Chief Information Officer (CIO) Strategy with Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani (CXOTalk)

#CIO #ChiefInformationOfficer #Commvault
The Chief Information Officer (CIO) role offers unprecedented opportunities for IT leaders who understand how information technology can help their organizations' innovation agendas. To gain an insider's perspective, we speak with Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO of data management supplier Commvault., who himself is a former CIO.

Among the important topics that Sanjay covers are:
-- How does data increase business agility?
-- Digital transformation and cloud computing strategy
-- Business continuity and recovery strategies: the modern strategic advantage
-- How cloud enables business resiliency
-- Cloud adoption and migration strategy
-- Power of the Chief Information Officer role
-- Understanding CIO priorities
-- Advice on the transformational CIO role and the CIO agenda

Sanjay Mirchandani is a customer-driven CEO determined to deliver Commvault solutions that impact the business and lives of our customers. Sanjay joined Commvault from the software maker Puppet, where he served as CEO for more than two years. Prior to that, he spent two decades in CIO and senior leadership roles at Microsoft, VMware, and EMC Corp.

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From the conversation: Advice on the transformational CIO role and the CIO agenda

Michael Krigsman: What advice do you have for CIOs who are listening to this and saying, "Yeah, I want to do this too, but there are roadblocks, there are obstacles, and I'm not sure how to do it"? What advice do you have for CIOs?

Sanjay Mirchandani: One, insert yourself into a business conversation or many business conversations, whether you're comfortable with it or not, because that's the only way you will understand the impact.

If your business allows you to own a line of business of some kind, embrace that. It's more work, it's a bigger challenge, but then you become a customer of your own services from IT and you know how good, how bad, what improvement areas, where you excel, where you don't. You get to see it first-hand. It's a great litmus test for how things are going and what it takes to run a business with IT as a provider.

Those two perspectives really, really help widen the experience base for potentially being a CEO.

Michael Krigsman: As a business leader, what do you look or when you're hiring a CIO?

Sanjay Mirchandani: Customer centricity. I want my CIOs to have the best customer perspective. Sit in the seat of the customer, your internal customer, your external customer – it doesn't matter. Gauge how you build things, how you deliver things, the quality, from that lens.

Don't look at it as a one-way service delivery capability. You will fail.

Michael Krigsman: It's interesting that you don't look first at their technical capabilities, technical skills, and shops.

Sanjay Mirchandani: Honestly, Michael, I think the technology element of that CIO job is rapidly decreasing. I am not saying technology is easy, but the contention around technology choices is reduced, broadly.

Yes, of course, you need to be technically astute and be able to make right decisions and drive direction. The conversation that CIOs have are far more business valuable, if you would, than technology-oriented. I think that that's going to be the differentiator between good CIOs and great CIOs when we come out of this pandemic; those that have helped their businesses accelerate versus those that have kept the lights on.

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Another gem of a show. Thanks CXOTALK for bringing these valuable perspectives to us.