Ashok Jade, CIO - Shalimar Paints

“It is not advisable for IT operating by its own set of rules, as a mysterious black box without adding business value and growth. In most of the cases, it is found that IT functions are focusing on delivering product and service but often forget to evaluate their value addition to business growth.

As a CIO one should understand this equation.

While focusing on deliveries, timelines, Scoping and resources, we focus to monitor and deliver business value out of each system and project - this is our main KPI.

We apply the formula of “Funding Going In and Business Value Coming Out”. As a CIO, I position IT function to “Act like a Business within a Business”.

Making IT as a business function looks to be appealing to execute but it’s a challenging although not Impossible. A few points we follow are -

IT Team Thought Process and Skill set: Over the period of time, IT team became a comfortable for keeping themselves away from business, they are happy being away. Changing their mind-set through repeated counselling, training is a task.

We create condition and environment in which people can express them freely, they encourage team-members to go beyond their tribe, silos and patterns. Understand and recognize that each individual is capable of creating innovation and ideas in their own capacity.

Financial Evaluation: Although it is easy to say to have ROI for each project, but in reality it is very difficult to have a win-win equation on IT Budget wherein business function also agrees on business value which IT has brought in to respective function. Agreeing business function on such equation is a task.

Opportunity to Explain and Analyse failures: As any business function has opportunity to brief management about their success and failure and take corrective actions, we in IT also give opportunity to every team member to learn and try new things and explain failure if any and learning out of it. This gives confidence to the team to try new things.

CIO and IT Leaders to continue partnering with business functions and take this journey ahead to continue to contribute in business growth.”