Mentor: Four Steps to A Business CIO

In the last two decades the CIO's role has changed dramatically.  Today, the primary challenges for CIOs are how to extract greater business value from IT implementations and how to provide greater differentiation, agility and intelligent insight. This necessitates that CIOs start thinking like business men. They need to really internalize the business proposition that can be brought to bear because of a technology intervention. Here are the four competencies CIOs of the next decade have to acquire to do that.

End-to-end technology delivery in business speak. Today technology is no longer about CPUs, clock rates and storage. It is about an integration architecture and about how a CIO can talk about the value of technology in business terms. Take for example, a mechanism we created called the ARB or the architectural review board. This is a collaborative effort between business and technology to decide the roadmap of a technology stack based on our business evolution. The ARB looks at all package and architecture decisions around B2B and B2C IT stacks. It also decides which IT function stay in and which are outsourced. The ARB creates a roadmap of how a business process will evolve over the next three years - and therefore how a technology stack will evolve. This is updated every year.

Financial depth and modeling. This is about cost innovation. At Airtel, an example of this is the S1 Utility Outsourcing Model (the revenue-sharing deal between Airtel and IBM.) But this could only be created after a huge amount of financial cost engineering.

And to be able to have the financial acumen to do something like that, it is important for CIOs to play roles in different business functions, perhaps even run a small P&L responsibility. This will help them acquire financial depth and understand the various pushes and pulls of a business. For example, I was given the opportunity to run Airtel's Enterprise Services business (the telecom business of Airtel) for about a year as a joint president and it taught me what it takes to run a business.
Business development and partner relationships. The CIO of the next decade will have to turn their suppliers into partners and create alliance-type relationships. This will allow a CIO to introduce new revenue streams. At Airtel, for example, we have been working with providers like Google, Blackberry and Apple to bring new products into the market place. If you are thinking this is easy for a CIO to do, here’s an example for a manufacturing CIO in the auto industry: introduce communication services — smart, intelligent devices — into products that are rolled off the manufacturing floor.

Deep people and customer engagement. The IT model at Bharti is based on what we call the IT Community Practice. It encourages a virtual organization in which the partners and employees of Bharti weave together, creating one entity. This promotes deep engagements with our partners’ employees so that there is no feeling of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. On the customer engagement side, my team has been made responsible for running Airtel's customer services.  Opportunities like this can help CIOs get closer to the customer of the business.
These are the skills that CIOs of the 2010 decade will need to acquire as they evolve so that we can have CIOs as business leaders, sitting at the head of the table, steering the course of business.

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About the author

Jai Menon
The director for technology and customer service at Bharti Airtel and the group CIO of Bharti Enterprises, Menon joined the company in 2002.  He started his career at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Labs, USA, and rose to become an IBM executive  where he assumed the office of executive director in IBM’s Software Group. Before joining Bharti, he was corporate officer and EVP at AT&T and also played the role of CTO across its businesses.