6 strategic projects any business can implement in 2016

To define business objectives, most large organizations host strategic planning sessions to set roadmaps to allocate budgets and resources for specific projects in the new year. Here are six strategic projects any business, regardless of size, should plan to implement in 2016.

As 2016 begins, now is the time for businesses (regardless of industry, size, product or service offering, or location) to take stock of all resources and initiatives, and plan strategy-centric projects to implement in the New Year. There are many projects any business can implement that, if executed successfully, can create fresh opportunities or drastically reduce the chance of costly missed opportunities.

Projects are often pursued for the purpose of generating revenues, creating growth opportunities, seeking innovation or even increasing brand awareness, but it can be easy to get caught up in just day-to-day operations without recognizing the actual cost of missing some more basic projects. Here are six projects any business can implement in 2016 to help ensure the people, processes and technologies are working together effectively to create better opportunities or avoid missed ones.

Project 1: Put more focus on projects that support strategy

Whether your business is small, mid-size or large, your first project should be an initiative to review the vision and direction intended for the business, and ensure all projects support that vision. If your business is small, you can achieve this by assigning one person to be a dedicated or part-time project manager, focusing time and efforts in this regard. Larger organizations can transition their traditional Project Management Office (PMO) into a high-performing Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO) that ensures all projects, programs and portfolios are channeled effectively and efficiently to fully support the company-wide strategic direction.

Project 2: Re-assess customer/client needs

The end result for businesses ultimately is to meet the needs of customers, regardless of a product or service. Now is the time to pause and think about whether your product or service is meeting the needs of your current or potential customers. Have you solicited feedback? What feedback have you received? Is the product or service you provide meeting their needs? If not, something needs to change. If you are meeting their needs, maybe exceeding expectations could be the new goal. Either way, this would be a good time to assign project management resources to address this, and stay ahead of the game. Remember, client’s needs change. It is easier and less costly to keep an existing client happy than to have to find a new one.

Project 3: Take on business process improvements (BPI)

The processes that were put in place when the business started may not be effective or even relevant anymore. This is another area businesses should revisit annually to reduce manual workarounds caused by ineffective business processes.

As a business grows, processes must be updated or possibly removed if they no longer make sense or if they create unnecessary work for employees. This does not always mean there is a need to take on costly process re-engineering initiatives. Often times after the process reviews are complete, you may need to make only minor modifications to a process to achieve overall improvements, cost and time savings. It makes no sense to continue using a process or partial process if the only reason it is in place is because “it has always been done that way.” This is one of those areas where past performance should not necessarily be an indicator of acceptable future performance.
Project 4: Revisit vendor service offerings

Many business owners and management intend to make vendor- or service-offering-related changes but, because they are so busy, they plod along paying for services that do not fully meet their needs. As companies grow and change so do their needs. Often times their back-office functions in particular can no longer keep pace in a way that supports current and future business growth requirements or potential. For example, this may be of particular issue for many small to mid-market businesses owners who receive accounting related services that only provide after the fact, partial, and not necessarily relevant financial information; making unnecessarily difficult to make crucial decisions on time.

All vendor service offerings should fully meet the needs of the business. Otherwise it is a poor use of financial resources, regardless of the dollar amount. It simply makes sense to pay for performance. This project should be on every business owner’s annual list.

Project 5: Review and re-vamp information systems and technology (IS&T)

In conjunction with revisiting vendor service offerings, taking an inventory of all information systems and technologies should also be on your project list. Advancements are always taking place, and as your business grows or changes, it creates the potential for the systems/applications and technologies you use to also require changes.

This is not to suggest jumping ship annually with all vendors or service providers, only make the move when significant gaps exist and existing offerings cannot sufficiently support the business currently or going forward. As with the vendor service offerings mentioned above, it may be time to either implement required enhancements if available internally or outsource to specialized service providers. Careful planning and selection is the key to finding solutions that are scalable to grow as your business grows.

Project 6: Re-deploying human resources

This is one of the most important and most difficult projects to approach as it has the potential to place employees in a state of panic. That said, it can also be one of the most rewarding for many employees as it can open up opportunities for advancement as well. Be transparent and talk with employees about this initiative in advance to alleviate the fear of job loss.

The goal behind this project should be to determine the most value-added use of human resource by matching high-level skill sets to key job requirements, and then re-deploying those human resources to better meet strategic objectives. It makes sense to sit down with individual employees to discuss their interests and career goals in conjunction with the business goals to create as much synergy as possible prior to making any changes.

Source: CIO.com – 6 strategic projects any business can implement in 2016 By Moira Alexander

2016: CIOs And CMOs Must Rally To Lead Customer-Obsessed Change Now

In the coming weeks Forrester has published its annual set of predictions for our major roles, industries, and research themes — more than 35 in total. These predictions for 2016 will feature our calls on how firms will execute in the Age of the Customer, a 20-year business cycle in which the most successful enterprises will reinvent themselves to systematically understand and serve increasingly powerful customers.

