Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of It
    CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of It
    CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of It
    Ebook458 pages5 hours

    CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of It

    By Pearl Zhu

    4.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The purpose of CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT is to provide guidelines for building a framework to run a highly effective, highly innovative and highly mature digital IT organization. Also, it provides the principles to reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence.

    -Rebrand digital CIOs with multiple personas
    -Reinvent IT to unleash its full digital potential
    -Reenergize changes as an ongoing digital capability
    -Refine talent management to bridge IT skills gap
    -Remaster multidimensional IT to create multi-level business value
    -Renovate strategy execution continuum to improve effectiveness
    -Reimagine IT as an innovation engine to catalyze business growth
    -Reshape IT via leveraging “3P”s: Principle, Portfolio, Performance
    -Retool IT agility to adapt to changes
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMar 31, 2016
    ISBN9781483565859
    CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of It

    Read more from Pearl Zhu

    Related to CIO Master

    Related ebooks

    Technology & Engineering For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Making The Most Of The Cloud

      Jul 8, 2021

      Making The Most Of The Cloud
      6 min read

    • Article

      Leadership Forum: Making Digital Transformation A Reality

      Jan 1, 2018

      Glenda Crisp Senior Vice President and Chief Data Officer, TD Bank Group + Connie Bonello Associate Partner, Financial Services, IBM Canada IN MOST OF TODAY’S ORGANIZATIONS, data underpins every transaction, operation and interaction. And yet, the ab

      8 min read

    • Article

      Cloudy With No Chance Of Erp

      Nov 11, 2019

      ERP (enterprise resource planning) was born around the time the first ‘[Something] for Dummies’ book was published*. It’s typically inflexible, uncompromising software designed for large businesses, like banks, large corporations, manufacturing and s

      2 min read

    • Article

      IBM Boss: Big Companies Were Not Prepared For The Pandemic

      Sep 4, 2020

      Sreeram Visvanathan is the new chief executive of IBM UK and Ireland. The 53 year-old is from Bangalore in India and previously led IBM’s global Public Sector team. In the middle of London Tech Week, he talked to the Evening Standard about the future

      4 min read

    • Article

      Stay Ahead in Turbulent Times

      Aug 2, 2019

      How do you stay ahead of your competition is a question we strive to answer in each edition of The European Business Review. In today’s fast-changing and hyper-competitive digital age, this question becomes more important than ever before. With the e

      2 min read

    • Article

      Will Develop The Distributed Delivery Model

      Jan 21, 2021

      It was the Great Recession of 2007. The very survival of Ford Motor Company’s legacy was at stake. Bill Ford Jr., the Executive Chairman, approached family members (who held close to 40 per cent shares) to allow him to pledge their blue Ford oval as

      5 min read

    • Article

      Arnab PANDEY

      Apr 1, 2021

      Arnab PANDEY
      11 min read

    • Article

      5 KEYS TO RESOLVING Cross-Functional Rivalries IN YOUR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

      Sep 30, 2020

      The challenge is as old as business itself: How do you get people in different parts of an organization to work together to solve common problems? Yes, COVID-19 has hastened a great coming together – across functions, disciplines, industries, geograp

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Leadership Brief

      Jan 22, 2022

      The Leadership Brief
      1 min read

    • Article

      Customer-centric From Its Core

      Sep 16, 2018

      What’s been the biggest change you have seen in your career? I think one of the biggest things I am seeing recently is data becoming more and more important in how businesses operate and how they deliver customer experiences. Even a few years ago whe

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Future Is Here

      Aug 9, 2019

      Technology is taking away many low-skilled jobs. But it is also creating opportunities in the form of new-age roles. Research shows 65 per cent of the jobs that today's school students will take up may not exist in the future. Due to technological ch

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Leadership Brief

      Jan 21, 2022

      The Leadership Brief
      1 min read

    • Article

      Creating, Innovating And Managing By Values

      Dec 3, 2019

      Being relevant and being able to generate real value to the business is even more important than being cutting-edge,” said Michał Sztanga, Managing Director of Future Processing. In line with this thought, we present to you the year-end issue of The

      1 min read

    • Article

      Snackable Learning Modules Coming

      Jan 23, 2020

      MD & CEO, Diageo India When I started working in the early 1980s, offices clattered with typewriters and papers were physically moved from one table to another. It was the pre-digital era. Desktops with floppy drives were just arriving. In fact, mill

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for CIO Master

    4.5/5

    2 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      CIO Master - Pearl Zhu

      Author

      Introduction

      Digital CIOs Rise for Change!

