The new CIO mandate includes delivering ‘Digital at scale’

The new CIO mandate includes delivering ‘Digital at scale’

Bhushan Sharma, Managing Director - India Business, DXC Technology, elaborates on how CIOs can enable the transition to an information-centric business by creating a balanced digital path forward.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

In the digital era, organizations face a classic conundrum: if they don’t drive digital at scale, they will succumb to the gravitational pull of technical debt and status quo of their existing operations, business processes and legacy systems. What are the best ways of digitizing your core and achieving agility while protecting the legacy systems?

Today most businesses on the transformation journey are in a big hurry to differentiate themselves or disrupt their industries. The usual IT approaches can’t keep pace.  So how can modern CIOs operate, evolve, and adapt their teams at the speed demanded by the business, while also being flexible enough to respond quickly when business conditions change? Here are a few things for CIOs to keep an eye on:

  • Position the move to the cloud
  • Be able to operate both in the cloud and on-premises at scale
  • Revisit and refresh the applications portfolio
  • Build an innovative business platform
  • Continuously transform applications for speed

In picking up the pace of IT, CIOs mustn’t take on too much at once. The key is to strike a balance. In this way, the modern IT organization can move at the speedy pace of business.

 

What are the top three things/criteria that CIOs should consider while selecting a partner to drive their digital transformation journey? How do you help drive digital transformation for companies?

The criticality of the IT estate is top of mind for all CIOs. Most of them today need to enable fast business innovation while also lowering the costs of their legacy environment. Core parameters that customers look for when searching for a technology partner to work within the long run include:

  • IT for the business - While the tech platform is created by IT, it’s designed to help the business, which can use this digital sandbox to develop ideas, test prototypes, and create minimum viable products (MVPs) with a fail-fast approach that’s both quick and highly secure.
  • A do-it-yourself solution - A technology platform for business innovation is something every organization needs to assemble for itself. That’s because these platforms address unique needs and are formed by unique combinations of products. These can include a hybrid cloud environment, data analytics, API-management capabilities, selected as-a-service offerings, and both integration and workflow technologies.
  • Culture shift ahead - Building a technology platform is only half the job. The other half is bringing about the needed cultural change. What many organizations now need is nothing less than a completely new model for collaboration. This new model barely distinguishes between IT and business; instead, it leads to what we call “scaled agile.” That’s when agile techniques such as MVPs, sprints, and scrums become pervasive practices throughout the organization, essentially melting business and IT together

At DXC, we can help simplify and optimize existing, on-premises investments and securely move IT resources to the cloud, while modernizing applications and building data-driven operations.

 

What is it that DXC Technology knows about delivering digital at scale? Why should CIOs partner with you?

DXC Technology is transforming IT services today. With its long heritage of running mission-critical systems, DXC operates from the core to the edge. DXC’s ownership of the technology stack’s foundational layer and the ability to move across from there represents a unique competitive advantage.

Customer feedback indicates DXC runs mission-critical systems and operations for our customers and they expect these to be run silently and effectively. Many of our customers need to upgrade these systems and they want to partner with someone they can trust. This trust requires a deep understanding of their environments, with demonstrated experience executing at scale.

DXC is poised for growth moving forward, based on three success factors:

  1. DXC has significant scope and scale, along with mission-critical positions at large customers.
  2. DXC in recent history has reduced its cost structure in an industry where being cost-efficient boosts your ability to compete.
  3. Customers are facing transformation challenges across the enterprise technology stack, and they need DXC’s deep IT Outsourcing (ITO) capabilities and experience. Customers need a partner like DXC to help them modernize their ITO layer, optimize their data architectures, and make it all secure and orchestrated across public, private, and hybrid clouds.

 

At DXC Technology how are you trying to strike the balance between internal capability development and the development of an ecosystem to deliver digital at scale? How are you developing partnership and collaboration models that enable you to deliver digital at scale?

Partnering is embedded in our business and the way DXC operates, so we take a holistic approach to these relationships. DXC’s extensive partner network helps drive collaboration and leverage technology independence. The company has established more than 200 industry-leading global DXC Partner Network relationships. The DXC Partner Network (DPN) encompasses four categories of partners: Strategic Partners, Solution Partners, Channel Sales Partners, and Supplier/ Reseller Partners which offers a technologically aware single point of access to a broad range of skills and offerings — including emerging technologies.

With this breadth and depth of partnerships — brought together in a clear framework — the DPN can quickly combine skills and technologies into complete solutions. We can help our clients solve some of the most complex and critical challenges that they face — whether in one location or globally. And we can keep those solutions focused on clients’ needs: For example, our extensive partner network allows us to be technology independent because it intentionally includes more than one provider for a given class of technology.

 

What are the challenges customers face in their digital transformation journeys? Can you narrate some real-life instances of how you have delivered digital outcomes for your customers?

By succeeding in their digital makeovers, organizations that were almost entirely dependent on traditional IT infrastructures and processes are now better placed to compete and operate at scale to deliver outcomes, by:

  • Transitioning to an Information-centric Business - Once a company becomes information-centered, it can incorporate digital tools like cloud resources and predictive analytics into workflows. This gives a company a better chance of making the right business decision and the ability to do things more quickly, accurately, and securely—key considerations amid volatile and changing business conditions. Employees too benefit from increased digital collaborations, access to innovative technologies, and more opportunities for creativity and productivity.
  • Gaining New Value with Legacy Infrastructures - As an organization moves toward greater digital skills and fluency, it must figure out how to bridge the divide between its traditional environments and its newly introduced digital technologies.
  • Creating a Digital Path Forward - A roadmap with clear, incremental objectives is key to a successful digital transformation. Without it, decision-makers can be overwhelmed by the number of technology options.

DXC Technology helps customers thrive on change. We have a clear and confident vision for navigating the future and have met the challenges of innovation many times. We strive to support a culture of performance, matched with integrity.

 

Today, with whom do you initiate conversations at a customer end: the IT team or the business?

As organizations embrace emerging technologies to reshape their operations, digital transformation is leading to digital advantage in India. Be it in pushing the current IT landscape via virtual clients and Cloud, or in new technologies like Mobility and AI and Analytics, companies continue to respond to accelerated change with speed and innovation. Thus, they’re putting more power into the hands of business users to drive business outcomes. This transformation impacts the company — people, activity, and processes — across the organization.

For the successful execution of digital transformation strategies, we need to work with both IT and business teams to achieve these business outcomes.

 

 What’s changing with how DXC Technology looks at India? Where are you betting your core investments?

DXC Technology in India is a hotbed of innovation and technical expertise and a gold standard for process maturity and quality. We are highly invested in India, with high-caliber technology professionals focused on helping customers address their core challenges and take advantage of market opportunities.

As clients embrace transformation, they face challenges in scaling their new solutions and integrating them with their existing IT landscapes. By providing digital solutions at scale, DXC will deliver new value, faster time to market, and increased productivity – all while minimizing risk. This enables our clients to unlock new opportunities and realize better business outcomes.

Our technology independence, world-class talent, and industry-leading partner ecosystem provide a clear and confident vision for the future. Through our partnerships with the world’s leading technology providers, we deliver the best, most proven solutions to de-risk technology investments.

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