N Nataraj is the CIO of Hexaware (NSE – HEXT), a provider of IT, BPO services and consulting. Founded in 1990, the company has grown to over 8100 workforce with global delivery centres in North America, Mexico and India with a goal to help clients achieve competitive advantage by combining their IT staff with offshore resources. In his role as the CIO of Hexaware, Nataraj is responsible for entire global IT operations including Information Systems Group and Systems Technology Group at the company. He also heads the Info Security Governance and Infrastructure Management Services. Nataraj holds 18 years of industry experience in the fields of IT, IS and Security. Before Hexaware, he was the CIO of Aztecsoft where he was responsible for IT/IS/Security and Infrastructure Business.

Priorities as a CIO

While driving the overall master plan from the IT perspective, we have clearly indicated the changes considering that the dynamics of IT has been changing. The innovation – revolution talks about the technology industry entering a period of unprecedented changes, which are fast and agile. Hexaware has now become closer to the business than just the conventional way of handling IT.

We are witnessing a lot of changes in innovation at the edge and the rise of mobile devices. We have entered into a “post – PC” world as most people are seen using either or all of the three devices: iPad, Laptop and mobile. The major implication for the IT organizations is in terms of how the services are enabled and implemented into these devices.
The next trend is the changing user expectations and decision structure. To combat all the changing trends we have come up with a vision called "enable every move that we make with IT". Even though our challenges are different at the beginning of every year, our one vision is common. Apart from that, every year we come out with different challenges, typically a vision statement which keeps changing every year.
CIO enables managers to deploy and use IT in business units most effectively. What is most important is CIO needs to understand that the effective use of IT adds only 25 percent to the business values, whereas remaining 75 percent accounts to the soft factors like customer satisfaction and others. From Hexaware’s point of view, the IT is no more linked only to the operational matter which is like saving cost which used to be 2-3 years back. The main driver now is how we want to shape IT internally from our point of view and how we deliver effectively from the business point of view; enable sales work force, delivery, HR and finance to deliver what is expected from board and customer perspective.