An Executive Conversation

It was a pleasant evening at Bangalore as I sipped my chilled beer while having a casual discussion with Sam, the CIO of a major aerospace component player. As the number of beers increased the discussion got more and more interesting.

Very casually I asked Sam what he was thinking now (midway through our second drink) and he very sadly explains about this senior team member who reports directly to him. He was told by this second line commander of his team that he was leaving to join an IT company for almost double the pay. Says Sam, “How the hell do I keep someone like him motivated enough in order to retain him.”

By the fourth drink I pretty much got a picture of the top challenges of this CIO who is among the most respected in the community. While training, retaining his IS team is a major challenge, alignment of the IT goals to the business is another of his key concerns. He says, “You know it ain’t as easy as people say. While I understand the business implications of tech investments, it is not the case with most of my team. They are more interested in doing the mobility project over the process re-engineering initiative that is underway right now. They feel there is no sex factor in this.”

I remember having a similar discussion with him almost a year back and he had then mentioned the challenge of managing his IT resources as his top worry that according to him was “keeping him awake all night”.

Today he has a different message altogether. He feels that now he is able to manage all his tech resources and more or less most critical business processes are tech-enabled. Now the challenge is to convince his management of continued investment into maintaining this infrastructure and putting more money into staffing the maintenance part with the right people. While this may be critical for the success of running the business smoothly, the business leadership at his organization feel the tech investments need to be in building more flexibility into the present system.

A partly drunk (after his seventh drink now) Sam now slurs, “The overall organization strategy is not about putting in more systems but leverage the present infrastructure to increase speed and agility within the systems.”

As you can see priorities are changing, for the good or bad is individual perception. But as we see more and more organizations going the tech way, there will be interesting stories that we can talk about.

Who says executive conversations cannot be had over a drink !!