CIO & LEADER-Issue-12-March 2018

Face Off 

Should Digital Budget Be A Part Of 

Enterprise IT Budget? Pg 24 

Insight 

What Does Hyper-Consolidation 

Mean For Enterprise CIOs? Pg 26 

Volume 06 

Issue 12 

March 2018 

150 

TRACK TECHNOLOGY BUILD BUSINESS SHAPE SELF 

Decoding 

Digital 

Transformation 

India, Circa 2018 

What the journeys of selected businesses in three of 

India's top business groups, Tata, Mahindra&Mahindra & 

Vedanta/Sterlite, tell us about big transformation Pg 12 

A 9.9 Group Publication

EDITORIAL 

Shyamanuja Das 

shyamanuja.das@9dot9.in 

The great 

question that 

has never been 

answered...… 

T 

“If you think 

you will be 

asked to drive 

transformation 

in a large 

company while 

keeping nuts 

and bolts of 

IT, you are 

mistaken" 

“The great question that has never been answered, 

and which I have not yet been able to answer, 

despite my thirty years of research,” confided 

Sigmund Freud, is ‘What does a woman want?’ 

The big question of business today—what 

exactly is digital transformation?—may not be as 

challenging as Freud’s ‘great question’ (maybe, 

one of the ultimate great questions of human 

civilization) but in many ways, they are similar. 

It is not that answer to these questions have not 

been attempted. In fact, they have probably been 

attempted by more people than any other comparable 

questions of their time and arguably that 

is exactly what makes them great. 

So, here’s one more shot at explaining what 

digital transformation means—the great question 

of business, circa 2018. 

The reason I started with Freud is that I can 

make the confession with a straight 

face—that what I have done is grossly 

inadequate to define what digital transformation 

means. Yet, if it can help you 

gauge the direction of the digital journey 

of some of the largest core sector companies 

in India a little better, I think my goal 

would be achieved to a great extent. 

Trying to define what digital transformation 

is not the job of editors like me. 

All we do is observe and report; maybe 

try to connect some dots at best. 

So, take it for what it is. It is a report on 

what is happening on the ground, with an 

attempt to identify some common trends. 

For CIOs, there are a couple of big messages. 

First and foremost, a CIO cannot drive digital 

transformation. Please read it completely before 

shooting me. All it means is a real transformation 

needs a dedicated driver. If you think you will be 

asked to drive transformation in a large company 

while keeping the nuts and bolts of IT (your current 

CIO role), you are mistaken. As you can make out, it 

has nothing to do with your competence or your professional 

background. It is everything to do about 

your letting go the past. 

Secondly, in the digital era, all that brought you 

here won’t take you there. You are probably here 

because you understand your business so well and 

you are a great problem solver. But for transformation, 

you may not be given a problem. Today, a good 

transformationist would look for all new technologies 

and should be able to quickly identify which 

one out of them can add great value to their business. 

You do not need to be apologetic about being a 

techie as long as you are comfortable with the landscape 

and do not get caught up with one. 

We will get into greater detail on what would 

make a CIO a great digital leader soon, in one of the 

next issues 

March 2018 | CIO&LEADER 

1

Face Off 

Should Digital Budget Be A Part Of 

Enterprise IT Budget? Pg 24 

TRACK TECHNOLOGY BUILD BUSINESS SHAPE SELF 

A 9.9 Group Publication 

Insight Volume 06 

What Does Hyper-Consolidation Issue 12 

March 2018 

Mean For Enterprise CIOs? Pg 26 

150 


What the journeys of selected businesses in three of 

India's top business groups, Tata, Mahindra&Mahindra & 

Vedanta/Sterlite, tell us about big transformation Pg 12 

CONTENT 

MARCH 2018 

COVER STORY 

12-23 | Decoding Digital 

Transformation - India, 

Circa 2018 

Decoding 

Digital 


Cover Design by: 

Shokeen Saifi 

Please Recycle 

This Magazine 

And Remove 

Inserts Before 

Recycling 

COPYRIGHT, All rights reserved: Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from 

Nine Dot Nine Interactive Pvt Ltd. is prohibited. Printed and published by Vikas Gupta for Nine Dot Nine 

Mediaworx Pvt Ltd, 121, Patparganj, Mayur Vihar, Phase - I, Near Mandir Masjid, Delhi-110091. Printed at 

Tara Art Printers Pvt ltd. A-46-47, Sector-5, NOIDA (U.P.) 2013011 

advertisers ’ index 

Seagate 

Netmatic 

IFC 

BC 

This index is provided as an 

additional service.The publisher 

does not assume any liabilities 

for errors or omissions. 

2 CIO&LEADER | March 2018

AROUND THE TECH 

04-07 

CIOs Think Of Themselves 

As Technology Visionaries 

www.cioandleader.com 

COLUMN 

08-09 

Why New Age BI 

Systems Are Better 

Than Traditional MIS? 

By Anshul Rai 

10-11 

Securing The Digital 

Supply Chain 

By Rahul Kumar 

INSIGHT 

28-29 

India Is Among Bottom 

Five Countries In Global 

Cloud Study 

34-35 

Cloud Apps And 

Web Portals Are 

The Biggest Targets 

For Attackers 

SECURITY 

36-37 

The Case of Rising 

Cyberattacks 

LEADERSHIP 

38-39 

Ten Ways Business 

Leaders Can Improve 

Gender Diversity 

MANAGEMENT 

Managing Director: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha 

Printer & Publisher: Vikas Gupta 

EDITORIAL 

Managing Editor: Shyamanuja Das 

Associate Editor: Shubhra Rishi 

Content Executive-Enterprise Technology: 

Dipanjan Mitra 

DESIGN 

Sr Art Director: Anil VK 

Art Director: Shokeen Saifi 

Visualisers: NV Baiju & Manoj Kumar VP 

Lead UI/UX Designer: Shri Hari Tiwari 

Sr Designers: Charu Dwivedi, Haridas Balan & Peterson PJ 

SALES & MARKETING 

Director-Community Engagement 

for Enterprise Technology Business: 

Sachin Mhashilkar (+91 99203 48755) 

Brand Head: Vandana Chauhan (+91 99589 84581) 

Assistant Product Manager-Digital: Manan Mushtaq 

Community Manager-B2B Tech: Megha Bhardwaj 

Community Manager-B2B Tech: Renuka Deopa 

Associate-Enterprise Technology: Abhishek Jain 

Assistant Brand Manager-B2B Tech: Mallika Khosla 

Regional Sales Managers 

South: Ashish Kumar (+91 97407 61921) 

North: Deepak Sharma (+91 98117 91110) 

West: Prashant Amin (+91 98205 75282) 

Ad Co-ordination/Scheduling: Kishan Singh 

PRODUCTION & LOGISTICS 

Manager Operations: Rakesh Upadhyay 

Asst. Manager - Logistics: Vijay Menon 

Executive Logistics: Nilesh Shiravadekar 

Logistics: MP Singh & Mohd. Ansari 

OFFICE ADDRESS 

9.9 Group Pvt. Ltd. 

(Formerly known as Nine Dot Nine Mediaworx Pvt. Ltd.) 

121, Patparganj, Mayur Vihar, Phase - I 

Near Mandir Masjid, Delhi-110091 

Published, Printed and Owned by 9.9 Group Pvt. Ltd. 

(Formerly known as Nine Dot Nine Mediaworx Pvt. Ltd.) 

Published and printed on their behalf by 

Vikas Gupta. Published at 121, Patparganj, 

Mayur Vihar, Phase - I, Near Mandir Masjid, Delhi-110091, 

India. Printed at Tara Art Printers Pvt Ltd., A-46-47, Sector-5, 

NOIDA (U.P.) 201301. 

Editor: Vikas Gupta 


3

around 

thetech 

WHAT 

CIOs ARE 

TIRED OF 

HEARING... 

“CIOs lack 

the strategic 

vision to see the 

big picture.” 


CIOs think of themselves 

as technology visionaries 

In a recent Global C-suite Study, IBM 

interviewed over 2,100 CIOs to better 

understand how the CIO function 

is evolving. The study reveals that 

CIOs have long moved beyond the 

original intention of the “I” in their 

title – Information – to a myriad 

of other foci. The new-age CIO is 

doing everything from helping to 

drive business strategy to enabling 

the creation of new products and 

services, to improving the customer 

experience and empowering their 

organizations. 

Interestingly, the critical issues CIOs 

used to face have changed over the 

years. The number of CIOs earlier 

were pressured to transform their 

organizations wasn’t that high, but 

there was a significant gap between 

CIOs’ responses and those of the rest 

of the C-suite. 

CIOs see themselves today as 

technology visionaries (24%) and 

transformational business leaders 

(21%). These are the foundational 

competencies of the contemporary 

CIO. Some continue to play more 

traditional roles – IT coordinator and 

manager (13%) and trusted business 

advisor (12 %). 

In the next two to three 

years, CIOs see the job 

shifting to areas much 

closer to the business. "The 

roles of transformational 

business leader and 

technology visionary 

still top the list, but 

IT coordinator 

and manager 

has dropped 

significantly," notes 

the study. 


Around The Tech 

BY THE BOOK 

The most driven leaders are those who 

dare to be their true-selves. Have you 

ever attempted that at the workplace? In 

a business world that is so competitive 

and uncertain, how do you interact with 

other people more authentically to tap 

into their illusive want? 

Brave Leadership by Kimberly Davis 

is the essential guide for leaders in 

today's ever-shifting world. Wherever 

you are in your leadership journey— 

new, seasoned, young, or old—if you 

aspire to be the best leader you can be, 

then this book is for you. It gives you 

perspective into overcoming barriers to 

become brave, learn to manage stress 

and anxiety, and prepare for highstakes 

meetings and conversations 

Do you have the influence you want 

to have? Are you able to set the direction 

of your career, connect powerfully, 

and feel more confident, courageous, 

satisfied, and purposeful? This book 

promises to help you tap into the want 

of the people you lead to get the results 

you need. 

This alluring and inspiring book 

bridges traditional business how-to 

with a personal development approach 

to demystify what it takes to be the 

brave leader you were born to be. 

makingheadlines 

#DeleteFacebook hashtag has been doing the rounds on Twitter. As if to add 

insult to the injury, users are now deleting their Facebook accounts. Tesla's 

CEO, Elon Musk is the latest to join the bandwagon. He deleted his verified 

Facebook pages for SpaceX and Tesla. 

However, the #DeleteFacebook issue is a bit of a deja vu moment for the company, 

which has been embroiled in a series of controversies for the last decade. 

Almost eight years ago, an online event christened 'Quit Facebook Day' was 

started by a group of dissatisfied Facebook users. The reason was identical - 

most users were concerned about their data's privacy. The boycott was a major 

flop after just over 30,000 of the site's 500 million users deleted their Facebook 

accounts. 

As more users get conscious about privacy, the more bad news it will be for online 

businesses such as Facebook. Will 2018 serve as an end of the road for Facebook? 

Iceland is a tiny country, with a population of 336,483. 

But it is a heavyweight in gender equality. It has had 

the closest gender gap of any country for nine years 

in a row. According to European Union data, Iceland 

is the world leader at including women in the labour 

force: Participation was over 80% in 2017. Since the 

1970s, more and more Icelandic women have entered 

the workforce, thanks to several political decisions, 

such as a legal right for parents to return to their job 

after childbirth. 

Iceland has had an equal pay law in effect since 

1961. However, the icing on the cake was when the 

Iceland Parliament in January this year, banned pay 

discrimination in the workplace. In 2017, the then government 

of Iceland made this standard not a voluntary 

one. Every company with 25 or more employees needs 

to undergo audit to using the standard to prove that 

they are actually not discriminating in the workplace 

against men and women. 

gender 

bender 


5


AUTO-NOMOUS 

matter of 

twitter 

Sixty-three percent of consumers are more likely to ride in an 

autonomous vehicle if it was offered by a brand they trust, a Deloitte 

survey has confirmed. Brand trust, however, is becoming more 

important, the type of company consumers would most trust to bring 

fully self-driving technology to market has not changed over last 

year. Consumers in Japan, Germany, and the United States still favor 

traditional vehicle manufacturers; this is in contrast to consumers in 

South Korea, India, and China, who would most favor new autonomous 

vehicle manufacturers or existing tech companies. 

