Spotlight: boAT's IT Strategy, Singapore Summit and KIMSHEALTH's IoT Innovation
CIO.inc Editors Discuss IoT and CIO-CISO Collaboration Suparna Goswami (gsuparna) • June 8, 2023Four editors at ISMG's CIO.inc review this month's most important technology conversation with CIOs and tech leaders.
See Also: The State of Enterprise Mobile App Security 2023: Results Analysis
The editors - Suparna Goswami, associate editor; Shipra Malhotra, managing editor; Smruti Gandhi, director - community engagement and executive editor; and Brian Pereira, senior director - editorial, discuss:
- boAT's IT strategy that helped them grow 2X;
- Singapore Summit for CISOs and CIOs;
- How KIMSHEALTH is leveraging IoT.
Spotlight is a monthly video series where editors highlight topics that matter to the CIO community. Catch up on our previous episode, where editors discussed the pros and cons of ChatGPT and lessons on the incident response from the FAA outage.
Transcript
Suparna Goswami: Hello there! I'm Suparna Goswami, associate editor with Information Security Media Group. Welcome to yet another episode of Spotlight, where we highlight important technological developments, how the role of CIOs has evolved, and some interesting case studies on how technology is being used to improve business schools. And joining in this episode is Smruti Gandhi, director of community engagement and executive editor, Brian Pereira, who is senior director - editorial and Shipra Malhotra, who is the managing editor. Welcome again, thank you for joining, and congratulations, Brian and Smruti, for the new designations.
Smruti Gandhi: Thank you so much, Suparna.
Brian Pereira: Thanks, Suparna. Good to be here again.
Goswami: So who wants to go first this time? Brian?
Pereira: Yeah, sure. I can take that first, Suparna.
Goswami: So, Brian, you spoke to Shashwat Singh, who is a CISO at boAt on how he leveraged technology to support the company's business expansion plan. Now, the company I read grew 2x under him. So can you please tell us about his IT strategy?
Pereira: Yeah, sure. So interestingly, it was a unique IT strategy formulated on the Olympic theme - Citius, Altius, Fortius, which means stronger, faster and higher. And that helped them achieve 2x growth over two financial quarters in 2021, and 2022. But at the core of it, they also deployed a data warehousing solution and customer engagement solution and an enterprise grade ERP. But first, let me talk about the unique IT strategy, what I think was the real motivator that helped them achieve this growth. So, Shashwat Singh, the CIO of boAt, boAt is a lifestyle audio accessories brand in India, you will see a lot of people using boAt headphones on the street, it's a very popular brand, because it's very valuable in terms of the pricing and the quality of the products are also good. So to explain the strategy a bit further, stronger means they needed a very stable technology at the backend to enable their core processes. Faster means they needed to respond faster to their customers, because it's very crucial in a fast-moving consumer electronics industry. And higher means they were aspiring for higher top line and bottom line. Now, after deploying, they had certain challenges that they were facing in terms of their inventory systems and their accounting systems were completely different and when not integrated. So they didn't have visibility into the two and they had to do a manual reconciliation. It was very labor intensive, it took about like six weeks. But after deploying the solution, it took just about 10 days, and now the employees are free to look at data analytics trends and other kinds of innovation. So I think that by introducing these three solutions, data warehouse into an ERP solution and a customer engagement solution, it helped and it motivated the employees to be more productive. So that is what my case study was all about.
Goswami: Fantastic, Brian, it was lovely reading that. And can you also tell us about what solutions they've essentially used to achieve the business goals?
Pereira: Absolutely. So as I said, for the ERP they were using SAP S/4HANA. For the data lake, they were using a tool called Byte Prophecy, which is a proprietary tool from Accenture. And they also had a customer engagement tool, which I am not able to get to recall the name. So those were the three solutions that did it, Suparna.