In 2016, the gap between customer-obsessed leaders and laggards will widen. Leaders will tackle the hard work of shifting to a customer-obsessed operating model; laggards will aimlessly push forward with flawed digital priorities and disjointed operations. It will require strong leadership to win, and we believe that in 2016 CMOs will step up to lead customer experience efforts. They face a massive challenge: Years of uncoordinated technology adoption across call centers, marketing teams, and product lines make a single view of the customer an expensive and near-impossible endeavor. As a result, in 2016 companies will be limited to fixing their customer journeys.

CMOs will have good partners, though. As they continue to break free of IT gravity and invest in business technology, CIOs will be at their sides. 2016 is the year that a new breed of customer-obsessed CIOs will become the norm. Fast-cycle strategy and governance will be more common throughout technology management and CIOs will push hard on departmental leaders to let go of their confined systems to make room for a simpler, unified, agile portfolio.

Firms without these senior leadership efforts will find themselves falling further behind in 2016, with poor customer experience ratings impacting their bottom line. Look for common symptoms of these laggards: Poorly coordinated investment in digital tools, misguided efforts to invent new C-level titles, and new products with unclear business models.

We will begin publishing our predictions for the CMO and CIO roles on November 2nd in conjunction with our Age of the Customer Executive Summit. A steady stream of predictions will follow in the days after that. In the meantime, I’m providing a sneak peek at our predictions documents by indentifying the top 10 critical success factors for winning in the age of the customer:

1. Disrupt leadership: CEOs will need to consider significant changes to their leadership teams to win a customer-led, digital market; CEOs that hang on to leadership structures to simply preserve current power structures will create unnecessary risk.
2. Institute a customer-obsessed operating model: Companies that shift to customer-obsessed operations will gain sustainable differentiation; those that preserve old ways of doing business will begin the slow process of failing.
3. Connect culture to business success: Those that invest in culture to fuel change will gain significant speed in the market; those that avoid or defer culture investments will lose ground in the market.
4. Personalize the customer experience (CX): Customers will reward companies that anticipate their individual needs and punish those that have to relearn basic information at each touchpoint.
5. Implement multidiscipline CX strategies: Companies that transform operations to deliver high-value, personalized experiences will drive a wedge between themselves and laggards just executing CX tactics.
6. Operate at the speed of disruptors: Leaders will animate their scale, brand, and data while operating at the speed of disruptors; laggards will continue to be surprised and play defense in the market.
7. Evolve loyalty programs: Companies that find ways for customers to participate with their brand and in product design will experience new and powerful levels of affinity; companies that try to optimize existing loyalty programs will see little impact to affinity or revenue.
8. Convert analytics to customer value: Leaders will use analytics as a competitive asset to deliver personalized services across human and digital touchpoints; laggards will drown in big data.
9. Master digital: Companies that become experts in digital will further differentiate themselves from those that dabble in a set of digital services that merely decorate their traditional business.
10. Elevate privacy as a differentiator: Leaders will extend privacy from a risk and legal consideration to a position to win customers; companies that relegate privacy as a niche consideration will play defense and face churn risk.

As you can tell we’re expecting 2016 to be another year of rapid change as firms learn to cope and respond to empowered customers and agile competitors. The decisions companies make, and how fast they act, will determine if they thrive or fail in the age of the customer.

To learn more, download Forrester guide to the Top 10 Success Factors To Determine Who Wins And Who Fails In The Age Of The Customer.

Shawn Banerji: CIO role at inflection point

It’s tough being a CIO these days. Technology executive headhunter Shawn Banerji offers his advice on how not to be marginalized in 2015.

Shawn Banerji of the Russell Reynolds Associates executive search firm in New York was in a holiday state of mind. A week before Christmas, he had already been to three CIO events and had another coming up. “This is always an interesting time of year,” he said, “getting together with clients, with successfully placed candidates, fundraisers — I had a table of 10 CIOs to raise money for a good cause.”
At such events the talk inevitably turns to the year gone by and what’s in store for those in the CIO role; 2015 points to a divide between the hot and not-so-hot CIO.

“I really feel we’re at an inflection point, because you have a very significant portion of the CIO population that is very excited about living through a shift in their role,” said Banerji, managing director and a member of the global technology practice at Russell Reynolds.

Business partners, boards of directors and their companies’ customers are looking to these fired-up CIOs “in a genuinely unprecedented manner” to create business value, he said. “They can’t wait to step through that door. They really feel like this is the best time ever to be a CIO.”

But he said there is also “a not insignificant portion of the CIO population” that is troubled about these very same changes. These CIOs are telling him that the competencies they are expected to have and the initiatives they’re expected to lead are things they haven’t done before or been trained to do.