So how do you make consumers feel more comfortable riding in 

self-driving vehicles? Deloitte reports that over 71% of US consumers 

fell that they would be more likely to ride in an autonomous 

vehicle if it had an established safety record (up from 68% last 

year). Howver, it only takes one negative incident to destroy much 

of the goodwill, faith, and interest built up around these long-term 

R&D experiments. 

VITAL 

STATISTICS 

Hit by 

ransomware, 

by country 

India 

Mexico 

U.S. 

Canada 

South Africa 

Germany 

France 

Australia 

U.K. 

Japan 

Hit by ransomware, by country 

48% 

48% 

45% 

41% 

54% 

51% 

67% 

65% 

60% 

59% 

% of 

organizations hit 

by ransomware 

in the previous 

12 months 

Source: Sophos’ The State of Endpoint Security Today 



And the award for 

THE BEST WORKPLACE IN INDIA 

goes to… 

#1 

#2 

#3 

#4 

#5 

As competition for jobseekers intensifies, 

Linkedin’s 2018 Top Companies report 

haw actively deployed employee-first 

strategies such as flexible hours, a good 

parental leave policy, and time-off to do 

more than work. Some of the emerging 

themes this year are: 

• Unconventional hiring methods: The 

top companies in India are looking 

beyond the grades and college rankings 

to recruit new talent. Directi (#1) cherrypicks 

talent using unconventional 

techniques such as case studies, tasks 

like app development and solving the 

Rubik’s cube. 

• Flexibility first: With job seekers 

increasingly demanding a work-life balance, 

these top companies have chalked 

out flexible parental leave policies and 

programs for planned time-off to recuperate 

or even pick up a new hobby. 

Amazon (#4) has a Ramp Back program 

that offers new parents eight weeks of 

flexibility and partial work hours, so 

they can acclimatize to their new schedules. 

At McKinsey & Company (#6), 

under ‘Take Time’, employees can take 

five to 10 extra weeks off to pursue their 

passion – get a pilot’s licence, write a 

book – or attend to family matters. 

• Wellness at work: Wellness and fitness 

facilities continue to be the top draw for 

employees while choosing a company 

to work for. Alphabet (#7) is known for 

its gourmet meals, fitness facilities, and 

on-site childcare services, whereas Ola 

has on offer multiple clubs for activities 

ranging from music to sports — where 

employees can mingle with other teams. 

• Democratizing power: From office interiors 

to policy creation, top companies 

are ensuring its employees have a say in 

how things are done. For instance, PwC's 

NextGen Sounding Board comprises 

200 millennial employees who participate 

in policy creation for the company. 

All new and revised people policies are 

first taken to this group. 

• Learn to lead: The top companies have 

made in talent growth and development 

an in-house responsibility. EY (#9) last 

year rolled out a program called EY 

Badges that allows employees to earn 

digital certificates for skills like artificial 

intelligence, data science and data 

visualization. MakeMyTrip (#18) offers 

a bevy of free courses for its employees, 

ranging from customized behavioral 

programmes to study tours to Europe 

and Southeast Asia. 


7

COLUMN 

By Anshul Rai 

Why New Age 

BI Systems Are 

Better Than 

Traditional 

MIS? 

How new-age BI systems can create 

value for Indian businesses 

T 

The author is the CEO and Co-founder 

of Happay, a business management 

company that caters to various business 

spends; the article was first published in 

cfo-india.in, our sister website 

The role of today’s CFO extends way 

beyond the mandate of traditional 

financial management into more 

strategic areas of business. The new 

responsibilities make it crucial for 

CFOs to have meaningful data at their 

fingertips to support and develop strategic 

business initiatives. 

However, the problem is with getting 

the right data, in the right format 

and at the right time. Traditional MIS 

systems, especially those used for revenue 

and expense reporting, are saddled 

with inaccuracy, inconsistency 

and unmanageable complexity. 

The way the data is collected, stored, 

compiled and presented to CFOs 

makes it unfit for analysis and decision-making. 

For department heads and finance 

teams, data management is an arduous 

and time-consuming process. 

Why is this the case? 

1. The data extracted from 

the traditional MIS systems 

is aggregate data. 

In any organization, department or 

product heads are given budgets at the 

start of every month or quarter, and 

their performance is gauged against 

this budget. To view their individual 

performance against budgets, department 

heads resort to the canned 

reports from the General Ledger (GL) 

generated by the finance teams. They 

view the report data, look for variances 

and take corrective measures to 

eliminate cost overruns and maximize 

budget efficiency. 

Seems pretty straightforward till 

this point, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not, 

especially when there are deviations 

in data. Aggregate data is not enough 

to understand the root cause of budget 

deviations. 

The GL reports show aggregate 

data for spends vs. budget. This 

data output has none of the rich 

transaction details that are necessary 

for investigating the root causes that 

trigger a budget deviation or an unexpected 

increase in a particular expense 

category. 


Column 

In this case, the departmental managers 

go back to the finance teams for 

the underlying details behind the GL 

data — the individual transactions 

that caused them to exceed their budget. 

This triggers a spurt of activity 

within the finance department, causing 

workload to shoot up immediately 

during the month or quarter end. 

The finance departments run additional 

reports to find out the required 

information for managers. The process 

doesn’t stop there. The departmental 

heads often have questions on the new 

reports generated. Once they receive 

the answers, they have follow-up questions 

and the cycle continues. It sometimes 

takes weeks for the issue to get 

resolved satisfactorily from both ends. 

2. The data is stored in 

multiple systems managed 

by different teams. 

The GL summary report contains 

transaction data that is extracted from 

different systems like HRM & Payroll, 

Accounts Payable and Inventory Management 

– each of them managed by 

different teams. 

People other than finance also gets 

tasked with requests for data extracts. 

This makes the entire process even 

more complex and time-consuming. 

No wonder it takes weeks on end to 

solve one issue. 

3. The data does not 

facilitate easy comparison 

of different departments or 

cost centers. 

The reports generated by the finance 

department for comparison are 

income statements and balance sheets. 

They show profits against losses and 

performance vs. budget for an individual 

manager, department or product 

and are definitely useful. 

So what is the way out for 

CFOs and finance teams? 

Alternative #1: Replace their legacy 

GL system. 

One way is to replace their current GL 

system with the latest ERP or accounting 

software. However, this might 

involve substantial cost and resource 

commitment. 

Alternative #2: Adopt a self-service, 

business intelligence system. 

A smarter way out is to adopt selfservice, 

business intelligence (BI) 

systems that give CFOs the analytics 

they need while leaving their existing 

GL in place. 

Let us look at how 

automated BI tools provide 

their users an edge over 

traditional MIS: 

Consistent, secure and error-free 

reports: Rather than generate aggregate 

reports, BI solutions help finance 

teams generate role-specific reports. 

Such reports enable managers to 

easily view revenues and spends of 

their direct reportees or their area 

of responsibility. Finance teams can 

enable managers to view these reports 

via web-based dashboards, rather 

than sending the reports via email 

in the form of spreadsheets. Emailing 

reports can expose the company’s 

financial data to unauthorized 

individuals. 

Spreadsheets can be easily altered 

and the resulting conflicting data takes 

weeks to investigate and reconcile. 

BI systems help managers view the 

reports they need in the most secure 

environment. 

BI systems also help finance teams 

automate the data-reporting process. 

Finance representatives can set rules 

and alerts within the system to notify 

managers of budget overruns and help 

them take action immediately. 

All data on one system: BI systems 

easily integrate with other systems 

like accounts payables, inventory 

management and payroll. Such integrations 

help finance teams to map GL 

codes with transactional data, invoices, 

purchase orders, etc. What was initially 

stored in a maze of spreadsheets 

cannot be brought onto the same platform 

and viewed together with a click 

of a button. 

Easy comparison: BI tools make 

comparisons across departments, 

across different data types and across 

different users easier to access as 

well as to visualize. Apart from 

addressing the key gaps of traditional 

MIS, BI systems help finance teams 

gain a lot more. 

Centralized visibility and accountability: 

Since departmental managers 

can easily identify budget variances 

and the underlying reasons behind 

them, they can manage expenses in 

a better way. They can spend more 

time understanding what triggers 

budget overruns, rather than running 

behind finance teams asking 

for details behind the aggregate summaries. 

They also have centralized 

visibility over all data and can take 

decisions in a prompt and efficient 

manner. 

More efficient work allocation: 

A significant amount of time and 

effort of finance teams goes into backtracking 

bugs, errors and outliers in 

the data and reporting them back to 

the department that pointed them out. 

BI tools eliminate these low-value, 

cumbersome tasks, allowing finance to 

focus on core job responsibilities, such 

as identifying new revenue generating 

opportunities or mitigating risks. 

Powerful feedback tool: BI systems 

can serve as a good coaching and feedback 

tools for management since they 

facilitate easy peer-to-peer comparisons. 

With access to the comparison data, 

VPs and directors can evaluate performance 

of different managers, understand 

why certain managers are able 

to meet budgets and help the ones who 

don’t create more realistic budgets and 

decrease their budget overruns. 

As big data and analytics become 

a priority, CFOs have to be prepared 

to take strides forward and bag the 

best business intelligence systems for 

their companies 


9

COLUMN 

By Rahul Kumar 

Securing The 

Digital Supply 

Chain 

It is a favored arena for malicious actors 

to plant malware, to devastating effect 

D 

Authored article by Rahul Kumar, 

Country Manager, WinMagic 

Ensuring a secure supply chain is a necessary 

precondition in today’s world of 

commerce. The digital supply chain has 

emerged as the weakest link for the potential 

insertion of malware backdoors. Governments 

and industry are just getting 

around to addressing the various concerns 

relating to supply-chain security. 

When it comes to data security challenges, 

human and technological influences 

can be amongst the most difficult 

to manage, seriously exacerbating cyber 

risk to IT-enabled supply chain management 

(SCM). It is quite common to find 

SCM software running on top of business 

software, exposing organisations to 

myriad risks and attacks. In fact, digital 

supply chain risks keep evolving with 

technological advancements and there is 

no end in sight for a definitive solution to 

address them. Merely determining the 

authenticity of various hardware, firmware 

and software components does not 

guarantee a secure system. 

80% of data breaches 

begin here 

It is common knowledge that most of the 

companies do not have full visibility into 

their supply chain. In fact, the potential 

risk exposure of a company increases 

with the number of unmanaged suppliers. 

It is quite normal for even a midsized 

firm to be part of a complex web 

of global inter-dependencies that are 

driving synchronized commerce today. 

Technological disruption has made the 

digital supply chain the prime source of 

risks, although there are several other 

ways that an organization could suffer a 

compromise leading to information theft 

or a service outage. 

With organizations relying on software 

and services from third-party providers, 

the risk of exposure to cybercrime gets 

only higher and supply chain disruptions 

are becoming costlier. It is estimated that 

80% of all information breaches originate 

in the supply chain, with manufacturers 

facing the brunt of all attacks—mostly 

from unplanned IT or communication 

outage, followed by cyberattacks and 

data breaches. The digital supply chain 

is also the favored arena for malicious 


Column 

The continued 

ascendency of 

supply chain risks 

has led to the 

evolution of new 

risk management 

approaches, 

focusing on 

cybersecurity 

practices 

actors to plant malware, to devastating 

effect. Remember what happened 

when several Chrome extensions 

were compromised? It resulted in 

hijacking of traffic and exposing users 

to potentially malicious popups and 

credential theft. 

Risks exist at every stage 

Cyber supply chain risks may originate 

at the suppliers’ end (inclusion of 

unwanted functionality, data or network 

breaches, insider threats); at the 

place of business operation (data theft 

or alteration of data, insertion of malicious 

software and hardware, outages, 

etc.); or at the distribution end (theft, 

tampering, counterfeiting, etc.). Many 

functions, departments and roles in an 

organisation own the risks affecting 

supply chain security. Risk blind spots 

in the supply chain occur only when 

little or no communication or cooperation 

takes place—both inside and outside 

of an organization. 

