The importance of flexibility and retooling architecture

According to Vinod Sivarama Krishnan, Chief Information Officer, Indus Towers Limited, smart companies and the smart CIOs should be devoting a substantial percentage of their efforts to basically retool their architecture. Edited excerpts from a video interview.

The journey of the CIO…

When I started in IT a good 30 years back, I certainly could not have imagined the journey that we’ve taken in terms of the quality and the depth of the role that we have. I think it’s always been surprising to me, given how much dependence there is on this key propelling function of our work: Should not the position that CIOs occupy organizationally be commensurate with the level of dependence that exists on them?

I think what we are beginning to see over the years is that the CIO is quickly becoming a pillar of the management team in the same way for instance that in a factory environment the head of manufacturing would have.

I can tell you that while I might be engaging with my functional peers much more in terms of topline and bottomline, I am certainly engaging with my team and the efforts that I am bringing, a lot of my attention is going towards how we retool our architecture to be flexible.

I think the importance of the role is being recognized and obviously that is leading to the selection and advancement of those people that are actually able to bring a strategic shift to the role and create that level of infrastructure, for want of a better word, that allows the company to operate.

Going forward, I think one of the things that we’ve always wondered when it comes to CIOs is how much of our job is science, how much of it is an art and so on. But in a very good way we are heading toward the part where the CIO’s role becomes a science, more in terms of the accepted management theory of: What is your role in the organization and how does that role impact the organization?

What you are seeing for instance with Chief Data Officers or Chief Digital Officers is just highlighting those other facets of the role that were always there and probably were not as prominent as they are now. With those pieces, I think this role is getting fleshed out very nicely and stabilizing very quickly to be one of those pillars or foundational roles of leadership.

The CIO in the telecom world…

One of the very interesting things about telecom as a domain is the close convergence between the operational technologies that is used in the telecom business versus the Information Technology that is used there.

Much more now than before, when if you look at it, fundamentally the telecom industry’s own equipment is nothing but an IT equipment of a different nature. That is great because that gives us a relevance in a business scenario that is somewhat higher but also a challenge because you have to now expand your own vistas in order to support, when it comes to areas like IoT and operationally improving performance using Information Technology. You have a higher bar in a sense in a telecom organization.

The other part I’d like to mention certainly is scale and data. Telecom is one of those industries that generates data disproportionately relative to other industries. I think recognizing that and handling that, and operating at scale, these are some of the things that I think are the nuances of telecom that make IT more challenging and more rewarding. I can certainly say that perhaps second to retail, telecom is one of the most challenging sectors for professionals in the technology world.

Post-pandemic, has our industry upgraded the way it should have and have we made changes to be better prepared with BCP for the future?

While many might say yes to that, and at a very apparent level the answer is yes, I think the true answer is no. I think we were very good as an Information Technology community, in finding those quick fixes that tided us through a very difficult time. But have we fundamentally retooled our infrastructures? Have we fundamentally recreated flexibility in our ways of working? I’m not sure.

There’s a reason for that. It is because flexibility of your systems, infrastructure or applications comes at a significant cost. As the pandemic ended, as your business as usual resumed, your normal business requirements, the demands of IT in terms of improved functionality, in terms of digitization, these things came back to the table. And in many cases have come back with a vengeance.

One of the lovely things about something like ChatGPT is that is that it doesn’t transform in and off itself, it is able to fire our imagination in a very real way to say: Oh! Here is a technology that I didn’t know could do this. How does this affect me?

That project of how do I retool my architecture, how do I make myself flexible by design, how do I spend money on that? That has gotten pushed slightly lower in the list of priorities. A lot of people now understand, what if it happens again? But in some ways that understanding has been overtaken by your more immediate pressures on your business, topline and bottomline and so on and so forth.

I think the smart companies and the smart CIOs should be devoting substantial percentage of their efforts to basically retooling their architecture. I can tell you that while I might be engaging with my functional peers much more in terms of topline and bottomline, I am certainly engaging with my team and the efforts that I am bringing, a lot of my attention is going towards how we retool our architecture to be flexible. That’s because I know that if something should happen, there will be no excuse for a forward-thinking CIO to say that he got overtaken by business priorities.

On emerging technologies like AI-ML, IoT…

From a model point of view, our industry is great for new technologies. Things keep coming. The way that I have looked at any new technology is, how does this help me to solve past, current and future problems? Whether you look at AI or ML is to say, I am sitting with these problems and I anticipate these further problems coming in and, how do you apply these technologies? Is it the answer to the present or future problems? If it is not, how is it evolving towards that direction.

What we look at as CIOs is: Does this technology mean something? Is it ready yet for prime time? We keep our hands engaged with each one of these technologies to understand their stage of maturity. We also look at whether it is really the answer to our problems.

What has changed is typically when you get into a situation where you want to start leveraging these technologies and there’s a certain critical mass, maturity of the product and evolution of the services and product.

One of the lovely things about something like ChatGPT is that is that it doesn’t transform in and off itself, it is able to fire our imagination in a very real way to say: Oh! Here is a technology that I didn’t know could do this. How does this affect me?

I think the biggest challenge is really to those who ignore this as a passing fad, because it will have an impact. Over time, there are clever people who will figure out how to apply this technology in every facet of their daily life.

When it comes to business we don’t have that luxury except for the vibrant startup community that seems to have a lot of bandwidth to delve into these technologies. For us who come from more established businesses, it’s more important to understand what potential the tool has.

Many other tools will come out now that ChatGPT has come out. As a technologist I am super excited about ChatGPT. As a person I am super excited by it. As a business CIO I think I’ll wait for a while till I can start using it in my stack.

(Catch the complete interview at the CyberMedia Series YouTube channel)

Vinod Sivarama Krishnan

Chief Information Officer,

Indus Towers Limited

sunilr@cybermedia.co.in