2013 : The year of Zero Tolerance

Its very apparent. It stares you in the face, you cannot miss it. If there was one thing that made an impact in 2012, that was technology - both the device and the software. The mobile devices with social networking apps on them were the kings and queens of 2012. I went into a research mode to see if there was an equivalent ubiquitous thing in the past that made a huge impact. Not surprisingly, what came up was a weapon. The AK-47 assault rifle.This was one rifle that is so light and efficient that sadly it can be used by children with minimal learning. This is the most abundantly mass produced rifle and has changed the way wars are fought!

The same can be said of mobile device+social networking apps in 2012. This weapon has given huge strength to the common man across cultures and geographies to raise voice over what they feel is undesirable, unethical and wrong. Mature democracies to dictatorship regimes have belted down under the force of these voices fueled by the mobile device+social networking app weapon. Occupy wall street to Arab Spring and now in our own backyard in India. Governments are seeing the absolute non-tolerant citizen who might not be voting but is definetly out there to tear down structures that don't find relevance in today's times. Not very sure if the mobile devices are feeding on the need to be socially connected on the move or the apps are feeding on the device proliferation. Computerization of technology is happening at an amazing unprecedented phase, that most CIOs could only wish for their projects in the the enterprise. 

One needs to take cognizance of the fact that the attitudes are changing. Absolute intolerance to mediocricity, blatant abuse of power and flouting of authority to crub voice of dissent will only grow in strength. I foresee 2013 to be a year where people in public service will come under scrutiny and will suffer lack of credibility and respect. The government and hence the police will find themselves completely lacking in credibility. Socilally connected mobile individuals armed with the power of convergence of video  audio and data over the internet will be putting extreme pressure on every social structure - government, police, tradition, religion and family to align to their way of life and find relevance in a positive manner as they live their lives. You will see people in position and power react rather clumsily at first as you have seen in the last two weeks and hopefully, they will adapt and align to serve rather than dictate.

Sooner or later the citizen is going to bring the same attitude to work on monday morning and the affect of this will be felt on the office floors all thru till friday. Enterprises who dont engage on a connected platform with their employees, will find employees engaging outside of the cortporate structure on corporate issues, thru their 3G connected cellphones armed with facebook, twitter and google+. Many corporates today are still heirarchical structures of power when it comes to most things that significantly impact organizational fabric. This is where employees might draw parallels with what ius happening in our society outside the corporate world. Mediocricity and inefficiencies might come under fire within corporates.

Connected employees are much more potent than unions. Most organizations who engage employees effectively, will find a greater appreciation coming their way. The better life inside the security of the corporate building as compared to the life on the street, will only go improve and increase employee engagement scores and drive higher employee loyalty.  meaningful engagement within the connected corporate that not just contributes to the employee but acknowledges employees contribution by keeping them in the decision making process, will go a long way. This is not only the right thing to do, this also keeps the spill over of the anger and frustration from entering the office environment. One such organization I know that dos this effectively is Indigo.     

CIOs have a huge role to play here. They can be the people who can drive the ground rules of connected enterprise, not as an order taker but as a direction setter. Can a CIO stand up and hold their own when some of the ground rules come under pressure from HR, Finance, Legal  and Brand ? many a CIOs will be told that its not their business to set the ground rules of engagement on the platform. How the CIOs react in those situations and conduct themselves, will differentiate the direction setters from the order takers. Direction setting is about painting a strategy and executing on the same with the intent of building long lasting structures on solid foundations. Each CIO knows what the best foundation for their organization is. Jan 2nd 2013 , Wednesday - most people will come into office with a mixed feeling of having mourned the brave-heart, wondering what beholds as future for our girls and women back home, and definetly some excitement around the fact that the old year has gone by and maybe the new year will bring in some hope and cheer. Are the enterprises ready to take on the challenges that will start walking their way starting this Wednesday?

A CIOs Christmas Gift Wish List To Santa

Its the time of the year where I act like a 10 year old with glee and hope in my eyes, as I draw up a gift list hoping Santa will deliver them. As a CIO I absolutely would love any kind of divine intervention to help me out as I deal with various issues. 

My wish list goes as follows:

Dear Santa,

My list is as follows:

1. I want Google to make up their mind, whether they want to remain a consumer services organization or they want to be an enterprise solution company as well. If they decide to get into the enterprise space as well, I want them to price their services in a manner they can sustain enterprise offerings, build a team that can understand and manage enterprises and commit resources to mould a part of Google that is compatible with the way enterprises want to run their IT.
2. No man is an island, and technology is here to serve mankind. No technology can stay relevant if it operates in isolation. Its funny that everyone talks of collaboration, team work and productivity while Apple, Google and Microsoft have built walls around their proprietary platforms. Dear Santa, I want you to give a contract to Leonardo DiCaprio to go back in time and invade the minds of Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt and Steve Ballmer and plant the thought of creating a standard for interoperability between iOS, Windows 8 and android mobile platforms, helping enterprises to carry more effectively and efficiently a safe , secure and sustainable mobility strategy with heterogeneity as an integral feature.
3. I wish for divine intervention to clear up the mobility space and drive clarity. If some need to die, please make it quick and painless (for everyone). Please bestow sustenance for the existing virtues of creativity, sense of purpose, social relevance and enterprise adaptability with all the players in the mobility space.
4. Dear Santa, please give Leanardo DiCaprio a second contract to invade the dreams of all cloud service providers, planting the thought of creating a standard for interoperability and data exchange between clouds and for creating a standard framework and template for shifting data and workloads across clouds.
5. I wish for the gift of the ability to quickly unlearn and sit in a discussion without carrying the burden of having to accept or reject everything being; for my team and me and for the world at large. I wish this for all politicians specifically.
6. I want CISOs to get more business friendly and find ways to support adoption of new invasive initiatives rather than fight it!
7. I wish for Microsoft to realize that mail, messaging and collaboration is availably free of cost thru social networking sites and get off their high horse and find a way to have more meaningful dialogue with the enterprise. I hope Microsoft's global leadership realizes this and re-structure their organization to operate more meaningfully in the current context and become pace setters in time to come.
8. Dear Santa, please help me understand why I feel so hollow for Windows 8 as the next enterprise desktop computing platform. I am not able to analyse this hollowness in me effectively!
9. I wish apple store infrastructure becomes available to the enterprises as a service enabling deliver enterprise app stores to our customers, partners and employees riding on apples creation.
10. The last wish is a more personal one. Santa, I wish for the next new apple offering to be a personal device that can transport people across time and space. I , for once, want to say beam me up Scotty and experience it happen before I die. I also wish for the world to be free of guns (specially US and UP) , children to be safe, polar ice caps to stop melting and last but not the least , both Cameroon Diaz and me get 5 years younger each year for the next two years and then stop ageing!