It is, therefore, important to formulate 

a strategy for end-to-end risk 

management in the supply chain, 

ensuring its integrity, security, and 

resilience. A successful strategy 

should outline ways to secure the 

organization and its dependencies, 

covering all tiers in the chain. The 

continued ascendancy of supply chain 

risks has led to the evolution of new 

risk management approaches, which 

focus on existing cybersecurity and 

supply chain practices for building an 

effective digital supply-chain. 

By identifying vulnerable systems 

and components, businesses can formulate 

risk mitigation measures that 

are cost-effective and efficient. Organisations 

can keep information assets 

secure by adopting and applying standards 

such as ISO 27000 and 31000, 

and recommending the same to all 

the players in the supply chain. This 

would require the implementation 

of technology and process upgrades, 

encryption, access policies, intrusion 

prevention systems, and other key 

best practices. It also makes sense to 

have a core group of risk owners collaborate 

on administrative and operational 

affairs, which also have a direct 

or indirect bearing on supply chain 

security. For instance, it is particularly 

important to immediately communicate 

any personnel changes to supply 

chain partners so that account profiles 

can be updated. 

Businesses can change for the better 

when they realize that the cyber-security 

of any one organisation within 

the chain is only as strong as that of 

the weakest member. With information 

and security practices shared 

across a supply chain, continued 

effort on the part of all stakeholders 

can convert their weakest link into 

an asset. Encryption of data and endpoint 

devices provides the last line 

of defense in a digital supply chain. 

Of what use is the best technology or 

practice if an organization’s staff or 

those in supplier organizations still 

are fooled by phishing attacks? Just 

one misplaced click could affect millions 

of consumers, bring down the 

organization’s reputation, impact 

revenues, and even risk business 

continuity. Securing data and devices 

with encryption across the enterprise 

and supply chain networks is a great 

means of protecting the enterprise 

against attacks, threats, and other 

risks—whether malicious or 

unintentional 

https://www.rsaconference.com/writable/presentations/ 

file_upload/grcw03_integrating_cybersecurity_into_ 

supply_chain_risk_management.pdf 

https://www.proofpoint.com/us/threat-insight/post/threatactor-goes-chrome-extension-hijacking-spree 


11

Cover Story 

Decoding 

Digital 



What the journeys of selected businesses in three of India's top 

business groups, Tata, Mahindra&Mahindra & Vedanta/Sterlite, tell 

us about big transformation 

By Shyamanuja Das 

12 CIO&LEADER | March 2018

Cover Story 

transform. verb trans•form \ tran(t)s-ˈfȯrm \ 

a: to change in composition or structure 

b: to change the outward form or appearance of 

c: to change in character or condition 

transformation. noun trans•for•ma•tion \ ˌtran(t)s-fər- 

ˈmā-shən , -fȯr- an act, process, or instance of transforming 

or being transformed 

First things first. Why another story on digital 

transformation? 

After all, isn’t it the most used (abuse is also a use) 

catch-phrase of our times? Don’t all vendors—selling 

connectivity to anti-virus and all things in between— 

promise to enable, nay ‘power’ your digital transformation 

journey, adding their bit of definition of ‘real’ 

digital transformation? 

That is the very reason this story was 

conceptualized. 

Paradoxical as it may sound, but this continuous 

sermonizing on transformation—coming right from 

global think tanks to your local recruitment agency— 

inspired us to look beyond those gems of wisdom 

and get to the bottom of it, asking a simple question. 

What exactly is happening in India as far as digital 

transformation is concerned? 

However, that sounded fairly large in scope for us 

to handle. We further trimmed it down to focus only 

on core sectors—where the need for big scale transformation 

is more acute. 

To ensure that we get into the depth, we decided 

to cut down on the breadth. We decided to restrict 

ourselves to just three of the large business groups in 

India who are strong players in businesses that have 

crying needs for technology-enabled transformation. 

Those groups are Tata, Mahindra&Mahindra & 

Vedanta/Sterlite—three of the largest, most forwardlooking 

organizations who have strong play in businesses 

that need significant transformation. 

How we selected these three is also fascinating. 

This writer was working on a story on India’s chief 

digital officers/heads of transformation. Keeping 

out too small companies and those for whom digital 

is a line of business (such as online media, agencies 

etc), we figured out that India has just a little over 40 

such designated people. 

More than a third of them work for one of 

these groups. 

What it means is not only are these companies 

serious about their transformation journey, they are 

a good representative sample to study if one wants to 

understand the course that digital transformation is 

taking in India. 

Within these groups too, we selected only those 

businesses that have a dire need for transformation. 

So, instead of a TCS or a Mahindra Holidays, we 

wanted to focus on the journeys at Tata Steel, a large 

manufacturing company and Mahindra Finance, 

which primarily operates in rural areas of India. 

What you will get from this story are a set of 

observations—occasionally pieces of wisdom too, 

but from the practitioners directly—and analysis 

based on those observations. 

Much like the digital transformationists themselves, 

we have taken a bottom-up approach, in sharp 

contrast to the ‘framework approach’ you have listened 

largely so far. So, we have spoken to the heads of 

transformations at these companies to understand the 

journey. Roughly, this is what you will get 


13

Cover Story 

• Why digital transformation? 

• What are the specific outcomes 

they are looking for? 

• What are the models of carrying it 

out? 

• How is tech impacting it? 

• And finally, the learning from all 

this: What does digital transformation 

entail? 

One big piece is missing—what 

have they achieved? We realized it is 

still too soon; you may notice glimpses 

of it in the story, however. 

One danger, though, is that a bottom-up 

study could tend to become a 

blind-men-and-elephant proposition. 

Being sensitized to that, we will not 

draw a model transformation dos-anddon’ts 

but will present common observations 

and their stories individually 

too, so that you can apply your filter 

on what is relevant for you and what 

is not. 

We will be tangible, and specific, as 

much as possible. 

Applying 

technology to business 

needs has been done 

since ever…but what is 

happening today is – 

you can impact all the 

three layers, strategy, 

product and processes 

which was not possible 

earlier. 

Sarajit Jha, Chief Digital Value 

Accelerator, Tata Steel 

Last point…this story is not a status 

report on digital transformation in 

India…e.g it does not even get into the 

macro picture. It means you will not 

find what is the percentage of companies 

that have chosen the path. It seeks 

to find what digital transformation 

means, from a micro perspective. 

The Imperatives 

Why was this transformation necessary? 

And how is this round different 

from the past changes? After all, 

changing business processes is something 

businesses are not trying out for 

the first time! 

“Applying technology to business 

needs has been done since ever…but 

what is happening today is – you can 

impact all the three layers, strategy, 

product and processes today which 

was not possible earlier,” says Sarajit 

Jha, Chief, Digital Value Acceleration 

at Tata Steel, one of the largest manufacturing 

companies in India and a 

leading steel company globally 

Newer companies are, of course, 

in better positions to take full advantage 

of the new regime. And they are 

disrupting age-old business models. 

Earlier, an aggressive new challenger 

would look at taking away your market 

share; now, it can make your business 

irrelevant. 

Adds Jha, “You rework your products/processes/strategy 

to remain 

relevant. If you don’t, there is a 

large price to be paid. “Yesterday, it 

was excellence that was driving the 

change; today, it is survival.” 

These are the companies that have 

taken a proactive stance to be on top of 

that change, rather than being pushed 

to act. 

That is what Dr Anand Agarwal, 

CEO, Sterlite Tech says quite unequivocally. 

“We are dealing with telecom companies, 

social media companies, cities. 

And we see each of them is itching to 

transform—to become significantly 

different from what they are,” he says. 

“We clearly realized that if we 

Why Digital 


in a 

nutshell 

1. New digital technologies have gone 

beyond information flows and are 

now impacting hitherto untouched 

areas in business: manufacturing on 

one hand and decision making on the 

other—in the process not just creating 

tremendous low hanging fruits which 

are acting as hooks for companies 

but also blurring the boundaries 

between these layers in a business 

2. Newer challengers are in a better 

position to take advantage of this 

new proposition and are creating 

alternate business models (like 

platform-based businesses) that are 

shaking established models. The 

large companies need to transform to 

effectively thwart this challenge. It is 

a question of survival. 

3. The global economy becoming 

increasingly collaborative and 

connected; it is difficult to remain 

isolated. Some have decided to be 

more proactive than others. 

4. Rapid penetration of digital 

technologies among consumers is 

increasing expectation to be served 

across digital channels (even more 

important in a demographically 

young country like India. 

need to continue to be relevant in this 

ecosystem, for us to rapidly transform 

and create a lead and enable our 

ecosystem to transform is an obvious 

requirement. We have to transform 

and we have to drive this transformation 

that is taking place,” he adds. 

Sterlite itself is changing its positioning 

from a cable manufacturer to 

an integrated telecom products and 

services company rapidly. 

“To enable external transformation, 

we have to do a lot of internal transformation. 

And that is what we are driving,” 

he adds. 

It was similar environmental 

changes that made Mahindra Finance 

take up transformation significantly. 

The company, that operates in rural 


Cover Story 

India, was finding that the world was 

digitalizing and there was need for it 

to better customer experience not just 

by providing information and interactions 

over mobile phone, which by 

now has become ubiquitous, but also 

by bettering customer experience by 

cutting down on decision cycle time. 

Clear, measurable 

business goals 

When survival—of even a market 

leader—is threatened, you go back 

to the basics. And that is what businesses 

are doing with digital transformation—they 

are trying to DIRECTLY 

impact one of the three fundamental 

parameters for any business—growth 

(scalability), profitability and sustainability 

of that profitable growth. 

“It is simple. it was to maintain and 

retain our market leadership,” says 

Tina Singh, Chief Digital Officer at 

Mahindra & Mahindra, pointing to 

the desired outcome of the company’s 

digital transformation journey. 

In Tata Steel, the identification of 

digital as the means is a little more 

explicit. “By 2020, we need to be an 

industry leader in manufacturing in 

the use of digital technology,” says Jha 

of Tata Steel. 

But it does not always have to be 

#THEJOURNEY 

Mahindra Finance 

MAHINDRA GROUP is one that started 

the digital journey at the group level when 

it hired an SVP, Digital Transformation 

in mid-2015. The mandate for Jaspreet 

Bindra was to explore how digital can add 

value to the business at the group level 

and help the individual group companies 

kickstart their digital journey. 

“My and my small team’s role is to work 

with a bunch of companies and chart 

out their roadmap,” Bindra had told us in 

late 2016. Their mandate is to look for 

new technologies and figure out how the 

technology can add value to an existing 

business or create a new revenue stream. 

One of the key technologies they selected 

was blockchain. And the group company 

that they selected was Mahindra Finance. 

And the use case was invoice discounting, 

often called bill discounting. 

Invoice discounting, the process of 

bundling and selling invoices at a 

discount, is a major source of working 

capital finance for many suppliers. Invoice 

discounting processes have traditionally 

been difficult, slow and risky, requiring 

each party to maintain and manually 

update separate ledgers. The application 

of blockchain to this process to test how it 

works successfully ended in end 2016. 

Having tries a cutting-edge technology— 

the trial made international headlines—the 

expectation was huge. That is when the 

current CDO, Tina Singh took charge. 

Her immediate task was to set a digital 

roadmap to ‘maintain and retain our 

market leadership.’ 

There were three explicit expectations. 

1. Streamlining by digitizing processes: 

efficiency/turnaround time leading t 

better customer experience 

2. Being able to use data to make better 

decisions; better respond to change 

and create new products and services 

3. Harness new tech at sector level (four 

companies in Mahindra in finance) 

complete new models – new revenue 

streams 

One of the challenges for Mahindra 

Finance was absence of a basic digital 

infrastructure. The company works 

primarily in rural India. In many cases, 

the branches had no connectivity; so the 

model was that they were working as silos 

and taking decisions independently. With 

new requirements like Aadhaar, that was 

not an option. So, building that is a priority 

before anything else can be done. 

In terms of customer facing functions, 

there was a need to reach out to the 

customers using mobile; but being in rural 

areas, it had to be done through SMS or 

through assisted mobile apps. 

At the same time, the company was 

trying out cutting-edge technologies like 

blockchain. 

These three belong to sort of three 

different generations. Few good 

businesses lack basic ICT infra; that is 

very clearly the past. Mobile apps is the 

current technology; while blockchain is 

clearly a future technology. The company 

was doing everything at the same time, 

not an easy challenge. 

