Shankar Krishnamoorthy, CTO,
Aspire Systems
Business acumen and understanding are
admirable qualities of a CIO. One has to
recognize business needs and direct team
accordingly.
For this one requires ability to:
- foresee the opportunities and
challenges
- mentor and empower people
- play hands-on. If you have to
lead, you have to lead from the
fore-front.
- communicate
- attention to details
 At
Aspire, we provide several opportunities to
people to grow and meet their aspirations – be
it in technical ladder or managerial
ladder. Apart from serving our customers in
their product engineering activities, we
innovate organization-wide projects which serve
dual purposes –things get done (eg. We build
several inhouse systems on our own, say for
example, capability management system, talent
management system, etc.) and enthusiastic
individuals participating in these projects are
also identified.
These projects help individuals shape up
their technical, managerial and leadership
skills. They make several decisions during
the course of projects as they take complete
responsibility of how a system needs to be
designed and used. These projects also
help in instilling business perspectives of how
an organization runs. Here, we don’t
really count on number of years of experience;
rather, we value capabilities, enthusiasm and
aspirations in providing opportunities.
On-going training is very important for
us. Being in product development business,
our customers expect us to be on top of cutting
edge technology and also understand emerging
business models (SaaS / OnDemand /
etc). Plus, product development needs our
team to be equipped with best engineering skills
(how to design a scalable architecture, how to
define product road map, how to manage releases,
etc.) and latest tools.
We have different layers of training:
metamorphosing college grads to producteers,
producteers to experts, project management
training, oftskill training, communication
training, business management, etc.
We also encourage our engineers to get
certified in different technologies; several of
our people are Microsoft certified
professionals, Sun certified professionals and
several other certifications. These
certifications help in better positioning before
our clients.
People look for challenges for job
satisfaction. I go to work because I like
doing what I am doing. If we can meet this
aspect, you solve most of the challenges in
retaining people. As a growing company, we
may be doing several things – something may work
out, something may have issues. But, we
talk to our people for their feedback and
thoughts. We bring in entrepreneurial
spirit into the company by empowering
people. Our people have the sense of
belonging and ownership in the company.
“Customer First” thought process and “Quality
Consciousness” are two things that I work
on. This helps in meeting the customer
expectations and keeps them
happy/delighted. Once this happens, your
people will take care of customers; customers
will take care of your business. You can
grow. We have achieved ISO 9000
certification two years back and now we are
working on getting the company into metrics
culture – where we can measure and improve
continuously.
CTO and CIO govern different ends of the
business. CTO focuses on technology aspects
–developing IPs for the company, choosing which
technology to focus, evaluating tools, etc;
he/she should be aware of the returns and
ROI. These would generally be long-term
oriented and impacts the directions of the
company growth.
In case of CIOs, several infrastructure
related projects depend on CIO’s team. MIS
is a nerve line for several companies to run
efficiently. As we depend on information on
our finger tips to run the business, 24x7x365
running of these systems (emails, servers,
website, intranet, etc.) is very
important. That brings in confidence on
your infrastructure and puts you on one level up
in front of your customer’s eyes. So, if the
CTO/CIOs recognizes the short term and long term
needs, it will help the company grow.
Strategic planning involves coming up with a
business and growth plans – again, both short
term (1-2 years) and long term. This will
also have plans on what IP you want to generate,
how you can help customers crash their product
roadmap, which technology the company needs to
focus on, How quickly you want to acquire new
customers, how you want to acquire new
customers, etc. If you look at these, it
talks about two things --- business acumen and
utilization of technology.
Our structured project management
methodology enables upfront plans on defining
development methodology, configuration
management, training/induction plans,
etc. We have instituted this process in
executing all our work. It has simplified
everybody’s life as most of the information that
we need would be in a single, central place and
all well defined. They would be living
plans and if there are any changes in reality,
these plans would also get updated. This
helped us in a big way in reducing communication
gaps and defects and also improved our
productivity in work.
- Empowering people and succession planning:
This helps in providing growth opportunities for
our people and also grooms them to the next
role. Succession planning is about
preparing somebody to take up your
place. We do this all along – for all the
roles – right from engineers to management
team. This strategy also helps in keeping a
tab on your direct execution cost.
- Challenge people: People would like to
be challenged, especially engineers. Most
of the times, engineers would handle complex
things skillfully; but, they may loose out on
doing simple things (eg. UI may have spell-o’s
which will take one minute to fix). We try
to instill perfection attitude.
