CIO Gyaan at the Gartner Summit
By Sunil Kumar
Mumbai, Feb 22, 2007

The Gartner India CIO Summit 2007, an annual conclave of Gartner for Indian CIOs ended in Mumbai yesterday with Gartner's annual predictions for the future of the Indian CIO community.

Gartner claims that as Indian companies continue to increasingly take on global competition overseas as well at home, leveraging and optimizing use of IT assets for maximum effectiveness and productivity has become a competitive imperative.

Gartner's research shows that Indian CIOs define success in 2007 as working with business in ways to build upon IT's strong internal focus to deliver growth and results. Companies claim to be examining business models and process, and retooling to compete on a global stage.

The CIO Summit India claimed to demonstrate how CIOs and IT professionals will accomplish next-step goals: by working effectively "in the business" to deliver current results, and "on the business" to realize strategy and value.

The closing keynote of the summit summed up the preceding two days and touched on a number of issues including technology futures, tactical decision making, sourcing issues and key comparisons of global v/s local CIO issues and imperatives.

Linda Cohen, Research VP& Distinguished Analyst, USA, Gartner mentioned that there was a pivotal shift in local software infrastructure. Elaborating on the massive uptake in users for Oracle, SAP and local Indian applications, technology could be used for large-scale growth provided there was a concerted effort around building enterprise architecture. The results of the annual CIO survey revealed that corporate budgets for IT had increased by 14.8% for IT and 16% for the enterprise.

The panel comprising of Peter Sondergaard, Terry Waters, Andrew Rowsell-Jones, Partha Iyengar and Linda Cohen also deliberated on the need for IT governance and putting in a lot more resources for moving from premature legacy platforms to new-age technologies. The business case was for the best possible use of enterprise architecture and better use of an information architecture.

The business strategy, skills and training depended on strategic outsourcing and provisioning differently for people, relationship management skills and acquiring services as CIOs comprehend the value of public relations and ensure that smaller projects and projects requiring better quality of thinking and better quality of information services would result in a paradigm that changed from something focused wholly on demand to a paradigm focused wholly on supply.

Since technology was now ubiquitious, the way business looks at IT and IT services is building programs that deliver staff skill set augmentation models and a shift in needed skills to better technical labor.

The panel summed up by claiming that India becoming an IT superpower would depend on market size and the drivers for value-added outcomes would depend on sheer spends in IT. As the country became more affluent and bandwidth usage expanded, the need for a comprehensive IT architecture would increase PC penetration throughout the country.