DAY 2/ Session

The CIO as a strategic business partner

Sunil Chandiramani, partner and national director-advisory services, Ernst & Young reiterated the changing role of the CIO and expectation from the CIOs

While elaborating on the evolution and role of IT, Chandiramani stressed the changing role of the CIO while giving insights into the various aspects of CIO who can be perceived as a strategic business enabler.

Traditionally IT heads managed internal corporate function and thanks to the emergence of ERP, CRM, SCM and other business enabling solutions which transformed the role of IT.

Chandiramani opined that while IT was expected to drive reliable cost efficiency, act as support for business agility, value creating and innovation, support in long term planning providing the competitive edge, the CIO was engulfed with providing better customer service, portfolio management, money, handle security, risk, procurement, performance measures, governance and so on.

With the change in time, Chandiramani finds there is a change in CIO management framework that is creating value by evolving an IT ecosystem management to realize the value as well.

From management point of view he finds the CIOs providing IT value management, IT M&A management, IT risk and security management, IT value governance, IT value business and so on.

Chandiramani finds that most not a big ratio of company executives perceive IT from a strategic perspective as still they opine that cost of IT should be reduced.

However, he firmly believed that the information capital is crucial to business growth and an intangible asset. “The way one can optimize the framework making it a strategic business enabler is to facilitate innovations in business models, support strategic agility and infrastructure capabilities which improves business processes which in turn results in business growth,” observed Chandiramani.

— N Geetha