Bill Allison, global technology services leader, Deloitte

Bill Allison is the global technology services leader at Deloitte, responsible for delivery of the full life cycle technology services to global clients. A principal with Deloitte since 1999, Allison has more than 25 years of experience in the analysis, design, and implementation of information systems, systems strategy, and business process improvement and has worked with some of the largest, most complex technology clients in the world. Currently, he acts in a risk and advisory role on many of Deloitte's most significant engagements.

In his previous stints, Allison held leadership positions including serving as the national managing director for enterprise applications; the role of regional managing director for Deloitte in the United States' Pacific Southwest, where he oversaw significant, profitable growth in the region. Before assuming leadership positions, Allison was a consulting principal in Deloitte's Midwest Region of the US.

Allison has spoken at various internal and external engagements, all relating to his work with enterprise applications. Among those are the Global Analyst Summit, Enterprise Application Summit, and Global Technology Council meetings, as well as Deloitte DBrief webcasts for client executives on various technology topics.

He has a Bachelor's degree in business administration from Illinois State University apart from also attending the Northwestern University. Excerpts

Based on your overall observation, which technology trends do you see gaining traction in terms of investment in 2012?

 

This is something I have been talking about. The organizations of today want things to be better, cheaper, and faster. Overall, one of the things that the CEO and board members especially worry about is risk management. They want the service providers to be better in differentiated skills, so there is a constant pressure on innovation. They should be certified to serve. Another thing that clients expect is reasonable offering with demand workforce. In IT there is a lifecycle of processes, what clients want to see is how seamlessly to arrive at that transition. And, lastly talking about faster delivery, it is not about working 24x7 responses, but being nimble and highly correlated to the demand and supply.

A typical organization has 2 aspects: Core and the edges. While mission-critical applications sit in the core, other enterprise applications form the edges. The coming trend would be about the innovation in these edges. These will be defined by cloud/system architecture, BI and analytics, mobility/BYOD, and big data/new data category.

Among these, while cloud has been around for a while, it is now that the service providers and the customers are ready to plunge into cloud. And, in the coming years, we will see a larger adoption and implementation of cloud services. Talking about cloud, service providers have done away with the experimentation and have reached to having a stable product in place. The next level, if for making large enterprise clients, identify and adopt what is the best solution.

You have been talking about the death of ERP and then you revisited it, calling it a false alarm. Is it because ERP is changing or it is the rebirth of ERP?

What has made ERP still relevant and what makes us say the end is far for ERP, is the resurgence of ERP. By definition, ERP is enterprise resource planning, where the financials and payroll were first integrated with production planning and inventory controls. And many companies had been doing good business by bringing what we call as automating the core back-office processes.

As a matter of fact, legacy ERP lies in the core serve at the heart of the business and operations and has other applications in the edges. All the organizations trust and believe in ERP and slated investment plans for expansion.

Few years back, it was said that the introduction of cloud could disrupt and lead to the end of ERP. But, cloud technology could not threaten ERP, as the enterprises trusted the core and preferred licensed, on-premise, enterprise applications. And instead of replacing ERP, they are looking at options around it, with ERP at the core. Having said that, enterprises continue to move up and create complementary strategic platforms for information.

From the business front, we will see a shift from traditional time and material based contracts to subscription and outcome based projects that would be benchmarked on value, cost, and delivery time. We might see a new trend of partnership, what we define as cooperative competition, and in the future, we would see market consolidation. This consolidation will not only be between competitors and customers but also involves service providers to achieve the best solutions.

What is your take on the changing role of the CIO? In an MNC scenario, where the policies framed are headquarter-centric, how independent is the CIO of the India centers?

Be it a large or small, global or local, all the organizations should work towards attaining a balance between strategy and tactics. All the CIOs aspire to be part of the boardroom discussions and they are gaining importance in the organization as more IT is being part of the core business strategy, but even the board should involve and align the IT strategy with the corporate one. A disconnect between the two, could lead the organization into a trouble.

India is a strategic market for all major organizations. It is also becoming the innovation hub for their major activities, and this includes Deloitte too. Indian CIOs for larger and global organizations are playing a significant role by enabling IT and driving this. However in order to make a bigger impact, the CIOs have to be more heroic.