Funding Business

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

Business strategy, like innovation, has an expiry date. Forget the tech, focus on your organization’s business drivers, and change how you deal with business.

When the history of Indian enterprise IT is chronicled, the beginning of the economic slump in 2008-09 will emerge as the watershed year after which nothing ever was the same for Indian CIOs.

Over these years, your organizations have rolled out more and more projects with fewer and fewer people in shorter and shorter time cycles. IT’s role as a valued service provider and as a key differentiator has never been in a brighter spotlight.

Why then does CIO Research indicate a third of CIOs are looking to switch organizations?

Do I hear that it’s because times are tough? And, budgets tougher to come by? That organizations have frozen IT spends? That justification cycles have become longer and longer?

Why then are enterprises large and small doing three times the number of IT projects today than four years ago? How are those projects getting funded?

Since the slowdown set in, I’ve seen managements transform how they view IT. Clearly, Indian organizations no longer invest in technology, instead they fund business results.

As a consequence, the approach towards deployment is rapidly shifting from an ‘as is-transition-to-be’ model which involved selecting a product or service, customizing it and deploying the solution; to a paradigm that begins with identifying a business outcome, selecting the right product for the job, and finally adopting it in a best-practices or template model (with no customization).

What you are pushing at business can’t be about big data or mobility or the cloud or analytics or ERP or any other enterprise-class technology—instead it has to be about revenue growth, about customer outreach, about helping the business build the right product or service rather than making the product right, and about profitable growth.

How you can tap into organizational and departmental budgets—both implicit and explicit—is a function of how well you are addressing your organization’s business drivers and the competitive scenario. The technology is almost incidental.