A Straight Line to the Top

A Chief Information Officer’s role in an organization is one that brings all the processes together and makes it work. At the top of the ladder, the CIO should be the person who understands the company’s vision, and put strategies into effect which will help to realize them. But more than just technical, the CIO has to buy into the business vision of the organization. And since you need the buy in from the technology as well as the business vision, where does the drive come in? Read more

Arshad Javed Minhas, Executive Director and CIO, Securities & Exchange Commission of Pakistan

About SECP: The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) was set up in pursuance of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan Act, 1997. This Act institutionalized certain policy decisions relating to the constitution and structure, powers, and functions of the SECP, thereby giving it administrative authority and financial independence in carrying out its regulatory and statutory responsibilities. Read more

Industry: Textile

Majid Noor, IT Manager
Gul Ahmed Textile Mills (Ltd)
About Gul Ahmed: Gul Ahmed Textile Mills Ltd was incorporated as a private limited company, in 1953. Since then the company has been making rapid progress and is one of the best composite textile houses in the world. The mill is presently a composite unit with an installed capacity of 103,000 spindles, 220 wide width air jet looms, 90 Sulzer’s, 297 conventional looms and a state of the art processing and finishing unit.
Scope of work: I maintain the Cisco-based infrastructure and VoIP Communication IP telephony system along with managing all connectivity, data center operations, Disaster Recovery site and IP-based surveillance and CCTV system across the organization. The IT Department also supports all IT-related workflows and connectivity as well as the textile industry-specific ERP.
Where do you see the role in Technology leading change within the Textile industry? I have been part of the Textile sector for about 9 years and it is unfortunate that only a few textile firms are IT-dependent. If they understand the potential of technology, they will be able to realize greater returns on their investment. We were the first organization in Pakistan to deploy IP Telephony which was initially setup with 500 IP Phones, and today, the IPT network has grown now to accommodate a demand of 1900 IP Phones on its network. The network allows Gul Ahmed managers to view key supply chain-related information through a seamless integration of the ERP system with the XML interface on the Cisco IP phones.
Challenges for the CIO: Achieving business objectives requires change, large and small, whether you are moving toward sustainability or some other vision. Most organizations encounter challenges along the way, for instance: defining measurable goals, developing leadership skills, managing conflicts, or dealing with resistance or other issues.
Gul Ahmed’s annual IT budget? Approximately Rs.20 million though the exact figure varies on expansion plans.
Your greatest achievement as the head of the department? Upgrading to a VoIP-enabeld infrastructure, network security infrastructure, implementing our Disaster Recovery sites and successfully implementing our ERP solution at GulAhmed.
than one hour a week with their team and only 15% spend more than 6 hours with vendors or service providers each week. In isolation, both these figures seem insignificant until you add the 83% of CIOs who said that they took part in meetings which discussed a company’s long term business strategy and the 29% that spend more than 6 hours a week with their executives. Almost 63% commented that they stay on the office premises all day long. These figures, when looked at together, seem be consistent in companies across the board.
Comments from the 5 featured CIOs also allude to a lot of the findings that these results yield. Irfan Zafar, GM Technology Innovation, Sui Southern Gas Company Limited, for example started the interview by commenting on the fact that business strategy is one of the things he does. His role at SSGC is to maintain and further develop the IT department, which is already a critical part of the company’s growth. He says, “The job involves a major technology enabled cultural and business transformation. My role extends beyond just IT - I am a business manager,” which is a statement that demonstrates the contribution the technology department has on the rest of the organization.
While we didn’t ask our respondents to comment on innovation in the workplace, simply because that is more of a subjective question than objective, but our featured CIOs did talk about innovation. Shahid Sarwar, Director IT of PIA, Pakistan’s flag carrier airline address innovation in his interview by saying that the level of competition has increased so intensely, that all businesses need to innovate through technology to stay ahead of the game. One of the challenges he faces is, “to keep pace with the rapid advancement taking place in technology tools and platforms and the second is to have them implemented across the organization with the required Business Processes Re-engineering.
It is a difficult task which requires financial
and human resources along with a management commitment to pursue implementation.” With PIA being one of the larger organizations in Pakistan, it’s no wonder they have a budget in excess of Rs.100 million to manage their technology needs on an annual basis.
Trying to assess how productive the workplace was, also proved to be interesting. We’re not surprised at the number of people who wouldn’t disclose their salary packages to us. Hopefully since we ensure the anonymity factor, more CIOs will be comfortable doing so. Recruitment is always a tough job in all companies.
IT departments seem to be struggling, like most other companies, with finding qualified people to fit the job description. The majority of companies, surprisingly enough, end up hiring people ‘with at least 2 years work experience’, only 21% hire ‘fresh graduates’ though only 5% hire experts who have no technical background.
A lot of companies seem to have the trend of bonuses and salary raises and almost half the companies say that there is a formal process to recognize achievers. We’re not really sure if the respondents in this case perhaps misunderstood the question to how they would ideally like to run their IT departments with what they have right now, and you’ll see why with the next few questions.
Linking back to the  question of the amount of innovation that is ongoing in the workplace it seems to be an assumption based on these trends that there is a lot of ‘on the job training’ taking place. Correlate that to the results we got from the question, ‘how frequently do people resign’ and ‘their reason for leaving’. A whopping 10% of employees in the IT department leave within a year of being hired, primarily to look for a better job. How much does this “better job” reason have to do with innovation is anyone’s guess, but research available online does show a link between the quality of the workplace to the rate of attrition (or productivity, for that matter).
69% of the companies reported having some kind of promotion take place in the IT department almost on an annual basis, but only 3% reported that there is no such environment and people just eventually leave the company. Could it be that there needs to be more team building in the departments for these numbers to either completely nullify or for the others to grow?

