Global CIO: IBM Exec Says India Will 'Lead Second Wave Of IT Adoption'Global CIO: IBM Exec Says India Will 'Lead Second Wave Of IT Adoption'

Without question, IBM is leaning heavily into that growth opportunity presented by India and its aggressive attitudes toward IT investments that the IBM survey revealed. With more than 70,000 employees already in India, the company is ramping up its support network across India to handle increased growth from its business partners and their customers. From a deccanherald.com article:

So, three big questions to answer here:

1) Are Indian companies "more forward-looking than their counterparts in the West and round the world?" In my opinion, yes, some and perhaps many of them surely are. Anyone who views this as heresy should compare this year's list of the Fortune 500 companies against the parallel list from 20 years ago—heck, even 10 years ago—and then think a bit about creative disruption and what it means in a borderless economy. While we may not all need to like the current state of things, we would be fools to pretend that simply because reality does not please us, we can ignore it. India's people, its education system, its entrepreneurial spirit, and its competitive drive have made their marks in every field of global business and that trend is only going to intensify. If you accept that rather evident statement, then how in the world could we not also believe that such a country—one into which as noted above IBM and many other visionary companies are pouring massive investments—does not have its share of companies and executives with more vision and insight than many American companies?

2) Does the fact that companies outside of India were vastly more likely (by a factor of 2.5) to slash IT budgets during the recession than companies inside India prove that statement? For many companies, yes, it does. And I place the blame for this one squarely on two sets of shoulders: first, on CEOs who have been either too lazy or too short-sighted to dig in and do the hard work of understanding how IT has helped transform organizations in the past decade and have therefore never understood its real value and potential; and second, on CIOs who have failed to make the leap from being a high-income IT manager focused on internal issues and yesterday's metrics as colleagues around the organization began wondering why do we pay so much for IT and get so little? I recall speaking in January with the highly respected CIO of a U.S. company who's extremely well connected with peers in this and other countries, and at one point I asked him how he or other CIOs he knows are attempting to keep innovation alive during those dark days when budget-cutting gave way to budget-gutting. And he said, "I have no idea—I don't know of a single CIO who's spending any money on anything new. Not one."

3) Does the eager appetite among Indian companies for not just playing with but deploying new technologies mandate that they will lead the next wave of IT innovation and adoption, and thereby claim the lion's share of the business value to which such investments can lead? Well it might not mandate such an outcome, but those Indian companies sure as heck will have a long running start if companies in the U.S. and elsewhere continue to take such risk-averse approaches toward technologies and solutions that aren't still in the labs but have in fact been fairly widely deployed in real-time production environments. This reaches back to my previous answer and my belief that blame should be split across the CEO and the CIO: the CEO rants and raves about not spending so much of the IT budget on internal operations, but then fails to vigorously support new initiatives from the CIO that threaten the established order and processes. Meanwhile, a lot of CIOs seem reluctant to step out of their comfort zones and take the uncomfortable and, yes, often risky approach of committing to sweeping changes without which the organization will continue to dawdle along, incrementally moving a couple of nickels from over here to over there, blowing smoke in executive committee meetings by yapping about all the cool new things being put through proofs of concept, and all the while reinforcing the status quo. It shouldn't surprise us to see the same old problems bedeviling us when we have only tried the same old sorry solutions.

I suspect we might be hearing in days to come that Chana's words were taken out of context, or that IBM's research findings were misinterpreted, or that every country's businesses and approaches and vision is exactly the same, and nobody's strategy is better than anybody else's, and so on and so on until we want to pound nails into our skulls rather than hear such mush.

I hope IBM and Chana stick with their findings and their opinions. I hope Indian companies continue to be bullish on IT and its potential, and I hope they continue to invest in it aggressively and deploy new stuff enthusiastically. Because competition makes everyone better, and every once in a while it's not such a bad thing to have someone smack us across the face with a 2x4 to ensure we've got our eyes open, our attention focused on the right things, and our sense of risk and reward properly calibrated.

I suspect that 20 years ago—which is not all that long a gap—the companies that held spots #1, #2, and #7 on the list from 20 years ago">1989 Fortune 500 list thought nobody in their industry was as "forward-looking" as they were, and that no competitor was hungrier or more aggressive at trying out and using new technologies and processes. And maybe their current fortunes today—just 20 years later—will convince us that Surjit Chana's comments are ones we should welcome rather than dismiss:

#1: General Motors

#2 Ford Motor

#7 Chrysler