only in reducing physical servers but also ensured automatic failovers and business continuity and helped it reduce TCO while getting a quick ROI on the company’s virtualization investments.

Shopper’s Stop had been working on virtualization (storage and server) for 12 months, and this had helped it reduce the complexity of its data center and reduce power consumption by about 20%.

“We have evaluated the business benefits on deploying virtualization. Due to the high cost of licensing it was not found to be economical in our environment,” said Dhandapani.

Other technologies

The Real World Web, a concept wherein the Internet would spread its wings beyond computers to make all the objects in the world a part of the Web was another of the technologies cited by Gartner.

“The Real World Web is quite a novel thought and it will definitely see the light of the day at practical levels. However, the year 2008 is too early for the same. I think it will take another three-four years for it to become more popular,” said Pendse.

He believed that social software could be used quite innovatively. Social networks of employees could be leveraged to be a part of the extended ecosystem of an organization to strengthen its brand, take forward the innovation desired by an organization, etc. It could also be used to attract and retain talent.

Mashups were lightweight, composite applications that used Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA). These helped in faster application development through the reuse of existing capabilities and enabled IT teams to become more responsive to their internal users.

The Web as a platform for application delivery and Software as a Service (SaaS) had gaining ground. Hero Honda was in the process of delivering more applications to its users on the Web and was also exploring SaaS. SOA was gaining ground and perhaps WOA would be the next phase of SOA.

The SCL-TVS Group was making use of the Web platform and WOA for commercial transactions between partners.

Sethi mentioned that in information lifecycle management, Metadata Management played a key role. Consequently, as part of the company’s information management strategy, Hero Honda was in the process of upgrading its dashboards and business warehouses and managing metadata became important to improve the efficiency of systems and usage of information as such.

“We are yet to evaluate Computing Fabrics. As I see, it is akin to an extension of Grid computing (though not in the strictest sense) to the server level where a server treats memory, processors, and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suits the owner’s needs,” said Sethi.

Challenges faced

It was easy to talk about these technologies, but when it came to implementation, most CIOs faced various challenges.

Gupta felt that most of the technologies mentioned were evolving and finding expertise was difficult. He added, “Once vendors and partners are able to provide workable ROI/TCO models for these in the Indian context, implementation will gain momentum.” According to him the top five technologies for Shopper’s Stop were BI and Analytics, Web and e-commerce, BPM, Green IT, and Master Data Management.

The major challenge, pointed out Pendse, was the difference of pace at which these technologies were made available and the speed at which they could be absorbed. This gap was widening, due to which it took time for organizations to truly leverage the value of the investments made in these technologies.

He said, “The second challenge would be in terms of different maturity levels of these technologies. Any new technology goes through the maturity curve. Adopting it at an early stage will result in first-mover advantages and also the implementation challenges. Even integration with existing IT architecture of the organization is a challenge.”

The top five technologies for Hindustan Construction were UC, RFID, packaged software (ERP/SCM/CRM/SRM, etc.), social software and virtualization.

Sethi revealed that the technologies prima-facie looked promising. However, one of the major challenges that they faced was that there were not many good resources available to help them exploit the true potential of technology and many times it either became a ‘hit and trial’ kind of scenario or a sub-optimal implementation. “Another challenge is the hype surrounding the technologies—where people all across talk about a particular technology or set of technologies but when one tries to do a return on investment, it is a tough job,” added Sethi.

The top five technologies for Hero Honda were Green IT, Virtualization, SOA, Web 2.0 and BPM, and others would be technologies for information security.

Sethi mentioned the reason for selecting these five technologies, “I feel these technologies are mature enough for CIOs to realize their true potential. The CIOs can relate these to their pain points and easily identify how these will help them make their organizations more efficient and effective or exploit the Web as an avenue for collaboration.”

vinita.gupta@expressindia.com