      The purpose of CIO Master - Unleash the Digital Potential of IT is to provide guidelines for building a framework to run a highly effective, highly innovative and highly mature digital IT organization. Also, it provides the principles to reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence.

      •Rebrand digital CIOs with multiple personas

      •Reinvent IT to unleash its full digital potential

      •Reenergize change as an ongoing digital capability

      •Refine talent management to bridge IT skills gap

      •Remaster multidimensional IT to create multi-level business value

      •Renovate strategy execution continuum to improve effectiveness

      •Reimagine IT as an innovation engine to catalyze business growth

      •Reshape IT via leveraging 3Ps: Principle, Portfolio, Performance

      •Retool IT agility to adapt to changes

      Figure 1: CIO Leadership to Bridge Gaps

      Part I: The Changing Role of Digital CIO: The prominence of the CIO role has risen greatly as IT has become an increasingly important success factor of the digital organization. The CIO position has a shorter history, but a more dynamic role to play due to the continuous changes of information and technology. Compare to the other executive positions, the CIO role continues to be shaken up, refined, reinvented and reenergized. The magic I of the CIO title sparks many imaginations and modern CIOs need to wear different hats and play multiple roles: to make positive influences as a Chief Influence Officer; to deliver the right information and insight as a Chief Information Officer; to orchestrate seamless integrations as a Chief Integration Officer; to convey the vision, bridge the gap and enforce the multi-layer, multi-cultural, and multi-dimensional communication as a Chief Interpretation Officer; to practice intrapreneur-executive leadership for exploring new business opportunities as a Chief Intrapreneur Officer; to scrutinize business cases, master business languages as a Chief Investment Officer. A modern CIO must also be a digital visionary, business strategist, customer champion, governance advocate, talent master, and change agent, etc., to ultimately grow into a CIO master. In the first part of CIO Master, we brainstorm CIO leadership from the following perspectives:

      Chapter 1 Twelve Digital CIO Personas: Due to the changing nature of digital business, the omnipresence of technology and the abundance of information, the IT leadership role continues to be reimagined, refined, refreshed, and reinvented. Too often the perception is that the CIO is a glorified geek. The reality is that the CIO is one of the most important executive roles in the organization, the person in that role must be business savvy and not only understand the vision of the company but also be able to formulate it. This is the sophisticated leadership role with multiple personas.

      Chapter 2 CIO as Digital Visionary: Due to the changing nature and continuous disruption of information and technology in business nowadays, the CIO seem to be always at hot seat, the saying about the demise of the internal IT has been around for years, the fact is that because of the pervasiveness of technology within the enterprise and radical digital transformation facing in the majority of organizations today, there is now a greater need for CIOs to understand business drivers and apply digital technologies to speed up IT and build business competitive capabilities. So CIOs must go digital, like a Pro!

      Chapter 3 CIO as Change Agent: Change is one of the most popular words in the 21st century. Why change is so tough and what really keeps C-suite executives from embracing organizational transformation is FEAR: fear of letting go of heroic leadership, fear of losing control, fear of navigating through uncharted territory, fear of chaos. But change is inevitable, due to the changing nature of technology, CIOs shouldn’t get pushed for the change, they are actually in a better position to play such a role as change agent in leading organizations’ change and digital transformation.

      Chapter 4 CIO as Talent Master: People are always the most invaluable asset in businesses. Hiring the right person for the right position at the right time, is the mantra of many forward-thinking organizations. The question is how would you define the right people? How do you define wrong, average, mediocre, good, great or extraordinary person? Or put simply, for what should they be right?

      Part II: Unleash the Digital Potential of IT: The business paradigm is shifting from the industrial age to a new digital era. Digital organizations are hyperconnected and interdependent, and they have to continue to adapt to the digital new normal with VUCA characteristics -Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. IT has been treated as a cost center and technology controller for years, because many IT organizations are seen as a help desk and a maintenance center to keep the lights on, but some simply cannot give a fair accounting of where the money is going in terms of business capabilities or, more importantly, directly identifying business value. Information is now the lifeblood and technology is the innovation catalyzer, to outsmart and outpace digital disruptors, IT plays a pivotal role in digital transformation with many expectations from business partners: The business needs IT to deliver services that drive productivity and effectiveness; the business wants fit-for-purpose IT solutions that enable them to be efficient in delivering products and services to their market at the right cost to deliver profits to the shareholders. Every business needs IT to provide better information as a nervous system for making effective decisions and improving profitability. And every business is also looking for IT to explore innovative practices for complexity management, data transformation, quality improvement and agile construction etc. Now with the acceleration of digital speed, IT organizations are at a crossroad, where it will either reinvent its tarnished image or become irrelevant in the digital age. So the challenge facing IT leaders is on how to re-imagine IT and unleash its full digital potential. In the second part of CIO Master, we refine digital IT from the following perspectives:

      Chapter 5 Thirteen Digital Flavored IT: All forward-looking enterprises claim they are at information business. Thus, enterprises across sectors work on enhancements and modernizing their platforms, in order to optimize customer experiences, build business capabilities, and improve organizational efficiency, effectiveness, and agility. IT should play a critical role in the radical digital transformation. As more often than not, technology is a major digital disruptor today, the purpose of digital transformation is to embed digital technology into key business processes, to optimize business capabilities and competencies to compete for the future. IT is business, digital transformation is neither an IT project nor an operational change, it’s a strategic initiative for business leapfrogging. From IT management perspective, we introduce 13 digital-flavored IT to accelerate digital transformation in this chapter.

      Chapter 6 Digital Strategy-Execution Continuum: The biggest challenge now is the increasing rate of change, and this isn’t going to change! Preparing a strategic plan is important because it points the organization in a direction where it can maximize its value position and reap as many benefits as possible. This direction must allow for economic, market or customer change and let the business adapt swiftly. Alternatives and adaptation are the keywords to survival. To put another way, the value of IT is providing the right information on demand to make or arrive at a strategic business decision. The information provided should be accurate, precise and relevant so that decision-making process is more successful. The objective of the IT strategy is not just to be aligned with business strategy, but it is an integral part of business strategy, and digital strategy execution is not linear steps, but an iterative continuum.

      Chapter 7 IT Innovation Management: Digital is the age of innovation, and the importance of creativity for organizations is well-known. Rather than being disrupted, innovation needs to be well embedded into business culture and process mechanism in order to run IT as an innovation engine of the organization. Innovation is not just about technology, innovation is not always about using the latest gadget, it’s about people, culture, partnership, manners, etc. Isn’t that what innovation is all about? Do it better, differentiate yourself from your competition, run, grow and transform the business. So it’s necessary to educate the IT team on the special requirements of the business and encourage them to engage with business counterparts in a value-oriented manner.

      Chapter 8 Three Ps in Running Digital IT: To reimagine IT potential, reinvent IT management and maximize IT value, it’s important to set guiding principles for practicing the multitude of IT management. Leverage three Ps - Principle, Portfolio, and Performance to run a high mature IT organization. Develop and nurture a high-performing IT team, strive to be a leaner and more business-focused. From IT Performance perspective, do not just measure the cost of IT but on the return that it provides. IIT needs to develop a systematic measure approach to assessing its multi-dimensional value beyond just monetary benefit, it is important for management to calculating IT value-added contribution, rather than just pushing the technology out, as IT has to rebrand itself as a value creator and strategic business partner.

      Chapter 9 IT Agility: Agility is not only the ability to create change, but also the capability to adapt to changes. Within an IT, organizational agility should be defined as the speed in which the organization can enable the enterprise’s goals and objectives because IT strategy is an integral element of the business strategy. Agile is a culture as well! It is important to recognize that moving from doing Agile to being agile may require a significant culture change that affects the entire business. It certainly is not just a development thing, it is a mind shift.

      Digital is now well embedded in every business. But even with IT as an integral part of the organization and its strategy, it is people who will underpin success in an organization that continues to reinvent itself at an unprecedented rate. Looking through these multi-dimensional lenses, IT value creation starts with keeping the business running efficiently and securely but extends quickly and broadly to include the facilitation of employee productivity and orchestration of business growth, agility and innovation. The truly successful CIOs and their entire IT organizations can establish the foundation for the success of the company with a real partnership with the rest of the business. It is the shift from doing digital to being digital.