Santa, some logistics. If you are flying around India, collecting the wish lists, your 3G might not work effectively everywhere and hence you might not be able to access this blog. To make it easier, I will hang a sock on the christmas tree with the wish list in it. Not too complicated a list, I am sure. For a hi-flier like you, this is easily do-able. Santa, you now operate in a world that is performance oriented, goal driven and results oriented. I will soon email you the balance scorecard based on which you will be appraised. You will get a 5/5 if you just manage to deliver to my last wish. You will get a special performance incentive bonus, if you manage to make any three of my first 9 wishes happen. No pressure buddy. Just do it!

Merry  Christmas and a happy holiday season to one and all. Hope your families and you have a blast bringing in the new year later this month. Wishing your families and you a fantastic 2013 filled with peace, prosperity, good health and happiness.
Cheers.

Personal Branding

Haven't you yet been killed with too much of personal branding advice ? Well, if you are reading this, I guess you are still alive, and the pleasure of putting you to death is now all mine !

Why do we need to brand ourselves? That is a dumb question, considering the fact that we have been doing it since childhood. Those of you who have siblings, you started your personal branding endeavor the moment your sibling arrived. The lucky ones that get undivided attention, you started branding yourselves as soon as you realized that your crush and/or first love needed to be competed for attention and affirmation. For those lucky ones with no siblings, and those who got lucky with crush/first love or both without a need to put up a fight; if you got married, you worked on personal branding to deal with at least two love triangles if not more:
1) spouse : mother : mother-in-law triangle
2) spouse : father    : father-in-law triangle
...not to mention that you dont get married to just your spouse but to your spouse's family and their extended family. For those who have not had any of these issues, well you never had a life to begin with!

Personal branding is pretty much the same game, be it at home or work. We show 15% of ourselves (the best parts of our personality) and most of our personal branding revolves around flouting these attributes with an intent to connect with the audience. The strength to our personal brand actually comes from the hidden / behind-the-scenes 85% of our personality. This is where people face challenges when they brand themselves and the branding is not backed up by most of the constituents of their personality. I guess we need to focus on three things:
1) What we brand
2) The brand itself (in this case ourselves and what we stand for)
3) The branding message

I share one anecdotes from one of my past stints, around the branding exercise by IT folks. Similar to people who are uncomfortable with their bodies and hence are embarrassed to take off their shirt while at a beach, some time ago a couple of us decided to brand our initiatives instead of branding ourselves. The branding exercise was successful, and our initiatives were much talked about. Slowly we got distanced from the initiatives as people with much better branding skills worked their way to identify themselves with initiatives under the spotlight. Felt much like Steve Jobs thrown out of the company he created! Under the umbrella of this branded initiative, a lot of business departments went about procuring their own IT needs. Now we had business departments buying IT products and services under the brand created by IT without involving IT ! A lot of us were chuckling even though the joke was on us! We then decided to brand ourselves to get the business departments come to us for their IT needs instead of buying all by themselves. A realization then dawned that when we were not comfortable with ourselves as we projected. Introspection, then resulted in some of us chiseling away parts of our personalities that were irrelevant and bridging the gap with the needed. After a great deal of effort, we saw a close resemblance between ourselves and our aspirational brand image. This effort would have worked against us, had we failed to sustain the perceptions we ventured out to create. This is possible only if the 85% of real you actually grew, evolved and transformed to back up the 15% show-cased.

We have always been taught to play to our strengths. Our core strength areas could be our ability to learn fast, a strong sense of right and wrong, flexible belief systems, tolerance, effective story telling, strong memory, logical reasoning, empathy etc. It makes sense to brand ourselves around our core strengths rather than otherwise. Our conduct and our branding needs to be in perfect harmony. Our personalities will reflect the real us at some point or the other. It would be detrimental to brand ourselves otherwise. A strong story-teller core value could be a great asset in sales or influencer or mentor role. One can brand themselves at fantastic presenter and a sales guru. A person with flexible value systems would make a great go-getter and innovator when playing within the corporate rule framework. It is important to recognize our core strengths and bring them to work, apply them in our individual fields of expertise and gain success. The most fundamental step to branding would be to discover ourselves first. There is no use of branding ourselves as leaders if we have created structures, perceptions and methodologies of management around us. We will be ridiculed if we brand ourselves as direction setters, while our teams do nothing but order taking. It is important to align both the hidden 85% and the 15% window dressing. CIOs are just as good or as bad as their teams. Any personal branding a CIO does, will need to be backed up by their teams in action, letter and spirit. A CIO will end up being ridiculed as a manager and a leader if he creates a ME and THEM as a part of his personal branding exercise. The CIOs personal brand will most definetly rub off on their team and will have consequences. Hence, in performance driven cultures, personal branding can become a very powerful tool.

