In this exclusive interaction with Moneycontrol, Sankaranarayanan illuminates how the role of the CTO has changed over the years and how it will evolve further.
Q: How has the role of the CTO changed in recent years amidst changing technology and business landscapes?
Sankaranarayanan: Historically, the CTO was a pure technologist who covered project management and procurement. Since then, the CTO’s role has undergone many significant transitions.
In today’s world, most business ideas are conceived with the innate understanding that they will be delivered on a technology platform. Various business problems are resolved only by technology intervention. Organizations are willing to invest in IT since such investments can result in huge cost savings. This places the technology platform at the organization’s center, pushing the CTO into a quasi-business role.
The CTO is now fully engaged in business and understands the intricacies well. Responsive organizations and CTOs have been involved with the field force and customers to understand the shift in market dynamics.
Therefore, the CTO wears at least two hats: one as a technologist, where he understands the technology and its implementation, and the other as a leader who understands where the technology will deliver the maximum results for the business.
Q: What are the new responsibilities and challenges to this quasi-business role?
Sankaranarayanan: One of the biggest challenges for the new CTO is bringing all the business stakeholders as project partners.
Since technology solutions involve various stakeholders, their management has become an integral part of the CTO’s job description. Having all stakeholders on board for any successful implementation is very important. Implementations can be faster only with all-department buy-in.
Today’s technology platforms are complex and require multiple integrations. Therefore, communication management of changes across the rank and file is very important.
Continuous cost reduction is another area of focus. Every organization looks at cost reduction to enable better pricing and value delivery to its customers. Initiatives around cost reduction have to be mostly implemented through technology intervention. So, the question that runs through a CTO’s mind is, “How do I achieve the same business outcome at a lower cost”?”
Q: How does the CTO facilitate innovation and ensure it doesn’t fail?
Sankaranarayanan: Every organization needs to innovate and innovate smartly, i.e., without impacting the current setup and systems. By their very nature, innovations are unpredictable as to whether they will meet the desired outcome. It’s the responsibility of the CTO to sandbox the innovation so that there is no negative fallout and only the successful ones make it to the organization’s mainstay.
Here, the CTO plays the role of an experimenter by embracing Cloud-based solutions and trying out new workloads.
Q: What will be the next wave of technologies that will disrupt the insurance sector in India?
Sankaranarayanan: Cloud, AI, and robotic process automation will continue to drive innovation and disruption in the insurance sector.
As companies move more critical workloads, the cloud will soon become the preferred destination for infrastructure and platform as a service. While the entire Data Centre movement to the cloud could be some time away, I believe that companies will start shifting new initiatives to the cloud for the following simple reasons: Co-existing with the current production setup, Lower Cost, and scalability.
Technologies like AI and machine learning will have greater use cases within the insurance sector, especially in eliminating fraud in claims, which is a pressing issue currently. Multiple processes still require intensive processing through human intervention in insurance companies. RPA will help automate these processes to a large extent in the coming days.
Another emerging trend is the use of IoT data to deliver wellness programs effectively. Wellness requires integrating people, IoT devices, and their health data, with trust being the most critical bonding factor. This is an emerging space, and I expect it to mature over the next 3-5 years.