Goswami: Great, Brian. Thank you. I recommend everyone to go to the CIO.inc website and read the story. Fantastic story on how technology can be used to leverage the business goals or to achieve the business goals. Smruti, I'll go to you now. So ISMG essentially plans to host a cybersecurity as well as an IT summit in Singapore this time. It will be after long time that ISMG will be hosting an in-person summit there in Singapore. You are part of the team who is driving the agenda, speaking to the speakers, both CIOs as well as the CISOs. What would you like to share more on the summit? What are some of the topics that you're exploring and the kind of CISOs or CIOs you are looking to target?
Gandhi: So before I go into the Singapore Summit, and it's a two-day summit, I'll just tell you in brief. One day, we're focusing on cybersecurity, second day on technology. Just to let all the viewers know that , ISMG has launched the brand Cio.inc, just a few months back, about eight months back and under this, this will be the first summit which they will be organizing for the technology community. The whole idea when we thought about having a single day on security and a single day on technology was that there have been myths around the fact that the CISO, or the head of security and the CIO are poles apart. The idea here is to establish a correlation between the IT and the security functions, and the importance of cybersecurity for an organization's digital transformation journey, and basically achieving the business goals. So the two-day ISMG Singapore Summit will be the first one for APAC's technology community specifically. It will bring together digital experts, innovators, thought leaders, basically where we discuss digital resilience, security, growth and business transformation. And as I said earlier, this is going to facilitate a crossover of the cybersecurity and the enterprise IT basically in order to provide a platform for CXOs, IT and the security professionals to explore the link, the strengths, share insights, and to learn about the best practices from the threats. So what we're doing is we're going to have it two days, as I mentioned, where we have about 20+ sessions, 40+ thought leaders and about four to five roundtables. We already have closed the advisory for this by Mr. Lim Thian Chin, who is the senior director of the governance group at Govtech. Singapore. He is the conference chair, along with Miao Song, who is the CIO at GLP. So the whole objective was we're having a common advisory board, but a mix of the IT and the security professionals because they're not poles apart. So we've closed their advisory. And these are the conference chairs. We also have Kunal Sehgal, who's virtual CISO of Security Decoded, and Rama Sridhar, who's the EVP and the strategic customer solutions from Mastercard, who are the coaches, apart from the other advisory members - a mix of the IT and the CISO professionals. Along with that, what we've done is we've formulated the agenda where we start with the keynote talks about the technology and the risk for enterprises in the new era, on day one. On the second day, where we're talking about business transformation, the keynote moves to a data-driven enterprises. How do you maintain agility, speed and cyber resilience? We also talk about business transformation, how can CIOs harness AI, data, analytics, and, the big topic, which is being discussed everywhere on social media is still generative AI, so not just ChatGPT, but generative AI. So, we will be talking about that. Apart from that, we will also be talking about the API risk, cloud, which is important for both the technology and the security community. How do you want to modernize your defenses in cybersecurity using the best technology? How do a CIO and CISO collaborate to defend? So these are the kinds of topics where are we talking about collaboration on both of the days. So we are not saying that the first day only the CISOs can attend or the second day only the IT community can attend. And that's why I said, we are trying to have topics for both. There'll be collaborating on topics and ensuring that both of them, and telling the community that CIOs and CISOs are working hand-to-hand and they're not too different hands who work poles apart. So with this, we have formulated the agenda.
Goswami: Absolutely. That's fantastic. Because it's very rare that there is a summit which is meant for both CIOs as well as CISOs. But Brian, Shipra, I would love to hear from you also, because since you interact with CIOs so often, do you still see them looking at CISOs as a separate team, or are more and more organizations realizing the fact that both these top members need to work together to ensure that business goals as well as security go hand-in-hand?
Shipra Malhotra: I think most organizations today have realized that both the CIO and the CISO need to work together as a team. Because any technology initiatives, new technology or digital initiative, that the CIO is undertaking or planning to undertake, they have to make sure that the security foundation is laid right. And a lot of technology decisions now are one of the determining factors of the technology decisions is whether they fulfill all the requirements of security and data privacy. So there is no other way but to bring the CISO in on the plan right at the very onset. And I think both the CIO and the CISO have realized that they are not on the opposite sides. And in fact, they have to work as a team for the common business objective.
