In 2008, post outsourcing, the biggest challenge for us was to consolidate our service delivery across 23 different telecom circles (business units). This was a big change for some people, who saw it as a threat. But our focus on the goals, coupled with regular communication helped us manage the show. 

There are five drivers of IT consumerization: The rise of social media, blurring of boundaries between work and home, new mobile devices, the need for tech-savvy employees, and greater employee recognition of IT's role in accommodating tech devices. For those IT leaders who want the boardroom conversation to be about value rather than cost, consumerization is the opportunity.  

The application of social media in retail trading is only going to increase as it enhances the efficiency in retail trading. Fundamentally social media caters to information dissemination through viral propagation, which is of great value in the world of retail trading. 

As with just about any area, IT is a discipline to fads and memes, "received truths" that seem to arise in the blogosphere and then ricochet around the echo chamber until they sound plausible even to skeptics. One most often quoted is the much-repeated meme is "death of the CIO" with dreamy visions of the world brought to us by the consumerization of IT and the cloud.  

It's often hard for CIOs to find the right people with the perfect skills and temperament to do all the hard things that have to be done to keep your business processes rolling along.Recruiting is expensive time consuming, depending on the qualifications that you are seeking in your new hires. 

'Success is always a result of teamwork; the leader needs to give the team freedom to take decisions. When they succeed credit goes to them, when they do not, the leader takes the responsibility for lack of success. Such teams rarely need to be reminded of what matters, they rarely let the leader down.' 

Most firms just throw their interns into the deep end and have them either sink or swim. We are taking the more humane approach in our internship program. The lesson I learned during my interaction with them was to not write them off. In fact, as CIOs we should listen to them. They have not been tainted by corporate politics or turned into status quo zombies. They might have fresh ideas that can improve the bottom line of an organization. Think Facebook... 

It doesn't really matter if you have to analyze a program with 100,000 lines of code or a log file with a terabyte of data - if you have good precision and good recall. The problem is however, that the more data you have, the more difficult it is to achieve high precision and recall and that is why real-time events (or debugging statements) are more effective in day-to-day security operations. 

The Dealer Management System (DMS) at TVS Motors - an ERP for our dealers - is now a private cloud-based service to experiment with the new technology. This is for new dealers and authorized service centers. This is being done to make it more attractive in terms of ease and usage. The product called InCloud is ready and due for deployment.  

Engagement should be embraced by all leaders and all contributors in an organization - not just the marketing department. But real engagement requires humility and the willingness to be vulnerable, and too many of today's leaders have been trained in authority and certitude first.