Building the right data architecture is 

what the company is doing now. That 

means first they must bring all data to 

one platform—customer data that the 

company has (and that is really unique), 

alternate data available about individuals 

like that of census data. The next step 

is to use publicly available data such 

as weather and crop production to 

triangulate. And all that data has to be 

analyzed using appropriate analytics. 

Apart from blockchain which is moving 

From PoC to commercial even while 

being considered for other use cases, 

the company is looking at using AI & ML 

algorithms and is working actively with 

fintech partners. 

After the first phase of automation, 

Mahindra Finance wants to go for 

Robotics Process Automation. 

The approach in Mahindra Group’s digital 

transformation is to try doing things such 

as data architecture not just at company 

level but at the sectoral level. The CDO is 

responsible for the sector. 

Singh does not have any doubt about 

the important role played by Enterprise 

IT “We are a small team that works with 

Enterprise IT; give them the roadmap. I 

cannot do it without enterprise IT” 

And this is how she summarizes the 

raison d’ etre of the digital team. 

“We are creating a new sense of urgency 

which will not happen in a business as 

usual scenario,” she says. 


15

Cover Story 

#THEJOURNEY 

Sterlite Copper 

THE STORY digital transformation 

journey of Vedanta Resources is not 

too old. The company took help of 

consultants to figure out if it could drive 

transformation but ultimately settled 

for hiring internal drivers of digital 

transformation. 

In June-July 2017, executive search firm 

Russel Reynolds helped the group hire 

three chief digital officers for its three 

business units – Aluminium, Sterlite 

Copper and Sesa Goa. 

While it is too early to talk about the 

journey in past tense, there are some 

initiatives that the company, Sterlite 

Copper is trying. 

“For large manufacturing companies 

like ours, the expectations from digital 

is around operations, maintenance 

and cost. If you reduce operations and 

maintenance cost by 10% or production 

cost by 5%, it is significant business 

value,” says CDO Amitabh Mishra. 

So, big efficiency gains are very much 

part of its transformation. But it is how 

it is planning to achieve that is what tells 

its transformation focus. 

“You can use digital to improve visibility 

of different components of production 

cost, such as manufacturing cost, 

cost of raw materials, cost of power 

and so on. Once you understand what 

contributes to cost, you can start 

reducing,” says Mishra. 

But one of the areas that the company is 

trying to leverage digital is in eliminating 

fatality. “It is very important to us. Digital 

goes a long way in improving health and 

safety environment,” says Mishra 

The company, where the Head of IT 

reports to the CDO, implementing tech 

is not a challenge. For the time being, 

apart from large scale industrial 

automation, the company is looking at 

building a data platform that can support 

the journey. 

eliminate fatality. It is very important 

to us,” says Mishra, explaining the 

outcomes expected from digital 

journey. 

Even for Mahindra Finance, CDO 

Tina Singh spells out the specific 

impact areas. They are: 

a. Streamlining by digitizing processes: 

efficiency/turnaround time 

leading to better customer experience 

b. Being able to use data to make better 

decisions; better respond to 

change and create new products 

and services 

c. Harness new tech at sector level 

(four companies in finance sector) 

for complete new models for new 

revenue streams 

In Sterlite Technologies, which is 

going through a change in its positioning 

from a product manufacturer to a 

solution provider, the person driving 

the transformation is not called CDO. 

Nischal Gupta, who reports to CEO Dr 

Anand Agarwal, is the Chief Transformation 

Officer. 

a long-term change. In most manufacturing 

businesses, for example, 

application of digital can bring about 

some disruptive efficiency gains to 

processes hitherto untouched by IT— 

delivering two distinct immediate benefits—the 

stated objective of cost and 

the unstated (but often an important) 

objective of bringing in credibility 

of the exercise and buy-in from the 

old-timers. The latter could otherwise 

become the most daunting task in any 

change management program. 

In addition to this immediately 

delivered benefit, digital enables clear 

visibility into areas that had relied on 

gut-feel often euphemistically called 

‘experience’ of people. By collecting 

and analyzing data, digital converts 

that to a pure science from guess work. 

In short, this is the essential of the 

famed industry 4.0 or 4th industrial 

revolution. 

In Sterlite Copper—a group company 

of Vedanta Resources, which has 

initiated digital transformation in all 

its group companies—huge cost gains 

are a stated outcome. 

“For large manufacturing companies 

like ours, the expectations 

from digital is around operations, 

maintenance and cost. If you reduce 

operations and maintenance cost 

by 10% or production cost by 5%, it 

is significant business value,” says 

Amitabh Mishra, Chief Digital Officer 

at Sterlite Copper. 

“You can use digital to improve 

visibility of different components of 

production cost, such as manufacturing 

cost, cost of raw materials, cost 

of power and so on. Once you understand 

what contributes to cost, you 

can start reducing,” he adds. 

In addition to cost gains, Sterlite 

Copper is looking at significant 

improvements in “health, safety and 

environment. “We want to absolutely 

We are dealing with 

telecom companies, 

social media 

companies, cities. 

And we see each of 

them is itching to 

transform—to become 

significantly different 

from what they are. 

Dr Anand P Agarwal, CEO, 

Sterlite Tech 


Cover Story 

Desired Outcomes 

in a 

nutshell 

1. Digital transformation is invariably 

driven by one or more company-level 

strategic goals, which roll into one 

or more of the three fundamentals 

of business: growth, profitability 

and sustainability of that profitable 

growth. 

2. The specific objectives—and even 

the mission statements—sound very 

different for companies because 

strategic priorities are different for 

each company 

3. Different companies are at 

different stages of journey. For 

some manufacturing companies, 

the desired outcome is to simply 

achieve those cost/efficiency gains 

in manufacturing through digital 

technology that IT has already 

achieved in service functions such as 

finance, HR, supply chain etc. 

4. For some companies, digital is part 

of a larger transformation initiative 

5. One commonality is that everyone 

agrees at the end, the business gain 

(even if it is efficiency) will come from 

analyzing data and not just simple 

automation of tasks. 

Companies 

realize that you 

cannot transform by 

help of an external 

consultant without 

the commitment of 

a full-time employee 

driving it. 

Amitabh Mishra, Chief Digital 

Officer, Sterlite Copper 

Obviously, the transformation 

agenda for Sterlite Tech is broader and 

bigger. It starts with basic automation 

of hitherto non-automated processes 

to “building a sustainable way of 

doing business so that it can scale,” as 

Gupta puts it. 

Some of the changes needed to 

achieve are 

• To free up the minds of every leader 

to focus on value addition rather 

than getting stuck in the business 

as usual in the day to day basis 

• To enable every leader to speak 

freely for desired outcomes 

• To have a collaborative goal setting 

in the organization rather than a 

directive goal setting 

• To ‘absorb’ the latest technologies 

to leverage them better 

• Bringing in a process based 

thinking (“don’t postpone problems; 

balance the short term and 

the long term”) 

Choosing the Right Model 

Digital transformation is not Newton’s 

Law. What I mean to each company 

may be very different 

“Transformation,” says Nischal 

Gupta of Sterlite, “is a customized 

recipe for each organization.” 

While there is a broad super list 

of common ingredients to choose 

from, the process of putting them 

all together could be very different. 

That is because there are so many 

business variables—the nature of 

business, the size of business, the 

starting point in terms of culture, the 

starting point in terms of technology, 

the outcomes expected… 

Hence, the models could vary 

significantly. 

Tata Steel, for example, looked at 

digital transformation as something 

that will change the way the company 

works. It was not about a quick of 

couple of big impact projects in lowhanging 

areas. So, it decided to do two 

things simultaneously – on one hand, 

it slowly changed the DNA of the company 

to a digital DNA by a variety of 

initiatives and on the other, created 

exemplars by trying things out on the 

ground. This balanced the short term 

and the long term. 

And the exemplars were not pilots. 

They were full-fledged transformation, 

albeit in a section of the business. 

On the other hand, Mahindra 

Finance had to focus on building basic 

technology infrastructure in rural 

areas so that processes could be automated. 

That was too a company-wide 

change like Tata Steel, albeit the actual 

tasks were completely different. While 

Tata Steel focused right away on 

people and culture, Mahindra Finance 

had to build some of the fundamental 

building blocks. 

In Sterlite Technologies, a larger 

transformation is underway with specifically 

identified components—IT, 

data science, process transformation— 


17

Cover Story 

#THEJOURNEY 

Tata Steel 

TATA STEEL’S digital journey is about 

three years old. 

It is in early 2015 that Sarajit Jha, who 

was running Tata Business Support 

Services as its COO moved to Tata Steel 

as Chief of Corporate Strategy. 

Till 2012, Jha had worked in Tata Global 

Beverages. Harish Bhatt, the then CEO of 

Tata Global Beverages was one of the first 

senior executives within Tata Group to talk 

about digital. 

When Jha moved in, not surprisingly, 

there was little awareness about digital 

in the company. In May 2015, Tata Steel 

formed a digital cross-functional team 

of youngsters; the logic was: they know 

more about the subject. 

In August 2015, the company hired 

Accenture as the consultant and started 

the first program called Digital Awareness 

Program for senior leadership on what 

is happening around digital and what is 

the potential impact. This was followed 

by a program called Digital Immersion 

Program which was followed by a 

program called Digital Darshan in 

January 2016. 

In August 2015, it had launched a 

reverse mentoring program for which 16 

senior people volunteered to be reversementored 

by younger employees. This got 

a mention by the World Economic Forum. 

This was followed by some pilots. 

That is when the company decided to 

go for a digital exemplar. The Tubes 

plant was chosen for that. The idea was 

how would a digital company look in 

2020. Based on that, identified some 50 

dimensions corresponding to 50 projects. 

Those were then prioritized based on 

feasibility and impact and they were 

piloted in an agile fashion. 

FAMD (Ferro Alloys and Minerals Division) 

followed Tubes as a digital exemplar. 

Exactly a year after the first steps 

were taken on digital, in May 2016, 

the company created the Digital Value 

Acceleration team. That is when Jha’s 

designation too changed to Chief, Digital 

Value Acceleration. 

Prioritizing the Objectives 

“We knew where the money was. 

Upstream was more money than 

downstream and some amount in 

marketing. We set up small teams to 

go and figure out where the money was 

and we crafted it into projects,” says Jha 

explaining how they prioritized. 

The approach helped the company to 

channelize the resources better. But 

some challenges remain. For example, 

the company is now realizing that it 

has probably too many point solutions. 

Sometimes, the actual value of many of 

these projects are not as much as it was 

through to be initially. 

Keeping Focus 

To keep its focus, the company launched 

its marquee program, MARVEL (Making 

Analytics Real Valuable Efficient and 

Logical) in September 2017. It is moving 

from MARVEL 1.0 to MARVEL 2.0 shortly. 

MARVEL 1.0 has 20-25 algorithms out of 

which 12 are close to completion. “The 

program should give us close to INR 

200-250 crore of value. The company is 

creating an analytics centre of excellence 

with close to 200 people. 

Probed on IoT, Jha explains that it is 

part of analytics. “To us, industrial IoT is 

the ability to increase, inject intelligence 

through the power of sensing into any 

discreet mobile or asset people and 

process – actually it is a subset of 

analytics.” 

The company is using MARVEL 2.0 

as the umbrella program for digital 


Making it Tangible 

The company uses a filter called SCRIPT— 

Scalable, Connected, Rapid, Intelligent, 

Personalized, Technology-leveraged—to 

decide its agenda. For the company, 

anything that is not on SCRIPT is not 

digital. 

In addition to serving as a filter, it makes 

digital transformation more tangible for 

everyone. 

The company intends to be an industry 

leader in manufacturing in the use of 

digital technology. The current focus is 

to deliver INR 500 corer EBIDTA impact 

through digital and establish a value 

pipeline of INR 2500 crore. 

By 2020, the company intends to be an 

industry leader in manufacturing in the 

use of digital technology. 

being driven by individuals but as 

part of a transformation team headed 

by a senior executive into which all 

these specific functions report to. 