      Part I: The Changing Role of Digital CIO

      Figure 2: The changing role of digital CIO

      Generally speaking, the job of a CIO has three parts: The first part is IT leadership. The task is to identify and recommend those latest technology trends that provide strategic value for businesses. This is probably the most forward-looking part of improving IT maturity. The second part is their representation on the executive staff. The job here is to respond to requests from other executives for solutions to business problems and provide input into strategic planning. The third part is the management of their organization. The task in this case is to improve operations to reduce the burden on the company, while trying to stay current with ever-changing technologies. That includes reducing costs, improving systems, streamlining processes and providing continually expanding business services and solutions.

      •CIOs must set the principles, guideline and rules to run a strong digital IT department : IT is in the middle of a sea change, and it is important to realize that there are basic principles and rules that make it work. But the self-centered our jobs are hard line only isolates IT more. Make a list of the positives and negatives for each situation. Regarding negatives, challenge whether it really is a problem. Is there a way to work through it? Make sure that nothing is dismissed due to out of date beliefs or natural human emotions. Understand your organization’s strategic goals and initiatives. What are you doing that doesn’t specifically support them? Work toward getting all of those tasks off your plate. What can you delegate to your team? Delegate and let them do their jobs. Also, make sure that the external customers who purchase products or services have a great experience relating to any IT systems that impact them. And that doesn’t mean continually bombarding them with how good IT is. It means involving them enough in the process so they see your success as their success.

      •CIOs have to bridge all the communication gaps: Most businesses executives have no idea how complicated corporate technology is. They don’t have to understand how complex IT is, if their CIOs know how to sell the value of what their teams deliver. Ineffective communication happens when a CIO has one way of thinking and other executives think another way. Most CIOs come up through the ranks on the technical side and think differently than the other executives. In many ways, they speak a different language, with the different way of thinking. If a CIO sees issues or opportunities he/she should deliver a message to the colleagues on C-level and convince them to support the ideas. The question is not only how to deliver the message, but also what message to deliver. In the case of competition for resources, that competition should be for company benefit, not CIO benefit.

      •CIOs act as senior advisors and consultant s: The CIO role is similar to the strategy management advisor in the digital era. It is expected that CIO will look at business and management components of the enterprise and improve them with IT. The problem here is CIOs, as well as other management personnel, for quite a long time have not been doing strategic management, which includes selling. The challenge is how to spend much less time keeping the lights on and much more time working with the business units. A CIO can identify and propose business development/ improvement ideas. If a CIO can do that on a regular basis, that will help to improve IT maturity. But to be able to do that, the CIO, as well as other executives, need to spend more time on strategy management, while now most of their time is spent on exception management. One of the key goals of enterprise and IT optimization is to accomplish that change.

      The priority for digital CIOs is to genuinely position IT as an integral and inseparable part of the business. CIOs need to lead the department in such a way that every level of the organization has great working relationships with the IT teams. With these in place, CIOs need to transform themselves from technology managers into business transformational leaders, and from a tactical IT manager to a strategy advisor and an innovator.

      Chapter 1 Twelve Digital CIO Personas

      By practicing multiple "I’s in leadership, CIO should stand for Chief Inspirational Officer.

      Compared to other CxOs, the CIO role is considerably new with less than three decades of history. The fundamental part of CIO role is to be a Chief Information Officer, as an information steward for the organization. Where CIOs have had success has been bridging the business value gap. IT has to find ways to measure and value projects that bring value to the business. However, most IT organizations are struggling with keeping the lights on, managing projects with higher failure rates, and with a built to last industrial mentality. But is that inadequacy the fault of IT’s limited capabilities, or the massive and constant change that pummels IT operations into just keeping up, much less participating in the design of the company’s future state? Or is it a business failure to recognize the value IT might be able to bring to the future of the company, given the right leader? The key is creating a framework where IT can see what the business actually values and then, along with the rest of the service lines, holding them accountable for results. So what started as a way to drastically reduce IT chronic late delivery turns into an exercise in transparency for both IT and the business as a whole. In general, show value IN BUSINESS TERMS. Be engaged, work hand-in-hand with business players; get them involved.

      Figure 3: The CIO’s 12 Digital Profiles

      Due to the omnipresence of technology and its constantly changing nature, and the abundance of information, the IT leadership role continues to be reimagined, refined, refreshed, and reenergized. Too often the perception is that the CIO is a glorified geek. The reality is that the CIO is one of the most important executive roles in the organization. The person in that role must be business savvy and not only understand the vision of the company but also be able to help reformulate it. A CIO who is not operating as a C-level peer, has, by their very limitation created a glass ceiling on the role of IT within the business. Here are twelve highlights on the I in CIO’s title:

      •CIO–Chief ‘INFORMATION’ Officer : An effective CIO solves, and, to the degree possible, anticipates business issues and needs. They are responsible for the preservation of knowledge, communication of best practices, data integrity and information security, and capturing intelligence from information. In a nutshell, the CIO is the ultimate enabler for the lifeblood of business: information and all the tactical & strategic elements of an organization.