Pereira: All of the above, I completely agree with Shipra, and just to add to that, from the conversations that I'm having with the analysts and CIOs, both the CISO and the CIO are now business enablers. Today, they talk about business enablement first, and then about technology. So definitely, there are more collaborations and more synergies between the CIO and the CISO. Secondly, security has become a top boardroom agenda. It's a discussion in almost every boardroom meeting that centers around technology enablement. So definitely, the CISO and the CIO have ascended, and their roles are become more strategic. And they even talk about new CIO archetypes, and new CISO archetypes. This is what Gartner has been talking about. And you'll also find stories about this on CIO.inc.
Gandhi: I just wanted to ask you, to sum it up the whole thing, the question that you asked Shipra and Brian, I covered a bit, basically the whole, all three of us and even you speak to a lot of CISOs and the CIOs to sum it up, in fact, if a business has to be future ready, two things have to be reimagined technology and security, both together. And that's why the whole thing of having the CIO and CISO committee together makes it very important.
Goswami: Absolutely. Well-said, Smruti, you have summed it up well. Shipra, I'll move to you now. I know you have been conducting a lot of interviews with CISOs. But you're also working on some interesting stories for the CIO.inc websites. Please tell us a bit about the stories that we can expect this month.
Malhotra: Yes, this is a very interesting use case that I came across at one of the leading hospitals in India, which is KIMSHEALTH. The CIO there has worked on an initiative around patient safety, which is tracking the surgical sponges. Just to give you a background - surgical sponges that are retained inside the patient's bodies, following surgery, is a major medical concern according to WHO and a lot of global studies. In fact, global statistics revealed that a surgical sponge which is left inside a patient is one out of 100 surgeries. So what happened was that at KIMSHEALTH, they saw some external cases from other hospitals, who came with the issue of having the surgical sponges left inside the body and they underwent surgery at KIMSHEALTH to remove it. So that was a trigger point for the hospital to find a solution for this particular problem. So what did they do was they implemented an IoT-led solution to track the surgical sponges automatically. Now, the existing process was to account for the surgical sponges through manual counting, which is prone to human error. And it also led to longer surgical operations run through many packs of surgical sponges, which exponentially increases the risk. And in a lot of cases, there are hundreds of surgical sponges, especially large operations and very complex operations, there can be hundreds of surgical sponges being used. And therefore, the probability of these sponges left inside the body increase. So they were completely dependent on the humans, the OT staff's diligence and experience, which definitely led to a lot of errors. So what they did was they implemented a bar coding for unique identification of surgical sponges and the packs before sterilization. There was scanning of both the packs and individual sponges pre-surgery into the software and a scan out of the sponges post-surgery before closing the patient. So that means that they had an exact idea of how many sponges were used inside the patient's body and how many sponges were taken out so that there was no scope for error, and there was accurate tracking of every sponge that was entering and exiting the OT. So this helped in improving the safety of every patient that came into the OT. And it completely eliminated human errors besides reducing time because it allows the surgeons to close more quickly as they're not waiting on a manual count and recount. And they have also looked at easy implementation in a SaaS model which can be easily rolled out and replicated to multiple OTs and the smaller centers. So I found this to be very fascinating use case where a simple IoT solution software, a SaaS-based solution that helps in just tracking something as simple as a surgical sponge, but makes a huge impact on patient safety.
Goswami: What a story, Shipra. I look forward to reading it as in when it is out. But you spoke about IoT, you spoke about leveraging SaaS solutions. So I'm assuming there would be some security challenges for use case like this. So what are some of the security challenges you got to know on this?
Malhotra: So besides the regular security challenges, what makes the challenges unique in case of IoT solutions, especially in the healthcare industry is that IoT by nature, the devices are expected to consume very low power because they need to run for a long time. And they have very small form factor. So for instance, if you take the example of a pacemaker in a patient, now that pacemaker needs to run for a long time, and it's not something that you can take out and replace overnight or in a few days, and it needs to run for like 15 to 20 years. And these sensors, they have to sense the pressure, the temperature, the movement, and these devices ... they need to do a lot of processing. So if you put encryption or data security measures on the device itself, then it will consume more power and data, which kind of takes away the benefit of the solution. So that is a unique challenge. So to make sure that data privacy measures are employed, not on the device itself, but at the active points where the data comes out of these devices, and then travels and goes into the IT systems where it is stored and it is consumed, and therefore within the overall IoT architecture and landscape. , the regular security measures then come into play.
