Sawhney, a veteran with several large enterprises including Hindustan Lever and Reliance, provided a fresh perspective related to IT and disaster management. "There has to be a proper setup for disaster recovery in a documented fashion knowing that each disaster is always of a different kind. All the CIOs need to work in a direction to mitigate the risks, make sure that there are enough systems and processes to be put on ground in a manner that every time there is a maintenance upgrade and expansion, and there are no fall backs. Moreover, while reducing duplication of efforts every thing works like clockwork" He also suggested that the opportunities of lowering infrastructure costs and operation costs should be taken into account and CIOs should try to focus on them.

In the Kolkata panel discussion, Abhrajit De explained the importance of IT management software, which is becoming crucial for enterprises and service providers who want to dynamically align their businesses and IT services, achieve greater control over their IT infrastructure, and ensure an improved user or customer experience. "IT managers must have the processes and tools in place to ensure that the infrastructure keeps pace with business needs and provides guaranteed levels of service at predetermined costs," he said.

Recognizing the inevitability and the importance of outsourcing IT infrastructure management, CN Ram of HDFC Bank emphasized on the security aspect. "There is probably a lot more hype about the security issue and actual security problems. It is appreciable that ever since automation started to hit the financial industry, there has been a lot of work done on security. These range from combating internal security, which is collusion and fraud to things like maker-checker concept. Ever since Internet banking has come in vogue, security issues have gained further importance." At the end of the day, even while outsourcing, a balanced perspective is necessary, keeping in mind that the finance industry and risks go together.

Execution, orientation and actionable intelligence are going to be the new buzzwords in IT infrastructure management, says Atul Kunwar		POWER PANEL: Veteran CIOs debated on the pros and cons of outsourcing IT infrastructure management to third parties
POT LUCK Shall we get lucky with our IT infrastructure? Seems to be the question most delegates were debating between themselves

Anwar Baghdadi of Countrywide Financials felt that the infrastructure should be such that they are able to take care of the ease and flexibility of people working around that infrastructure. Thus, nothing changes even if business-outsourcing activities change. All that it requires is a framework, ensuring that there is an interconnection of a virtual mechanism to the organizational structure. Albert Herbert of Wockhardt Hospitals believes that outsourcing is also strongly dependent on the technology behind it. Managing the IT infrastructure as a loosely interconnected group of components is no longer sufficient. Rather, the infrastructure must be managed from the viewpoint of the lines of business it supports. Specifically, IT managers must have the means and tools to ensure that the infrastructure keeps pace with business needs and provides guaranteed levels of service at predetermined costs.

Some other common pertinent issues emerged from the various panel discussions. These include problems like tracking, controlling and making the most cost-effective use of the ever growing and ever more complex mix of IT assets. Secondly, CIOs are facing the challenge of ensuring availability of external services and integrating them with internal service solutions. And lastly, streamlining the daily activity workflow for a more proactive work pattern and the implementation of new initiatives in a timely fashion is gradually becoming a sine qua non for these CIOs. All the IT heads also need to strive to achieve centralized management, controlling the IT environment, be it infrastructure or outsourcing infrastructure management.

Manogyata Narayan
manogyatan@cybermedia.co.in

Page(s)   1  2