Bipradas Bandyopadhyay, Head of IT, Zuari Infraworld India

"CIOs have now undergone role transformation and become Corporate Innovators in all the big companies as per the market demand and the fast changing business environment. It means now that Instead of CMO only, both CMO & CIO jointly decide the Go-To-Market Strategies of the company as now the company needs to be socially active and agile to capture the intended customer segment as fast as possible before they are captured by the competitor. In some situations, CIO will lead the strategy formulations for Marketing, Operations depts. of an organization and suggest technical innovations to make these departments agile, responsive and pro-active so that business results are achieved as per the timelines and overall organization health improves. Technologies such as IoT, Blockchain, Machine Learning, Social Media Engineering, Data Science Applications are some of the tools that CIOs are having in today’s world to bring change in the workings of an organization and truly live as Successful change agents for the years to come.

In my current profile many technical innovations have been done that have brought good business result for the organization both internally & externally. Using Data Science and Analytics I have formalized a social media marketing strategy that increased lead generation by 200% in a span of 3 months and subsequently conversion also increased quite substantially. Internally as process improvement initiative, implementation of the centralized document management software has improved turnaround time of our Projects, Procurement Departments by 33% in a period of 6 months. There are many such instances where bringing in new technology has improved efficiency of a process inside the company and has favourably impacted the topline of the organization during the long run.

Modern CIOs must wear the hat of a business head and be well conversant with issues plaguing the business – be it in Sales & Marketing, Operation, Administration or general governance. As CIO he/she should be able to correctly identify the problem/pain areas, suggest appropriate resolution by using updated or latest technologies and ensure good level of monitoring of the implementation of the solution proposed and be sure that the implemented solution is indeed the resolution of the problem identified. A detailed understanding of existing business challenges, products, markets and future plan of the organization is required before a CIO becomes strategic advisor of CEO - both in technological and business worlds.”