Sometimes, we can kill ourselves due to lack of finesse in communicating our personal brand. I was delighted  with a DBA, who said her core strengths was her ability to think straight in times of duress. The way she came across the interview table, every part of her body had "nerves of steel" branded all across. Three of us interviewing, felt exactly the same way! People mostly come up and say they are a strong DBA! I heard a CIO describe himself as one who can do anything. Having known him for almost a little over a decade, I know he meant that he is comfortable with the unlearning and learning and has enthusiasm and inquisitiveness as a part of his personality. Due to these attributes, he constantly dabbles with different new technologies all the time. He is a risk taker and due to this he is one of the few guys who would pilot almost every new technology in his enterprise! All of this came out as "I can do anything"! I love the way fevicol has been branded as a bond that never breaks. Been racking my brains on how to get creative around my personal branding.

Once we manage to brand ourselves in a certain manner, we need to be cognizant of the fact that organizations face the challenges of playing in a game, where changes in eco-system and business dynamics is a constant feature. This needs the organization to innovate, change and transform; and all of this demands different competencies from its workforce to meet such challenges.A CIO who is seen to bring stability thru standardization and process discipline\ to the organization might become a liability when organizations needs change agents to compete effectively. One needs to keep an eye on one's own branding and how is it seen relative to organization's medium and long term needs. One needs to decide when and how a shift needs to occur in personal branding, with the passage of time, as organizations need to deal with different challenges. I particularly like this book "SHIFT" by Peter Arnell and recommend reading it.

I personally think the best way to brand oneself, is to play to our core strengths and put our true selves on display thru blogs, tweets and the enterprise social fabric for people to see us to be for who we are. One needs to be constantly looking for feedback to mould and shape our messages to ensure that the messages are being consumed exactly as they were meant to be. Personal branding exercise is all about the perception we want everyone else to carry about us. We need to play to our strength, play full on and visibly so.

The Need For Self Preservation

First responsibility of top managers and leaders is self preservation. I was taught this lesson from a veteran, a very senior board member and a leadership practitioner of a very large and famous IT multinational of yesteryears. His basic contention was, if you don't preserve and protect yourself from each and every threat and not actively lookout for potential threats coming your way, how then will you ever be able to carry out your agenda of value creation for all your stakeholders and the community in general. His message to a couple of us more than a decade ago was to shamelessly protect ourselves if we wanted to really make a difference, and not just take one on the chin all the time.

Managers and leaders will face threats all layers. Let me focus on leadership, as the game is quiet different there and stakes are very high. In leadership roles the following threats are very real but not limited to the list mentioned below, the list below comes from my experience of having fought these demons as they trapped me at various points in time in the past.

1. Delusion
2. Insecurity
3. Amoralism

Delusion:

I have had this amazing opportunity to be in this space called delusion  I have experienced many facets of delusion and have learned very invaluable lessons, and fortunately very early in life. Few lessons I learned, are as follows:

1. What I inspect is what I get. This is true despite the fact that I know the people I work with, I have massive trust and faith in people I work with and some of them have fantastic past track records. I learnt quickly to get out of the delusion that "not placing my trust in someone is bad" is very different from my need for inspection. I trust someone, and hence I bestowed that responsibility to that person. After that, what you inspect is what you get.
2. I am as good as my current conduct. Walking this path has has helped me to stay out of the delusion that despite status-quo, faith in my abilities and character can never be displaced or disputed.
3. I am not an island. I need partnerships and eco-system to carry out my agenda. So, I own nothing and  control nothing. I facilitate for people around me. I am never in delusion of my abilities by virtue of the role and responsibility I shoulder. First thing I do is insulate myself with complementary skills and attitudes and then find ways to empower them fully.
4. Leadership is not a step in an hierarchical structure nor is it a virtue that you need to shoulder all the time. Leadership is a tool that one can pick up at discretion depending on the need of the hour.
5. Leadership and Management and  are two different things. Successful people oscillate between the two based on the best one can achieve by deploying either one of these two tools or a hybrid one. On many ocassions I have chosen one of my mates/colleagues to play a leadership role on a key initiative if that's what is needed to meet objectives or deliver results. My role then is that of  a management person supporting, mandating and aligning resources to my colleague's leadership to ensure success and meeting of objectives.

Insecurity:

I will be honest. I have never been insecure when I was in a corporate job, not even on my worst day. Hence I had to learn this lesson too late in life when the stakes were really high ! As a corporate citizen, I have never been prey to the 6 Cs that characterize insecurity - Comparison, Compensation, Competition, Compulsion, Condemnation and Control. I stepped off a corporate job in August 2011 and started off on my own as an independent IT Consultant. I was blessed with the opportunity to experience insecurity and discover how I could go from bad to worse. Fantastic lessons learned. Insecurity was neither financial, nor was it fear of failure. Insecurity came from the delusion that to be a good business person, I need to understand every aspect of business. I obviously don't. So, I decided to do everything myself ! How stupid is that. Insecurity makes you wear a mask of a superhero. You try to be who you are not and your actions speak. I decided to register for service tax, manage my own financial aspects (tax, income, balance sheet) etc. Instead of focusing on my core strengths and work with people who have complementary skill sets (something I did all my life by choice in corporate jobs), I became superman. I wore a mask and I started comparing my consulting fees with what other consultants charge. I started, leveraging my gift of gab, putting down fellow consultants with some potential clients. There was a deep compulsion to push clients to innovate and do new things instead of helping them see benefits that they could realize and enjoy, talking to them in their language (again something I have practised all my life as a corporate citizen). It took a meeting with L N Sunderrajan to help me realize that I was insecure. I will never forget the favor he did me, by calling me over for a drink at the MIG Cricket Club, Bandra - to discuss a completely different agenda. Sunder has used experts and partners for his financial accounting needs, coding and design. He focuses on the core strengths of his team members and himself and delivers along with his partners. Luckily, I met him while I was in the 4th month of my stint as an individual IT consultant and learnt the most valuable lesson of my life.I am not sure if Sunder ever noticed me to be insecure. I did talk to him on my need to be financially selfish and not share income. How short-sighted and naive is that for someone who has always talked about delivering success in the long-term thru partnerships while in a corporate job!

