The Evolution of CIO – From Information to Innovation
CIO typically stands for chief information officer. Today, while that’s still true, it’s changing. New technology, new business trends and emerging needs mean that this exec is really more involved with innovation than just information technology these days.
The Changing Landscape
Once, the CIO was largely responsible for IT and IT alone. Today a whole host of different elements has altered the landscape. For instance, BYOD and the cloud-based economy that’s responsible for the increased consumerization of businesses have made it more important that CIOs help determine the best way to move the entire company forward. That means not only are they involved with creating policy, but it’s their responsibility to look for solutions to problems that might not have even affected the company yet.
CIOs must be much more aligned with their company’s business and understand the status of their infrastructures and the business environment, as well as their capabilities to adapt and respond to changing laws and business regulations. The CIO’s role must shift from protecting and defending the status quo to driving new, innovative capabilities. With the age of digitalization its about technology-empowered business strategies.
You can see this reflected in the slew of new “hats” the CIO is increasingly required to wear. Many have a second title of head of business transformation. Others are called the head of business process change, or even the head of the supply chain. Many also share the role of chief technology officer, which is very telling as it applies to the new focus on innovation and business-wide empowerment.
A Helping Hand or Two for CIOs
Companies today are transforming to be software-driven, software-managed and software-defined. Software is now the core tool for businesses to transform their organizations into todays business world.
A number of new technologies can help make the lives of these harried professionals simpler and easier. For instance, by eliminating cumbersome enterprise software and creating software that works more like smartphone applications, CIOs can empower teams and individual employees to do more with less wasted time, less frustration and even outside of traditional office hours.
CIOs also have the ability to encourage the entire business to drive to a more frictionless approach though software and hardware innovations. Not only will this save employees massive amounts of time, but it puts that invaluable data right where it should be and accessible to those with a need for it.
As businesses look increasingly to revenue growth and ask the CIO to be more strategic, the CIO has the potential to do more than identify and add supporting technology for various initiatives. He or she can help design the end-to-end innovation process that leads to a better business in the first place, and then enable it as well.
CIO’s must help drive the creation and management of the innovation process and put together and implement cloud, mobile, and microservices based solutions on which the enterprise executes much of the innovation process.
For smaller organizations who do not have a full time CIO on staff today it is critical you begin the process of looking for technology partners who are focused on understanding your business and needs and helping to find innovate technologies and solutions that can be deployed. To grow and drive today’s business requires increased automation and digitalization of business process.
Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss.
