Gartner: CIOs to play significant role in India’s gwth

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At a curtain raiser to the Gartner CIO India Summit 2007, Gartner Inc. announced that Indian ICT spending is growing at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.8 percent, the highest in APAC, to exceed US$36 billion by 2009. This increase is backed by rising expectations from businesses for IT to play a larger role in growth, efficiency and competitive advantage. 

 

Gartner's India CIO Summit, which will be held at The Grand Hyatt, Mumbai on February 20 - 21, 2007, will focus on the strategies and tactics that successful businesses leverage to maximize the effectiveness of their IT organization in order to deliver growth and results to the business.

 

According to Mr. Terry Waters, global head of Gartner Executive Programs, the world's largest community of chief information officers (CIOs), "Business leaders expect IT to support and drive enterprise growth plans. The increase in IT spending is driven by business priorities such as supporting competitive advantage, attracting and growing customer relationships and improving business processes."

 

Vertical industries like communications, financial services and services industries are driving the India market, especially with their need for telecommunication equipment and services followed by hardware. With competition and Indian companies going global, the Indian CIO's role has evolved and their priorities, according to a recent Gartner survey, are similar to those of global CIOs.

 

India's economy continues to experience extremely strong growth, and consumer demand is growing even faster. This increase in demand, and the industry expansion it brings with it, raises issues concerning the availability of talent and ramping up of IT adoption by domestic businesses.

 

Mr. Partha Iyengar, research vice president, Gartner and Chairperson for the Gartner CIO Summit, explains, "As the globalization of the Indian economy continues, most industries are not only faced with inflated consumer expectations, but also increasing competition - both foreign and local. Multinational corporations bring with them Western best practices and technologies, which allows them to provide a high level of customer service, and offer better products. Local companies have responded by investing heavily in technology, which will improve service levels and reduce costs. Verticals like automotives, FMCG and retail are facing enormous pressure from their core market in India for survival. Therefore the differential is how effectively Indian companies are using IT to drive efficiency, effectiveness, and information management for decision making."

 

Top Challenges being faced by the Indian CIO

Global Aspirations: Indian companies fueled by global aspirations are entering new markets through organic and inorganic growth. They compete with global companies that have a history of leveraging IT to support their business needs. This leads to challenges for the CIO in areas like customer support, capacity planning and integration. Indian companies are relatively new adopters of IT, and therefore Indian CIOs have years of IT backbone to catch-up on. This is further adding pressure on the CIOs to meet the IT requirements of Indian companies going global.

 

Resources: One of the biggest challenges faced by the Indian CIOs today is bridging the resource gap to meet the rapid growth in the ICT market to support their business growth. The resource gap is at two levels:

·       Human resources: Being lower down in the value chain for IT resources, local Indian enterprises are faced with internal labour shortages - particularly in program and project management, enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects and IT operations.

·      Vendor Relations: Most Indian IT services companies are primarily focused on outsourcing deals from foreign markets while global IT services companies operating in India focus on large deals from Indian companies. The small and medium businesses (SMBs) in India growing to meet the burgeoning domestic market requirement are therefore finding it tough to get the right IT vendor as they are not lucrative to Indian or global IT services players. Finding the right IT vendor to partner with is posing a major challenge for Indian SMBs with most IT players ignoring the local market opportunity.

 

Emerging challenges:  An emerging challenge that Gartner perceives in the next six to eight months is retention of the business line managers. As the industry continues to be more business and domain focused, retaining resources in the business will be a big challenge. Managers from larger banks, manufacturing units, and other vertical industries will constantly move in order to meet the domain needs of large IT services players operating out of India.

 

In conclusion, Partha Iyengar says, "Indian CIOs need to create results by working "IN" the business to improve current capabilities and build for the future by working "ON" the business to drive new capabilities, innovations, projects and services."

 

Sourced From: Text 100 Public Relations Consultancy