NOVEMBER 20168IN MY OPINIONAGE OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONBy Vinod Krishnan, CIO, Usha InternationalHeadquartered in Gurgaon, Usha International is the leading brand in Fast Moving Consumer Durables including products like Fans, Sewing Machines, Home Appliances and Power Products.Over the years, CIOs have worked very hard to align continuously to business initiatives and ensure that IT operates in sync with key business imperatives delivering results that matter in a very direct and impactful man-ner. Achieving this entailed investment of time and efforts in understanding the sales, marketing and finance functions of the business. It also involved govern-ance and compliance priorities and synthesising them into an application strategy that delivers required functionality to the business. Business-savvy CIOs have learnt to antici-pate business trends and prepare a pipeline of capability development projects, often running into multiple parallel proofs of concepts with competing technologies to famil-iarize themselves with what could be tomorrow's necessi-ties, while they still have the luxury of understanding how these technologies can be applied for solving customer and business issues.In the golden era of alignment, this led to a win-win situation where the CIO became a trusted partner to the business. CEOs and CFOs had begun to rely on their CIOs to have anticipated indus-try developments and to be aware of (if not proficient in) various technologies changing the face of their industry. Those CIOs, who were not able to align effectively ended up in the untenable position of being caught flat-footed and unable to respond in time to new requirements. Be-ing aligned closely with the business also meant a higher profile for the CIO in the boardroom, since the speed of delivery of solutions had become critical to success at a business level.However, with the frequent disruption of industries by more nimble and less encumbered competitors such as startups, this positioning and strategy has been challenged and is becoming less relevant with each passing day. The CIO's challenge is now to be as flexible as possible, help-ing the organization pivot rapidly to reduce the competitive imbalances with smaller, more efficient competition while at the same time leveraging the scale and established base to drive down costs aggressively. Business functions are often caught unaware by the rapid changes precipitated by
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