Headquartered 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 to ensure that IT operates in sync with key business imperatives delivering results that matter in a very direct and impactful manner. Achieving this entailed investment of time and efforts in understanding the sales, marketing and finance functions of the business. It also involved governance and compliance priorities and synthesising them into an application strategy that delivers required functionality to the business. Business-savvy CIOs have learnt to anticipate business trends and prepare a pipeline of capability development projects, often running into multiple parallel proofs of concepts with competing technologies to familiarize themselves with what could be tomorrow's necessities 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 industry 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. Being 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 and less relevant with each passing day. The CIO challenge is now to be as flexible as possible, helping 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 unawares by the rapid changes precipitated by these competitors, and information technology is often the only leveller which enables the disrupted to quickly reorganize to better or at least match the product and service offerings from the disruptors.

CIOs nowadays need to proactively find ways in which technology available in the market, even if at a preliminary stage, can be used to disrupt their industry. They also need to improve the muscle tone of the organization to the point where they can offer solutions and support new product and service introduction in short timelines. Additionally, many of the innovations which have come in by way of business practices and acceptable industry norms can be adopted to create lower cost and more efficient operating models.