- Lead from the front: I expect my
managers to lead from the front; if their team
needs help in testing the product, writing some
modules, my managers would not hesitate to jump
in. They roll their sleeves and make sure
that they work closely with the team and get
things done. While this may not happen
often, it is important for the leaders and
managers to understand the complete perspective
of the work and also show the “I am there”
attitude to the team. This also helps them
to have an eye on the details and quality of
work that is being done.
Communication is the key challenge for
any deployment. In our case, we have
almost 12 hours time zone difference between us
and our customers apart from distance. This
brings in different challenges. Even a
simple question from either end has to wait 1-2
days to get clarified. Imagine, if you send
10 questions and you get 8 questions replied;
these 2 unanswered questions can become
bottlenecks. So, we need to have strong
communication mechanism – you should be able to
foresee bottlenecks / questions and work with
customers ahead of time; that will help in
meeting the timeline. Also, you need to have
good communication mechanism in telling the
customers whether you are going to meet the
planned scheduled (or) are there delays and so
on. If we can solve the communication
hurdle, several of the challenges can be
resolved. We constantly work on using the
latest tools and technologies to reduce the
communication gap.
- Putting yourself in your user’s
shoes: This is one another challenging
aspect in some of the deployments. Our
engineers are very smart and they can pickup
technology very fast. But, understanding
domain (or end user environment) is very
difficult and it comes over a period of
time. Imagine, implementing ERP for a TV
Station to manage advertisements (scheduling,
screening, invoicing, etc.). It is a
complex process and involves huge amount of
money flowing through this system. Unless
you work in a TV station hands-on, it will be
difficult for you to completely visualize the
process. So, our engineers have to go
through a steep learning curve to understand
complete process and digest this. We try to
reduce the learning curve by bringing in experts
and domain consultants or visiting end user
facilities.
- Set the supporting infrastructure proper
right at the beginning: this is one of the
best practice or lesson we have learnt early in
our business. If we set things right to
work (eg. If you have a source control system
right in the beginning, it will make every
engineer’s life lot easier; if you set the
timesheet management system right in the
beginning and have your people log time, you
have set yourself on right path to measure
productivity).
Perception of the IT industry has
definitely changed over a period of
time. Now, it helps us in positioning us as
a global leader. Several countries are
looking at India and Indian engineers for taking
care of their IT needs. It is
remarkable. It helps economy. We have
huge gap in computerizing our own domestic
requirements. Several egov projects are in
progress and we will have connected economy
soon. Hardware and software costs, communication
costs have reduced quite a bit. We have had
times when an overseas call cost Rs 32 per
minute and now, it is 6 rupees per
minute. If we work on the infrastructure
and cost of operations, it will further boost
this.
People front, we are definitely
doing a good job – educating and training
thousands of people to get into IT. We
need to do better in terms of getting employable
grads. Going forward, IT is becoming
commodity. And, cost arbitration is not
going to stay for long. We need to go up
on value chain by brining in niche services,
improving on quality, etc. If we
strengthen our infrastructure, we will have
bright future assured.
We are getting equipped. We need to
improve our infrastructure quite a
bit. But, we have lot of positive
opportunities. We can learn from developed
countries in implementing new infrastructure –
we don’t have to make mistakes to learn - we are
in golden period where we can straight away go
for latest technologies. Economy is
growing.
Companies are investing
in R&D. Wireless and computerization is
penetrating the country. Quality of Service
is getting recognized.
While, we
have a long way to go, I am quite confident that
we have a bright future.
The role of IT
department has evolved over a period of
time. It is no more EDP. It is
instrumental for growth and helping in taking
day-to-day business decisions. We can rely
on getting past performance and metrics.
If your IT department maintains history on how
bandwidth is consumed, you can take better
decision on when to upgrade your internet
bandwidth and what investment to make in
future.
Manufacturing companies can use how to use
inventory / when to order for parts / and so
on. Look at Railways. Few years back,
we looked at computerization of reservations as
a tough process. Now, everybody has
realized on how it has simplified every
individuals’ life + brought in growth for
railways by increasing productivity, access to
info, increased customer satisfaction, etc.
Tips for IT Managers:
- Instill “customers first” thought process
- Set goals
- Set expectations right
- Empower/empathize people
- Measure and review progress
--- As told to Sonal
Desai |