Much before business became technology and vice versa, the CIO was just the custodian of technology. IT departments were the slow-moving bureaucratic lot. But CIOs and their teams have travelled quite far from that point. Today, CIOs are acting as key business strategists, helping businesses transform and grow.
Meet a CIO, who also successfully led several business roles, including that of a CEO of a multinational firm’s India business – Muralidharan Ramachandran.
This former CEO of Atos India offers a handful of lessons on what it takes to be the “CEO of your own career” (to borrow his own words).
In this exclusive interaction with CIO Dimension, Murali explores some key aspects that today’s CIOs must consider, including the changing talent scenario, new opportunities around digital transformation and also on working with startups.
Watch the full video here:
Before becoming the CEO of Atos India, Murali worked as the CIO of Syntel (later acquired by Atos) for over 8 years. He also moved onto other responsibilities as vice president later during his stint at Syntel, in the areas of quality assurance and cybersecurity. Before moving out of Atos in 2022, Murali became the vice president of Growing markets for the company’s key services.
In his two-decade long leadership journey of great diversity, Murali has acquired the rare skill of striking the balance between technology and business.
He believes that the biggest challenge for a CIO going forward will be to ‘filter out the noise’ amidst the overwhelming technology options. “Today you have the option to choose any technology that you want. But the tricky part for CIOs will be how they can take the whole organization along in the journey and manage change. CIO will need to be a big ‘change-manager’ rather than being a hard-core technologist” he says.
In this conversation, Murali also takes us through the evolving talent landscape where the industry transitioned from the traditional SDLC models to agile methodologies and how it drove a big change for tech leaders. He explains why the current mass layoffs in the tech sector are a result of imprudence and why companies need more sustainable models for talent acquisition and management.
He believes that a CIO’s digital investments will be strictly evaluated based on the four fundamental business criteria – revenue growth, cost optimization, customer experience and regulatory challenges. “The CIO has to choose her battles wisely,” he sums up.
