He further elaborates on his metaphor. “Think and then run.” Desai has 30 years of experience at Motorola in business management and strategy, worldwide supply chain, quality, and ebusiness strategy and implementation. As CIO, Desai is responsible for aligning IT strategy and technology deployment with Motorola’s umbrella business strategy, strengthening Motorola’s IT capabilities crucial to the corporation's growth, and accelerating e-business strategies and capabilities.

In the IT landscape, he sees a severe lack of business acumen, which he believes is fundamental to running a business. “All projects, whether in IT or in conventional business, must be tied to a profit and loss (P&L) statement and balance sheet. It's not that IT professionals lack knowledge of business theories, but, most senior IT managers have no experience of running an entire operation. As a result, many fail to apply common business practices to the IT world. Another common misunderstanding is that when a business case is formulated, the concept of cost avoidance is used to justify the project. Cost avoidance is another trap. IT systems are built to help companies run, but more importantly, it should realize that the system they build should help the company make money. Building systems to avoid certain costs will simply create one more trap.”

Desai should know. As one of the largest manufacturers and retailers of cellular products, Motorola relies on the enterprise infrastructure Desai and his 4,000-member team builds and maintains. “We could have the best product—superior technology, great design—but unless we deliver the value that the user seeks, we will not sell. I think that this absence of customer-need recognition is perhaps the single biggest reason that the IT industry failed.” He insists that “support systems” and the “support” philosophy that an IT team adopts is only a mindset, whereas they should be equally involved in the P&L of the business.

Thirty Years

Desai joined Motorola as an engineer in 1973. He holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago and a master’s degree in business from Loyola University, Chicago. In his rise through the Motorola ranks, Desai has driven divisions under his responsibility to gain sizeable profits and achieve strategic business strengths. During his tenure as senior vice president and general manager of the iDEN Subscriber Group, his team significantly grew the business and formed a strategic partnership with Nextel.

Prior to this, Desai was corporate vice president and general manager of the iDEN Subscriber Division. While at the Network Solutions Sector, Desai led Worldwide Supply Chain, and iDEN Subscriber business, e-business operations that improved manufacturing margins, resulting in several hundred million dollars of cost savings.

Before his current assignment, Desai served as senior vice president and deputy to the president of the Personal Communications Sector (PCS). In that position, he focused on PCS engineering, quality, and program management teams, resulting in the shipment of 12 new platform 2000 cellular phone products in GSM, TDMA, and CDMA.

With a wealth of supply chain management, manufacturing, and product management experience behind him, Desai brings cohesive knowledge of enterprise demands and requirements, matched by the skills needed to meet them. As Motorola’s CIO, he says his role is more as a business-driver than as a support person. “IT cannot be a separate, unaccounted expense. We must be responsible in delivering ROI,” says Desai. “After all, Motorola’s four critical components are design, develop, deliver, and diversify. This hasn’t changed over the last 70-plus years of our history. So why should IT, enterprise software, or support take on any new importance? The business value is more important than the system.”

Aligning needs

“A fish stinks from the top. Unless the team is aligned with management objectives and needs, you cannot expect results. That has been the way with IT so far. They develop products in a vacuum and this certainly erodes the need-knowledge that the client can share. And then, systems simply fail to perform,” says Desai. “Nobody gets up in the morning, thinking, ‘Today, I’ll go to work and screw up.’ We need to establish clear communication at all levels if a system has to work efficiently.” Desai also feels that the wholesale customization that vendors have sold clients in the past has beaten them at their own game. No client wants to spend more on an enterprise system that hasn’t begun delivering value yet. “Unique codes, lack of cross-platform integration ability, and one-vendor windows have all broken what could have been a very good market. This is what I call a lack of aligining needs. The vendors themselves have failed in aligining their needs to their own business, let alone client-business.”

