BANGALORE, INDIA: It was an evening that offered rich technology knowledge takeaways for CIOs at The Technology Gourmet: A leadership exchange to reinforce infrastructure planning, organized by CIOL in association with IBM on Thursday.

Global leaders from IBM shared their views on topics ranging from Governance, Security and Risk Mitigation, BPM enabled by SOA, Green IT and Collaboration at the technology session, which saw active participation from CIOs from the city across verticals.

The IBM global experts, in sync with the theme of the evening, did don the role of master chefs by dishing out rich technology recipes for the CIOs. The evening opened to keynote sessions from Elizabeth J. Smith, general manager, Infrastructure Services, IBM and Steven Sams, vice president, site and facilities services, IBM.

The sit-down dinner and discussion, followed by the keynote sessions, created a perfect platform for participants, to discuss technology related issues, as well as to experts from IBM, who offered solutions that helped address the pain points faced by CIOs in their day-to-day business activities.

In her keynote address, Smith touched upon the findings of a survey 'CIO implications of the IBM global CEO study'. In the survey conducted early this year, IBM interviewed 1,100 CEOs across the globe from Fortune 100 companies as well as those from mid-sized businesses. The CEOs raised issues that they felt were critical as they progressed in their business, she added.  

Significant change and opportunity
"CEOs see significant change and opportunity ahead, and are radically changing their business design to respond," Smith said. "CEOs are expecting significant changes (increased by 33 percent) while the ability to manage change has not kept pace (39 percent feel unprepared)." 

The other important factor that we noticed was that CEOs are investing heavily in engaging newly prosperous and more informed and collaborative customers; and are moving aggressively towards global business designs, she informed.

Explaining more on how IBM steps in to understand the CIOs implications and help face the challenges, Smith said that 83 percent of the CEOs, who were hungry for change, expected some substantial change in the next three years. "They faced the toughest challenge of constant pressure to meet increased expectations while reducing costs. Here, IBM steps in to align the CIO's agenda with business while ensuring infrastructure flexibility and scalability."

As regards innovating beyond customer integration, 76 percent of CEOs see opportunity in more informed and collaborative customers, Smith said, adding that turning information into business insight and empowering customers by giving them (secure) access to relevant information, were some of the CIO implications noticed during the survey.

CEOs want to see that their enterprises are globally integrated. "We saw that 75 percent of the CEOs were actively entering new markets. They wanted operational, technological and cultural integration barriers to be removed and create a collaborative working environment. They faced the challenges of integrating people, processes, data and technology," Smith said.

Realising this, she added, IBM tried to identify differentiating processes and evaluate multiple sourcing points. It also fostered collaboration with best practices.

When it comes to seeing an enterprise being disruptive by nature, 69 percent of CEOs are planning some type of business model innovation over next three years. The CEO implications here were that they wanted to remove obstacles to business model changes and facilitate rapid integrations of mergers and acquisitions.

The biggest challenge these CEOs faced was the shift from being a technology provider business solution creator and reorient to focus on ROI and profitability. Further, 69 percent CEOs believed that rising customer expectations of corporate social responsibility will positively impact their businesses. The challenge here was to enable growth while controlling costs. IBM helps them in assessing the current energy use while design, build and consolidate energy efficient data centre.

The above findings, somewhere, touched upon the day-to-day challenges faced by CIOs of today's enterprises across the globe, and helped find a solution to those gathered in the evening session.