Another hotly debated issue when 

it comes to models is centralized versus 

decentralized models—whether 

to drive digital at the group level or at 

the individual company level. This is 

especially relevant in India (and much 

of Asia), because there are large number 

of conglomerates with diversified 

businesses. 

Sudhir Singh Dungarpur, Partner 

and Leader Digital at PwC that consults 

many Indian conglomerates on 

their digital transformation, points 

to the model shifting to the decentralized 

model. 

“In large groups, the Group Chief 

Digital Officer role has become more 

of a ceremonial position,” he says. 

“In a conglomerate, each of the 

business is different and it is difficult 

to create a centralized strategy.” 

“Some of these companies have 

already taken quite a few digital initiatives, 

while at the group level, it is still 

being defined,” says Dungarpur. 

Agrees Maneesh Dube, Consultants 

at executive search and corporate 

advisory group Russel Reynolds, 

“Digital transformation is a hands-on 


Cover Story 

Approaches 

1. Most companies have a dedicated, 

senior person reporting to CEO 

driving the change. So, it is not an 

extra KRA for some executive. 

2. In all cases, there is a team 

dedicated to the CDO/Head of 

transformation, but it is small. 

The idea is to change the way 

organization is working and not do 

things in a closed lab. 

3. There is a clear move towards 

decentralized model. 

in a 

nutshell 

4. A consultant can help but cannot 

do it for you. 

job, not a hands-off one. So, doing it at 

group level is fairly difficult.” 

The biggest testimony to the 

change is from Jaspreet Bindra, one 

of the first Group CDOs in India, who 

joined as SVP Digital Transformation 

at Mahindra & Mahindra way back in 

2015 and helped the group companies 

in setting up their 

own digital teams and 

carry some pilots. 

“Ultimately, it 

has to be done at the 

company level,” he 

agrees. Though he 

refused to confirm it, 

sources say he is moving 

on from the role. 

While Bindra 

moves out, Tata 

sons appointed 

a group CDO, 

Aarthi Subramanian, 

a business 

person with 

a tech background, 

who comes from TCS, less 

than a year back. We could not speak 

to her for the story. 

Vedanta, the last of the three 

groups we cover, despite a having a 

mandate at a group level to go for large 

scale digital transformation, never 

went for a group CDO. It appointed 

CDOs for each of the companies, 

almost at the same time frame. They 

do share some of the best practices 

and talk to each other, but work separately, 

closely with the respective business 

heads. 

Another thing that we hear from 

mid-sized companies is appointing a 

consultant to transform the company 

digitally. Larger companies have 

already learnt—some of them the 

hard way—that that is a impractical 

expectation. 

“Companies realize that you cannot 

transform by help of an external 

consultant without the commitment of 

a full-time employee driving it,” says 

Amitabh Mishra of Sterlite Copper. 

In case of Tata Steel, Accenture 

was a consultant but an internal 

person has been driving it. 

Tech First 

Tech is to digital transformation 

what the mantras are 

to a Hindu puja. Without it, 

the rest of the components not 

possible; that explains why digital 

always precedes transformation, notwithstanding 

how much pains people 

take to explain that it is less about digital 

and more about transformation. 

In short, these two mantras together 

sum up the role of tech in the digital 

transformation journey. 

Transformation is a 

customized recipe for 

each organization. 

Nischal Gupta, 

Chief Transformation Officer, 

Sterlite Tech 

It (the 

objective of digital 

transformation) is 

simple – to maintain 

and retain our market 

leadership. 

Tina Singh, Chief Digital Officer, 

Mahindra Finance 

Mantra 1: Do not underestimate the 

value of tech 

Mantra 2: Do not overestimate the 

value of tech 

You cannot start with tech; tech 

cannot be your ultimate outcome. But 

it is the most crucial thing in between. 

Let us put it this way. This is not 


19

Cover Story 

Sterlite Technologies 

“We have decided to lead the change.” 

Dr Anand Agarwal has been heading Sterlite Tech for last one and a half decade. Today, he is driving the change 

of the company from a cable and fiber manufacturer to an integrated telecom products and solutions player. He 

shares his perspectives on his company’s transformation leveraging digital. 

What necessitated the 

transformation? And how is it 

different from changes that you 

have seen/driven earlier? 

The thought of course came from 

what we are seeing in the overall 

marketplace; the opportunity frame 

that we have seen around us. We see 

the ecosystem around us on the verge 

of transformation. We are dealing with 

telecom companies, social media 

companies, cities. And we see each 

of them is itching to transform—to 

become significantly different from 

what they are. 

Transformation is a strong word; it is not 

an improvement. It is a transformation 

of the revenue and business models of 

all our customers. We clearly realized 

that if we need to continue to be 

relevant in this ecosystem, for us to 

rapidly transform and create a lead and 

enable our ecosystem to transform is 

an obvious requirement. We have to 

transform and we have to drive this 

transformation that is taking place. You 

can either wait for the ecosystem to 

transform when you are compelled to 

change, or you can transform before the 

ecosystem and enable and drive that 

transformation. We chose the latter. 

What it means is a shift in the offerings 

that we do. For example, if I sold a 

product, now I am selling the product 

as part of a solution enabling the 


What are the measurables? 

For everything, there are clear 

measurables. On the external side, 

the measurable is how am I able to do 

more for my customers at the same 

level of cost. 

For instance, I am providing my 

customer 100 capacity at 100 cost. 

Can I provide them 100 capacity at 120 

You can either wait 

for the ecosystem to 

transform when you are 

compelled to change, 

or you can transform 

before the ecosystem 

and enable and drive that 

transformation. We chose 

the latter. 

cost? For me, it is a revenue increase of 

20%; for them, it is doubling their capacity 

at 20% extra cost. If I have a manufacturing 

plant where 300 different designs are 

being churned out, how do I optimize 

those designs to 40-50? Same with tome 

for RFQs – how can I bring them down 

significantly? All these programs have 

clear measurables. 

One of the key components of the 

transformation journey seems to be 

data. Your take? 

For most of the companies, data is a 

byproduct. We are moving data. Our 

customers are in the business of carrying 

data, storing it and processing it. For us, 

hence, the question is a little different. 

How do we handle that data—do we keep 

it close to the end customer? How fast can 

it move between one center to another? 

What kind of compression technologies 

you must apply? 

We are not thinking of creating a new 

revenue model from the data; we are 

focusing on making these processes— 

transporting data, storing data, 

processing data—better. 

As someone who has been in 

manufacturing industry for long, 

how do you see the phenomenon 

called industry 4.0? 

The best thing about all these is that 

it has created a sense of urgency in 

everyone. Now, people are compelled 

to know about it. For me, that is the 

big shift. But the danger is people get 

fascinated by a tool and say I must 

use it. I must do industry 4.0, I must do 

blockchain… 

For us, it is a natural progression. For 

example, the new factories that we are 

making now have much more sensing; 

much more robotics-enabled material 

movement; they have much better 

communication channels. It is leading to 

better decision making. 

But it is all powered by our 25 years of 

experience as well. 

The tools and the expertise need to 

marry. If you use the tool for sake of a 

tool, I do not think it is a great thing. 

But we have seen companies 

coming from nowhere and 

shaking markets, just because 

the existing leaders did not 

change fast enough…. 

Yes, you need to do both. If you do 

not change, you will die. You must be 

willing to change, must know about all 

the tools available out there but must 

have the expertise to use them most 

appropriately to create business value 

for yourself and your customers. 

As I said, it should be a marriage. 

And it is that marriage you need 

to manage. 


Cover Story 

the first-time businesses are going 

through a change. It has happened in 

the past, many times. But this time’s 

change is not just powered, but to a 

great extent, initiated by tech. 

When Klaus Schwab talks about 

the Fourth Industrial Revolution, he 

defines it as the fusion of physical, 

digital and biological. So, tech is fundamental 

to this round of changes. 

The only thing that some experts— 

like Sudhir Singh Dungarpur of 

PwC—worry about is that much of 

the talk in many enterprises are still 

focused around tech. That is going to 

take you nowhere. 

Nischal Gupta, Head of Transformation 

at Sterlite Tech, while putting 

tech as a major factor, however, clarifies 

that it is probably the easiest part 

of the entire set of things that you need 

to do—starting with culture. 

What gives a clue to the importance 

of tech is how the lingo has changed. 

Earlier tech was being ‘applied’ to 

solve business problems, implying 

Role of Tech 

in a 

nutshell 

1. The round of change called 

digital transformation is initiated by 

technology. 

2. Tech is very crucial but should not 

hijack your digital transformation 

discourse—seems to be the most 

common message from both 

practitioners and advisors 

3. There’s a definite shift from an 

inside-out to an outside-in approach 

in application of technology. You 

now need to scan the tech landscape 

to proactively figure out what 

technologies can potentially add 

value to your business 

4. AI/ML, IoT, analytics/Big Data 

and Blockchain are the technologies 

most referred to; usually applied in an 

integrated manner 

5. However, digital transformation 

may need any tech—from basic 

process automation to collaborative 

tools 

you had a business requirement which 

tech helped fulfil. Today’s common 

phrase is ‘use case’. That implies that 

you need to continuously watch technology 

landscape to scan for new technologies 

that can ‘potentially’ impact 

the business and find use cases for 

them. This means technology first. To 

be sure, this must be part of a broader 

transformation journey. 

Call it the outside-in regime, as 

opposed to the inside-out approach 

that we have traditionally seen. 

So, what are the specific technologies? 

Well, depending on where you 

are, it could be any information technology, 

starting with basic process 

automation but newer technologies 

that are specifically referred to in the 

context of digital transformation are 

the usual suspects: Artificial Intelligence/Machine 

Learning, Analytics, 

IoT, Blockchain…and they are not 

always independent of each other. You 

never know where your IoT ends and 

analytics begins or machine learning 

takes over. 

Sarajit Jha of Tata Steel simplifies it. 

“You need a very strong sensing layer; 

you need a data platform on top of 

that; you need analytics and then the 

decision on which products you want 

to change which is the business layer.” 

What does Digital 

Transformation entail? 

Based on the research, these are 

some of the top-level trends that we 

could figure out. Some of them may 

have been discussed in the above sections 

but have been listed here again 

because we believe they are important 

trends that meaningfully define a contour 

of digital transformation in India, 

circa 2018. 

1. Digital transformation is 

essentially an organizational 

change. 

In all organizations, digital transformation 

is a mandate from the top and 

aims to transform the entire organization. 

If it does not, it is not digital 

In a 

conglomerate, each 

of the business is 

different and it is 

difficult to create a 

centralized strategy. 

Sudhir Singh Dungarpur, 

Partner, Digital Services, PwC 

transformation. You may find people 

holding Chief Digital Officer designation 

who focus only on customer 

facing aspect (i.e digital marketing, 

customer service etc) or technology 

(process automation). They do not 

drive digital transformation of an 

organization. They just drive one digital 

initiative. Summary: not all CDOs 

drive digital transformation. How is 

that for a beginning? 

2. Digital transformation rolls back 

into basic business metrics. 

All outcomes (often integrated into 

a mission statement) must have a 

direct path into one of the basic business 

metric—growth, profit, sustainability—and 

hence are measurable. 

Of course, there may be intermediate 

measures to track progress, but 

they are more of milestones than the 

destination. For example, in Sterlite 

Tech, one of the objectives is to “free 

up the minds of every leader to focus 

on value addition rather than getting 


21

Cover Story 

stuck in the business as usual in the 

day to day basis”—and the objective is 

faster growth. 

3. Digital transformation typically 

follows a cycle. 

Typically, digital transformation 

components follow a sequential 

pattern 

a. significant (often disruptive) efficiency 

improvement 

b. better customer experience 

c. newer products/services and 

d. better business decision making 

leading to agility and scalability. 

e. Creating new business models/ 

platforms and ecosysteme 

Often (b) is a direct result of (a) 

and sometimes, they are independent 

initiatives. In many services firms and 

newer companies, the first is already 

achieved by It and hence the journey 

begins at (b). Usually, (c) and (d) follow 

(a) and (b). For large companies—and 

not just in India—(e) is often a distant 

goalpost. Few have even gone to a 

stage where they can start planning 

for it seriousy. 

4. A top-level dedicated person 

must drive digital transformation. 

Design thinking 

is a must for 

organizations. 