You will be the only person who would not know if you are insecure. People around you notice it. Keeping an open mind to that fact that somewhere insecurity could lurks within you, helps you test dispassionately this hypothesis. If you keep a keen eye and ear open to how people around you behave with you and what they talk to you. People tend to run projects without involving the potential end-users right from conceptualization till the time its ready for UAT, if some of the Cs are in the play. The Cs are responsible for blaming end users for lack of imagination and appreciation. People who operate in partnership models neither face these C issues, nor are in the business of requirement gathering.

Amoralism:  

The best way to preserve oneself  is to be completely at peace with the eco-system while carrying the burden of one's beliefs, value systems and personal notions of ethics. If you noticed some skepticism laced in dark humor in the last sentence, you've got what I mean. As Sarkar  says, there is nothing that's either right or wrong. One who has the power, his wrong becomes right (bad english translation)!

Organizations are either social or commercial enterprises out there to achieve certain goals, meet certain objectives and deliver value to its stakeholders. They go about it in a certain manner. Its important to work in places where there is a cultural alignment of notions of personal ethics and value system biases with that of the enterprise's. Its quiet naive to blame an organization to be immoral or ethically wrong if personal biases are tangential to that of the organization. Choosing the right organization to work for, actually means choosing the most congenial place to work, where you have alignment on value systems, ethics and morals. I am borrowing a few lines verbatim from a doctoral thesis :

The phenomenon of amoralism: An investigation of the cognitive and emotive roots.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation,  2008,  250 Pages

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

1. The Statement of the Problem

It is a common empirical observation that most people take considerations of morality as important factors in making a morally relevant choice. Moreover, such considerations ordinarily override other reasons for actions. To say that a certain act is useful, agreeable, profitable but yet immoral usually means to condemn the act in the strongest possible terms. In the ordinary discourse the labeling of some action-guiding principle or a particular action as immoral gives the ultimate reason for rejecting it. Likewise, one may think of an action as difficult, unpleasant, risky and costly but yet required from the moral point of view.

You cannot preserve yourself if you are at war with the ethics and value systems of the organization, even if you have what is hilariously known as good ethics and best value systems. Step into organizations where there is harmony and homogeneity between your personal belief systems and that of the organization. This is one aspect where diversity does not take anyone anywhere. People who often blame the workplace to be devoid of ethics (when actually, all the while the employee and the organization have their own ethic systems, but have nothing in common), usually forget that they have the power to choose not be part of the game on that particular playground!

Protect and preserve yourself vehemently against habits, virtues, weakness and people with negative influences. One might ask, what is negative? Anything that deflates , demoralizes and puts you down is negative. Sometimes, it is incompatibility with the co-system, sometimes its your sense of perception and values and sometimes its people who dont like either your agenda or you. Some of us might wash our hands off people issues saying we are not political or my organization is not political. The moment there is more than one person in the room, there is politics! People who take up leadership roles need to deal with this with equal enthusiasm as they do with other challenges. If you dont survive, you will cease to exist in a state of power that is needed to carry out your agenda and meet your goals of delivering value to your stakeholders and the community in general.

New demands on CISO.

Consumer Technology is inside the perimeter. Its been an invasion of devices, apps and cloud services. Enterprise data has found an easy bridge to cross the perimeter and free itself. None of this is unknown to us, though have to admit its been a sensational development at a sensational pace and technology adoption and work style adaptation has happened with passion that has never been witnessed or experienced by an enterprise app or project. As a CIO one only hopes and wishes that these virtues be associated with enterprise IT initiatives we lead.  All of this has caught us off guard  as most of this is unplanned induction and some definitely see it as an intrusion.

The CISO's role is all the more critical against this backdrop. The CISO, to be really effective, will have to don a new avataar or rather add a few more facets to their personalities. While setting the ground rules and policing to ensure adherence to policies have been the only traits CISOs have shown, and while some have undertaken branding and advertising to ensure awareness, nobody has seriously stepped into the shoes of a educator and a protector. Every organization has policies around ownership, distribution and life-cycle management of all its enterprise assets; specially data. Data is all over the place - documents, data in the enterprise database, spreadsheets, scribbles and notes on note pads. Employees create data on the go.

Consumer Technology has placed in the hands of employee, tools and devices that come to their aid in doing their jobs effectively. In this process, enterprise data is not just passing thru these personal devices and cloud storage, it is actually being created on them and then , hopefully, getting into enterprise systems. There is ample scope for data theft and data leakage. While enterprise governance is all about checks and balances to safeguard corporate assets and contain risks, employees are all about productivity, speed, quality of service and delivering the wow factor with attitude in their deliveries. Governance need to ensure employees can bring all of that onto the table in a secure environment as employees find lot more exciting tools outside the secure environment. One way to get around this is to step up the act on awareness and education.

The CISO is in a fantastic position to map the spirit and the letter of the corporate policies to these consumer technology choices that are all around us and highlight, clearly, in simple language, with examples, the possible damage that could happen to the enterprise if some of these apps were used. I reached out to 12 senior CISOs in the industry before I penned this blog post and everyone thought that it was a good idea and some called it innovation. I was actually a bit miffed. I reminded them, that this had always been an expectation from their chair, but all that one got was policies and policing. CISOs need to be aware that they are here to support the employees conduct their business in a safe and secure environment. Along with education and awareness, the CISO needs to push the CIO's team to fund small labs that can discover the best way to leverage these consumer technology ideas within their enterprise to achieve business goals.

It would be nice to see CISOs bring out videos and literature that shows how enterprise data and hence the personal credibility of employees could be at risk by unabated and un-mentored use of apps like Dropbox and Evernote. At the same time the CISO should work with the CIO to figure out ways of accommodating such features and functionality within the enterprise. CISOs needs to bring their expertise on the table in a lot more ways than just policing. This happens when CISOs wed their agenda with business objectives beyond just securing the enterprise and extend their expertise to areas around employee productivity and morale enhancement by support agility in the employee personal productivity space. Everyone loves carrying and showing off not just cool devices, but how they use it to deliver value. Most of the the time, the wow factor created is targeted around their individual selves, no harm in supporting it, if it does result in value to the organization.

