A CIO must ensure that IT and business are operating for a shared goal: Ashish Pachory, CIO, Tata Teleservices

By Krishna Mukherjee

IT has to be an equal stakeholder in creation of business value in the hyper-competitive telecom space of today. In an interaction with Voice&Data, Ashish Pachory, CIO, Tata Teleservices, talks about the changing role of a CIO and how his role today, is not merely confined to IT but goes beyond that.

Voice&Data: As the CIO of a telecom service provider, what are your strategies to remain ahead on the growth curve?

Ashish  Pachory: In today’s hyper-competitive telecom landscape, IT has an opportunity to act as a true differentiator for the business. To do so, IT has to be an equal stakeholder in the creation of business value. In other words, IT has to be integral to the customer’s overall experience with the telecom service provider. Therefore, to drive competitiveness, the CIO has to enable superior customer experience.

Information Technology is at the core of delivering superior customer experience today. For example, the ability to reach the bottom of the pyramid and define systems to measure experience parameters at different stages of the customer lifecycle, and then correlate these for delivering personalized support require big data analytics to be institutionalized. The CIO must create the right avenues for these trends to be seamlessly ingrained into the IT ecosystem for delivering superior customer experience.

Voice&Data: How is SMAC gaining momentum in telecom ecosystem?

Ashish  Pachory: Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) are definitely very important pillars of the modern enterprise. The enterprise segment is now moving towards Mobility. I see major shift happening for enterprises towards more and more Mobility, which means you make yourself independent of devices and platforms. Cloud is certainly a key requirement here because unless the content and data reside on the cloud… it will not be accessible in a mobile environment which requires access from different platforms, networks and devices. Enterprises are also moving towards empowering their workforce so that information is readily available in all places and at all times. Building powerful data warehouses that can provide drilled-down information is becoming crucial.

It is indeed an opportunity for IT, and hence for the CIO, not only to integrate more tightly with the business and influence business outcomes, but to execute at last that crucial architecture transformation that one has been planning for many years but unable to get around to. Moving to Cloud is not a fork-lift operation. It’s an opportunity to make your applications and data architecture leaner, reevaluate your information security systems and finally retire those intra heavy processes that were consuming a lot and delivering little. Same reasoning applies to Big Data adoption. I certainly see demand getting stronger on the axis of mobility, cloud and data analytics which I think will be the defining trends of the enterprise future.

Voice&Data: How important is the integration of all SMAC processes for better customer experience?

Ashish  Pachory: True Integration requires looking at Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud not as separate areas but as one converged means of delivering superior customer experience. Basically, one cannot exist without other. If you don’t have access to Cloud you are not mobile and you don’t have access to the central information base. Therefore, you cannot leverage the information by making it available when and where you need it. I think there’s a strong integration element here which requires all of these to work together in convergence rather than each one of them working separately.

Voice&Data: What are the IT adoption strategies in TTSL and how much have you budgeted for the same?

Ashish Pachory: As a progressive organization which is at the edge of technology, not only as a consumer but as an enabler, TTSL has led from the front in the adoption of new technology to deliver sustained business benefits and superior customer experience. We recently became one of the early adopters of big data for monitoring and tracking application yielding significant advantages. We were also early with the adoption and launch of cloud based services for both applications as well as infrastructure.

We have launched innovative new services for our customer’s based on latest technologies like ADM, HTML5 and Wi-Fi offload. I expect that as we go into the future our technology adoption will continue to be led by the business and will be determined by new service offerings than by legacy offerings.

How much I have budgeted for the same is a tricky question because the adoption will depend on the business case. In TTSL, as I am sure in many other organizations, the budget for IT is decided by the expected business outcome. So, one cannot have a predicted fixed number for the budget in advance. It will depend upon what type of traction we have on the business and revenue front.

Voice&Data: How are the needs of CIO evolving with the changing times?