Goswami: Well, sure. Thank you, Shapira, thank you for sharing that information. I look forward to reading that story of yours or interview of yours. So my final question to all of you, in which area would you like, ChatGPT to excel? Essentially, what is the use case that you'd like to drive for ChatGPT, since there's so much talks around ChatGPT. So, anything in your wishlist? Brian?
Pereira: Yeah, I've been researching this for some time. And I've been observing, Suparna, that the output for ChatGPT has been largely text-based or graphical-based, there'll be a lot of use cases on that. But what I would like to see is something more in the audio realm. Now the use case here would be real-time language translation. How about that? Like, I'm speaking in English, and you're hearing it in Hindi, for example. And this would be possible by natural language processing technologies, which is built into your mouthpiece. And I think that would be an interesting use case, especially for travelers from the west who are coming to oriental or Arabic countries, they could speak in English, and then it would do a real-time translation in that country's language, and vice versa, even travelers from the side of the world going to the west. Now it also has a lot of use in the business world where English is largely used for communication. And as a lot of people struggle with English. So imagine the application year someone could speak in their native language to a businessman in another corner of the world, say a Japanese businessman, and he would understand it, he would hear it in his own language. So that's something I would like. It's called speech-to-speech. We have seen speech-to-text applications. We have seen text-to-speech applications. There are applications like VoiceWave, and also there are a lot of audio readers like Speechify but I haven't seen something like speech-to-speech language translation. That's a use case I'd like to see, Suparna.
Goswami: Fantastic, Brian. Smruti?
Gandhi: I want ChatGPT to help become an AI mechanic assistant, and I'm coming from a personal thing which has happened when I was looking for some mechanic to help me out with a huge car repair and I was also talking last week to a CIO of an automobile company in the north. And that's where this idea ... we were just generally talking about an idea and I said we should have an AI mechanic assistant who can help us basically. You have your normal chatbots who help you with your usual queries and offer expert advice, etc. But somebody who can help you assist with repairs, provide you advice on if you had an accident on the spot? How do you help, rather than me calling up the customer care, waiting for two hours and somebody helping me out? Or I doing a YouTube video to figure out how do I fix this.
Goswami: Fantastic ideas there. Shipra?
Malhotra: I think taking forward from what Smruti said, I think that use case can be applied in a lot of areas, in a hospital environment, in the education environment, and, of course, a lot of other environments. So specifically, what I was looking for was what Brian was also mentioned about something in the audio space? From a social impact perspective, maybe mental health support, where ChatGPT can provide support for mental health by engaging in conversations, offering empathy, suggesting coping mechanisms and connecting individuals with the appropriate resources. Now, I think this is still a far way off. Because when we talk of empathy and feelings and emotions, when it comes to AI, there's a lot of apprehensions whether it can surpass human beings, because right now, one of the most critical factors that separates humans from AI is emotions and empathy. So I don't know if that is something that ChatGPT masters and where we will be left with. But definitely this will be an area that can make a lot of impact on individuals and society in general.
Goswami: Absolutely, in fact, in a recent anti-fraud summit that I attended, and one of the sessions that I moderated was on whistleblowing, and the panelists were exploring whether if we have AI taking down the complaint, will they feel more secure, since they're speaking to someone who is not associated with the company and who will not be judgmental about it. But again, the same argument was whether AI will have that empathy. And so let's see, the world is out there, and so many great ideas out there. Thank you, Shipra; thank you, Smruti; and thank you, Brian, for sharing great ideas, as well as giving us a gist of what you're working on and what to expect from ISMG as well as CIO.inc. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, this is Suparna Goswami from ISMG.