Challenges for Growth
There is no doubt an ongoing crisis. Technology brings automation, which ultimately brings business efficiency. Most companies, however, are also finding themselves cut back on IT spending – In fact, a question revealed that almost 80% of the organizations have held back on all IT spending in the past 4 months. We’re assuming this isn’t a good sign for the vendors, who usually make their orders at least one financial quarter in advance, however we should be able to present some vendor-perspective findings in the next CIO survey we release.
In speaking with Shahid Sarwar of PIA to find out how companies should be getting ready to handle the financial crisis, he says, “viewing the current financial pressures, optimize on the existing resources, delay any capital intensive projects, if possible, and increase emphasis on Data Security, Network Redundancy and fall back recovery procedures.” Ibrahim Memon, Head of IT, Greenstar Social Marketing, explains that, “The global economic crisis will restricts organizations to make further investments, including into MIS and IT, despite the fact it has become an integral part of all organizations.  My advice is to see this crisis as an opportunity – pool your efforts in optimizing the effective use of the available MIS/IT resources and businesses will benefit in the long run.”
Irfan Zafar, GM Technology In
novation, Sui Southern Gas Company Limited says something fairly simple. “Have a strategy. Look for improvement opportunities within the organization that have direct financial benefit to the bottom line. Invest in people and empower them with a strong and transparent accountability and reward mechanism. It is all about the people you have as your team and how supportive you are of each other.” Considering SSGC has reinvented itself into an extremely IT savvy organization, it would seem that Irfan is speaking from experience.
But perhaps the challenge really is to change the mindset that our organizations are stuck in. Once the culture and corporate change can be initiated and opened up to the prospect of technology innovation, then a greater impact can take place. As the SECP CIO looks back over the years and says, “    The first challenge was to change the mindset towards “real automation”. You see, in a typical sense, automation is confused with an abundance of computers and allied equipment as almost everyone is happy to have more of them without thinking of their use or what applications would run on them. When I joined SECP 5 years ago, there was no application or information system present in the organization. Computers were only given to private secretaries who were using them as typing machines or else they were being used by senior officers, who kept them well preserved.  Some middle management officers would justify some productive use of the computers for spreadsheet analysis but other than that, these machines were completely deprived.” Five years is still a relatively short time period to get a mammoth organization such as his, to change.
Looking Ahead
Pakistan has only recently achieved a certain degree of maturity in its markets. The deployment of large-scale projects have been one of the factors which have accounted for the increased level of awareness amongst the industries which make a significant contribution to the over economy. The only way to drive technology and its enabling characteristics into the mainstream, is to make sure that IT departments play a more significant role in helping organizations to conduct better business. Once the return on investment can be witnessed, technology departments automatically reap the benefits.
But in order for CIOs to really do their jobs, they must be part of the decisions. That is the only way the alignment can take place between the business and the technology. While the business maps out its growth path, the CIO will be able to assess what tools are required to make sure there is enough infrastructure, capacity and power to match that path. And this is not something that can take place overnight.
There is such a serious dearth of extracted, collated information which can indicate that our organizations, sector or economy is a reality. We encourage IT departments to work with us to better help identify issues, challenges and opportunities within specific sectors, and to help the market better understand and profile the needs of technology divisions within our companies.
The results we have collected and based this issue of CIO Pakistan on, are based on what people have told us. As for the rest of the pieces of this gigantic puzzle, we still have a long way to go.

