The rapid rise of social media, cloud computing, and mobility in India has started to affect how organizations do business in the country. This is driving a fundamental shift in the CIO role as it moves from classic “plan, build, run” cycle management to a business-oriented, leadership-focused position. To gauge systems integrators’ (SIs’) readiness to support the changing CIO role, Forrester interviewed CIOs at 30 Indian companies and has just published a report on the same. For the purposes of this report, “Indian SIs” includes SIs headquartered in India and multinational SIs doing business in the country. We conducted interviews with CIOs in the form of open discussions; our aim was to determine CIOs’ opinions about their SIs, including how effectively those SIs are shifting to a more value-added, business-oriented engagement model. These interviews yielded some grim findings, as CIOs believe that SIs:

• Don’t understand the business requirements of the CIO role. Only 28% of CIOs think that SIs understand their changing business requirements, while 70% of CIOs think that SIs focus too much on technology delivery.
• Focus too much on upselling or cross-selling their products and solutions. SI teams, including account managers and consultants, usually focus more on promoting products and services; they have very little knowledge of what CIO and client organizations are looking for and don’t care to learn.
• Lack the tools and templates to define the business value of emerging technologies. Most of the CIOs indicated that they believe that SIs are not able to define the business value of emerging technologies.

The Forrester Asia Pacific (AP) team has just published its predictions for 2013 in the IT Industry Disruptions Fuel Renewed Asia Pacific Market Growth report. Some of the top trends and predictions that I believe are particularly critical in the India market:

• Government reforms will not positively affect IT spending until 2014. Forrester estimates that India’s IT purchases will grow by 9.5% in local currency in 2013. The Indian government is taking steps to reform initiatives and stimulate the economy in the wake of faltering economic growth caused by inflation as well as corruption, political gridlock, and lack of business investment. However, Forrester expects corporate spending to remain cautious ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for 2014.
• Increasing customer expectations will drive software spending. 94% of the Indian organizations surveyed in our Forrsights Budgets and Priorities Survey, Q2 2012 cited the need to improve their product and services capabilities to meet increasing customer expectations as their top business priority. We therefore expect increased investments in CRM, customer communications management (email marketing software, SMS communication software, etc.), and business process management tool solutions.

I have.

During the holiday break, I had the opportunity to spend a week on the beach in the Turks and Caicos islands (but that's another story).  One of the books I brought with me and thoroughly enjoyed was The Idea Factory - Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by Jon Gertner. 

Back in the day when “network” meant “telephone,” AT&T either directly or indirectly controlled virtually the whole thing.  Bell Laboratories served as the R&D arm of the organization, developing the equipment that Western Electric would produce for AT&T.  In addition to the very practical work in things like insulators for cables (which are a big deal when the cable is running under the Atlantic Ocean), there was a small group who conducted the basic work that led to discoveries such as the transistor, practical lasers, charge coupled devices (CCDs), and information theory. Bell Labs built the first communication satellites – Telstar.

While it could be argued that AT&T did not reap all of the benefits possible from its inventions, the way that Bell Labs operated presents some useful lessons for organizations looking to improve their innovative capabilities:

Over the past 20 years, I’ve been involved in many process initiatives, working closely with business and IT execs. And I’ve seen some efforts work while others go south. But it’s only this year that I so clearly understood why some organizations zoom ahead in process transformation while others stumble, go in circles, or abandon the chase. My own big “ah-ha” moment came at a big business process excellence event in 2012, when I looked across an audience of 500-600 process practitioners and realized there were very, very few CIOs, IT leaders, or even technologists in attendance. Then I remembered some past technology events when my references to process technologies, techniques, or methodologies drew blank stares. Why was that? It was because few process experts were in the room! That made me start wondering — what’s wrong with this picture?

More and more senior execs are embarking on business process transformation. These new changes are catalyzed by many things: new business models made imperative by a new market leader, new threats or opportunities because of rapid changes in technology, a much more customer-centric business strategy, aggressive global expansion plans, or something else. As a result, many organizations are working to become process-driven by 2020.