Are SIs Meeting CIO Expectations?

A survey of 30 CIOs in India identified a large gap between what CIOs expect from their SI partners and their actual experiences

The rapid rise of social media, cloud computing, and mobility in India has started to affect how organizations do business in the country.

Such convergence of IT has converted hopes into realities that we thought were only dreams just a few years ago. Earlier, the role of a CIO was to make decisions but now along with that he has to align IT with business values and also focus on user satisfaction. However, there is a new challenge that CIOs today face. Increasing business complexities and adaption of newer technologies along with forever-rising employee demands, the CIO's challenges are only increasing day by day. Hence they have started looking beyond IT when engaging systems integrators (SIs) with the objective of driving business results through innovative business solutions.

But, are these SIs delivering on their promise? A Forrester survey of over 30 CIOs yielded some grim findings:

Expectation of both the parties are mismatched: In the increasingly competitive environment, the time to react is becoming shorter. CIOs today have the core challenge of speeding up their manufacturing cycle so that they can pace up with the growing technology demand. So if one is not able to align technology with their growing business needs then it may lead to huge repercussions. According to the report, a majority of the CIOs believe that the SI team, including account managers and consultants, usually focus more on promoting their products and services and seldom on what the CIO needs.

Only 28% CIOs think that SIs understand their changing business requirement. Whereas 70% CIOs think that SIs focus too much on technology delivery.

Defining the business value still a challenge for SIs: CIOs believe that SIs should align business value of their customer to the new technology they adapt. It is extremely important to facilitate business growth through IT innovation and enable customers to adopt the same. A senior decision-maker from a large auto manufacturing firm mentioned that SIs could not derive the business value for moving to cloud infrastructure for more than 6 months.

Change in delivery manager adds to worry: It is believed that solution delivery almost always depends on the availability of a delivery manager; if that person leaves their position, the entire project is at risk. CIOs believe that this is the common phenomenon among most SI during the project implementation phase.

How CIOs Extract Value from SIs

Instead of wasting time in waiting for SIs to mold their technology-driven strategy, Indian CIOs are developing and adopting their own methods to extract greater business value from their SIs.
l Mapping SI's financial compensation with the CIO's organizational objective: Some CIOs from large organizations are adopting financial compensation method to align SIs strategies with their organization goals. CIOs are giving bonus to SIs if they are able to meet certain measurable conditions

Adding ‘knowledge transfer' clause in the contract: Leveraging business processes via technology is what today Indian CIOs are looking up to, and they know they can't do this when they're locked into some SI's standard contracts.The CIO of a large Indian manufacturing firm put a knowledge transfer clause in his contract that means the staff will be swapped with SI for few months.This step help both the parties together in understanding the real business scenario for SI and at the same time CIO's team gains a deeper knowledge of the vendor's technology.

"More and more manufacturing organizations have outsourced IT completely or partially and rely on their regular IT partners/vendors - so now if their regular partner is implementing an IT solution then there is no need to knowledge transfer other than regular documentation but if the solution is deployed by another niche vendor then knowledge transfer is added as a clause and it is to given to their regular IT partner," adds Puneesh Lamba, CIO, BILT.

So what Do SIs Need to Do?

CIOs are looking for an SI to proactively pro­pose a combination of consulting and trai­ning services to address key business challenges: They want SI teams to address 3 key parameters: 1) How can we make our IT strategic planning process more agile and responsive to business demands? 2) Where are other CIOs finding real business value from mobile, social, and cloud technologies? and 3) What can we do to elevate the role of IT to support business innovation?

According to Achuthan Nair, sr vice president & BU head, Global Managed Services, Wipro, "About 2 years ago, Wipro identified 3 areas of strategic focus Cloud computing, Analytics/Big Data and Social Networking. Over the last 24 months, we have built our own value propositions in each of the 3 areas and we have got our customers for these propositions. We are excited by the potential each of these areas have in not only disrupting the current approach to enterprise computing, but also the opportunities to add value to our customers."

SIs can do this in 5 steps: Define clear objectives for your technology delivery model; map technology offerings against the client's business objectives and challenges; identify projects; showcase the business returns of your technology solutions; and execute projects with mapped offerings.

It is important for SIs to sustain a balanced scorecard and measure its success accordingly: SIs should try following industry standard processes. Deliver project performance reports and align the same with business. IT budgets are increasingly determined by business objectives. Funding for such projects should not be a constrain for strategic partners that help drive those results.

According to Arun Gupta, CIO, Cipla, "An SI should understand the business problems faced by their companies and industry as a whole, they should address real life problems with their solutions, deliver their promises (time, cost, value), educate on future trends and experience from other engagements, communicate the bad news in the same way as they do good news."