CIOs are key as business and tech have become intertwined

According to Sreekrishnan Venkateswaran, CTO, Kyndryl India, CIOs are responsible for successful post-Covid business outcomes in the face of all the changes that took place during this period.

How are CIOs leveraging technology to enable their company’s vision?

Because business and technology have become intertwined, CIOs are also key corporate strategists. Today’s CIO is the custodian of innovation more than being the provider of internal IT, and is hence responsible for the relevance of the company’s business model.

For example, the CIO of a manufacturing company in circa 2023 will be thinking of how digital twins and industrial metaverse can advance shop floor digitization. An insurance company’s CIO will want to understand the implications of blockchain on customer experience and the corporate bottom-line. A telecom CIO could be blueprinting the use of emerging drone technologies to automate the maintenance of cellular towers.

How did Covid impact the role of the CIO?

Covid shifted several paradigms ranging from employee work models to customer buying behaviour. And CIOs are responsible for successful post-Covid business outcomes in the face of these changes.

The pandemic validated the value proposition of low-touch automation. One consequence has been the mass popularity of AI and the heightened awareness of how ML can solve complex challenges. Another after effect is the acceleration of cloud adoption and the ensuing leverage of software-defined operations—from scalability and on-demand consumption to digitized business continuity and data services. The CIO has been in the middle of all this, anchoring and catalysing the ‘new normal’.

What is the difference between a CIO, CTO and CISO?

A CIO is the corporate technology keeper responsible for optimizing the company’s operating model and digitizing its business. A CTO is usually external facing, so the his role is more relevant for businesses that are technology service providers. For a company such as Kyndryl, CIOs across industries are clients served by its CTO and engineering teams. A CISO on the other hand, is laser-focussed, if not obsessed, with corporate security. With cyber-attacks increasingly being seen as a top business risk, a CISO of this decade is likely to see cybersecurity as a major concern.

That said, the line between some of these roles is blurring. Many telecom companies for example, have their CTO responsible for cellular and network transport advances and the CIO responsible for IT infrastructure, business applications and customer experience.

Is the Indian CIO any different from the global CIO?

India often brings a distinct perspective to problem solving due to the country-specificity of several challenges we face here. India-scale can bring unique design points and daunting engineering constraints. For example, because India accounts for the highest number of real-time API banking transactions in the world, Indian banks need more stringent system uptime guarantees compared to banks in other economies. To take another example, agricultural loans in emerging markets are a complex construct compared to lending in developed markets given the non-financial nature of the variables involved such as crop yield, soil health, and rainfall. The price points in this part of the world are also different, which calls for the ability to improvise rapidly.

Today, emerging markets such as India are the first to throw up demanding client use cases that set creativity in motion. Thanks to the arrival and adoption of exponential technologies, India has been able to leapfrog over the traditional path taken by developed economies. The CIO of an Indian business has to be equal to this task.

What are the difference between the duties of CIOs across various sectors and verticals?

CIOs need industry-specific expertise given that they are ultimately responsible for protecting core business models from disruption and for capitalizing on new market opportunities.

The CIO of an Indian bank, for example, will be accountable for the performance and resiliency of the bank’s core banking system such that it can handle the steep scale at which the number of Unified Payment Banking (UPI) transactions are rising in the country. The CIO of a retail chain has to ensure that e-commerce systems can optimally handle seasonality spikes and also adopt upcoming standards such as Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC).

The CIO of an agricultural equipment manufacturer will be concerned with injecting edge and IoT intelligence into autonomous tractors so that they are capable of precision pesticide spraying and spot fertilizer delivery. The CIO of an airport will want to boost digitization of the passenger journey from the kerbside to the boarding gate. The CIO of a mining company will focus on improving worker safety using computer vision and geofencing. The CIO of a microfinancing institution will want to use the power of data and analytics to predict loan defaults and customer churn. A CTO of a technology service provider has to have cross-industry breadth, given that technology companies serve CIOs across the board.

What will be the future role of the CIO?

The CIO of this decade and beyond will continuously monitor, dynamically tune, and when necessary redesign, business models based on the trajectory in which technology is moving. The CIO will be a key strategic advisor to the CEO.

How are you developing a unified data management architecture?

Kyndryl is a cross-industry technology service provider and we have developed multiple products to help CIOs. One is a “Data & AI Console” that offers a unified control plane across multiple data platforms and pipelines, thus providing data traceability and a way to measure data quality. After all, the value of the decisions that AI will generate depends on the quality of the data that goes into training associated machine learning models.

The second is an AIOPs platform that is part of an offering called Kyndryl Bridge, which provides CIOs real-time insights into their complex IT estates. The idea is to elevate operational strategy from being reactive to turning proactive. Kyndryl Bridge helps businesses to bring down outages by infusing the power of data analytics into operations; it will enable CIOs to measure the number of prevented disruptions in addition to tracking recovered failures. It will give CIOs heightened control by providing integrated observability over their tech infrastructure, and hence result in better business outcomes.

At what size of company do you require a CIO?

All businesses need a steward of innovation, regardless of whether the role is called a CIO, CTO or CDO. If technology is relevant to your business, you need a senior executive to do deep tech thinking interlinked with tangible business outcomes.

What are the Dos and Don’ts for the CIO?

A CIO needs both technical and business proficiency in equal measure and needs to maintain the right balance between the two facets. The role is necessarily cross-functional and spans internal business units, hence it needs leadership as well as communication acumen. I believe that the score to rate a good CIO is a vector of four variables – technical prowess, business sense, management skills, and integrity.

aanchalg@cybermedia.co.in