Sanjay Chowdhry, Chief Information Officer, Hamdard Laboratories India

“I believe the CIO vision is just to be focused on today's world opportunities, but also have a clear view of business directions and transformation for future.

Having an understanding of business strategy and close market watch, any disruption in business process and introduction of technology can be done for business revenue growth.

I take it as an opportunity to create business case for the solution/technology with clear measurable results/gains and benefiting parties. Business case have clear figures of expenditure and ROI gain and time lines. Business case also have clear details of associated risk which may arise due to the applied change.

When you talk with C-level executives in their business language, they understand it better and take quick decisions as they have all figures of investment and gain on same page.

CIOs are increasingly turning to digital investments to drive growth. These initiatives must improve product/service competiveness or create new market opportunities for the business.

Now days CIO role is more looked as an innovative executive, who know how data can mined to have more revenue generating opportunities. Days gone when IT Head or CIO was assigned role of business enabler, and was just improving the process efficiency by using Technology. Now CIO is the business partner who believes in innovation with keeping business and technology in alignment, have access to data and can generate or create new opportunity of revenue generation.

In our organization, we follow approach of regular exchange of information. Having formal and informal meeting with all departments and understanding their constraints in process as a team member not as an IT Guy. This helps in not in resolving, improving efficiency in process but also helped us in identifying new service fronts and revenue collecting and saving streams.

Strategically CIO play a mellow person role in most of the organization. Modern CIOs need not to change to tough guys but have to maximize their access to data and knowledge sharing, have to build strategy around working in collaborative mode.”