Catch Minhaj Zia, Managing Director – India & SAARC at Polycom in a conversation with Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst & Group CEO,Greyhound Research on Greyhound Research’s knowledge sharing series ONTrigger.
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Sanchit Vir Gogia: Good morning, Good afternoon & Good evening. Thank you for taking the time out to watch yet another video of our knowledge sharing series, Greyhound Research ONTrigger. If you’d like to learn more about it, please visit www.greyhoundresearch.com to know why we are doing this knowledge sharing series.
Today, we have the good fortune of talking to Minhaj Zia, Managing Director – India & SAARC, Polycom. Minhaj, welcome to the show.
Minhaj Zia: Thank you for having me on the show. I’m really excited to share my views on Polycom here.
SVG: Recently, I was talking to a CIO, he is doing a massive infrastructure re jig, but his challenge is that his EUC strategy, mobility strategy, and now collaboration strategy, all running in silos. His TCO is not something he can explain to his CFO. Is that something you observe in the market as well?
MZ: I have seen this happening over and over again in so many organizations. I have a philosophy for this as such. Most of this if you look at implementations or deployments have happened on immediate need basis that each one of them. When a senior person takes over, business leader comes and says I want this implemented here and now. That, then immediately becomes a priority of a CIO or his organization to get that job finished. Instant gratification is a reality. There is lot of pressure on the IT to really not do a thorough analysis of user requirement, holistically looking at from an architecture perspective, but get those small-small projects implemented to meet the business needs for that time. Once you get that done under pressure, then you start thinking about how this will integrate with that, which I have already done or something else which is coming now. That becomes a big-big challenge for an IT organization. 
SVG: What do you suggest organization should do? Should they start by doing fleet analysis? Analysis of everything. What is that right starting point for an organization? The large Companies like Maruti, Hero Honda. They already have implemented and invested crores and crores of rupees. How do you think such organizations should be re-looking at collaboration in the gamut of the broader mobility scenario?
MZ: I think a couple of things that they can do. One is, when there is really no pressure, I would say the time when they have really, they can do some kind of thinking work. Put together overall long term strategy of at least three years, as to what do they would want in their organization. And to do that they have to study the user requirements as such. What is their business that they know? With that business, what kinds of user needs are emerging? So that they would like to improve X portion of that particular business process or Y potion of another process. So which are the low hanging fruits in that organization in terms of improvements. So identifying those gaps or challenges which a user faces in doing his work is the first step in that, and most of the time, that is not done really by organization. Many IT organizations have not started implementing or having business analytics team as well. Analysis of business process or process engineering as they call it, so that there is a kind of in-between medium that can interact with business side, understanding the business needs and business requirements. On other side can talk to enterprise architects and give them ideas of how they want it to be done.
SVG: Have a centre of excellence that makes business IT real.
MZ: That’s correct.