"You need to dismantle silos in your organization across various domains"

Gaurav Kataria, Vice President - Digital Strategy (Aerospace & Defense), Cyient shares his views on being a practical CIO and the way technologies like IoT and machine learning has assisted day-to-day business processes.

Here are the excerpts:

What does it take to be a practical CIO?

We tend to only look at technology rather than the big picture and outcomes. The focus has to be on what technology can deliver. We are so focussed on ensuring the IT applications run well, the IT infrastructure, IT security is in order without tieing back into business. You need to understand the pain-points to be able to provide the necessary solutions. Also, if you are in a telecom organization, where you are providing IT which will impact the main customer, even in that case, you need to understand the end-customer and then apply the suitable technology to solve problems. Further, you need to dismantle silos in your organization across various domains. In addition, you can partner with start-ups and bring a collaborative solution to the table. Today, it is all about 'time-to-market'. How well you can do it efficiently from a cost perspective is all what matters. 

How have technologies like IoT and machine learning assisted your day-to-day business processes?

As an organization, we have gone down the cloud-first strategy. For example, we implemented 'work-day' as a 'HCM platform' that transformed our business from end-to-end HR stand-point. From the infra side, we have set up a datacenter with the help of HP, who helped us with its design. Through this way, we have been able to deliver higher reliability and availability back to the business from a datacenter perspective. We then built it to Tier-3 standards which further helped. From the IoT perspective, we have connected all our printers and implemented 'follow-me printing', which means I can print something from Office A and go to Office B and collect the print from there. At the same time, there will be someone moitoring the availability of cartridge and paper on every printer. So the ease of use from an employee perspective has gone up multiple times. 

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