[Interview] Part 4: Hari Panday - Top Business Issues and Integrating IT

This is the next blog in the continuing series of interviews with leading professionals. In this series of blogs, I have an exclusive interview with Hari Panday: President and CEO, ICICI Bank Canada, International Executive, Business and Technology Thought Leader.

Enjoy!
Stephen Ibaraki, FCIPS, I.S.P., MVP 

Q6: As a leading CEO, what do you see as the top five issues facing businesses today and your recommendations?

A: Lack of qualified workforce to sustain the growth in the service sector; business leaders have to consciously designate training and development among their top priorities.

1. Ability of businesses to cope with the speed of changes in consumer behaviour; the empowerment of consumer is happening like never before, driven largely by the speed of information-flow around the world. Advance consumer research tools and techniques generally available to only large or multi-national companies need to be deployed more widely to small and medium enterprises.
2. Canadian companies, including small and medium enterprises not investing in growing export markets; tax schemes and support for research funding can incentivize businesses to make exports as important as domestic sales.
3. Minimal levels of risk-capital available for young innovators - software industry still can not access traditional financing; pools of risk-capital have to be created with both industry and government partnerships. All Canadian universities have to make concerted effort in applying their research - applied research can not just rest in science faculty, but also in management and building our human and intellectual capital.
4. Regional disparity in Canada is becoming a visible issue. Wealth creation has to happen in every province and territory. Individual city and provincial authorities need to promote their local businesses within Canada. They need to make a revolutionary shift to compete with foreign providers of goods and services in their own backyard.

Q7: From the CEO perspective, how do you see technology integrated into business performance, strategy, goals, and objectives? What would be your key priorities for ensuring business and IT alignment?

A: Integration of technology into business strategy is absolutely critical in today's environment. IT and business have to align themselves in building business applications that are simple and include prediction models, facilitate design of business lines, ATMs as a robust delivery channel, collection and analysis of data for marketing, customer service, financial reporting, organizational research, improvement of quality and productivity in service operations; employee performance measurement, competitive decision situations, risk management, simulation experiments; cost/benefit analysis; data access; privacy issues; conceptual design; artificial intelligence; new communication technologies; analysis of complex problems using mathematical programming models, management information systems for complex treasury products and critical business segments; management of operations; interfacing among the functional areas of business.
________________________
Look for more with Hari in the next blog.
I encourage you to share your thoughts here on these interviews or send me an e-mail at sibaraki@cips.ca.
________________________