"Consumerisation and Megatrends - CIO's Challenges Today"

Young has been with Informatica for over 11 years and held the position of a CIO for about 8 years. He was recently in Bangalore to address the keynote at Informatica World Tour events. Data Quest had the opportunity of catching up with him and understand some of the priorities and challenges he faces as a CIO. Here are some excerpts:

What are you most proud of at Informatica?

First and foremost is my team. They are the ones I'm most proud of, as I can't deliver anything without my team. I feel that my best IT team sits in Bangalore.

From a delivery standpoint, there are things we have done around master data which I think are very unique in the industry and drive business value. My pride lies in driving technology to get information we need at the right point of time.

As a CIO , I ask myself - how do I drive value back into the enterprise. To me, it's never been about infrastructure or apps and processes - it's about making information available at the point of need. A few years ago, we built a master data solution to get a single view of our customer. So, if a customer touches us on our website, our sales guy can see the CRM system and while checking our customer support, he can get a view of the customer and see his activity.

What are the biggest challenges CIOs face today?

Our biggest challenges go across themes - I think that consumerization and mega trends really impact CIOs.

Earlier, technology was deployed at enterprises and then went to consumers. Now technology goes to consumers first and then we try to figure out how to place it in the enterprise. For instance, people want to use Dropbox and other consumer services that are easily available. There's a disconnect on how it will be used in the enterprise. Personally, I believe Dropbox is great for sharing files and as a consumer, I love it, but as a CIO, I hate it. The security implications that it creates matters. What happens if someone puts an internal document out around an M&A activity, product roadmap or pre-release financial on Dropbox? It gets compromised.

The whole idea of consuumerization creates a lot of issues for us. It forces us to manage employees' expectations internally. The employee isn't wrong in wanting to use consumer technology, the challenge is that consumer technology is ahead of enterprise technology and CIOs have to catch up and figure out how to adopt it.

With megatrends, CIOs are trying to figure out the value of social, mobile, cloud and big data, and how to manage these new elements in the company. Some concerns we ponder over are, 'In cloud, my data is not fragmented out, how do we make sense of it', 'My employees are creating designs on their mobile devices', 'If my customer is carrying a sensor in his phone, how do I take advantage of geo-location data?', 'How do I manage and use social media' etc. Those create many challenges for us.

If you're not planning around mega trends, your successor will. We have a constant fear that if we don't make sense of it soon, our successor will and we have a fear we're going to lose. It's not about the job - we can be out of business.

A CIOs job isn't getting easier with time, it's a lot harder than it was. We expected a few years ago that technology was going to make our lives easier. In fact, it's the other way around - technology has made our lives harder.