Why Indian CIOs Excel at Driving Business Innovation
They view themselves to the degree that change agents and fight to harness technology for transformational purposes
by Navi Radjou
Posted onward Made in India: May 28, 2008 2:34 PM
In the last few weeks, I interacted with the CIOs of leading Indian firms such as Tata Motors, Larsen & Toubro, Asian Paints, ICICI Bank, ITC, and Suzlon to learn how they are driving business innovation in their organization. My aim was to benchmark their innovation performance against their US and European peers.
In a report published last year, Forrester reported that only 28% of Western CEOs believe that their IT department is proactively driving business innovation. I have heard many Western business execs complain that during the time that their IT function is good at showcasing cool new tech inventions like RFID and Web 2.0, it is powerless to align these technologies by the firm’s business processes in a way that boosts value and impact for the enterprise. In other words, Western CEOs view their CIOs as great tech inventors but poor business transformers. As a result, in most US and European companies, the IT department is relegated to a advocate function, instead of action as any novelty catalyst.
But in India, I found a totally different scenario: here, the IT department is actively driving business innovation. The Indian CIOs I met view themselves as change agents and strive to mounting technology to continually transform their firms’ products, services, processes, and in like manner trade models. Based on my research, I identified two key reasons for for what cause Indian CIOs excel at business innovation:
1) Indian CIOs are obsessed by IT/business alignment. Unlike their Western peers, Indian CIOs are not career IT managers. Many of them come from a monetary theory or operations background and have held P&L responsibilities as ordinary managers or business unit leaders. Manish Gupta, Tata Motors’ CIO, was previously a senior sales exec. He credits that experience for his ability to usage “customer-focused innovation,” and to proactively engage his business peers in building the business case for emerging technologies. Manish Choksi, CIO at Asian Paints, is in addition the firm’s Chief Enterprise Strategist: this dual role allows Choksi to act being of the class who a mediator between IT and business, ensuring that IT “keeps the lungs on,” while also driving long-term growth by enabling new trade models. All the Indian CIOs I met used the term “time-to-value” again and again: in some measure than dabbling with the latest technologies in a lab setting, they strive to swiftly scale the deployment of cutting-edge technologies in a matter context that yields greatest importance for their corporation. As Choksi eloquently puts it: “As a strategic concern innovator, my task is to leverage IT to compress the aspiration-to-execution cycle.”
2) Indian CIOs are effective at orchestrating innovation networks. Rather than reinvent the technology diverge in-house, Indian CIOs rely on external providers to address chiefly of their technology needs. They avoid developing custom applications from scratch, and opt for packaged software from vendors like SAP. To effectively confront his company’s growing business introduction of novelty demand, Anantha Sayana, Group CIO, Larsen & Toubro, has shifted his IT staff’s responsibilities from tech developers to sourcing professionals of external IT solutions. Many Indian CIOs have built fluid ecosystems that tap into the creativity of rank-and-file employees, customers, and partners to conceive and tool innovative concern solutions.
As innovative Indian corporations like the Tata Group, ICICI Bank, and Larsen & Toubro aggressively expand abroad, expect their business-savvy and well-networked CIOs to empower, and even drive, their firms’ international growth strategy.
