Charles Wang, the founder of Computer Associates, who wrote a book, TechnoVision, about a decade ago about CIO-CEO relationship had famously remarked, “I wish CIOs had just one hand; so that they would stop saying, on the other hand.”

That was then. When the CIO's job was to suggest options and leave the decision to other C level executives “who understood business”. While Wang may have been impatient about it, the CIO behavior that he was referring to was a result of the expectation from him by the average CEO in a large corporation.

Things have changed. The CIO is more a business executive than a techie today. And his understanding of the business is not inferior to any other C level exec's. While he may have smoothly-and sometimes not so smoothly-transformed himself to be the business manager that everyone expects him to, his responsibility of evaluating technologies and keeping an eye on the development in IT to be able to get the best out of it, has not gone away anywhere.

The CIO Handbook, done by Dataquest once a year, is our way of just providing a little helping hand.

India is a high-growth economy, and growth is visible in all sectors of the economy-manufacturing, consumer products and services, infrastructure, business services... No matter how cliché it sounds, the responsibility of making that growth smooth, if not faster, lies with the CIO. While there has been an acceptability of that fact and the CIO's importance within the organization, that does not make his job any simpler. And let us make a disclaimer: Ten handbooks like this will not do it for him. It is just a small little help.

So, how did we select what we have carried in the handbook, from the vast world of business and IT. Here is a small round-up of what we have taken into account while selecting the edit mix of the issue.

Growth is the Driver for IT
Much of today's IT (the technologies, solutions, and services) is developed to cater to the needs of the developed markets in the West. These are markets that are growing 1-2% annually, if at all. In contrast, much of the Indian business is growing at 20% plus.

Accordingly, what drives business value in a market like the US and in one like India are very, very different. In a developed market, with little growth happening, the only way to increase bottomline is by cutting cost. Much of the developed world's strategy for IT deployment and outsourcing is derived from that reality-to get an extra half a cent from a dollar.

On the other hand, in India, with the growth happening all around, it is a question of how well you capture that growth. The priority for most CEOs is to make that growth smoother and faster, while not letting bottomline get out of hands.

So while the buzzword for business-and hence IT-in developed markets is efficiency, in a growth market like India, the key word is scalability. The CIOs job, by and large, is to make that possibly as well as he can.

It is not that efficiency is not important. Forward-looking companies in telecom, retail, and aviation-all high-growth segments -have invested on IT solutions that would build efficiency from day one. But the top-of-mind issue for every CEO-of a big company or small, of a services firm or a manufacturing outft-is growing fast, growing well.

Much of the technology areas, case studies and companies in CIO Handbook have been chosen keeping this reality in mind.

No SMBs Here
The fact that India is a high-growth economy which is starting from scratch in many areas means the rules of the game are not yet fully written. Small and medium business-a term borrowed from the developed markets and still used a lot in the Indian market-is a phrase that many business organizations today are not comfortable with.

In a market with 1% growth, everyone knows who the leaders are and why they will be there for time to come. So a company with a 0.04% market share does not even aspire to take market share from a company with 22% market share. In a nascent market like India, that is not the case. Most small companies-in high growth segments of the economy-believe that it is a matter of time before they become large enterprises and genuinely hope that they can beat today's leaders.

We endorse that belief. And that is why slowly but steadily, we are replacing SMBs with emerging enterprises when we denote the small companies in high-growth segments.

Thanks to India's vibrant IT culture-a result of its offshore industry-many such emerging enterprises believe that they can take on the existing leaders with the help of IT, and are taking all steps to turn that belief into practice. Not surprisingly, many of them are taking a lead in IT deployment.

This is also shown in how vendors are adjusting their strategy in the market. On-demand is something that most software vendors are looking at very seriously. In Oracle, for example, while CEO Larry Ellison says that they are still not convinced about how to make money from the small business segment, his India MD identifies on demand solutions for emerging enterprises as a hot trend for 2008.

Many of our case studies and technologies are taken from this segment-emerging enterprises.

IT in Core Business, not Support
The paradox of Indian business is that while there is growth and no large-scale cost cutting measures which drives IT deployment and outsourcing in the developed markets, affordability of the end products and services is extremely important in a market like India. For lack of space for further explanation, let us simply call it the Nano paradigm.

In a typical legacy business operation, when a company wants to cut down costs, it starts with areas where cutting cost will not affect the business significantly. That is the case in developed markets. In large enterprises in developed markets, since the business value is linked to cost cutting, all IT deployment and outsourcing starts with non-core, back-end support functions. But in markets like India where the cost of end product is the driver behind business strategy, IT gets applied first to core business, rather than support, which we are already seeing. This gets accelerated because everything is so new that the risk of applying new technologies is far lower compared to the rewards of potential benefits that it can bring in for a company. So, by and large, most growth sectors are putting IT straight into the core business resulting in more verticalized approach by the vendors and solution providers.

The selection of areas in 'IT in Excellence section' in the CIO handbook and the topics in 'CIO Gyan' represent this reality.

Emergence of IT-heavy Verticals
Business transformation through IT was a phrase invented by large IT companies to impress Fortune 500 clients. But if there is business transformation that is truly happening through IT, it is not the Fortune 500 but selected areas of Indian industry which are realizing that the entire business can be reinvented using IT.

Media is a case in point. In other areas like engineering, telecom, and online businesses, IT is being deployed to change the way business is done, creating far better customer experience, at the same time increasing efficiency.

Bollywood-India's showbiz industry-is transforming production through the use of IT. We have an interview with Subhash Ghai, CEO of Mukta Arts and director of popular Bollywood classics such as Hero, Saudagar, Ram Lakhan, Karma, and Taal-on how Bollywood is taking to IT.

Little Legacy
The absence of legacy IT in India in most businesses means that the decision regarding IT deployment will not be done to minimize risk but to maximize rewards-meaning more strategic than tactical. As the articles and case studies in the CIO Handbook will show you, this has already started happening.

The challenge before each CIO is to make sure that he/she makes a clear distinction between the demand side of IT and the supply side of IT. The fact that manpower is becoming such a scarce resource in a country of a billion people-thanks to India's status as the global IT services superpower-means going forward in the near to medium term it will be far more difficult to attract technical talent to user companies.

A judicious mix of outsourcing and in-house deployment will be a far more effective step. Maybe, in next year's CIO Handbook, we will focus on that in a major way!

Shyamanuja Das
shyamanujad@cybermedia.co.in

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