Industry: Airline

Shahid Sarwar, Director IT,
Pakistan International Airlines
About PIA: Pakistan International Airlines Corporation (PIA) is the flag carrier of Pakistan, whose government owns 85 percent of its shares. PIA’s route network stretches to Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America. It connects 35 cities within Pakistan. Six million people flew the airline in 2000, when passenger traffic accounted for 85 percent of revenues. Engineering and charter services accounted for nine percent. PIA also conducts some contract work for aerospace manufacturers. There are approximately 19,000 employees and has a fleet size of 44. The principal divisions of PIA include Automation, Cargo Sales & Services among others.
Scope of work: To plan and implement Information Technology systems/services and solutions in all areas of the Corporation across the Domestic and International network.
Where do you see the role in Technology leading change within your sector in Pakistan? The Airline Industry has emerged as the biggest user of IT tools leaving behind all other industries.  In the present day competitive environment, use of technology is making the difference between success and failure.
Challenges for the CIO: The first challenge is to keep pace with the rapid advancement taking place in technology tools and platforms and the second is to have them implemented across the organization with the required Business Processes Re-engineering.  It is a difficult task which requires financial and human resources along with a management commitment to pursue implementation.
PIA’s annual Technology budget? The budget varies from year to year depending upon requirements but generally remains in excess of Rs.100 million.
Your greatest achievement as the head of the department? The greatest achievement is the implementation of a Reservation and Departure Control system across PIA’s domestic and international network.
Your vision for your organization? We are already a major IT establishment in the airlines of South East Asia.  We however still feel that a lot has still to be done in shape of revamping current systems, adopting to new technology platforms and assisting the airline in its various business processes.
in a bank or financial institution. Telecom and ICT companies have your next largest set of CIOs at about 14% of the total sample size. The majority, however, made up service providers who built the stronger part of the Small and Medium Enterprise segment. But call them what you will: IT heads, IT managers, General Managers, Head of MIS or Network Engineer, our consideration was if they are involved in business strategy, they fit the profile we’re looking for.
There is a strong trend of automation in the workplace. 77% of the companies report that the majority of their operations critically depend on a sound technology infrastructure. What is interesting is the could be that the number of companies that depend on technology to run their operations are also the ones with the largest IT departments,
Salary scales seem to be on the lower side but then we were focusing on a lot of SMEs. What was surprising was that the salary did not accurately reflect the number of years a lot of the IT heads had been active decision makers within the company. Neither was there too much discrepancy in the number of size of the IT department.  Take that analysis one step further and the correlation between the salary range, average size of the IT department and the budgets they have access to, and you have no consistency what so ever. Do keep in mind that the majority of these were private companies – we haven’t even started looking into the public sector companies up close.
Of course, every category of company has a dedicated IT head to manage the technology side of business, and while these findings remain consistent with what informal assessments have quoted previously, the following results help to better breakdown how the CIO spends his day. A few of the respondents wanted to know why we were so interested in this line of questioning, and our reasoning is this – If you compare the amount of time a decision-making CIO spends inside the office, to the size of his team, it makes you wonder how decentralized the operations in that department are.
Approximately 3% of the respondents spend less
For more details about the company, please visit www.piac.com.pk

Industry: NGO

Ibrahim Memon, Head of IT, Greenstar Social Marketing
About Greenstar Social Marketing: Greenstar Social Marketing Pakistan (Guarantee) Limited is a nonprofit, non-governmental organization devoted to improving quality of life among low-income people. A non-governmental organization, Greenstar has a staff strength of more than 1500 permanent and contractual employees. GSMP operates through its nationwide network of 31 fully equipped and fully functional zonal offices covering more than 100 districts of Pakistan. Scope of work: The IT department is responsible for 3 major areas: IT Infrastructure, Database Management and reporting and Development. The department is also responsible for MIS and IT training, on the organization’s own MIS system. Where do you see the role in Technology leading change within the NGO culture in Pakistan? Advancements in technology, particularly in IT, have made a significant impact on the working style of NGO sector in Pakistan.

