From the Editor-in-Chief: Abracadabra

Vijay Ramachandran is the Editor-in-Chief of IDG Media.

Unimpressed, indifferent, even blasé, that’s how I see the typical end-user respond. It’s possible that this is part of a curse that afflicts organizations today, since no user seems satisfied

The summer of 1975 is not distinguished in my mind because of the declaration of the Emergency in India. It sticks out because in the midst of the political turmoil and the atmosphere of fear, my father helped my brother and me discover a special brand of magic. On a muggy June night as we waited for the power supply to resume, Appa took a lime that had escaped being turned into pickle, and stuck in one of Amma’s hair pins and a copper wire. He next added in a torch bulb to complete the circuit. Voila, there was light! It remains one of the more precious of my memories.What my father lit that night was, of course, far more powerful than just a bulb. He propelled my brother and me on a journey that had as its milestones walkie-talkies, burglar alarms, TV remote controls, home intercoms and the smell of molten solder.   Ultimately, it wasn’t the knowledge of electronics that kept us charged, it was knowing what to do with it that made it fun. Though the context is different with enterprise tech today, the critical issues unsurprisingly remain the same—what are you doing differently and how is it playing out for your co-workers? You’d think that the impact of the cloud, mobility, analytics, smart devices, and enhancement of compute output would have lines of business and your colleagues jumping for joy. That’s not the case though, is it? Unimpressed, indifferent, even blasé, that’s how I see the typical end-user respond. It’s possible that this is part of a curse that afflicts organizations today, since no user seems satisfied. More realistically, I suspect, it’s because the glorious experience that end-users have with personal technology has permanently raised the bar on what they expect from you, how fast your team can make good on its promise, and how ‘cool’ the experience is. How do you then up the ante? By being even more proactive about tapping into business requirements, by crafting compelling solutions, by focusing more on keeping systems simple to use and simple to leverage, by ensuring high business impact. This is never going to be easy to accomplish. Get it right and the wow factor will indeed return. As CIO India marks eight years of showcasing excellence in enterprise IT, I have one request: Bring back the magic!