      •CIO-Chief ‘INNOVATION’ Officer : A CIO works closely with business and industry partners establishing the strategic technology direction of the company. They lead the planning, development and execution of strategies and solutions for supporting the organization. They ensure that the production systems continue to meet established performance standards. They establish, promote, and reinforce a proactive, action-oriented customer-driven philosophy for the IT team. They identify creative, technology-based opportunities to improve service, reduce costs, and increase revenues with the team.

      •CIO–Chief ‘INSIGHT’ Officer : An effective CIO has a unique cross-organizational perspective. They can bring true business value by providing cross-organizational insights as well as integrating technologies, people and business processes across lines of business (LOB). Strategic integration also creates the opportunity to enhance the bottom line. A CIO is a business leader who understands the why of using technology to enhance business, and can communicate with those who know how to implement it.

      •CIO–Chief ‘IMPROVEMENT’ Officer : CIOs are in the unique position to provide oversight of business processes. Only a CIO knows how to identify the normal, because they are the only person other than the CEO that sees every part of the business, and can identify what should be automated vs. what can be automated, in order to improve overall company performance in both the short-term and long-term. A CIO is a top executive in the organization, responsible for optimizing organizational effectiveness, efficiency, and agility.

      •CIO - Chief ‘Investigation’ Officer: Although information is the lifeblood of an organization, and technology drives business innovation today, most of IT organizations stick to the level 2 (reactive mode) or level 3 (alignment stage) of the maturity. Most businesses perceive their IT as the department less innovative in the enterprise and even the controller to stifle innovation. And many IT organizations are overloaded and under-deliver, with a high rate of project failure. How can CIOs as IT leaders learn from these sorts of failures, reimagine, and reinvent IT organizations to improve IT and overall organizational maturity?

      •CIO-Chief ‘Interaction’ Officer: IT is no longer running as an isolated function or back office utility. Nowadays, IT has to add more business value and delight both internal and end customers. Hence, the CIO needs to talk about business with other C-Level managers more often, but not about IT. This is the major issue in companies. CIOs need to be an IT evangelist, learn to sell, speak business, but it’s a two-way street. IT is a way to innovate for the business and improve processes, but it’s not the solution if the CIO doesn’t understand business areas. CIOs must be adding value to the business and their input is essential to almost every decisions businesses ever make.

      •CIO-Chief ‘INFLUENCE’ Officer : The role of the CIO is to push the focus away from politics and back towards performance. It is critical to retool business culture via optimizing processes with the latest technology tools, as too much time is spent on internal politics that have little relevance to customers and investors. Nothing garners influence like delivering the goods time after time, on time. Negative politics rarely adds shareholder value - performance does. So the role is to deliver business growth through technology, innovation and cost efficiency.

      •CIO–Chief ‘INTRAPRENEUR’ Officer : Intrapreneur-executive leadership is an emergent trend. If entrepreneurship is to look for change and deploy it as an opportunity, then, intrapreneurship is about creating new ventures from within an established company. An effective intrapreneur CIO:

      - Runs IT as Business.

      - Communicates, Sells, and Educates.

      - Translates business to tech, and back again.

      - Does more than enable; they enhance business.

      - Is an evolutionary change agent.

      •CIO–Chief ‘INTEGRATION’ Officer : Digital CIOs are like conductors who orchestrate the digital symphony via cloud computing in their organizations. Isn’t a CIO a super-systems integrator of silicon-based systems (tech) and carbon-based systems (people) and the very different cultures that dominate each realm, so good relevant stuff flows freely throughout the entire system? A CIO must drive the IT services development and support to add value to the business directly or indirectly. The CIO also optimizes the IT cost for OpEx and CapEx, while keeping the required QoS required by the business.

      •CIO–Chief ‘INTERPRETATION’ Officer : A good CIO communicates with the business in business terms and not always in technical jargon. He/She should bring change and inspiration and excitement to resolve problems, or, better said, grab opportunities. The CIO must demonstrate the ability to distill technical issues/investments into clear, simple business languages, to help the organization make the correct choices. He/she must take risks to achieve something believed in, understand people and communicate a lot. And don’t forget the humor, but true humor served in a nice manner and likable fashion.

