Data Quest Article, 03/2009, Ganesh Natarajan   Impact Sourcing – seeking diamonds in the rough!   Speaking to an audience of over a hundred of India’s top CIOs at Cyber India on Line’s annual conference in Kathmandu, Jagdeesh Khattar till recently the leader of India’s ongoing automobile success story, Maruti looked quite bemused when asked what a CIO should do to get the attention and understanding of a boss who was not conversant with IT. His view was simple – any CIO who in incapable of explaining the benefits of a new IT plan to the CEO in terms of business outcomes and benefits does not deserve to carry the title! In a difficult period that the next six months will surely turn out to be – for all industry sectors in India and abroad, the challenge to the CIO to deliver more for less will call for a radically different approach to planning and executing projects. The topic I presented at the CIO summit was titled “Impact Sourcing” and was a response to exactly this challenge by presenting a series of case studies from the US and Europe of wise CIOs who have chosen a 10 by 10 strategy – strategic projects and initiatives that promise and deliver a ten percent reduction in total cost of ownership in ten months or less! Take the case of the … The interesting part of the Impact Sourcing approach is that the CIO as strategist did not limit the scope of the exercise to just technology or systems – on the contrary in many cases the impact on the organisation itself has been substantial and inevitability one or more of the other more traditional elements – processes, applications and infrastructure has been transformed by this more holistic approach. This has always been true of most visionary approaches to transformation – Knowledge Management for instance can never be truly successful if it does not include processes, technology, culture and leadership styles in its ambit, but the ability to touch so many critical dimensions in a short span of less than a year is what makes Impact Sourcing a worthy initiative in these difficult times. Finally my day in Kathmandu came at the end of whirlwind East and North East trip which started in Bhubaneswar and moved through Guwahati before culminating in Nepal. Quite a contradiction here because while the little Orissa capital has spruced up its act and is now emerging as a serious challenger to the established leaders in IT and BPO cities, Guwahati still represents the forgotten part of India and will need a lot of attention from the Government, academic institutions and supportive industry chiefs before this town and the other worthy outposts of the North East become part of the Indian progress story. And about Kathmandu the less said the better. It is a town and indeed a country in serious need of development and an hour navigating the Tribhuvan International airport puts everything that we have achieved in India in shining perspective. Jai Ho!.       Back