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Follow UsThere
is hardly any sense of proportion
when we talk about IT. And that is why the IT challenges of small or
mid sized business are never of the corresponding proportion. In
fact, these challenges end up being far more complex for
purely
because of the restraint that has to be exercised on the budget front
and various other issues like server space, what model to go for,
vendor management, getting the right skill set etc. me
And
well, there is no singular answer
when it comes to these questions. The answers are varied and so are
the choices. And as experts say, choices in these cases have to
essentially revolve around your needs. And well, our CIOs agreed on
that at the DQ CIO Summit on IT Infrastructure in partnership with IBM
held recently in
Delhi.
Love
thy People
But the problem is that the IT heads of
mid sized companies don't have too many people to love. While a
typical SME in a tier 1 city shall still have someone on the lines of
a CIO, the mid sized organizations in tier 2 down cities may not even
have an IT department.
And
even in a place like Delhi, an
organization with a workforce of 500 odd people, has an IT team of 4
to 5 people. In these cases, not only skill-set balancing becomes a
major issue, but vendor management also becomes critical. Most of the
CIOs calendar is either crowded with vendor meetings or with
technical sessions with his team. Says Krishna Kumar, CIO of CyberMedia
India ltd, “the biggest challenge in a mid sized organization
is to
get the expertise to set up in the initial infrastructure.”
He
adds, that in most of the cases CIO is forced to take the outsourcing
decision because of limited availability of skillsets within the
organization.
Anuj
Mediratta, Director, Ace Data
Devices, who also looks after the IT function within his
organization, agrees that skills at hand is a major challenge which
most of the mid sized organizations' CIOs have to face. He is not
only the epitome of this challenge, he also adds a new dimension to
it by constantly trying to figure out new models.
Another
issue that the mid sized CIOs
are facing these days is the struggle with constantly increasing user
expectation. And in a country like India, where bandwidth is not so
readily available and comes as a cost, the rise and rise of the video
and other media hasn't helped the heads of IT. Rajesh Munkal, Head -IT
of Carzonrent
says that a possible solution to the people issue is so move towards
SaaS model. However, there are budgetary constraints associated with
that as well.
That is one mantra that the CIO's are
looking towards now. Since people management is interwoven with
vendor management (if you don't have the skill set within you have to
look without!) and that too is entangled with budget problems, the
best solution perhaps is to go by monthly payments. According to Kumar,
who has implemented
the monthly model across the organization, it is a sound way to deal
with monetary issues.
There
are other solutions ofcourse. One
of these is to go for the
management facilitates, that
some of
the leading vendors are now offering for mid sized businesses as
well. However, the monthly model has been a proven hit here as well,
so our CIOs suggest! And finally, in order to get out of
your management what you really need, be it more people or more
servers- there is only one trick- demonstrate it to them. Show them
what it can do for them, and the deal is yours!