The New Mandate for IT: Value, Velocity, and Vigilance

 

 

Dr. Subroto Kumar Panda
CIO & CISO - Anand and Anand

 

The role of IT is undergoing a profound transformation. Success is no longer measured solely by uptime, compliance scores, or deployment speed, but by the tangible business value technology delivers. At Anand and Anand, technology initiatives are increasingly aligned with growth, operational efficiency, risk resilience, and responsible AI adoption, creating a framework where innovation and governance advance together.

 

Creating Value Through Collaborative Governance
Earlier IT used to showcase its measurable outcomes by the least amount of downtime and least no of non-compliance after the annual audit. But now it has changed into systematic investment outcome and value driven framework structurally aligned with business imperatives. All IT initiatives now should map directly to revenue growth, operational efficiency and risk resiliency.

We now measure the effective efficiency growth with all the possible automation through proper structured AI implementations rather than decreasing software deployment time cycle. Increasing customer engagement personalization and implementing net promoter score for internal tools. Looking aggressively and recalibrating the cloud usage on a daily basis so that the financial impact is reduced considerably. Now we are bringing in cohorts from all the business process and making them a part of the IT steering committee. It is now a shared project charter rather than an IT project.

This helps for ‘fail-fast, recover faster’ ideology in action. Rigid governance is being replaced by continuous monthly governance reviews, AI augmented performance monitoring. By utilising real-time executive dashboard, leadership gains instant visibility to project health and financial burn rates.

 

Developing AI Expertise in a Regulated Environment
Being in an extremely regulated industry, use of AI has to be ethical, clear and consciously implemented. It is just like trying to build a baby into a humanoid. Even if so much advancement has happened in AI, yet while implementing we have to be extremely conscious of various facts and its implications while being used in legal parlance.

For the broader business workforce, the focus is on universal AI literacy and advanced prompt engineering to optimize daily administrative, reporting, and analytical tasks. For our technical and IT teams, we are fast-tracking specialized training in data engineering, model fine-tuning, and MLOps, ensuring we possess the in-house expertise to manage complex AI pipelines securely. We provide employees with enterprise-grade, isolated AI sandboxes.

This allows teams to safely build prototypes, automate repetitive workflows, and test data-driven hypotheses without the risk of leaking proprietary source code, intellectual property, or enterprise data to public models.