Part 2 : My First 90 days : Maneuvering The Landscape

This is in continuation with my earlier post that marked the first 30 days of my first 90 day journey in a new group, in a role that has been created for the first time. My second set of 30 days in Interglobe Group as the Group CIO, gives me the confidence to bat on the front foot for the time being. Having gone through the induction and the learning process on the key businesses of the groups, it was time to get to know the people better. A lot comes out as you do one-on-one with your peers, their one-downs and your direct reports.

3 things have been achieved at the end of 60 days:

1. Re-validation and the associated satisfaction of having joined the right workplace.
2. Firm understanding of business strategies, priorities and goals
3. A fair amount of understanding of the formal and informal structures that is responsible for the enterprise's success

The moment the satisfaction of having joined the right workplace sets in, what hit me immediately is that the organization must be seeking similar satisfaction for themselves on my appointment! This is a fine line one needs to walk on. I am in a new domain and need time to get my head around the business operations, goals and the strategy. At the same time the organization is extremely keen to quickly test the strength of their investment. I listed down three initiatives I need to run, while as a parallel process I formulate and co-create the digital strategy for the enterprise along with my team. Engaging on small initiatives, is a great way to showcase your mettle and also understand your environment and eco-system. Dealing with various individuals helps you discover both the fruitful and the wrong engagement techniques. Each person is different and needs to be approached and engaged with in a different manner, till you firmly establish your leadership and by virtue of that respect, people start aligning to your needs on engagement. Architecting this turnaround is very key both for political reasons and for your influence sphere to be effective. This should not be mistaken for arrogance. There is a huge distinction between the two. 

It would be foolish to take everything at face value and dis-respectful if your behavior displays this intent! This is a fine line that needs to be walked again.  There are many aspects of the new organization that you want to learn by putting it to test. Small simple tests can reveal the underlying fabric of agility, pride levels and engagement strengths of the organization. These three attributes are very important to me and hence I tend to look out for these and so I mention them here. One might argue, is integrity not a key value and should one not test that ?  It is, but that is one aspect a person should research before joining the organization. Once in, it would be foolish to either question or test integrity of the organization. At leadership levels, once in, one should take integrity and ethics as a given workplace strengths and move on to re-enforce these, and not test these. Attempts to test these in the initial phase of your new job at the leadership levels, gives way to various interpretations that will most adversely affect your personal brand. Always remember that you are the new guy. Any perceptions on your personality or brand that get created for in the first 90 days, will last for a very long time. In good organizations, respect for leaders who cannot manage their perception in the early days, is very scant. A few places might entertain benefit of doubt, but most performance driven organizations don't. The leadership is always hoping on riding on the new leader's brand to get a few things done in the first few days. Usually the announcement of your appointment , specially the part where they articulate your strengths,will carry traces of hints on their agenda. If you hurt your personal brand, you tend to be of little use to them in the first 90 days.

It helps to quickly see if there is someone out there who will hold your hand as you maneuver the new landscape, align with the culture and the way things are done, identify the formal and informal structures in the organization that the responsible for the organization's success and discover the most effective modes and means of communication. I found a fantastic guide for myself in this journey. This person had already made up his mind before I stepped in, to play this part. That is an attribute of a very mature workplace. The first thing to do is to cement this relationship with trust, friendship and integrity. My efforts in this direction will reveal their results in the next 30 days to come. But, best not to let the expectations go high on this, or rather on any support system in the organization in the first 90 days. 

Armed with whatever I could learn and internalize, I was nervously excited about my first leadership committee meeting at Interglobe, where I was to present my three initiatives. I wanted my first official pitch to set the tone for the next couple of months and lay the foundation of my brand equity as a strategist and direction setter. I was sure, I would be treated with kid gloves and loads of forced warm smiles, patronage and plenty of flowery language laced with nicety; none of which should affect me. Thankfully, the talk was cordial but straight and I walked away with the feeling that very soon, the language will reflect acceptance of my abilities at the table. None of "this is how things are done around here-you are new-you will learn." talk, rather they were looking forward to me setting a direction as the Group CIO. One of the key aspects I have to still work on is the interpretation and hopefully my guide will pitch in here as well.

Quality time one-on-one with business leaders was a must and I did get that to clearly drive my point home, that I am here to give a new direction and set agenda for driving business change, solicit their partnership in driving this change and striking the chord on the fact that its as much their change agenda as mine.

I am completely new to the domain and the following are very clear to me:

1. They know their business much better than anyone else (including their competition as they are market leaders) and hence I will learn the ropes from them.
2. I am an outsider and hence can quickly see where frog in the well syndrome is playing up and hurting the organization. This is my key strength at the moment and I bring this to the table.
3. I am neither boxed down by the organizational thought processes nor have been conditioned to the organizational constraint perceptions. This boosts my strengths further and is my trump card.
4. I am the new guy on the block and new ones at any level get some leeway. The new guys at leadership levels get loads of leeway for exceptionally short period of time.

So that's 3-1 in my favor as of now and for a very short time, as I add to my strengths, build relationship bridges and lead. That pretty much sums up the second 30 day block of my first 90 days in the new job!

Business Analysts - Key to success

The CIO round table on "war for talent" at the gartner symposium, brought forward someThe CIO round table on "war for talent" at the gartner symposium, brought forward some very key aspects around success having been delivered more often than not, when there is deep involvement of good business analysts.

We debated on the need for BAs to be part of the IT team and not as part of the business teams. The interesting question posses by fellow CIO of Cannon, was wether it would then be fair to say that business teams can then bring on board technical analysts! Aren't most business folks technical analysts any way!