Strengthening of IT infrastructure in NGOs is usually on the agenda of international donors for which they allocate special funds.  In my view this international support has already developed a culture of technology receptiveness in our NGOs, more than any other sector in Pakistan. Organizations like Greenstar who have a nation-wide network are in fact in a position as pioneer use of such technology in the country. Challenges for the CIO: Information Systems have become much easier to use but the optimal utility is still undermined. Users can access information at the “click of a button”, however it is difficult to convince the right budgets be allocated into the relevant infrastructure. Availability of experienced HR is also a challenge, particularly in the smaller cities.  GreenStar’s annual Technology budget? More than Rs.10 million annually.  Your greatest achievement as the head of the department? The conversion of the complete MIS system of Greenstar to an online system that has made it accessible not only from within Pakistan but from anywhere around the globe along with the successful implementation of Oracle Financials and HRIS Systems. Your vision for your organization? Being the custodian of information, I see our MIS and IT grow to a full fledged independent department.  More importantly, I see MIS reports to continue to help authentic and update information quickly, which serve as the final verdict in the success of any project or performance in the organization.
ufacturing companies, primarily industries whose head offices were away from the actual site, had separate IT heads for their plant and separate ones for their business. What we didn’t find in our random sampling, was any women in decision-making positions in the business organizations. It could have just been the luck of the draw for the companies we called, but it seems considering the conserving mindset where even the women who study Engineering or Computer Sciences, don’t make it into the workforce for very long. Perhaps one of the results of the growing economic crunch is that there might be more serious consideration given to having both members of the family contributing towards the monthly income.
Before opening the survey up to the public, one of the main concerns our research team had was that we would not be able to restrict the survey to only experienced IT professionals for a number of reasons. In our initial sampling to assess the quality and relevance of the survey, it became evident very quickly because of the high attrition in the later part of the 1990’s when a lot of the IT professionals had left the country in search for better opportunities, the number of years that the majority of IT heads had worked in any one organization, would be fairly limiting. And because this would disqualify the major part of our population, we decided to diversify the spectrum.
Also the term CIO itself was a restricting one. If we were to have restricted the general survey to only those who actually had the CIO designation, we would have had very few respondents to work with. This is a longer project for us to be able to collate information from the CIOs directly, which is a more indepth survey.
Since we were trying to locate those who actually had the designation of “CIO”, we didn’t come across too many in our random sampling, but from those that we did, these CIOs were primarily in the Financial Sector. In fact, 33% of the 100 respondents were
For more details, please visit www.greenstar.org.pk

Industry: Oil and Gas/Govt

Irfan Zafar, GM Technology Innovation, Sui Southern Gas Company Limited
About SSGC: Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC) is Pakistan’s leading integrated gas Company. The company is engaged in the business of transmission and distribution of natural gas besides construction of high pressure transmission and low pressure distribution systems. Scope of work: I am responsible for building a strong technology team and create opportunities for people in the company along with setting performance standards for them. The job involves a major technology enabled cultural and business transformation. My role extends beyond just IT - I am a business manager. Where do you see the role in Technology leading change within the public sector? “Change” in the public sector may seem a myth but we have managed to alter that mindset. Our organization is a world-class utility reference site, an example for everyone else.

