Technology in the driver’s seat, ASEAN CIOs in the hot seat

Over the last month in Jun 2013, we met with almost 6000 clients from 7 cities across ASEAN at the IBM Technology Conference and Expo 2013 roadshow. It was great to see a lot of old friends from existing client organizations and to meet many new ones. We also saw a growing number of attendees from non-IT departments – line of business leaders, marketing folks, finance and so on.

Why did they come? Well, I would suggest that it’s because the role of technology in any industry, function and geography is becoming increasingly important. They are already big users of technology, but they needed to know “what next?”

In this, they mirrored the thoughts of more than 1,700 global CEOs IBM interviewed in 2012 as part of our bi-annual CEO survey. Technology has been moving up the rankings over the eight years we have done the study and in 2012 was identified as the single most important external force impacting their organizations. In fact, 71 percent of them believe technology will be the most important driver of change from 2012 to 2015. 

The question is: is your infrastructure ready for this?

Many organizations here are deploying virtualization as a start. According to IDC[1], nearly 71 percent of organizations in Asia Pacific have started or plan to start virtualization projects, nearly 50 percent of CIOs have started and another  21 percent plan to start soon. Cost control, consolidation and the need for increased IT flexibility are the main drivers for this move towards virtualization in Asia Pacific. The flexibility of being able to provision resources on the fly and deploy applications faster in a market travelling at warp speed just makes business sense.

But virtualization is not an end in itself. It is a means to getting the customer insights that CEOs have identified as the most critical investment area for them with 73 percent of CEOs surveyed making significant investments in this area.

This may sound a bit strange as obviously the need for customer insight isn’t new but what customer insight actually means today has. For a start, there’s far more raw data to draw from than ever before and data is coming at us with a furious pace due to social media interactions. So the infrastructure and the tools needed to make sense of this must be more powerful and in real time. Secondly, where customer segmentation with post analysis of demographics and psychographics was the height of sophistication before, today we as marketers want to understand individual customers, not just the groups they belong to, we want to know instantaneously how customers are interacting and respond to them in real time, and on an even more advance level, predict customers’ behavior.

This is important because there seems to be a strong correlation between the ability to tap into and use data effectively, and business performance. Outperformers have been shown to be twice as good at deriving value from data across the three dimensions of access, insights and action – which are key to engaging customers as individuals.

The bad news is that in another IBM study of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs)[2], 71 percent of CMOs said they are underprepared for data explosion. Over seventy percent of the CMOs who are underprepared intend to invest in technology and need to integrate insights to deal with data explosion.  This puts the limelight back on the CIOs to come up with a quick solution to this growing need. The bad news is that sixty percent of the CMOs who are underprepared stated that their inhibitors are cost and that marketing is not aligned with the IT team. As marketers, we need to build the business case together with the CIOs. 

The good news is that both IDC[3] and Gartner[4] have predicted CIO’s top focus areas for 2013 are – among the usual suspects of cloud and mobile – Big Data, Analytics and Business Intelligence. So both CMOs and CIOs have the opportunity to build the case together and demonstrate the return on investment that the business requires.

Another interesting fact is that both analysts predict that CIOs talk about a high degree of interest in what they call converged or integrated systems, which in a nutshell means infrastructure that combines server, storage and network technologies into a stack.

This is exactly why IBM's Smarter Computing approach was designed to deliver what organizations need in three key areas of cloud, data and security. Today, CIOs don’t want to worry about putting the pieces together; they want a platform that integrates hardware, analytics-based software, network management services and virtualization, so that they can hit the road running.  

As technology moves into the driver’s seat for enterprise agendas in 2013, ASEAN CIOs will find themselves increasingly in the hot seat to identify new ways to store and manage Big Data and most importantly, make sense of it. Smarter Computing can help.

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[1] IDC Asia Pacific IT Services Survey, Server Virtualization Services 2011-2015 Forecast Market Trends and Opportunities, Dec 2011

[2] From Stretched To Strengthened: Insights from the Global Chief Marketing Officer Study, IBM (September 2011)

[3] IDC Predictions 2013, Enterprise Servers (Feb 2013)

[4] Gartner Webinar CIO Agenda 2013 – Implications for High-Tech Providers, Mark P. McDonald (Feb 2013)