Grooming BAs to the point where they really start delivering value is a long process. In environments that are friendly and embracing g, BAs could be productive in their second year. In large complex environments, sometimes it takes 3 or 4 years to really deliver value.

The grooming program is the key to success. These BAs need to spend at least 6 to 8 weeks in each of the key depts and SBUs working as apprentice to the line function 2 to 4 weeks each in the other depts of the organization. Once the business operations are clear, these guys should shadow the SBU leaders for 3 weeks and dedicate a day to be spent with SBU head exclusively one-on-one. These guys then been to serve as apprentice to the C layer for a week each.

Couple of aspects to be kept under active observation for grooming interventions in the first 6 months of their active deployment.

1) Do these guys come up with their own ideas for the Organization or do they come back with a list of things to be I proved upon as told by the business teams during the induction and the grooming program

2) Their attitude and their next steps after some of their plans are either rubbished or politely turned down due to prioritisation.

3) their approach to building their individual credibility and branding in the first 4 months of their productive deployment.

4) Their ability to assess risks and their approach to project planning where risk of failure is high

5) Their ability to effectively interact with the C layer and their ability to hold their own under the spotlight.

I have been in the past, been able to very quickly slot the guys into 4 buckets:

1. Self starters - self explanotary.
2. Efficient executors - they need to be told what needs to be done, and then you don't have to follow up
3. Solomon's spiders - keep trying repeatedly when faced with failure. They never give up
4. Batman - two faces, both strong suites
5. The Spielberg - builds larger than life plans and projects. Loves to take Complex projects. When handed over a simple project, paints a larger than life picture about it. Inspires participation from one and all.

Each of these strong suits are detrimental at one level. I don't generally work with BAs who have one strong suit and a equal or relevant mix of other aspects. I like to bring together people with these exclusive strong attitudes on one table and work with them as a team. The learning are immense. However, this results most of the time into an emotional drain on oneself. So if you don't enjoy roller coaster rides at work, maybe a different approach needs to be evolved.

The opposite of work is play. Human beings, I believe are wired to play. We need to choose our game and invite the players to team up. I love picking BAs from college. Good BAs work inside the business teams and get pro-activity going for IT. Instead of being told by the business on what needs to be done, IT can start defining for business the best path forward. For this to happen, the grooming process is key.

Couple of advantages with this approach:

1) CIOs will be integrated on the business plans at the SBU level by integrating the BAs into SBU structure. This move will be welcomed, if the BAs KPIs are similar to that of the SBU heads KPIs

2) The CIO can plan SBU's directions and can have more meningdul discussions at Mancom/ExCo - travesring the journey from order taker - agenda setter - strategy co-creator - pace setter.

3) Evolve the BAs to digital strategy officers

Boxed In By Efficiency ?

Interesting discussion over the weekend with a few friends with C level responsibilities. People were cursing their past efficiency drives, that have boxed them in so much, that transformation costs look prohibitive as they attempt to do things different. Two things are constant : Change and Efficiency. How does one drive change in an environment that is running efficiently, and meeting customer expectations? At the outset the question sounds quiet ridiculous. If your place is running efficiently, and your customers are not complaining, why change ? We narrowed down the reasons for change in an efficient environment:

1) Aligning with eco-system changes

2) Meet the ever changing customer need that most of times goes unstated or not captured

3) Differentiate yourself from competition

Most of the guys at the bar counter cited reason 3 as the biggest driver to initiate change. Once a pioneer innovates and institutionalizes the processes to the extreme to drive inefficiencies, you have a tightly boxed in system that works like an well oiled assembly line with no need for any maintenance. It does not take much time and effort for your competition to observe and replicate. Giving the innovator the benefit of doubt, lets assume that competition does run the process less efficiently, at the end of the day, the innovator is no different from the competition anymore. They all offer the same service. Perils of service industry. One Tequila shot later, much to my delight,  most of the people came around to a consensus that reason 2 is the trigger for change and not 3 - work on the customer , not your competition! More like the 3 idiots philosophy of run after excellence, success will follow. Apologies for digression, but this is how the discussion actually went into a tangent and a couple of us brought the prime issue back on the table. Does the efficiency drive kill your ability to change at reasonable costs?

Sometimes, the BI folks, who are generally at arms length from the nuances of business operations dynamics, come up with head turning stuff that becomes compelling to contemplate the change. Really good ideas that are disruptive and transformational, need the core processes to be uprooted and an invasive surgery done on the business operations to put an idea into action. To mitigate the risk of failure one decides to prototype and pilot. The costs associated with such an implementation approach are quite taxing on organizational bandwidth, time and coffers.

I though the cloud is a good way to offset some of these costs (non HR related costs). Lets say, the BI folks come up with a unique and different way to restructure mortgages that may/may-not deliver additional delight to your customers, but defiantly adds to your bottom-line without taxing the customer any more that status-quo . Your existing systems and processes are run at the best possible efficiency levels and hence are tightly coupled with the eco-system to deliver the results. How will you implement the prototype to test the concept without executing all the changes to the existing systems and processes? Will you ask your eco-system partners to participate in this change, and at what cost?

I would implement the challenger process on the cloud as a service. The only changes I would make to my IT setup would be to add integration points on my ESB to connect the service on the cloud to my data. This way I could get both the challenger and the campion process to work on the same data set ; and I now have an environment where :

1) Both the challenger and champion processes can run at the same time enabling more accurate comparison

2) They both run simultaneously on the same data set and hence I can compare results

3) I do not change my existing eco-system and hence offset the risks

4) In the event the challenger proved itself to be far more exciting and since I did not invest in changing my IT
   eco-system to create the prototype, maybe I now have a more amicable scenario where one could discuss
   the merits of running the process in-house or outsource it!

Some elements of investment cannot be shied away from. To implement the prototype, there will be investment needed on re-training, re-structuring and job role re-definition. Since this is a prototype, the scale is much smaller and change management easier. Walking thru this prototype experience also sheds light on the merits/de-merits of outsourcing a successful challenger prototype.

