Radico Khaitan is one of India’s oldest and largest liquor manufacturers. Formerly known as Rampur Distillery which was established in 1943, the company went IPO in BSE and NSE and has their corporate headquarters based out of New Delhi. The current Market Cap of the company is around Rs.1, 811.32 Crore.

Chief Information Officer (CIO) is a job title commonly given to the most senior executive in an enterprise responsible for the information technology and computer systems that support enterprise goals. Generally, the CIOs’ now are part of core business team. In essence, a CIO in today’s modern organization is required to possess business skills and the ability to relate to the organization as a whole, as opposed to being a technological expert with limited functional business expertise. The CIO position is as much about anticipating trends in the market place with regards to technology as it is about ensuring that the business navigates these trends through expert guidance and proper strategic IT planning (ROI) that is aligned to the corporate financial strategy of the organization.

Today’s CIOs and IT departments are at the cross-road: on the one hand, digitization and globalization make the technology more critical than ever, IT capability becomes the competitive differentiator, information/data just penetrate into every corner of their organization and our human society; on the other hand, the latest technology such as cloud/social computing unleash the potential to decentralize the enterprise, and democratize our working environment, will IT be left out or more strategic focused and mission critical?

As we know, in a down turned market the bottom line becomes even more critical for the management. A bad economy stalls or reduces necessary resources needed for new technologies to maintain competitiveness or operational efficiency. Why do we think the Cloud is the main stream today? Because long term risk and buying those new servers today just got outsourced to the Cloud.

Here is my list of the top challenges facing today’s CIOs