CIO Series: Mumbai: Collaboration and Scalable Architectural Approach is the Solution

New models of IT infrastructure hold the promise of making the organization more agile, responsive, and competitive. There are also cases where the IT infrastructure is aligned to the needs of specific businesses. For example, customer-centric enterprises (enterprises that have customer interactions as a lever for value) need to have flexible and scalable infrastructure. Further, these models also operate on differing economic equations, which is a key consideration in choosing one model over the other. Dataquest hosted an event along with BT to examine the potential and issues related to infrastructure models.

Mridul Srivastava, director, Marketing, BT India discussed the top three challenges or focus areas of 2012. based on a report by Gartner. He explained how every player irrespective of any industry or country, is serving in unbalanced economies and he outlined four focus areas that are directly shaping IT enterprises:

• Consumerization of IT, which has moved/developed faster than enterprise IT
• Proliferation of social media
• Increasing redundancy of Pcs
• Analytics as guiding tool for enterprises.

The unprecedented spread of social media presents loads of challenges for the CIO. Harsh Marwah, country lead, Sales & Business Development, BT India, cited possible solutions. He also talked about the CIOs predicament of Do more with Less and stressed on the need for end-to-end solutions. Such solutions are absolutely vital for organizations undergoing IT infrastructure transitions or planning to go into one.

When you talk about infrastructure transitions, it is often about using cloud computing and some models thereof. Dinesh Sharma, senior director, Business Transformation, BT India shared BTs learning through its experience with cloud computing. He said, Cloud is about adoption; it is more than just being cheaper, faster and scalable; it is about innovation and keeping pace with technological developments; and finally it is about services, not technology only. BTs technology and service offerings in cloud (IaaS, PaaS, CaaS, SaaS) are geared towards not only serving its own customers but also its customers customer, said BT officials.

Collaboration of the existing technologies with the new and virtualization is increasingly becoming a norm. Minhaj Zia, Cisco India emphasized the importance of smooth collaboration of new mobility technologies with the existing strategies over scalable architecture in the organization. He gave examples of Cisco Jabber (an all-in-one unified communication app) and VXC Differentiators. With the changing and growing enterprise needs, it has to collaborate different media to become a competitive differentiator. And this is certainly a continuous journey and not a one time project, he said.

Security of data remains the top most concern (nearly 40%) of CIOs irrespective of the industry or the domain they operate in, if they opt for cloud or hosted contact centers. Prasanto Kumar Roy asked the audience to introspect deep into this concern and find out whether the concern is borne out of their individual experience or because they have to pacify their SBU heads. Majority of the CIOs are apprehensive that their crucial information is going out of their own control, and therefore chances increase of its misuse.

The other big concern of the industry is network availability at the last mile. No matter what advanced solution an organization may have but if it is not able to deliver it to its remote customer then its of no use. So it is important for solution providers to ensure end-to-end connectivity. To these security and network related queries, Marwah said, BT takes ownership for end-to-end connectivity, and for that the customers also need to be very specific about their security concerns and expectations from the vendor. It is difficult for any service provider to develop a pan global infrastructure, but it can partly develop, own and manage with other service providers. Therefore vendors need to provide pre-emptive and proactive approaches in case of any anticipated fall out.

Another issue making things very difficult for IT heads is strict regulatory norms, along with the countrys jurisdiction in case of an MNC operating in India. In BTs case, it has to comply with strict norms of the BFSI and defense sectors in every country. Marwah added that hosted contact centers is already an established trend globally but now India is seeing a surge.

Social Media has certainly affected every possible industry but enterprises today have adhoc, unstructured and non-scalable approach towards it. Less than 10% organizations use any social media platform to communicate internally or externally.

In a nutshell: Answers to these concerns and challenges lie in adopting cloud computing in an integrated and classified manner; opting for managed services and hosted contact centers; and effectively using social media.