Desai is now driving the move to integrate the systems in Motorola. “Our mission is to deliver processes that are world-class, simple, common, and global. Is this difficult? No. It is elementary, my dear Watson!” laughs Desai. In the past, the decentralized organization at the company had led to independent vendor negotiations and unique system purchases. “Today, we are picking best-of-breed applications and building our own common system,” says Desai. “Our guiding principle is that all future dollar-spend will be on common systems.”

He declares that IT has been an enabling factor in driving productivity only in six industries: semiconductor, wholesale, telecom, high-tech manufacturing, security, and retail. The common belief that increasing spend in IT will increase productivity is a myth.

How does he respond to the belief that enterprise software cannot be measured on a P&L basis as its application is spread across the entire business? “The cost of the system has to be clearly shown in the balance sheet to see its productivity. Allocation of costs to each section using the system will immediately raise flags. In the past, servers were added left and right, with no justification. But today, each component is being evaluated in terms of cost-benefit and we see systems being streamlined constantly. Now, all this has a bearing on the P&L,” emphasizes Desai.

“Secondly, I have found the entire IT industry fragmented. Vendors have gotten away easily, by providing clients point solutions. Nobody has thought about providing an end-to-end solution. Platforms are different, ERP systems are different...all this has to stop!” thunders Desai. “One day, another man from a garage will come up with a brilliant end-to-end solution, and the world will simply stand by and watch.”

Customization will not work

Motorola’s supply chain itself is being standardized across the company to build a “customized” solution. The key, Desai says, is component standardization and reutilization. “Show me a plug-and-play format of an operating system. We will welcome it with open arms. Money is not the silver bullet for IT,” says Desai. All point systems should be integrated seamlessly. “People have talked loudly about web-services being a panacea for these problems. I haven’t seen a real-life application that has been built around, or on, web services. I think for now, real-time enterprise solutions and web services still remain a hype,” says the Motorola CIO.

“What does a GM do? Make cars. What does a Chrysler do? The same. What is different? Do they use special methods to buy parts or fit them onto the car? No. Why did software take on this unwanted role of customizing software for each company? Pure greed,” explains Desai. “Customization was only a tool to tie in a client to a product and defeat competition. But that worked only for a short while. The software companies forgot that the clients are old hands at business and could quickly sort out the wheat from chaff. And when they demanded seamless integration, most software companies collapsed. Such short-sighted, high-handed methods resulted in the quick deaths of these companies,” says Desai.

Focus, focus, focus

The genial story-teller this time draws from the lores of Mahabharata to emphasize his all-consuming desire to remain focused on user-need. “Remember what the four Pandavas and the hundred Kauravas told their guru: I see the leaf, I see apples, I see clouds, I see a bird...Only Arjun said he saw the left eye of the bird. That is focus,” says Desai. Unless the product is built with a 100 percent focus on user needs, it will fail.

This also seems to be the message Desai uses to charge and move his troops forward. “If a sector manager understands that his sector’s business is tied to the P&L of the entire group, he will run his business accordingly. The point is, the P&L of the entire group is the bird. If everyone in the troop can fix his or her eye on that bird, we will go forward. The story of Arjuna is well known in Motorola,” says Desai with a laugh.

India should build R&D skills

“The day the news was out that there was a new CIO at Motorola, the best of the Indian companies beat a line to my door. They have good teams, great deployment, excellent pedigree in various verticals. But I think they lack R&D skills. This is the only platform that will sustain them. If they can solve the point-solution problem that large enterprises are facing by creating end-to-end solutions, they can create a huge win for themselves. Yes, focusing on IT maintenance solutions brings quick revenue, but with the markets being so volatile, it won't take another country a long time to beat India on the costs. I ask them to invest more in R&D. Can any Indian company say it can bring forward workable end-to-end solutions, or solve integration problems? This saddens me,” says Desai.

Career-climbing

“Set your sights on what you want to achieve. There is no silver bullet in life,” says Desai. He quotes the 14th verse from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, which he explains further. Practice long, practice continuously. And to relieve the boredom from this length of time, develop a reverence for what you are doing. The clarity in vision comes automatically. And he echoes the-now familiar phrase that he adores, “It is elementary, my dear Watson!”