      •CIO-Chief Intelligence’ Officer: The relationship between IT and Marketing is a mixed bag. Data analytics is the battleground both functions desire to conquer, and they have to work more closely than ever with collective insight and collaborative effort in managing and analyzing data, in order to capture the value their business needs from it. More specifically, what are leadership qualities for business analytics? What do you think it takes to lead an advanced analytics team? How important are competence in analytics, leadership ability, and communication skills? How important is it to manage from top-down or bottom-up?

      •CIO-Chief ‘Interface’ Officer: CIOs are getting involved in building products for external/internal customers, but unfortunately, creating great user experiences continues to be a struggle. UX—short for User Experience—refers to the experience a given user has when using a piece of software or technology, rather than the purely technical capacities of that device, as customers’ loyalty depends in large part on how they feel about your digital product or channel. What’s your strategy and tactics in building up superior development teams, so you can deliver the innovative apps, to delight customer via an intuitive interface and optimal processes?

      Digital CIOs, are born to change, but how they overcome these digital transformation challenges depend on their ability to think, adapt, proactively plan and execute, with a sense of humor. By practicing twelve "I’s in leadership, The CIO should stand for Chief Inspirational Officer. Inspiration to others can be your biggest benefit to the business.

      1. CIO as Chief Information Officer

      Information by itself is meaningless until it’s interpreted and analyzed to capture insight and harness innovation!

      Compared to other CxOs, the CIO role is considerably newer. However, the magic I in the CIO’s title implies many high expectations for such a contemporary leadership position: Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Insight Officer, Chief Influence Officer, Chief Improvement Officer, Chief Investment Officer, etc. But fundamentally, to go back to its roots, the CIO role is to be a Chief Information Officer, as an information steward for the dynamic digital corporation, to ensure the right people getting the right information at the right time. Because today IT is permeating into every corner of the organization, and information is the lifeblood of any business across all industrial sectors.

      •The word information is central to the digital IT : Technology is the operative part of information technology, and that leads to a CIO focusing on the technology part, rather than the information part of the definition. Now, information is the lifeblood of the organization, and all forward-thinking organizations declare they are in the information business. IT indeed needs to shift from T driven operation to I focused: information, insight, and innovation. The information side of the IT description is a bit nebulous by the other favorite buzzword of the day: Big Data. That gets closer to the role of the CIO, though. Because if the CIO role is to survive and thrive for more than an on-demand span, the focus has to be on acquiring, managing, manipulating, teasing intelligence out of, and providing insight into the organization based on information that the organization creates or acquires. Or simply, the CIO role needs to be elevated to the information part of the definition, or back to basics, as the title implies: "Chief Information Officer."

      •Digital IT is all about how to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time, to help them make the right decision: IT is the steward of business data & information. Data by itself is meaningless, until it’s interpreted and analyzed. Technology enables large data sets to be captured and presented for analysis, but the value hidden in data is only revealed through intelligent reasoning. Information is raw material, until you manipulate the raw material in meaningful ways, which give you business insight to interpret and utilize. Then you have established a value. IT plays a critical role in information lifecycle management; to transform raw data into information - insight/intelligence - wisdom. As the tech matures and the technology becomes better understood by most of the enterprises, information will get better and become more valuable, and it will become a digital business capability IT can build on.

      •The digital CIO is an information master : The digital CIO should focus on both information content and context; how that information can be tapped from the underlying data and be utilized to turn it into valuable strategic insight and how the information and insight can be penetrated through the business and be actively used in managing business processes and shaping the business capabilities to execute business strategy solidly. An effective CIO solves, and, to the degree possible, anticipates business issues and needs. He/she is responsible for preservation of knowledge, communication of best practices, data integrity and information security, and capturing intelligence from information. In a nutshell, the CIO is the ultimate enabler for the lifeblood of business information and all the tactical & strategic elements of an organization.

      Today, the CIO is not just managing IT to keep the lights on but is managing the information to enable enterprises to become nimble and gain the competitive edge, harness innovation catalyzed by IT and lead to business transformation. As CIOs continue to be put on the front line to run IT as a digital transformer, they need to ensure their organizations are information savvy. And where CIOs have had success has been bridging the business value gaps. IT has to find ways to measure and value projects that bring value to the business for its long-term prosperity.