Jaspreet Bindra, SVP, Digital 

Transformation, Mahindra & 

Mahindra 

That is the current thinking. A digitalization 

initiative which delivers 

significant value to the company may 

be driven by a non-C-level person but 

a transformation cannot be achieved 

that way. Some argue that the role of 

CDO, head transformation is temporary. 

The jury is out on that one. 

But that debate can wait. The current 

thinking is you need a dedicated person. 

That is about it. It cannot be an 

added KRA for someone. 

5. Shifting to the decentralized 

model. 

In most large conglomerates, the digital 

transformation initiatives are at the 

individual company level. (See Choosing 

the Right Model) 

6. It is a culture shift. 

“60-70% is actually bringing a culture 

shift,” says Nischal Gupta, Head 

of transformation of Sterlite Tech. 

“Shifting the mindset without replacing 

everyone,” is how he explains it. 

The Tata Steel journey shows what 

it involves – right from branded programs 

to reverse mentoring. 

7. At the end, it is a change 

management. 

People, Process, Technology—any 

change management has these three 

leavers and so has digital transformation. 

The prefix digital just emphasizes 

the fact that it has been initiated by a 

fundamental change in technology’s 

capability.

Cover Story 

8. It is not enough to do good work; 

one must talk about it. 

That is a mantra that iconic chairman 

of American ICT regulator FCC Reed 

Hundt often repeated. Communications 

is an important aspect of any 

transformation journey and digital 

transformation is no exception. Branded 

programs do help. Tata Steel had 

every aspect of it branded, including 

the key program and even filters. 

9. Technology’s impact this time is 

beyond processes. 

Technology has been applied to 

achieve dramatic gains in efficiency. 

This time, it is impacting changes to 

all the three layers, strategy, process 

and product. 

10. Some technologies are more 

equal than others. 

Thanks to the buzz around sensing 

(IoT) in the context of the Fourth 

Industrial Revolution and the sci-fi 

kind of stories around AI/Machine 

Learning, they may be getting all the 

limelight as far as tech is concerned, 

but it is the good old cloud model that 

started this change becoming a reality 

in many ways. 

11. It is essentially a game of data. 

Take out data out of it—it will look 

like another automation exercise. 

In manufacturing, for example, 

SCADA and other ICT-based systems 

in an isolated manner have been there 

since long, delivering great functionality. 

But now, they feed data into the 

enterprise systems and that makes all 

the difference. From customer experience 

to new efficiency, from better 

planning to risk management…it is 

data that is crucial to a digital transformation. 

Without a solid data 

and analytics strategy, digital change 

is tactical. 

12. Design thinking is the emerging 

catch phrase. 

In the context of digital transformation, 

design thinking is emerging as an 

essential requirement. Most of the digital 

leaders we spoke to mentioned it 

either in the context of organizational 

requirement or as one of the essential 

capabilities of an executive driving 

digital transformation. 

13. Culture change top challenge, 

tech is the easiest. 

Almost everyone agrees that culture 

shift is the biggest challenge; technology 

is the easiest one to tame. 

14. Use-case, not application of tech: 

the shift to Outside-in. 

Traditionally, tech has been applied 

to solve an existing business problem/ 

requirement. In the digital era, where 

the transformation is essentially 

digital leveraged, it is the other 

way around. Look for new tech, 

quickly gauge if it has a scope to 

make big changes to your business, 

articulate that and convince the top 

management of the value that it can 

add to your business. ‘How’ has a 

fancy name: use case. So, in that sense, 

it is technology first. You can call it an 

outside-in regime. What it also means 

is tech becomes one more thing that 

any senior executive (not just one 

Digital 

transformation is a 

hands-on job, not a 

hands-off one. So, 

doing it at group level 

is fairly difficult. 

Maneesh Dube, Consultant, 

Russell Reynolds Associates 

person) must follow in a transformed 

organization and continuously 

think of how it can improve the 

company, the function, the business 

unit. 

15. The role of enterprise IT is 

important but rarely does it drive 


Why do so few CIOs drive digital 

transformation? This question often 

is interpreted as: what do CIOs lack? 

While the second question can be 

answered, that is a smaller reason, if at 

all. For example, their way of looking 

inside-out: too much focus on problem 

solving (the problem must be stated by 

someone else) than the ability to draw 

on blank canvas. That may be true 

to some extent but the big reason is 

something else. 

That is the unwillingness of the 

CIOs themselves. Sounds strange. 

Here is how it pans out. Most CIOs, 

who are otherwise quite capable of 

driving digital transformation are 

denied that opportunity are keen to do 

so without giving up their CIO’s role, 

which includes everything from infrastructure 

(the big-budget technology) 

to applications. 

That is a clear no-no for any 

organization serious about digital 

transformation. Digital transformation 

is not a KRA. It is the singlemost 

important initiative for an organization 

choosing that path. It cannot 

be handled along with data center 

rollout. 

In some organizations, CIOs are 

given this designation. They are either 

just fancy designation or are in techmature 

organizations like IT-ITES or 

other B2B services where transformation 

is around a specific aspect. More 

importantly, culture change is not part 

of the transformation journey. 

In many organizations (like 

most Vedanta companies), the CDOs 

are techies but do not directly look 

after traditional IT. In Sterlite Copper, 

for example, Head of IT reports to 

the CDO 


23

FACE OFF 

//SHOULD DIGITAL BUDGET 

BE SEPARATE FROM 

ENTERPRISE IT BUDGET? 

If you keep digital budget as part of 

IT budget, there is a high possibility 

that it might be reused in some form 

that is not digital spend. However, 

every executive must understand why 

digital budget shouldn't be a part of 

enterprise IT budget. Today digital 

transformation is not just IT Transformation 

– but is made up of business 

transformation (BT), IT, culture and IT 

security as well. Out of these four, only 

two directly concern the IT department. 

The other two, BT and culture, 

make up digital creation --which may 

or may not be IT's responsibility. 

Therefore, if companies are to allocate 

digital and enterprise IT budgets 

separately, it may vary, depending on 

the industry, organization, and demographics. 

Typically, digital budget is a 

measure of the percentage of a company's 

IT budget while ideally it should 

be of the percentage of revenue of a 

company. IT budgets are in tune 0.6% 

to 4.2% of the company's ROI, digital 

budgets should be at least 50 % of IT 

budget if not more or 0.3 to 2.1% of the 

company's revenue. 

Quick View 

Anjani Kumar, Global 

CDO, Collabera, says 

digital budget should be a 

percentage of the revenue of a 

company. 

Historically, the enterprise 

IT budget used to account 

for a lot of infrastructure 

and a little for applications. 

Slowly it has changed. 

Today, in many organizations 

budget costing for 

applications outweighs 

infrastructure. Specially 

with SaaS subscription, 

IT infra gets hidden under 

application subscription. 

A lot of organizations still 

grapple with 30-50% of this 

ANJANI 

KUMAR 

Global CDO, 

Collabera 

budget being used for IT 

operations - keeping the lights on - but 

true DT can help optimize the same 

over a period of time. 

Today, every company embarking 

on a DT initiative realizes that digital 

tech is more expensive than traditional 

technologies. For instance, if your company 

wants to invest in any technology, 

you must chart a clear roadmap, and 

explain how you plan to use the digital 

budget and timeline in a manner that 

will help realize the ROI. It is because 

your business may know how the IT 

budget is consumed, but accounting 

for digital budget is fairly new to business 

execs and finance, and therefore, 

the buy-in for such projects can be difficult. 

One way to overcome this complexity 

is by explaining business how 

a small portion of this budget will be 

allocated for POC and a working prototype, 

and the rest of the budget will 

be released only after weighing in the 

pros and cons of the initiative. 

"Accounting 

for digital 

budget is 

fairly new 

to business 

execs and 

finance" 


Face Off 

ANIL KUMAR 

SINGH 

Former GM & 

CIO, KRIBHCO, 

Noida 

"Keeping 

separate 

budgets in 

the name 

of digital is 

demanding 

extra fund 

allocation" 

In my view, there is no need to keep 

separate budget allocation in the 

name of digital. 

When we talk about enterprise 

IT, we always talk about a larger 

frame of IT implementation in any 

enterprise IT environment, it is 

required to keep business running. 

To do that, one need to budget for 

all activities —from data preparation 

to application development 

to users training— and provide 

all necessary information relating 

to business. We have to understand 

the concept of allocating 

IT budget. Keeping in view of the 

type of business, we prepare the 

IT budget based on the business 

requirements and business plan of 

an enterprise. The company’s management 

is only concerned about 

their ROI and it is the responsibility 

of CIO to plan and distribute 

the allocated budget into various 

activities. There are three types of 

transformation to be activated in 

any organization: 

Digital transformation 

IT Ttransformation 

Workforce transformation 

Enterprise IT transformation 

encompasses all of the above. While 

considering the business plan of 

an enterprise, one should always 

consider all three activities in order 

to achieve a successful IT implementation. 

This means that while 

preparing an IT budget, CIOs should 

always think of an end 

to end solution for an enterprise so that 

at any stage of implementation - from 

data preparation to digital transformation, 

security implementation and 

users training - it is enough to propel 

Quick View 

Former General Manager 

(Management Services & 

CIO) - KRIBHCO, says that 

no separate budget allocation 

is necessary 

the business in a stable manner with 

the help of adequate IT infrastructure. 

Digital transformation is an integral 

part of IT transformation. But yes, if 

digitization requires more effort, one 

can plan accordingly during the implementation 

stage. Keeping separate 

budgets just in the name of digital is 

demanding an extra fund allocation for 

IT activities. 

The expenditure for digitization and 

digital transformation can be met within 

your enterprise IT budget, which 

must project a clear picture of your 

enterprise IT spending across infra, 

digital and business as usual. In view of 

the above, keep the enterprise IT budget 

as a whole and then implement the various 

activities in different phases. 


25

INSIGHT 

What Does Hyper- 

Consolidation Mean 

For Enterprise CIOs? 

The Rule of Three framework may give some ideas on 

what to expect 

By CIO&Leader 


Insight 

RRecently, market research firm Synergy 

Research Group published its 

2017 market data for telepresence 

market. The specialized research firm 

said while the market is showing signs 

of revival, two companies—Cisco and 

Polycom—together account for 78% of 

the market share. 

Just a few days prior to this 

announcement, Synergy had released 

the data for the cloud infrastructure 

services market. There too, the top 

four—Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and 

Google—together hold 60% of the market 

share. But the big news is not that; 

it is that they are continuously gaining 

market share. In Q4 2017, data for 

which was released, they have taken 

away 3% market share from the rest. 

So, not only are these four dominating 

the market, they are further strengthening 

that dominance. 

The research firm has also released 

the Unified Communications as a Service 

(UCaaS) market data for Q4 last 

week. Though it did not explicitly indicate 

revenue market share available Q3 

data suggests that three companies— 

RingCentral, Mitel and 8x8—accounted 

for close to 55% market share. 

The story is similar in hyper-converged 

infrastructure (HCI) market. 

IDC’s Q3 2017 data shows that two 

companies—Dell EMC and Nutanix— 

accounted for more than 51% market 

share. 

These are just four segments for 

illustration purpose. One can go on 

illustrating the points further by citing 

more examples of markets where the 

top 2-4 players account for more than 

half the market share. 

In short, we are seeing a sort of 

hyper-consolidation—far more concentrated 

than even what Prof Jagdish 

Sheth and Rajendra Sisodia predicted 

for free, mature B2C market segments 

in their famous 2002 book, The Rule 

of Three. 

There is little common to the type of 

companies who hold the dominant positions 

in these markets. Some of them are 

IT giants (Cisco, Microsoft), some are 

well-established niche players (Nutanix) 

and some are unknown names even to 

enterprise IT community. 

Also, in terms of size, there is little 

commonality among these markets. 

Cloud infrastructure services is a USD 

45 billion plus market while telepresence 

is less than USD 2 billion in size. 

Yet, there is one thing that is common 

to all of these: these are all mature 

horizontal enterprise technologies— 

areas where CIOs are still the undisputed 

decision makers, in contrast 

to the vertical-specific solutions or 

emerging technologies like AI, IoT and 

Analytics, where other business and 

operational managers could be calling 

the shots. 