This approach requires building the challenger process from scratch and this could be done in a loosely coupled manner. If indeed outsourcing a successful challenger seems a good choice, since the prototype was built from scratch without tinkering with the incumbent mix of legacy/non-legacy / soon-to-be-legacy systems, you have a complete BRS that could just make the RFP really informative. One could look at using the prototype build as a bargain-able asset during negotiations with the RFP contenders.

I have not had the opportunity to walk this path as yet, but it seems a good concept and a framework to keep at the back of my head.

To Track OR Not To Track !

In the absence of physical connect with the end consumer, the only way to understand your customer behavior is to analyse the way customers react to you solutions, their appreciation of your products and services and their affinity to your brand; all based on data from digital interactions. While most of this feedback is postmortem and /or near real time, almost all remedial actions are after a postmortem analysis. With systems getting integrated for meaningful service delivery, the IT infrastructure is more or less in a position to deliver real time analytics results that could be acted upon. We see this behavior in a lot of web properties. 

Many organizations are gearing up to structure their digital assets to be need-aware and sense customer requirements. This happens thru having business tie-ups with digital properties with high footprint and then gauge customer's content consumption and subsequently drawing conclusions from the same. This way when a customer comes onto your portal, you are aware of the customer's browsing pattern and are in a position to personalize the portal experience. Selling becomes easy if you put your customer through a collage of content and track their behavior and the time spent with the content; before you prepare your selling pitch through personalization.

Most of the digital advertising world banks on customer's click stream information as the core constituent of their pricing model. Some models are based on clicks and some on views depending on where you are advertising. Many portals subscribe with third party digital advertisers rather than run their own setup, with customer click stream data being the basis of the billing models. With Microsoft pioneering the Do Not Click feature in IE10, the enterprises, specially the marketing guys, will have to really work hard to make the digital advertising world and the CRM strategies effective. While I am not touching upon the ethics part of tracking a customers behavior online in this blog, I am merely analyzing the challenges this will pose to the enterprise and the effect on technology strategies related to CRM. 

Most organizations would love to anticipate customer needs without having physical contact with their customers, and most of this exercise on the ground today is all about what the organization thinks the customer needs rather than what the organization knows whats going on in the customer's mind. Most of the need anticipation data is an out come of analytics results based on the data an enterprise has on their customers wallet, life stage information and life style information. What's going on in the customer's mind is a result of what the customer is seeing and reading in the virtual world on the sites with whom the enterprise might have no business relationship. The only way to read the customers mind is to track customer browsing pattern and time the attention span given by customers to the content that is served up. I land on  XYZbank.com after having ogled at the three new SUV models launched, the bank better know that and serve up interesting car loan offers on  SUV. I land on XYZbank.com after having browsed thru news portals where the highlight of the day/week is the terrorist strikes and accidents that have taken place; the bank better know that and serve up insurance protection plans. I browse thru some interesting pictures on scuba diving, mountaineering and land on XYZbank.com; the bank better know that and serve me up some content that offers personal loands for holidays. To strike the iron when its really hot, information on my digital consumption is so very essential. 

With Do Not Track, these challenges get a little more complex. While my view is that DNT is a flag that you can ignore if you choose to, but that mounts to getting pesky calls and SMSs on your cell phone after having registered for DND. If enterprises start asking customers permissions for tracking their behavior in order to serve them effectively, I am not sure how many customers will consent. Time will tell. For most advertisers life has become now more interesting and they will need to re-look at their basic business models to protect revenue. A consumer today cannot exercise similar choices on billboard ads, print, television and radio ads. They just ignore them or devote time based on their mood and need of the hour. Maybe the same makes sense in the portal world too. DND is essential on telecom side as SMSs and calls are an invasion of privacy on personal devices, where your phone buzzes insensitive to what you be engaged in at that time. Email spam is an invasion of privacy and the you could painfully unsubscribe to each unsolicited content that turns up in your inbox or clean SPAM folders from time to time. But, I guess digital advertising on portals could be treated the same way as billboard, TV and print ads, where consumers will ignore or pay attention based on their interest levels.

Part 1 : My First 90 days : Back to the School

My last 3 weeks have been amazing. After my decision to return to a corporate job and in a completely unfamiliar domain, I have been having a ball. On my first day of work, I gathered every bit of 19 years of my work experience in the banking and financial services domain, locked it firmly in a box and walked into my new organization with butterflies in my stomach. I joined the Interglobe Group as their Group CIO. Interglobe is in the travel, aviation , hospitality and retail business with plans to enter the education domain. This is completely unrelated to the domain experience I have carried so far, or rather enriched myself with ( as per my resume - what crap!).

On the 1st day of work, my walk, to meet my peers and subsequently my boss reflected my excitement that comes with a new job, hopes and aspirations I carry of making it big in a new place and nervousness with a bit of fear of walking into a completely unfamiliar industry domain(s). I did a final check for the nth time to ensure that I was not carrying any baggage of my past from my umpteen years of BFSI experience! These things just creep in onto you if you are careful !

The lack of knowledge about the domain , and complete lack of knowledge on the non-BFSI office culture (it's so easy to anticipate attitudes and the culture bankers bring onto the table), makes one rather extremely humble, and pleasantly so. This humbleness and humility of not knowing the domain has been such a great asset in my management arsenal. I wish I had walked into every new job after my first one with the same empty head, absolutely no baggage of the past and with a great deal of humility and humbleness.

I was lucky that I made a few right choices on the approach to my new role. I decided to enroll as a trainee and understand the business operations of all the six businesses of the group. Its been three weeks now and I am barely thru 60% of one business and about 20% of the second and there is a great deal of learning yet to happen. The joy of learning truely rediscovered after almost 23 years!