      2. CIO as Chief Innovation Officer

      IT leaders are in a unique position to orchestrate the business innovation symphony.

      Figure 4: The CIO as Chief Innovation Officer

      Most of the forward-thinking IT organizations are experiencing the digital shift from ‘built to last’ to ‘design to change’; from a back-office support function to a value creator and innovation engine. But how to manage such a digital transformation more seamlessly? What is the primary role of the CIO in harnessing IT innovation and building IT competency and maturity?

      •IT leaders are in a unique position to orchestrate the business innovation symphony: Today, technology is often the innovation disruptor. Therefore, IT leaders are often in the right position to oversee business processes, identify critical business issues by working closely with a business partner from a long-term perspective, and leverage technology to manage innovation across the enterprise boundary. IT leaders need to identify the issues associated with innovation in an enterprise and most actually have developed a unique model and platform for open innovation. The challenge is, of course, with most organizations, there’s a relentless focus on reducing operational expenses and, especially for services companies, increasing efficiency and utilization. This draws down the availability of resources that can engage in the pursuit of innovation. The big problem for many large companies is that they are too busy working on the short or medium term goals. Of course they know innovation is important, but they simply don’t know what to do about it, so it’s easier to focus on what they already know how to do. Companies that have a great success with their original strategy have more difficulty in changing their path, especially those open capital companies with shareholders asking for more and more dividends for the next quarter.

      •IT leaders need to manage an innovation portfolio, including both incremental innovation and disruptive innovation in a systematic way : Unfortunately, in most organizations, innovation is still a serendipity; it emerges haphazardly, with little planning. An enterprise that depends on doing the same thing, again and again, engaging various teams and groups, will have less appetite for change. Incremental innovation can be tolerated to some extent, but disruptive innovation is almost impossible unless the company is going through a crisis. Most of the time, even when a crisis is going on, change of the leadership is required to accept disruptive innovation and the channels of communication are further muddied because of the language barrier associated with IT. Information is now the lifeblood of any organization, Hence, you need a CIO that can translate between business-speak and tech-speak fluently. By conveying the vision and communicating effectively, IT leaders can work more collaboratively with business leaders to solve business problems via innovation, and manage an innovation portfolio in a more systematic way. Bottom line thinking is one of the great tragedies of modern corporations. The true value of support services is hard to derive, since measuring productivity can be elusive and difficult to quantify. Leading with only operational considerations is not the way forward. IT success needs to be accomplished by working with business partners to leverage opportunities for changing how the business competes in the marketplace.

      •Failure is inevitable for innovation; the point is to fail fast and fail forward: That said, sometimes more is learned and gained from failing than succeeding. The key is to fail fast. Opening up a spirit and opportunity for people to stretch and try new things will, in the end, generate many more returns than was ever thought possible! The business expects ROI, but it is clear that the majority of IT organizations still cannot articulate their economic value to the board or shareholders in a language they understand, and performance metrics will not solve the problem. Costs are part of the solution, but they need to be understood in terms of usage or volume patterns, and they need to be distributed across often very complex revenue models that are in a constant state of flux. There is often a bit of a political battle that goes on when IT claims its proportion of revenue value, even when far more precise mappings exist between costs and revenue. Once it plays that game IT matures beyond being a cost center and acts more like a business partner, or business within a business, because its value proposition can be backed up with something approaching empirical evidence as opposed to gut instinct.

      An innovative and value-driven IT needs to understand stakeholders’ expectations and propose an innovation solution portfolio that corresponds to both demand and cost drivers. With a focus on business priority IT develops the professional competencies needed for successful business solution delivery and captures organizational knowledge to continuously improve performance, and harness innovation, and ultimately improves the organizational level of efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and maturity.

      3. CIO as Chief Insight Officer: How to Become a Trusted Advisor for Business

      CIOs can provide holistic business insight via effective information management.

      Figure 5: CIO as Chief insight officer

      CIOs are the information steward of the enterprise today. However, data or information is the means to an end, not the end itself. More importantly, CIOs need to capture business and customer insight from the abundance of information in order to foresee the future of business and continuously drive operational excellence. Therefore, CIOs play a crucial role as ‘Chief Insight Officer’ to provide data-based advice for business executive peers and the corporate board.

      •CIOs should be the trusted advisor to Board and C-Level, and an empowered CIO can be part of the Board: As such, the CIO should be a productive

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1