Architect's Corner!

One of the most exciting parts of the Architecture World summit is the panel discussion. Until 2007, we used have only one panel discussion typically towards the end of day2. As the summit is reaching wider section of the practitioners, need was felt to increase the number of panel discussions as well the number of panelists for each discussion.

This year, we are having 5 panel discussions. Out of five, four panel discussions will happen in the halls designated for the tracks (let me use the term “track panel”), while the CIO panel discussion will happen in the main hall where all the keynote presentations will be made. This year CIO panel will discuss “Enterprise needs IT architecture to survive, sustain and grow – CIOs insight”.
It’s interesting to note that Enterprise and IT Architecture have made their way up to the boardroom just as a board level talk of outsourcing did in the 1990s. The CFOs and board are looking at the economics of architecture as a blueprint to business transformation. It has been established beyond doubt that successful organizations have achieve significant performance achievements based on architecture driven initiative resulting in reduction in IT administration cost, new service offerings, cost efficiency, readiness for changes etc.

Both SMB and large enterprises have embraced architecture as early adopters to provide competitive advantage and eliminate technology and financial barriers. In addition, enterprise businesses are more focused on establishing key architecture foundation to support the underlying heterogeneity, legacy systems, and mountain of standards and technologies. Some organization have successfully used their Architecture initiatives to save IT cost reduction of nearly $0.5B, while others are attempting better results from Merger & Acquisition.
There are several IT related initiatives are being pursued by the organizations such as Business Intelligence, IT Service Management, SOA, Master Data Management (MDM), IT Security, Cloud computing, SaaS etc. All these initiatives have two things in common i.e. plethora of technology stacks and big promise? Unfortunately, very often these initiatives are driven by different business units and teams with scant regard for the enterprise wide repercussion of each of them. Let’s say a SaaS based option of IT with little regard for security or business intelligence initiatives with no regard for redundant and repetitive business processes within organization? Challenges are many and that’s why Enterprise & IT Architecture have eventually started to make sense to one and all (really? not sure )

Notwithstanding the approach and the maturity of architecture, organizations of all size are struggling to reduce IT complexity, improved IT consistency and looking for enhanced alignments. The good news is that you are not alone when it comes to problems related to lifecycle management, IT inventory, application inventory and usage analysis, network capacity and security audit, applications & management policies. Of course focus on virtualization, optimization and de-duplication continues to haunt one and all.

The panellists for the CIO panel include:

Jim Heaton Chief Architect Baker Hughes Simone Dobbelaar Head of CIO-office, Dutch Immigration Mark Grant Director of Enterprise Architecture, CSX Corporation Manoj Agarwal CIO & Head of IT, SBI General Insurance Navin Chadha CIO Vodafone Essar Limited Ajai Kumar CIO Lemontree Hotels Arup Choudhury CIO Eveready Industries India Limited Aniruddha Paul VP & Head of IT Change Delivery, ING Vysya Bank

We are going to ask our panelists:

1. How important is the Enterprise & IT Architecture in their organization? What are the initiatives? How many IT projects in a year?
2. Does the Architecture initiative project-specific or enterprise wide in nature? What are the metrics for measuring the success?
3. What are the quantifiable benefits so far? How much does it costs?
4. What are the people & political challenges, roles & responsibilities, re-skilling issues, timeline challenges etc. and
5. Role of CIOs in Mergers & Acquisitions imperatives beyond just balance sheet consideration?
6. How to initiate a large scale transformation initiative, what are the actions & activities and what buzzwords to avoid.
7. Did they ever face a scenario when a seven-eight digit IT gave single digit benefit?
8. Are they tired of the pile of documentation which doesn’t result in effective decision making?
9. Does their CEO consult before flooding the market with new product or service offerings?
10. Most important, what are the lessons learnt being in the battle field?

Join our 9 panelists for the of very interactive and engaging panel discussion on 27^th evening. Do write me if you have questions which you would like our eminent panelists to address. See Ya!