Challenges for the CIO: My biggest challenge was to build and retain the team that we have developed over the past 5 years. My second biggest challenge is to find opportunities for continuous improvement within SSGC and making them happen. Every new technology-enabled transformation initiative is an opportunity for my team to do more. SSGC’s annual IT budget: Rs.100 million or less every year to expand our service network, rehabilitation of technology, and investments in new initiatives. Your greatest achievement as the head of the department? SSGC is recognized as the most technology-enabled organization in the region and we are very proud of it. My biggest achievement is the team that I have been able to build and retain. Additionally, we have had a number of successful project implementations within the organizations. Your vision for your organization? IT in SSGC is already a profit center and my vision is to further enhance our customer service and make technology as a major enabler sustaining the transformation.
We sent out a fairly generic net which spanned 100 companies across various verticals with the following objective: we wanted to be able to better identify who our CIOs were and what role they played the business environment of every company. The CIO or IT Head is the one who is responsible for making all the technology decisions in a company and once you get to know his buying behavior a little better, a lot of things will take place in the market. Vendors, for example, will be able to package their products better matching those needs, or other service providers will know how to perhaps serve the organization in a more optimum manner. As for the majority of questions, we’ll get the opportunity to learn what a CIO is all about in Pakistan’s terms.
We asked the IT Heads a series of 24 questions which allowed us to get an insight into helping profile them better. From the results, we got 71% respondents based out of Karachi, followed by 14% in Lahore, 9% in Islamabad and 6% percent in the tier two cities. While we’re certain that is a CIO in the majority of companies across the country, we’ve been trying to assess where the greatest concentration of IT heads is. If you notice on our Facebook and LinkedIn groups, there have been a few requests for us to conduct more events in cities outside of Karachi, and while we do, you can see by this sampling why we’re so Karachi focused. Simply because it is the commercial capital of Pakistan, Karachi seems to have a very healthy concentration of decision-makers. But this is something we’ll be assessing in every survey to better match the industry to the trend and the geographical proximity.
The varying designations were also of keen interest. The head of the IT or MIS department is either the CIO, more commonly referred to as the Head of IT or Department Head. In some cases where the company was smaller, the General Manager was also found to be the one making the technology decisions in the company.
For more details, please visit www.ssgc.com.pk

Reengineering Logistics

TCS is the epitome of multi-tasking. This year, it consolidates the following: celebrates 25 years, manages 5 million monthly shipments, 170 Service Centers, 2031 couriers on the road daily and makes itself Pakistan’s most technology-intensive company!
In the early 1990’s when people pronounced Psion as Puu-si-on, the IT department of TCS was already well ahead of its time. In its 25th year of operations, TCS not only leads in the market, but quite literally, owns it. Read more

Opening up WiMAX

you need sustainability in order to allow robust technology to survive the test of time. Sustainability has an added challenge of making something work for all stakeholders and keep operational costs to a minimum. Pakistan has made a very quick leap from dial-up internet to broadband and despite the low internet penetration, corporations who are in it for the long haul, don’t question the ROI.  They know that things will fall into place eventually.
For the time being, everything is making mostly commercial sense. Wateen rolled out WiMAX almost a year ago, and Mobilink has chosen to tread waters more wary, but can’t help but help wonder how users in Pakistan will react to the new bandwagon. Because of the associated costs to get set up, the trickledown effect of WiMAX connectivity might not make it down to the bottom rungs of the pyramid a social internet was intended to influence. Companies, and quite rightly so, are about making business sense, but also want to inspire change amongst their customers. How can barriers for adoption be reduced so that there can be greater impact is a balancing act every company has to deal with. Read more

The Eternal Optimist

Sajjad Syed is the Managing Director for SAP in Pakistan. In a time when one would think companies have to cut costs, Sajjad talks about how smart investment in technology and infrastructure and how it will help Pakistani companies grow in the longrun. “Companies have to invest today so they are prepared for the growth and competition that will happen when the markets begin their upward trends again.” Read more

Serving Tech Savvy: Mohammad Khalid Shah, Corporate Director IT, Avari Hotels

When you think of Pakistan you certainly don’t think much of the hospitality industry and give even lesser thought to how a hotel is run in the circumstances that it is. Having only a handful of names that include the likes of the Sheraton, Pearl Continental, Marriott and Holiday Inn, the lack of a strong tourism industry hasn’t provided hotels much reason to provide services geared towards the tourist. On the other hand with Pakistan poised as a hub for outsourcing, manufacturing and infrastructure development, the number of expos, conferences and growth in trade and business find hotels packed with foreigners and out-of-towners that frequent the large cities in search of rest, relaxation and connectivity with the rest of the world. Read more

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