What does it mean? 

Of course, lesser number of vendors 

invariably suggests that power shifts 

to the vendors from the buyers. Or the 

vendor becomes more powerful. This 

has prompted many to raise the possibility 

of vendor lock-in. 

Though the traditional vendor lockin 

of the 90s and prior may not become 

a reality, it may make cost of switching 

a bit higher. While the technologies are 

open and hence no vendor can blackmail 

a user, today barriers are created 

by nurturing the ecosystem. So, even 

if switching may be theoretically possible, 

every step from finding an integrator 

to get skilled people to hire may 

be challenges. 

And it is already happening. The 

cloud players are today projecting the 

size of their ecosystem more than the 

services metrics when selling their 

value proposition. However, it may 

also mean that from the skill standpoint, 

things may be less challenging. 

However, it may be a worthwhile idea 

to look at the market through 

the framework of Sheth and Sisodia’s 

Rule of Three model. What it says is 

that free markets often lead to a situation 

where equilibrium is attained 

eventually by two kinds of competitors: 

full-service generalists and 

specialists who could focus on a submarket 

(either products or vertical/ 

horizontal segments). 

While full-service companies want 

to grab market share, specialists’ financial 

performance deteriorates as they 

gain market share and they play a margin 

game—thus driving innovation. 

While the leaders—the generalists— 

try to compete by offering price advantages, 

specialists try to innovate. The 

middle guys are in disadvantage positions. 

Often, the model is explained by 

illustrating the shopping mall analogy. 

While a few large general stores 

anchor the malls, high value niche 

players go there to tap top customers. 

Of course, IT markets are still not the 

ideal candidate (thanks to multiple factors 

including the non-independence 

of markets segments from each other) 

for conforming to the rule of three. 

Specialists are often forced to be 

super-niche players creating and commanding 

dominant position in those 

super-niches. While no framework or 

rule can help you manage your challenges, 

it may be worthwhile to look 

at the market proactively through this 

framework to understand how they 

may evolve 


27

Insight 

India Is Among 

Bottom Five 

Countries In Global 

Cloud Study 

India ranks 20th out of 24 leading IT economies, 

compared to its ranking of 18th in 2016, a sign that the 

legal and regulatory environment for cloud computing in 

India is restricting innovation 



Insight 

BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard 

AAs per BSA 2018 Global Cloud Computing 

Scorecard, a flagship study that 

assesses cloud computing policies 

around the globe, India ranks 20th out 

of 24 leading IT economies, compared 

to its ranking of 18th in 2016, a sign 

that the legal and regulatory environment 

for cloud computing in India is 

restricting cloud innovation. 

The study reflects an updated methodology 

that better reflects the policies 

that have helped cloud computing’s 

exponential growth over the past five 

years, putting additional emphasis on 

countries’ privacy and cybersecurity 

laws and broadband infrastructure. 

In 2018, most countries continue 

to make improvements, but some 

markets are falling further behind. 

Germany scored the highest on the 

Scorecard – due to its national cybersecurity 

policies and promotion of 

free trade – followed closely by Japan 

and the United States. Bringing up 

the rear are a small group of nations 

that have failed to embrace the international 

approach: Russia, China, 

Indonesia, and Vietnam. The following 

Chart shows that Germany to Korea 

maintained a consistent score before 

a sudden drop to 60.6 by Mexico. The 

downfall continues upto Vietnam with 

a lowly score of 36.4 while India ranks 

20th with a score of 48.4. 

As per the study, the low score and 

ranking of India is because of its poor 

Germany 

Japan 

US 

UK 

Australia 

Singapore 

Canada 

France 

Italy 

Spain 

Poland 

Korea 

Mexico 

Malaysia 

South Africa 

Turkey 

Argentina 

Brazil 

Thailand 

India 

Russia 

China 

Indonesia 

Vietnam 

results in Data Privacy (Score: 4/12.5 

and Rank: 20/24) and IT Readiness 

and Broadband Deployment (Score: 

6.9/25 and Rank: 24/24). 

The Scorecard’s key findings include: 

Advanced privacy and security 

policies set leading countries apart 

from lagging markets. Countries 

continue to update and refine their 

data protection regimes, most often 

in a way that enables cross-border 

data flows. Several countries, however, 

still have not adopted adequate 

privacy laws. 

Emerging markets continue to lag 

in the adoption of cloud-friendly 

policies, hindering their growth. 

Examples include regulations that 

impose significant barriers for cloud 

service providers, data localization 

requirements, and a lack of cybersecurity 

protections. 

Deviations from widely adopted 

regimes and international agreements 

hold back key markets. 

Internationally accepted standards, 

certifications, and testing help 

improve the security environment 

for cloud computing, but not every 

country recognizes such best practices 

as meeting local standards. 

60.6 

59.3 

57.3 

54.3 

51.8 

50.3 

48.4 

48.4 

45 

43.7 

40.7 

36.4 

84 

82.1 

82 

81.8 

80.6 

80.2 

80 

79.6 

79 

78.4 

77 

72.2 

Source: BSA 2018 Global Cloud Computing Scorecard 

Those few countries that have 

embraced localization policies 

pay a heavy price. Data localization 

requirements act as a barrier to cloud 

computing, causing negative financial 

impacts for local markets. 

Increased emphasis on IT readiness 

and broadband deployment 

leads to interesting results. The 

ability of countries and companies to 

leverage cloud computing for growth 

requires access to a powerful network. 

While almost all countries continue 

to work to improve broadband 

access, the success of those efforts 

remains very inconsistent. 

By examining the legal and regulatory 

framework of 24 countries, the 

Scorecard aims to provide a platform 

for discussion between policymakers 

and cloud service providers. This 

dialogue can help develop an internationally 

harmonized regime of laws 

and regulations that facilitate cloud 

computing. 

“The Scorecard is a tool that can help 

countries constructively self-evaluate 

their policies and determine next steps 

to increase adoption of cloud computing,” 

said Victoria Espinel, President 

and CEO of BSA 


29

Insight 

Artificial Intelligence 

WIll Take Care Of 

Your Baggage 

Every mishandled bag is one too many for airlines and airports 


TThe smart use of technologies such as artificial 

intelligence is expected to revolutionize the management 

of baggage over the next decade, promising 

to make mishandled bags an increasingly rare 

event for passengers globally. This is according to 

SITA’s Intelligent Tracking: A Baggage Management 

Revolution paper published recently. 

The paper notes that more than 4.5 billion bags 

are handled by industry baggage systems each 

year but airlines and airports will have to cope 

with twice that number with passenger numbers 

set to double over the next 20 years. Already, 

through improvements to technology and processes, 

the air transport industry has halved its 

annual mishandling cost over the past decade from 

USD 4.22bn to USD 2.1billion. However, every mishandled 

bag is one too many and the industry continues 

to seek ways to reduce the number further. 


Insight 

Ilya Gutlin, President of SITA Air 

Travel Solutions, said: “We at SITA 

believe that harnessing data and AI in a 

meaningful way will revolutionize how 

we manage the air transport industry in 

the next decade. SITA has a unique role 

to play in realizing the potential of data 

andbaggage management is one area that 

will benefit. It is an area we are strongly 

focused on, collaborating across the 

industry to innovate.” 

The industry’s immediate focus is on 

implementing the International Air 

Transport Association’s Resolution 753. 

The resolution requires member airlines 

keep track of each bag and share that 

tracking information with all involved in 

delivering those bags back to passengers 

at their destination. While the resolution 

will deliver accurate data on the journey 

undertaken by each and every bag, the 

industry is already looking beyond the 

resolution to develop an even more accurate 

model for baggage operations. 

Ilya Gutlin, said: “The bag tracking 

data that will be generated and collected 

under Resolution 753 will provide the air 

transport industry with a rich stream of 

data. This can be enhanced with AI tools 

to create greater efficiencies in baggage 

operations and, ultimately, to improve 

our experience as passengers.” 

From an operations point of view, AI will 

allow airports and airlines to learn what 

baggage routes cause the most stress on 

their systems and what factors are most 

likely to cause them. These systems could 

also generate insight into the patterns of 

baggage movements that would enable airlines 

to deliver bags more effectively. 

Using AI, intelligent machines will 

enable baggage to be autonomously 

managed from the moment a passenger 

checks in their bag to when it arrives 

at the destination – all without human 

intervention. For example, in this vision 

of the future, autonomous loaders could 

be used to transport bags between the 

terminal and aircraft. Baggage data will 

also allow airlines and airports to provide 

passengers more relevant information on 

their baggage as it makes its journey from 

departure to destination 

Form IV 

Statement of ownership and other particulars about the 

publication CIO & LEADER as per Rule 8 

1. Place of Publication Nine Dot Nine Mediaworx Private Ltd. 

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4. Publisher’s Name Anuradha Das Mathur 

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31

Insight 

Indian Businesses 

Increase Spend 

On Enterprise 

Applications 

Increased competition, alignment of IT to business and 

rate of technology change are some of the reasons 



Insight 

EEnterprise application software 

spending in India will reach USD 2.5 

billion in 2018, a 19.8% increase from 

2017, according to Gartner. In China, 

2018 enterprise application software 

spending will reach USD 5.1 billion, a 

18.9% rise from 2017. 

While both countries are poised 

for continued growth, organizations 

have different criteria for selecting 

the vendors they use. For example, 

a recent end-user survey by Gartner 

showed that corporate branding is 

an important software selection criterion 

in China, while organizations in 

India focus more on pricing and contract 

flexibility. 

“China’s and India’s enterprise application 

software spending has grown 

at double-digit rates historically, and 

they will continue to be hot spots,” said 

Keith Guttridge, research director at 

Garner. “To be competitive in those 

countries, technology business unit 

leaders in technology providers must 

understand software adoption dynamics 

and spending intentions.” 

Hot spots for growth 

Survey respondents were asked how 

they anticipate that spending on enterprise 

applications will change in 2018. 

The survey found that India’s spend- 

ing intention is more aggressive than 

China’s. In all categories, India has a 

higher percentage of respondents who 

want to increase spending across all 

enterprise applications. Enterprise 

content management (ECM), business 

intelligence (BI), customer relationship 

management (CRM) and open source 

(enterprise edition) were the most 

popular in India. In China, the most 

popular were open source, ECM 

and CRM. 

“Although ECM is considered a hot 

market, it remains small in terms 

of share. However, as organizations 

in emerging countries are growing 

rapidly and business requirements 

becoming increasingly complex, there 

is increasing demand for solutions to 

digitalize content to support business 

processes as part of digital workplace 

initiatives,” said Guttridge. “CRM is 

claiming some budget spending intention 

from other major applications, 

such as ERP, while open-source applications 

continue to have a good proportion 

of increased spending intentions.” 

Looking at data 

from decades, 

China's 

and India's 

enterprise 

app spend 

has grown at 

double-digit 

rates 

Reasons for increased 

spending 

Although transforming to digital business 

is an important reason to increase 

software spending, other factors take 

precedence in the survey results. 

Respondents suggested practical reasons 

for increasing software spending 

in 2018, including increased competition, 

alignment of IT to business and 

rate of technology change. In India, 

increased competition and availability 

of skills are other top reasons for 

increased spending. In China, many 

end-user organizations are struggling 

to keep up with fast-growing customer 

requirements, and must invest in their 

rapidly expanding customer bases. 

Key initiatives for software 

spending 

In India, increased software spending 

is being strongly influenced by overarching 

digital transformation (chosen 

by 91% of respondents), followed by 

mobile (88%) and artificial intelligence 

(AI — 88%). In China, cloud/SaaS 

offerings lead as the top influencer 

(chosen by 63% of respondents), followed 

by Internet of Things (IoT — 

62%) and mobile (60%). 

IoT is particularly significant in 

China due to the large manufacturing 

base, and the fact that “smart manufacturing” 

is an official initiative in 

the country’s 13th Five-Year Plan. 

However, adoption of emerging initiatives 

such as IoT, AI and digital transformation 

will largely vary. Some enduser 

organizations are still piloting, 

experimenting with and trialing their 

own resources in order to implement 

these initiatives. 