Ashish Pachory: Today, we have dominance of IP-centric technologies around us. Bandwidth has become increasingly abundant. Everyone has smart mobile devices. This has completely changed the enterprise IT scenario and led to a growing hunger for actionable information at all times and in all places. In such a scenario, the CIO must ensure that IT and business are thinking, building and operating together for a shared goal and that is to make the business successful - for the company and for its customers. In today’s world, the CIO has to increasingly play the role of a business manager, responsible for business results, and is no longer an unseen manager of IT resources. For example, the measurement and reporting of IT performance is now on business axis such as reporting end-to-end customer acquisition times as benchmarked with the industry, as opposed to reporting server or application uptime. Similarly, the cost and TTM considerations for IT are now driven by business and not by IT. These are significant changes and companies which have been quick to adapt these have a distinct advantage over others.

Voice&Data: What are the key challenges you are facing?

Ashish Pachory: Showing short-term business benefits on IT investments, particularly in newer technology domains, remains a challenge for most CIOs. Also, as technologies like M2M, mobile-VAS and others proliferate, the challenge before the CIO would be to develop sustainable monetization models and thus ensure profitable business growth. CIOs need to be able to bring differentiation through innovative new offerings leveraging cloud, social media, big data analytics and enterprise mobility. Cloud and enterprise mobility will also bring their own challenges on security and data privacy which will need to be managed. A CIO therefore needs to balance the technology benefits and risks while being a direct stakeholder in driving business value.

Voice&Data: What are the cultural shifts you are noticing in today’s ICT world? How are you managing the change with these shifts?

Ashish Pachory: The creation of mobile enterprises has overturned traditional concepts and led to business and IT being increasingly interdependent - with business having a stake in IT and vice versa.

The biggest cultural shift that I see is the amalgamation of IT and business on many fronts. There was a time when IT and business existed in non-intersecting universes, where IT was an invisible backend enabler of the business, but no one could exactly relate business to IT. At best, IT was considered a tool for increasing productivity. That has changed. IT is now on the front enabling business at every step. And I expect this trend to grow, with IT and Business becoming 2-in-a-box driving business value together.

IT’s alignment with business is critical for survival in today’s environment but it is by no means a trivial task. Organizations have to consciously and consistently strive to achieve it. This environment requires business team to be tech- savvy and the IT team to be business savvy. There have to be a lot of common elements in the KRAs of IT and business teams and it cannot happen on the basis of technology alone.

Voice&Data: What are the consumption patterns in big data?

Ashish Pachory: As a telecom service provider, we are managing immensely large volume of data which is continually growing. To exploit it for customer advantage requires advanced analytics tools. Hence, we are exploring analytics domain as one of the areas that can be targeted for offering specialized services and improved experience. It is not enough to have strong data storage and warehousing capabilities but I believe analytics have to play a very strong role in driving value out of data.

Superior analytics helps us to reach to the bottom of the pyramid and target the right group of customers for launching a new campaign or service. Today, the focus is not on customer acquisition but on customer retention which requires you to differentiate your offerings from the competition, which in turn means providing an individualized and special experience to each customer.  This is only possible through meaningful analysis of customer behavior that is achievable only with advanced analytics. TTSL is a strong adopter and advocate of big data. The technology is helping us a lot in understanding the customer needs and preferences.

Voice&Data: What are your key focus areas?

Ashish Pachory: A CIO must see himself or herself as a business leader whose sole mission is to make the business successful. A CIO must derive the goals and priorities for the IT organization directly from the business goals.

While the creation of business value is the overriding goal of the CIO today, the CIO cannot afford to lose sight of some other important focus areas. These would include your peer relationships, networking within your industry, and your grasp on technology which enable you to steer the organization through the increasingly complex technical maze. The ability to deliver on committed time, cost and quality targets is a very important success measure for IT leaders, as is the demonstrated capacity to recover quickly from catastrophic situations, which often do become part of the CIO’s backdrop, in spite of all efforts to steer clear of these.