"Invest in Cybersecurity as if you're facing a cyber incident every day" - Insights from Deloitte India's CIO Programme Leader

In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, businesses are increasingly turning to Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to lead their digital transformation journeys and navigate the complex intersection of technology and business. We spoke to Deepa Seshadri, Partner and CIO Programme Leader, Deloitte India, who sheds light on the role of a CIO, the challenges they face, and the exciting trends shaping the future of IT. With vast experience in cybersecurity and a wealth of insights on leveraging data analytics and emerging technologies, Deepa offers valuable advice to aspiring technology professionals looking to build successful careers and become future CIOs.

As a Partner at Deloitte India, Deepa plays a crucial role in collaborating with clients to address their most critical business challenges using technology and ensuring their operations remain secure from a cybersecurity standpoint. In addition, as the CIO Programme Leader, Deepa is dedicated to empowering technology leaders with relevant insights and trusted experiences that drive business value and keep pace with the latest trends and emerging technologies throughout their career journey. Under the CIO program's umbrella, there are two main focuses: Leadership and Relationship offerings, and Research and Insights. Let's delve into Deepa's perspective on the role of CIOs and their impact on businesses today.

Can you tell us about your role as a Partner & CIO Programme Leader at Deloitte India? What are your main responsibilities and areas of focus? 

As a partner, I work with my clients to solve some of their critical business issues using technology and ensure they operate in a Secure manner (from cyber security standpoint). Building an energetic and skilled team is part of my role.

As for the CIO programme leader, my role is to deliver trusted, personal experiences and relevant insights to technology leaders at the moments that matter most. Through this program, we empower CIOs and technology leaders to deliver business value and keep pace with the latest research and emerging technologies across their career lifecycle.

Our CIO program has two main focus : 1. Leadership and Relationship offering 2. Research and Insights.

In your opinion, what are the key challenges that CIOs face in today's rapidly evolving technology landscape, and how can they effectively address them? 

Over the years, the pace at which every platform or technology that is being adopted at scale, is improving with very short release cycles. This means that what was relevant and the most powerful algorithm 3 months back, has a new successor that’s even more powerful. Fortunately, what we have also seen is that backward compatibility with versions going back to years, is also being addressed. Now that’s a result of a quickly evolving technological landscape.

The key challenges for CIOs are not only about staying updated with technology but also taking into consideration evolving business models, owing to the role’s non-siloed transformation that it has seen in the recent years. Add to this Cybersecurity, Data Privacy, talent management and financial prudence are some of the key challenges faced by the CIOs in today’s business scenario.  

These challenges emanated/stemmed from the advancement of the technology itself and one of the most effective ways to address these challenges is through robust processes and governance mechanism designed to maintain data integrity. Talent can be managed well is by creating a talent plan detailing the current state, future state and gap analysis thereby designing a roadmap to fulfil the gap by conducting training programs/roadshows on the emerging technologies and creating a pool multi-disciplinary team.  

Data-driven decision-making has become crucial for businesses. How do you see the role of CIOs in leveraging data analytics and insights to drive innovation and business growth? 
 
CIOs need to embrace data analytics. Everything from supply chain to machine floor to operations, productivity is measured against data points. The CIO must stay ahead of the learning curve when it comes to employing latest methods and algorithms to crunch more data in the shortest time to deliver business insights that deliver a credible impact. It is imperative for the CIO to understand the business objective of innovation and thus help business growth. Some of the strategies that CIOs can look at are: 

• Building a data-driven culture - provide training on data analytics, making data accessible to the required stakeholders 
• Invest in analytical tools - Collect, store, and analyze data thereby help business leaders to identify trends, make predictions and optimize operations 
• Collaborate with other leaders to align technology goals with business goals and holistic strategy for the organization. 

The digital transformation journey is a top priority for many organizations. Can you share some best practices for CIOs to successfully lead and navigate their organizations through this transformation? 

 Digital transformation is not an isolated process. It brings together human capital, technology, processing power and new platforms to bring a wholesome transition of not just processes, but the entire organization. CIOs must invest time to engage with peers, industry analysts and practitioners to understand how the future might pan out. Some of the effective practices to ease out the transformation journey for the organization include: 

1. Establish clear vision on the objective of digital transformation 

2. Connect and involve business leaders in the planning process 

3. Create a talent pool to implement and execute the new technologies and processes 

4. Communicate plan to the relevant stakeholders (internal & external) 

5. Monitor and track the progress of digital transformation and make necessary modifications as per the feedback. 

Another key aspect that the CIOs must look at is collaboration with technology partners who can bring in cutting-edge technology that might not be available in-house. 

