CIO's challenge post 2009...

I recently had the opportunity to be with some Indian CEO/CIO's where there was a panel discussion on the role of the CIO in the post recession period. Even though India did not really go thru a slowdown it was nevertheless a time for all retailers to introspect and take a breather and work on improving efficiencies. This apparently seemed to have worked as the Indian retailers are posting better results.


In one way the CEO/CIO's in India on our panel arrived at a consensus that the slowdown  gave them time to stop for a while and get the dirt out of their systems. Real-estate prices in India are the highest, the slowdown gave the chance to the retailers to work out models which would help them come to realistic levels. 

Going forward all the CEO/CIO's in our panel were unanimous that IT was going to play a very vital part in their future growth of retail business in India and they would like to see the following coming from technology:

1. Flexibility  - business models in India are still evolving, so systems which allow the business to launch newer models, formats is going be the most important. CEO wants this flexibility from systems.

2. Control - With flexibility comes the need to keep control. Systems for retail in India should be flexible but at the same time need enhanced control. Since the business is evolving, new models getting tried out the managers need to be empowered. This comes at a price, internal control needs to be tight and CEO's want real-time monitoring to keep control.

3. Business Intelligence and Analytics - With India's demographics being so disparate, CEO's need real-time customized area wide business intelligence. Analytics to watch localized trends, ensure localized plans is vital.We had a CIO in our panel who gave us some interesting statistics on sales from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in India. He was giving examples where sales of lifestyle products from their stores in Tier 3 cities sometimes actually exceed Tier 1 cities in festival times by a wide margin. This is because the Tier 3 cities have pent up purchasing power which comes out during festival periods and since there are few organized retailers in Tier 3  this purchasing power is used to buy. Other trend which he mentioned is that today lot of their consumers are exposed to international trends so they are demanding their design team to create international grade products at local pricing and the expectation from the business is that IT would play a important part in innovation in product development.

4.  One more interesting perspective was put forward by a CIO of a leading retail finance company which specializes in rural finance product retail. The technology stack available in India currently does not cater to companies which want to do bottom of pyramid marketing and sales in India. Power supply challenges, cost per transaction, reliability, wide diverse demographics are some of the unique challenges which face retailers who want to get deep into India's rural geography. CIO's are expecting innovation in this area from IT product vendors which would enable them to leverage IT to tap this market. 
5. Another areas which the CEO/CIO's touched was the emergence of social networking to aid business. This is a fairly new area which the CEO/CIO's in India and even the world are watching keenly. How to tap the Facebook, Orkut, Linkedin phenomenon is currently being discussed. Once CIO of India's largest consumer goods company commented that they have already started investing in a platform to support social networks and they are launching their first business application ( I am lucky to be part of this project using IBM technologies). Going forward they would gauge the impact of this trend and continue to invest and try to innovate in using social networks for their product development feedback, product penetration, CRM area. 


So looks like 2010 is going to be a busy year for all CIO's in India... Lets see how it goes..