CIOIN

On a recent visit to India to inaugurate their new office in Mumbai, Richard Reidy, President and CEO, Progress Software spoke to Anup Varier on the growing need for enterprises to be operationally responsive to changing market conditions and customer interactions. Talking about the evolving role of the CIO, Reidy emphasized on the need to focus on aiding growth rather than just cutting costs.

Progress Software has recently increased its focus on India? What was the catalyst behind this move?

Reidy: We have been in India for quite some time now with our product development facility in Hyderabad. But we have started looking at India as a market only recently. We always knew that India held a lot of opportunity. So we are trying to understand the specific business problems that CIOs are trying to solve in a high growth economy like India. The Savvion acquisition that we completed last year has also catalyzed our growth in India and with a new facility in Mumbai we feel we are really here.

Based on your discussions with some of your customers, how do you view the role of an Indian CIO?

Reidy: In India, organizations have spent the last couple of years cost cutting, consolidating datacenters and using virtualization. But business leaders are no longer throwing money at IT and are now asking for returns for every rupee they spend. CIOs today are focusing on delivering business value rather than just cutting costs. And, like it or not, CIOs can’t just stick to being VPs of IT. They have to act like the business leaders that they truly can be.

Today, all that enterprises are thinking about is seizing new opportunities. And for many of the growth verticals in India, bringing out new products and services has a heavy dependency on IT. So it isn’t just about IT not coming in the way of this growth but a question of how IT can be leveraged to propel it further. CIOs are becoming business process specialists.

What are some of the major challenges that Indian CIOs are faced with?

Reidy: The transformation projects undertaken at many of the large telcos involve a lot of mergers, integrations and consolidations that make them a multi-dimensional enterprise. Many of the products that they deliver are made available through acquisitions. But not all of them have similar systems and in order to maintain a steady increase in customer base they have to keep adding new services.

In such a complex scenario, just managing the process of ordering and turning on those services for the customers becomes difficult. So there is a need for order management that aids the provisioning of the services and occasionally when something goes wrong they should be able to identify and rectify it before the customers notice the issue. This leads to a need for order visibility. Software becomes necessary in order to enable this. And this is the case across industry verticals- be it logistics, airlines or even BFSI.

Moreover, creating a new product and enabling it on the system usually takes a really long time because it will require underwriting the existing platform in the BPM suite and creating a new process that will cut across multiple systems. But people are no longer ready to wait that long. They are keen on having agility and being quickly able to detect issues, solve them and even bring out new offerings to the market without losing control. Organizations want to be more responsive.

But doesn’t a responsive system work with an eye on the rearview mirror?

Reidy: All our solutions are about figuring out what is happening now, as and when it happens. And any action that you take after learning what is going on, is the response to the event. These can even be utilized for predictive measures from the patterns that emerge in real time. Based on this information, the organizations can simulate and automate the response to any event that falls into the identified patterns. So, when we say responsive, we are still looking at things that our competitors promise by calling predictive.

Is a responsive system of any use if the underlying data is unclean and unusable?

Reidy: There are firms that specialize in designing warehouses and cleaning data. We don’t offer products in that category, but our products assume that your information is trustworthy. We then connect to that trusted information and transmit it into the business process and reformat it where necessary. So issues related to format of the information can be resolved and in many cases we partner with other providers that do the previous bit.

In view of the dynamic market conditions, how can CIOs keep a tab of the changing business requirements?

Reidy: CIOs are admittedly not as adept at business as the heads of the particular businesses. But they definitely are or should be experts in generic business processes and understanding how can it be modeled, simulated, maintained and implemented in an automated manner. The business will see the CIO as a true partner only when they join hands in understanding what the business process is and judging how to modify it to gain revenue and mitigate risk.

It is only then that they become agents of recommending the most relevant technology for the business. It is important not to give the CEOs a chance to say that great ideas are being held back because IT is not delivering. They need to get their products out faster than their competition. And if that doesn’t happen, then that’s when you see CIOs and CEOs getting fired.

So do you think there is a growing synergy between business and IT or is there a rift?

Reidy: We recently hired an external agency to identify the areas in which businesses needed help with. The firm did extensive research interviewing CIOs and came up with a list which many believed would be different from the priorities of business people. But when the same firm gathered its inputs from the business leaders, the list of priorities were very similar. This shows the synergies that are coming up.