My first job was at HDFC Ltd. I had joined as a Officer - IT (read programmer) having been picked up as a part of campus recruitment process. As part of my induction I spent 4 hours manning the reception desk at the Churchgate branch, managing customer inflow. I spent a full day as apprentice to credit appraisers whose job was to interview potential mortgage borrowers and assess their loan eligibility. I spent time as an apprentice to loan disbursement officer, who hands over the disbursement checks to delighted customers. I went on some very exciting loan recovery visits with the recovery officers assigned to 60dpd and 90dpd buckets! Spent time in the accounts dept helping them with their day-to-day accounting jobs. HDFC was a place where I went thru the branch and backoffice operations as a trainee for a month. I was recruited to program and hadn't touched a terminal to code for the first 30 days! That initial first month stood me in great stead right through the rest of my career. Thanks to this experience I was never an easy prey to ivory tower syndrome. Have always been rooted to the ground realities all through my career.

Now after 23 years, I am doing the same; learning a new domain. Spent some amazing time in the flight ops centre, the planning centre, with the engineering team and the commercial operations. Looking forward to hit the tarmac in blue overalls to check out the preventive maintenance, flight landing and take off ops. Looking forward to meeting the sales franchise, get my hands dirty with retail business ops and walkthru the hotel buss ops. So much to learn and so little time. I wondered again, why do I feel that I have very little time. I realize that its my conditioning of having to deliver a fantastic success in the first 90 days of my job. I decided to put myself off this misery. I walked upto my boss and told him that I need a  90 day window to learn every aspect of the business operation of the group and come back to him on the potential the group carries to leverage each others strengths and synergies - group IT themes that would contribute to both topline and bottomline.

This will be a very exciting journey. The group had decided to experiment by creating for the first time a Group CIO role. This is a new position and it is fascinating to hear the expectations various stakeholders have from a position such as this. It will take a great deal of influence to align perceptions to ensure realistic delivery, given my lack of familiarity of the domain and the current state of readiness of the group companies to work in a matrix structure, that they are so unused to. Its going to be a very harsh test of my influencing capabilities and I am excited to give it a go. In another two days, it will be 30 days gone and 60 more to go! For me it's really back to the school after 23 years of work experience! Wish me luck.

BYOD : Head in the Cloud...but feet on the ground

BYOD (Bring your Own Device) coupled with cloud based services can turn out to be a killer combination. Just make sure neither you nor your enterprise get killed in the process!

I have been a mute spectator (intentionally so  sometimes also known as "listen-only mode") to a lot of corridor talk, post seminar/symposium chatter and some dinner conversations around how my CIO friends are ushering in BYOD and trying to get cloud based applications and other cloud based resources married as part of enterprise IT landscape. I am a big supporter and advocate of such a philosophy. I am, however, very concerned about the manner in which this welcome approach and philosophy is being ushered into the corporate enterprise landscape and the manner in which implementations are being executed. There are some very grave risks associated with the immense benefits such and approach brings to your table. 

One of the free and sticky bumper offer that usually accompanies BYOD is the complexity of device diversity. If one implements BYOD in its true spirit, then one has to cater to integrated enterprise apps to work seamlessly across all device types. Diversity presents itself both at the device OS layer and at the device form factor layer. Applications will need address both these challenges coupled with the challenges of version control and management. God help us all, if BYOD device support were to eventually become part of IT facilities management and enterprise helpdesk support offerings!

As with any software, vulnerability of mobile operating systems will get exposed as its proliferation increasing in the enterprises. This will usher in a whole new business opportunities for security software vendors on the mobile landscape, very unlike the opportunities that exist today. This will brings in the challenge of getting BYOD devices  constantly updated for firmware and OS upgrades and updates. This will need to be ensured against the backdrop of the challenge that these are not corporate assets and employees have a choice of not to comply. Hence, I have deliberately avoided using the word mandate and stress on the word  ensure.

The problem of device diversity and the device (device+firmware+OS) management can be effectively addressed by investing in an mobile application delivery and mobile device management platform. These platforms deliver on manageability, maintenance and governance aspects for mobile application and the mobile infrastructure landscape. These platforms are anything but inexpensive. Some CIOs might find, for their scale of rollout, the commercial benefits to bottom line from BYOD either not significant or completely off-set by the investments required for implementing the platform. These platforms are not yet available as a service, and there is a possibility of such a business model evolving. One needs to evaluate BYOD benefits and associate eco-system costs, in light of business benefits that will get delivered by virtue of business value creation. This model needs to be adopted not for saving cost but more to create and deliver business value benefits.

While the platform ensures management , maintenance and governance challenges are effectively dealt with, the framework falls flat in the absence of employee participation. While the enterprise invests top dollars in such platforms, the enterprises need to ensure that there is enough interest generated to keep the employee invested. If the employee chooses not to participate in the process of upgrades and updates on firmware and OS, enterprise security could take a beating. The secret sauce here is finding the right levers that will keep the employee continuously invested in the process and the framework.

Enterprise governance and security frameworks will be put to severe test as employees leave the organization along with enterprise data on their mobile devices. Seamless and timely de-provisioning of user network and application accounts tightly integrated with employee exit process, is still an issue many Indian corporates haven't yet addressed effectively. BYOD will only add to this already complex problem. An enterprise appstore as a part of the IT Infrastructure will only address part of this problem, that of application access de-provisioning. Having an appstore as a part of enterprise mobility brings other advantages on value creation front. Please refer to my earlier post titled Mobile : the double edge sword for more on this. An appstore just adds more to the investment dollars needed if one were to follow this approach.

I believe BYOD with cloud based architecture for application and storage infrastructure can be big value driver, if one has insights enterprise goals and needs and aligns mobility solutions to deliver the same. there will be significant investments needed to create a scale-able, secure and manageable mobility infrastructure which could potentially wipe-out the bottom line savings BYOD might offer (depending on scale and complexity involved), BYOD will almost definetly succeed as any other initiative, if it delivers on the goals of business value creation.