Depending on who you listen to, the good times are back - or are going to be here soon enough. In a couple of months, risk-taking is going to be back in style, which makes it important to remind ourselves to sniff out the opportunities out there. That is why, at its last Leadership Summit of the season, CIO brought together three people who, individually, bring some of the elements needed to pull off the extraordinary. Sanjay Nayak points out the possibilities; Gourav Jaswal tells you how to make the right choices; and Sumit Dutta Chowdhury explains how he pulled of an idea many CIOs would consider unusual.
Key Highlights
Gourav Jaswal
Synapse, DirectorTitled "Why You Choose What You Choose", explaining " how Heuristics can shape CIO's business decision", Gourav Jaswal's presentation talked about the various factors that govern decision making functions. It is a something one should know to be able to sell. He spoke about various types of heuristics- for instance anchoring heuristics that rely heavily on only one trait, or availability heuristics, the tendency of basing predictions of the frequency of an event. For CIOs to justify their investments, there is typically a situation which is termed as 'Escalation of Commitment', where people justify increased investment based on the cumulative prior investment. He pointed out how using heuristics usually skews the decision making process and what we should be using is the Cogitative system, which allows us to make more effortful, reasoned, logical, serial, progressive and self-aware choices.
Sanjay Nayak
Tejas, CEO, MD & Co-FounderThe presentation by Sanjay Nayak addressed issues close to start-ups and product companies in India. For instance, as he points out, five years ago, 70 percent of capex in the telecom industry was located in US, Europe and Japan. Today, the traditional western markets hold about 50 percent of this share and the incremental growth comes from emerging markets like India. Thus, it could be concluded that new technologies today have to be driven by emerging markets like India to be successful.
However, he also brought about the difficulties that it poses to the entrepreneurs. There is a conspicuous lack of a product company ecosystem, he said. He was also troubled by the confined mindset of people and complains that most would prefer to solve only a minuscule part of the larger problem that is individually handed over to them. This restricts their growth and vision in the overall sense.
Sumit Dutta Chowdhury
Reliance Communication, CIOReliance Communication has deployed the Web 2.0-enabled corporate intranet, 'MyWorld' to cater to the fast changing needs of its very young employee base. The Web 2.0 intranet covers collaboration, communication and communities. 'MyWorld' is like a personalized world where employees can get into and do 50-60 percent of their work through that interface. The platform has helped the organization drive enterprise efficiency and employee productivity levels. The staffers can now save 15-20 percent of their time in a week, which is equivalent to a day's work. The Web 2.0 intranet has ended the paper trail of office applications. Post implementation, the organization also saw a 25-30 percent reduction in its internet bandwidth usage. The initiative also made them more future proof in their back end applications by affecting a 40 percent reduction in the load on backend servers. The initiative has resulted in cost optimization on various fronts.
