“CIO’s are often at the heart of change within the enterprise,” said Verizon Enterprise Solutions Senior Vice President and CIO Ajay Waghray in his recent keynote at the CIO Summit of America in NYC.
“More companies look to CIOs to provide the leadership and direction to unlock the potential of their organizations through technology in order to generate competitive advantage,” said Waghray in his opening remarks. “As technology continues to evolve industries and markets at an ever-accelerating pace, CIOs must constantly rethink the ways in which they deliver value for their businesses.”
In his keynote, Waghray went on to explain, “Today’s IT environment is one of disruption from market forces at work.” The key, says Waghray, is to harness technological advancements to generate new opportunities. Areas of rapid disruption are coming from mobile, the cloud, M2M and big data. These technologies are radically changing markets across virtually every industry. “Harnessing technology advancement to generate new opportunities is not a luxury; it’s a requirement for survival,” emphasized Waghray.
With all of this change, the IT department must be able to help the enterprise navigate so that it stays ahead of the competition and provides value to the organization, Verizon’s CIO told attendees. How you ask? According to Waghray, the role of the IT department is three-fold: optimization and consistency, innovation and the ability to prioritize key IT projects. In the first area, IT is responsible for developing efficient systems, streamlining processes and enabling the business. In the area of Innovation, IT departments should be prepared to solicit ideas; drive incubation and development and lastly take risks, learn and improve. In the area of deployment, IT leaders must be able to vet ideas and programs, measure business value and be able to see the business end-to-end.
To assist organizations managing through change, Waghray has developed a framework for CIO’s, called the OCI Model. By following an IT framework that is simple and business-driven, companies can create a better and more efficient customer experience, focus resources and assets to derive optimum performance, and unleash their organization’s true potential no matter the disruption.
The three pillars of the OCI Model are: 1) Optimization; 2) Consistency and 3) Innovation. In a few words Optimization represents “less is more”; Consistency means “one function, one process, one system” and Innovation is the ability to “enable the future of the business.” Examples of each respectively, include streamlined application architecture, standardized efficiency processes and systems; and the implementation of analytics, mobile/M2M, cloud and security.
To help clients leverage these new technologies, Verizon itself uses the OCI Model to innovate. For example, with big-data analytics, Verizon Enterprise Solutions is helping the government and other payers root out fraud in the healthcare system. In a report to Congress late last year, the Department of Health and Human Services cited the fact that Verizon’s anti-fraud management system was up and running within 60 days. In the first year, it processed more than a billion claims and saved the government $3 for every $1 invested. In another case, Verizon used its system to analyze 2.5 million claims in a single day and found more than 13,000 suspicious claims, representing more than $200 million in possible fraud.
Another focus for Verizon is helping enterprises take advantage of the cloud as businesses recognize this new delivery model as a radically more efficient and effective way to organize work in a rapidly globalizing world. Verizon’s Enterprise Cloud provides infrastructure as a service within the expertise, security and availability that large organizations such as The Preferred Hotels Group, the Library of Congress and Club Med among others with mission-critical computing needs demand of their infrastructure. Waghray points out that experts believe that by 2015 fully 10 percent of the digital universe will be maintained in the cloud.
In wrapping up his keynote, Ajay stressed the importance of establishing a streamlined foundation that empowers IT to enable the future of the business, creating the IT workforce of the future today, and leveraging IT as a source of innovation. “With these three things working in your favor, IT can truly become the change agent for your company’s success.”