“Despite moderate economic growth, 

technology and service providers 

(TSPs) should craft a go-to-market 

strategy that assumes that China and 

India will continue to be fast-growth 

markets in the region and the world,” 

said Guttridge. “TSPs can differentiate 

their offerings by providing ‘handholding’ 

mini-consultations for key 

initiatives, such as IoT (especially in 

China), AI and digital transformation 

(especially in India). They can also 

deliver use-case scenarios that demonstrate 

the value of products and services 

to these emerging technologies.” 


33

Insight 

Cloud Apps And 

Web Portals Are The 

Biggest Targets For 

Attackers 

Gemalto’s 2018 Identity and Access Management 

Index Survey indicates that the role of a dedicated Chief 

Information Security Officer within organizations has 

increased by a quarter in the last year 



Insight 

AThe mainstreaming of cloud and the 

use of a disparate range of devices 

within businesses has led to nearly twothirds 

of IT decision makers admitting 

that their security teams are considering 

implementing consumer-grade 

access to cloud services for employees. 

Gemalto’s 2018 Identity and Access 

Management Index Survey interviewed 

more than 1,000 IT decision makers 

globally and found that a majority of 

them believe that the authentication 

methods they implement in their businesses 

are not as good compared to 

those found on popular sites including 

Amazon and Facebook. 

Nine in ten IT decision maker 

respondents state that their organization’s 

security policies around access 

management have been influenced by 

breaches of consumer services, which 

shows how powerful these breaches 

can be. 

Most vulnerable to attacks 

Around 50% of respondents highlight 

web portals as one of the biggest targets, 

around two in five say the same 

for cloud applications (SaaS, PaaS, 

IaaS), 39% mobile applications, 37% 

local network access and just under 

three in ten say so for VPN. In addition, 

two fifths of respondents consider 

unprotected infrastructure such as IoT 

to be a big target for cyber-attacks. 

Over four in ten respondents see 

cloud applications as one of the biggest 

targets for cyber-attacks. Of these 

respondents, 71% indicate the reason 

behind this may be the increasing 

volume of cloud applications in use, 

and 55% say that the lack of strong 

cyber security solutions to implement 

appropriate solutions. Over two fifths 

also indicate cloud applications may 

be targeted for cyber attacks because 

access management solutions are currently 

in place for the cloud are poor, 

which is something that organizations 

could improve. 

Two-factor authentication 

is gaining adoption 

The vast majority of respondents’ 

organizations are now using twofactor 

authentication for at least one 

application. For instance, eight in ten 

respondents report that their organization 

has at least one application that 

is currently protected by two-factor 

authentication for cloud applications 

(SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), 78% for local network 

access and web portals, with 77% 

for VPN and enterprise applications. 

9 in 10 IT 

decision makers 

feel that their 

org's security 

policies around 

access mgmt 

is influenced 

by persistent 

breaches 

Spend more on security 

A total of 45% respondents agree that 

their companies have started spending 

spending on access management 

(45%), staff being trained on security 

and access management (44%), and 

more resources being allocated to 

access management (42%). In addition, 

around two in five say that secure 

access management is now a priority 

for the board, rising slightly from 34% 

in 2016. 

The impact of social media 

The survey also highlights the extent 

to which social media platforms play a 

role in marketing. Interestingly, despite 

social platforms having been used in 

the past as an attack route for malicious 

actors to breach organizations, 

it seems IT departments fall short in 

being able to apply cohesive access 

security for social platforms. For 

example, over two fifths indicate that 

employees use a company-approved 

individual account when using social 

media for work. According to the survey, 

50% of respondents report that 

their organization secures access to its 

social media accounts via a relatively 

simplistic method of username and 

password, a slight drop from the 65% 

who reported doing so in 2016. There 

are of course, those who say that their 

organizations use native two-factor 

authentication provided by social 

media sites. 

Compliance and auditing 

Nearly all respondents think that twofactor 

authentication will be able to 

contribute towards their organization’s 

ability to comply with data protection 

regulations and pass security 

audits, with over half believing that 

this is definitely the case. Similarly, the 

majority of respondents believe that it 

is important that their organization is 

able to produce a single audit trail of 

access events taking place throughout 

different resources used by the organization, 

with nearly three in ten viewing 

this as extremely important. The 

ability to encourage better compliance 

and easier auditing may not often be 

the primary reason to implement twofactor 

authentication, but is certainly 

an added bonus 


35

SECURITY 

The Case of Rising 

Cyberattacks 

Automated and sophisticated swarm attacks are making it difficult 

for organizations to protect users, applications, and devices 


A 

A latest Fortinet Global Threat Landscape Report 

reveals that attacks per firm increased over the 

previous quarter. In addition, automated and 

sophisticated swarm attacks are accelerating making 

it increasingly difficult for organizations to 

protect users, applications, and devices. Some of 

the highlights of the report are: 

Swarm Cyberattacks Increase in 

Volume, Variety, and Velocity 

The sophistication of attacks targeting organizations 

is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. 

Digital transformation isn’t just reshaping business, 

cybercriminals are leveraging the expanding 

attack surface it creates for new disruptive opportunities 

to attack. They are implementing newer 

swarm-like capabilities while simultaneously targeting 

multiple vulnerabilities, devices, and access 

points. The combination of rapid threat development 

combined with the increased propagation of 


Security 

new variants is increasingly difficult 

for many organizations to combat. 

Unprecedented Volume: An average 

of 274 exploit detections per firm 

were detected, which is a significant 

increase of 82% over the previous 

quarter. The number of malware 

families also increased by 25% and 

unique variants grew by 19%. The 

data not only indicates growth in 

volume, but also an evolution of 

the malware as well. In addition, 

encrypted traffic using HTTPS and 

SSL grew as a percentage of total 

network traffic to a high of nearly 

60% on average. While encryption 

can certainly help protect data in 

motion as it moves between core, 

cloud, and endpoint environments, 

it also represents a real challenge for 

traditional security solutions. 

IoT Attack Intensity: Three of the 

top twenty attacks identified targeted 

IoT devices and exploit activity 

quadrupled against devices like 

Wi-Fi cameras. None of these detections 

were associated with a known 

or named CVE, which is one of the 

troubling aspects of vulnerable IoT 

devices. In addition, unlike previous 

attacks, which focused on exploiting 

a single vulnerability, new IoT 

botnets, such as Reaper and Hajime 

can target multiple vulnerabilities 

simultaneously. This multi-vector 

approach is much harder to combat. 

Reaper’s flexible framework 

means that, rather than the static, 

pre-programmed attacks of previous 

IoT exploits, Reaper’s code is easily 

updated to swarm faster by running 

new and more malicious attacks 

as they become available. Demonstrating 

its swarm abilities, exploit 

volume associated with Reaper 

exhibited a jump from 50,000 to 

2.7 million over a few days before 

dropping back to normal. In Asia 

Pacific, the top prevalent exploits 

detected exhibits a similar pattern. 

For example, exploits targeting the 

Apache Struts and IP camera/DVR 

vulnerabilities make up some of the 

top exploits detected in APAC for 

Q4, 2017 as well. IP camera/DVR 

vulnerabilities in APAC are quite 

prevalent as these devices are popular, 

available at low cost, but do not 

have sufficient security designed 

into them. 

Ransomware Still Prevalent: Several 

strains of ransomware topped 

the list of malware variants. Locky 

was the most widespread malware 

variant and Globe Imposter followed 

as the second. A new strain of Locky 

emerged, tricking recipients with 

spam before requesting a ransom. 

In addition, there was a shift on the 

darknet from only accepting Bitcoin 

for payment to other forms of digital 

currency such as Monero. In APAC, 

new malware variants and ransomware 

droppers account for the top 

prevalent malware seen in Q4, 2017. 

Cryptocurrency Mining on the 

Rise: Cryptomining malware 

increased globally and in APAC, 

which seems to be intertwined with 

the changing price of Bitcoin. Cybercriminals 

recognize the growth in 

digital currencies and are using a 

trick called cryptojacking to mine 

cryptocurrencies on computers 

using CPU resources in the background 

without a user knowing. 

Cryptojacking involves loading a 

script into a web browser, nothing is 

installed or stored on the computer. 

Security should 

operate at 

digital speeds 

by automating 

responses as 

well as applying 

intelligence and 

self-learning 

Sophisticated Industrial Malware: 

An uptick in exploit activity against 

industrial control systems (ICS) and 

safety instrumental systems (SIS) 

suggests these under-the-radar 

attacks might be climbing higher 

on attackers’ radar. An example is 

an attack codenamed Triton. It is 

sophisticated in nature and has the 

ability to cover its tracks by overwriting 

the malware itself with garbage 

data to thwart forensic analysis. 

Because these platforms affect vital 

critical infrastructures, they are 

enticing for threat actors. Successful 

attacks can cause significant damage 

with far-reaching impact. 

Attack Variety: Steganography is an 

attack that embeds malicious code 

in images. It’s an attack vector that 

has not had much visibility over the 

past several years, but it appears to 

be on the resurgence. The Sundown 

exploit kit uses steganography to 

steal information, and while it has 

been around for some time, it was 

reported by more organizations 

than any other exploit kit. It was 

found dropping multiple ransomware 

variants. 

Fighting Swarm Attacks 

Requires Integrated 

Security 

The threat data in this quarter’s report 

reinforces many of the predictions 

unveiled by the Fortinet FortiGuard 

Labs global research team for 2018, 

which predicted the rise of selflearning 

hivenets and swarmbots on 

the horizon. Over the next couple of 

years, the attack surface will continue 

to expand while visibility and control 

over today’s infrastructures diminish. 

To address the problems of speed and 

scale by adversaries, organizations 

need to adopt strategies based on 

automation and integration. Security 

should operate at digital speeds 

by automating responses as well as 

applying intelligence and self-learning 

so that networks can make effective 

and autonomous decisions 


37


Ten Ways Business 

Leaders Can 

Improve Gender 

Diversity 

Grant Thornton has tracked the progress of women in 

business for the last 14 years 



Leadership 

AAccording to Grant Thornton, the professional 

services company, that has tracked the progress 

of women in business around the globe for 

14 years, explores how business leaders think 

and feel, and outlines practical steps that can 

create change. 

Creating an 

inclusive 

workplace 

that 

supports 

gender 

diversity 

won't be 

easy 

1. Champion the cause 

To create change, senior leadership need to take 

the issue seriously and lead from the top. 

2. Make diversity and inclusion a 

core value 

Organisational values drive behaviour, so it’s 

important that the whole business is signed up 

to diversity and inclusion.Our research shows 

that translating good intentions into practice is 

an ongoing challenge for businesses. 

3. Set goals 

Making gender diversity a core value is 

not enough in itself; business leaders should 

set clear goals by which they will measure 

progress. 

4. Link progress to pay 

They say that what gets measured gets managed, 

so business leaders should make diversity 

and inclusion goals part of the leadership team’s 

compensation packages to encourage change. 

5. Avoid tokenism 

Simply putting one woman on the senior management 

team is not enough to ensure a range of 

voices is heard and for the business to reap the 

rewards of diversity. The issue is not only about 

whether there are women present but also whether 

women feel their perspectives are valued. 

6. Reduce ‘mini me’ recruitment 

and promotion 

Providing support to understand why this 

happens and how it can be avoided will forge 

a better process. Unconscious bias training 

can help people at all levels of the business 

avoid the temptation to hire and promote 

employees who look, speak and think in the 

same ways. 

7. Introduce sponsorship 

Sponsorship can have a significantly greater 

impact on gender diversity in leadership than 

simple mentoring schemes. 

8. Investigate the benefits 

Evidence of the commercial gains brought by 

gender diversity will help convince sceptics of 

the need for change and provide justification for 

investment in new initiatives. 

9. Be comfortable with 

discomfort 

Creating an inclusive business environment 

that supports gender diversity in leadership 

will not be easy, so leaders need to be in it for the 

long term. 

10. Share your story 

Business leaders who are open about what is 

driving change in their own companies can 

encourage others and help them overcome the 

complexity of turning theory into action. It can 

be challenging for business leaders to feel able 

to be transparent about internal ways of working, 

and particularly about mistakes they’ve 

made, but without this we are unlikely to see 

widespread progress 


39

CIO &amp; LEADER-Issue-12-March 2018

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