Cybersecurity is a critical concern for businesses across industries. How do you ensure that your organization has robust cybersecurity measures in place, and what advice would you give to fellow CIOs in terms of mitigating cybersecurity risks? 

 (I’ve been a cybersecurity practitioner and it might take you a whole new set of questions to just scratch the surface of what cyber has to offer J! But let me take a shot at this.) 

The approach towards cybersecurity requires a pre-emptive stance. When the cybercriminals have struck an organization, the organisation goes into damage control mode. And this damage is not limited just to the technological infrastructure. If a data breach occurs, it impacts intellectual property – owned and shared, brand value, customer data, trade secrets, and a whole lot more. My advice to CIOs is straightforward – invest in cybersecurity as if you are going to face a cyber incident every day. Keep the defenses up but also build proactive risk mitigation processes. This will help the organizations in the long run. 

With the rise of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and cloud computing, how do you see these technologies shaping the future of IT and the role of CIOs? 
 
 The future of IT and the role of the CIO are becoming so much more interesting as compared to what they were a decade back. Emerging technologies are not only challenging technological frameworks that organizations have been working on, but also the business models that they have been used to.  

Automation, cloud and new technology models are taking root and speeding IT delivery and changing the way technology teams and business function work, collaborate and create value. These technologies are helping IT teams and CIOs to move away from traditional boundaries of trusted operator to becoming business cocreator. With the growing demand for rapid and efficient delivery of low friction experiences, technology teams are shifting from project and process focused operating models to more product and outcome centric which prioritizes collaboration, acceleration of time to customer value and other business outcomes.  

For instance, blockchain brings an entirely new perspective to trust. And to think that trust can best be built in a distributed manner, is a new way to think about doing business.

I won’t be lying when I say that exciting times are ahead, not just for IT, but for the CIO.  The CIO role is no longer necessarily a tech-based career; the career path is open to the COO and/or CEO for the truly skilled professional, and tech leaders who recognize this could have a great career ahead of them.

What are some of the current trends and developments in the IT industry that you find particularly exciting or promising, and how do you see them impacting businesses in the near future?

Artificial Intelligence: Organisations are integrating AI into enterprise applications and processes across functions. Al has proven to be useful in solving environmental issues in far-reaching ways. The Government of Haryana along with Deloitte piloted an Al-based platform to support farmers in managing crop residue through the creation of a marketplace where farmers connect with equipment providers to curb the problem of stubble burning and enabled seamless access to the marketplace through integration with familiar channels such as WhatsApp.  

Meta Cloud or Super Cloud: Increasingly, enterprises are adopting multicloud strategies due to specialised capabilities and optimised pricing. Adopting what is known simply as metacloud or supercloud involves building a compatibility layer through a family of tools and techniques that can help cut through the complexity of multi-cloud environments by providing access to common services such as storage and computation, AI, data, security, operations, governance, and application development and deployment.  

The goal is to fight vendor lock-in and allow developers to freely run ML and other workloads wherever and whenever they want. Developers often seek to do this to optimise for cost and performance. American cloud computing and virtualisation technology companies have already launched interoperable services which work across leading cloud providers, and we will see more of such cross-cloud integrators in the future. 

Decentralised Architectures and Ecosystems (Blockchain-Empowered): Using distributed infrastructure technology, decentralised ledgers enable the exchange of trusted data across networks by keeping records of each transaction. India has successfully built fantastic foundational digital infrastructure such as Aadhaar, e-Sign and Digi locker along with digitally enabled networks like GSTN. If you take the example of the telecommunications sector, the regulator has already deployed the distributor ledger technology to control spam SMS traffic and track down the unregistered telemarketing companies. On the other hand, the regulatory body for the securities and commodity market in India, under the Ministry of Finance, has instructed all depositories to make use of blockchain technology to maintain records. 

Embedding Cyber by design in all the emerging technologies will be important. Cyber acts as a ‘Break’ in the car, not to slow down the Digital transformation but to move faster.

As a leader in the IT field, what advice would you give to aspiring professionals who are looking to build a successful career in technology and become future CIOs? 
 
As you grow in an organization, don’t think of yourself as just a manager. At the heart of a CIO’s organisation is technology. And the CIO is the one coordinating the entire technological landscape for the organization. You need to be in the trenches as much in the boardroom.  

The new CIO must be “business savvy technologist”. Today, CIOs have a critical role in developing and fostering business strategy, and their readiness to leverage technology is a key competence in executing the strategy. Future CIOs would need to have business as well as technology acumen to help co-create solutions that optimize existing business and deliver future growth.  I would also encourage you to go through the Deloitte insights on  Competencies of tech leaders | Deloitte Insights.