Budgets naturally need to be redrawn and tightened amid the global Covid-19 pandemic. As per Gartner, CIOs need to focus on a multi-faceted plan incorporating business impact and organisational risk to succeed. Top business-IT leaders in a panel discussion on The Economic Times Spectrum shared their experiences on how to manage IT spending.Chris Contakes, SVP and CIO, The US Chambers of Commerce, Gopi Thangavel, VP – IT, RIL and Srikanth Gopalakrishnan, CIO HR, Legal, Communications & CSR, Deutsche Bank in conversation with Dr. Chandrasekhar Panda, Senior Director, Digital & Core Tech Strategy, McKinsey&Company, talks about the changing trends in IT spending and how businesses can manage the IT budgets.
“Today, security for us has become most important. We are in financial services so we have to be very serious about this. We are talking about enabling cloud security and encryption technologies,” said Srikanth Gopalakrishna, Deutsche Bank.
He suggested re-using the technological capability.
“Whether you build it or buy it. You need to look at it holistically from a business perspective and not in silos,” he added.
For US Chambers of Commerce, cybersecurity has become a priority today. The organization is looking to retire as much legacy infrastructure as possible.
While talking about IT spending, Chris Contakes said, “We need to constantly pressure test the budget and analyse it almost on a daily basis to optimize it better. We should look for savings in areas where we are not focused as of now and be able to leverage the same for collaboration tools, data and the tech that keeps an eye for the future.”
Throwing light on budget constraints, Gopi Thangavel, VP – IT, RIL, said, “I have seen 1 lakh budget not being approved and 100 crore budgets being given the permission. I believe it’s purely about ROI and justifying that money to the business.”
Dr. Chandrasekhar Panda, Senior Director, Digital & Core Tech Strategy, McKinsey&Company believes that if the companies are not managing the demand effectively and do not frame the business case clearly, the stakeholders will raise questions and it might get difficult for the CFO to get the budget approved.
Hear Gopi Thangavel, VP-IT, RIL sharing a case of how he saved IT spends and increased the productivity of employees by just not choosing to reply to all on emails.
