'We may soon see more CIOs becoming CEOs'

Being at the helm of the IT organization of a Telecom company in the current scenario, your role will be an exciting and challenging one. What do you think makes it so?

These are certainly exciting times. IT is no longer an invisible entity that works somewhere in the background to keep the light bulbs on. Today, in most progressive organizations including TTSL (Tata Teleservices), IT is an equal stakeholder in the achievement of business results. More particularly in high-tech, service-dominated industries like telecom, IT's role is tightly integrated with the business as a key enabler of market differentiation and competitiveness.

Today we have a dominance of IP centric technologies around us. Bandwidth has become increasingly abundant. Everyone has smart mobile devices. This has completely changed the enterprise IT scenario and led to a growing hunger for actionable information at all times and all places. TTSL is not only a consumer of these new trends but also its enabler for its growing base of enterprise customers. In this scenario the CIO must ensure that IT and Business are thinking, building and operating together for a shared goal, and that is to make the business successful - for the company and its customers.

The new age CIO has hence moved beyond the traditional role of technologist, project executor and cost manager. In fact lines are blurring rapidly. We may soon see more business managers becoming CIOs and CIOs becoming CEOs.

With competition on the rise, telecom companies are striving to stay ahead with improved customer experience. What role does the CIO play here?

For driving customer loyalty, operational efficiency and new revenue streams in an environment characterized by multiple devices, platforms and networks, customer experience management (CEM) definitely plays an indispensable role. Customers are justifiably demanding more of their service providers today, and managing customer experience as a discipline requires tracking every interaction through the lifecycle. This includes interactions and experiences at various stages, like purchasing, call center communications, payments and other touch points across the organization, and even outside, as through social media. This is well recognized and ingrained at TTSL and has spurred the deployment of IT tools and processes to garner deeper customer insights.

To deliver sustained competitive advantage, CEM has to be at the core of your strategy. At TTSL, this is achieved through continuous focus on strengthening the network in terms coverage, speed and capacity, supported by a responsive customer services organization and a dynamic information technology eco-system. CEM depends a lot on surrounding systems capability that have IT at the center. For example, the ability to reach the bottom of the pyramid and define systems to measure stage-wise experience parameters for a given customer and correlate them for personalized support require Big Data analytics to be institutionalized. The CIO must create the right avenues for these trends to be seamlessly ingrained into the IT ecosystem for delivering superior customer experience.

As Telecoms increase their focus on cloud and mobility, and use big data and analytics to become more competitive, to bring operational efficiencies and reduce costs, what is the opportunity for the CIO?

Cloud, Mobile and Big data are all equally important pillars of the modern enterprise.

Enterprise segment is now moving towards Mobility. I see major shift happening for enterprise towards more and more mobility, which means you make yourself independent of devices and platforms. Cloud is certainly a key requirement here because unless the content and data reside on the cloud, it will not be accessible in a Mobile environment which requires access from different platforms, networks and devices. Enterprises are also moving towards empowering their workforce so that information is readily available in all places and at all times. Building powerful data warehouses that can provide drilled-down information is becoming crucial.

This is indeed an opportunity for IT, not only to integrate more tightly with the business and influence business outcomes, but to execute at last that crucial architecture transformation that one has been planning for many years but unable to get around to. Moving to Cloud is not a fork-lift operation. It is an opportunity to make your applications and data architecture leaner, reevaluate your information security systems and finally retire those infra-heavy processes that were consuming a lot and delivering little. Same reasoning applies to Big Data adoption (say Hadoop in place of DB layer) and Mobile Device Management.

At TTSL, we see demand getting stronger on these axes of Mobility, Cloud and Data which I think are going to be the defining trends of the enterprise future.

What is the biggest technology challenge/threat for telecom companies at present? How are you dealing with it?

With technology becoming more integral to the business, I believe that the challenges of the technology leaders today are increasingly the challenges of the Business.

From a CTO perspective I see the biggest challenge would be to assure network agility with the data explosion brought in by the new services like M2M. Agility does not refer only to capacity but also to adoption of new technologies for access, backhaul and core, and speed of migration. In the next phase, I believe telecom will not be a stand-alone service and hence its propagation would require domain expertise in diverse business segments. Managing an eco-system of partners and integrating their products into a unified solution would be another challenge, given that time to market expectations will continue to shrink.

On the CIO side, as technologies like M2M, mVAS etc proliferate, the challenge would be to develop sustainable monetization models and thus ensure profitable business growth. CIOs need to be able to bring differentiation through innovative new offerings leveraging social media, big-data analytics and enterprise mobility. Cloud and enterprise mobility will also bring their own challenges on security and data privacy which will need to be managed.

In this scenario where IT is so closely linked to business outcomes, especially in a space like Telecom, what do you think should be the approach of a CIO in delivering strategic value?

The creation of the mobile enterprise has overturned all traditional concepts and led to business and IT being increasingly interdependent - with business having a stake in IT and vice-versa.

If we stop to look at the current business environment we see the dominance of IP centric technologies, enterprise mobility, cloud based applications & content, explosion of data, among others. A lot of this is enabled by IT.

Strategic value at TTSL comes from a business-led IT organization, measurement of IT along Business (not IT) attributes, Business sponsorship of IT, thought-leadership (trusted advisor to business), comprehensive and collaborative Business-IT governance, and keeping the IT roadmap in sync with the business roadmap.

I would only like to add here that IT's alignment with business is critical for survival in today's environment but it is by no means a trivial task and should not be under-estimated. Organizations have to consciously and consistently strive to achieve it. This environment requires business teams to be tech savvy and IT teams to be business savvy. There have to be a lot of common elements in the KRAs of Business and IT teams. Technology itself is an essential but not sufficient to project IT as a strategic enabler for the organization.