“They’re concerned by not being able to step through that door. They’re asking, ‘Am I at risk of being marginalized? Am I at risk of being completely dis-intermediated?'” Banerji said. Their fears are not unfounded.

“I have clients tell me, ‘I don’t need Russell Reynolds to just go find me a legacy operations CIO,'” Banerji said. Finding a top-notch traditional CIO to run IT operations is by no means an easy task, he added, but that isn’t what companies are hiring Russell Reynolds to hunt for.

“They are looking for people who understand digital and are able to drive those associated and broader transformations through the application of digital technology internally and with their external business partners,” he said.

That’s the language companies are using today when they talk about IT, but capitalizing on IT — really using information technology to drive business — remains a hard slog for most companies, Banerji said, even at companies that have managed to reel in that elusive transformational CIO. “These companies want to achieve certain outcomes, but their organizational structure — and in many cases, their corporate culture — is set up in a fashion that actually precludes or minimizes the ability for that CIO to be effective,” he said.

Companies and candidates alike tend to “get obsessed” over titles, budgets and reporting to the CEO, but those old measures of CIO role success are meaningless in a situation where major transformation is required. “Forget about titles, I tell them. It is about nailing down content: what does the job actually entail — and does the candidate have access to the appropriate people in order to be successful?” Banerji said.

2015 prescription: vendor relations, security, talent wars

CIOs can thank (or blame) the cloud for some of the upheaval around their jobs. Banerji said his corporate clients are increasingly comfortable with offloading commoditized IT operations to external providers that will provide all manner of computing as a service, or claim to be able to anyway. These service providers are extremely comfortable going directly to business power users to strike a deal, greasing the wheels with the following pitch: I can do it faster for you and more cheaply and in a more flexible manner than your own CIO can.

“So some of these CIOs are saying, ‘Boy, if I can’t create meaningful business value, and the organization feels it can partner with these specific service providers to address the commoditized or more operational aspects of IT, what is left for me?'” Banerji said.

To remain relevant in 2015, Banerji advised CIOs keep three questions foremost in mind:

How do I work with service providers and vendor partners to generate the desired outcomes without marginalizing myself and my IT organization?
How do I ensure that the security environment at my organization is robust and sustainable?
How do I ensure that the people I am attracting and retaining in my organization are the right people, given the fluidity of the skill sets needed to deliver business value?
An important FYI: If security is not at the top of your 2015 agenda, put it there now. The single fastest-growing part of the Russell Reynolds’ CIO role portfolio is an IT executive with security chops. A few years ago, that person would have gone by the title, chief information security officer, sat in the networks function of the IT department and reported up through the head of IT infrastructure to the CIO.

“What we have seen in the last six months — precipitated in part by the very high-profile security incursions and breaches — is that organizations are rethinking this position in an incredibly fluid manner,” he said.

How fluid? Not only is the role being elevated within the IT function, but in some cases it has also moved from under the CIO and placed under the CEO or, in some cases, as the head of enterprise risk.

Source: searchcio.techtarget.com-Shawn Banerji: CIO role at inflection point by Linda Tucci

People in CIO positions should stay off this list

Today, customers rule — CIOs who don’t submit put their careers at risk. Analyst Bobby Cameron details five binds that spell doom for CIO positions.

It takes a lot for a list to grab me. In the Internet blur of read-this-or-else language, most lists — no matter how urgently titled — just highjack valuable time. “CIOs’ Top Five Career-Ending Digital Transformation Challenges,” by Forrester Research analyst Bobby Cameron, is an exception.

Cameron’s blunt language is meant to underscore just how dire the situation is for CIOs in today’s business environment.

“There’s a lot of immaturity in CIOs that’s just got to go,” Cameron said in a telephone interview. Many are stuck in the past, he said, centered on internal operations. In the so-called age of the customer, though, when buyers wield more power than ever before, CIO positions must focus on technology that serves those buyers — and keeps them coming back.

But right now, Cameron said, fully two-thirds to three-quarters of CIOs are at risk of falling into one or more of these five career-ending predicaments:

1. They’re not trusted.

2. They can’t inspire meaningful change.

3. They’re stuck in technical debtor’s prison.

4. They think small.

5. They aren’t customer-obsessed.

The no-hit list

Let’s take them one by one, starting with the issue of trust. The main requirement of CIO positions is to deliver and safeguard the IT systems that keep businesses running; being perceived as untrustworthy is unthinkable for CIOs. Yet, if their IT organizations have a history of failures in delivering bread-and-butter service, the business side is going to have a hard time trusting the CIO to deliver the more advanced capabilities that can provide a competitive advantage, such as big data analytics or cloud computing.

A CIO also won’t be trusted, Cameron explained in the report, if the IT department doesn’t build systems that are “end-to-end” — integrated into all the other applications a business uses on a daily basis. At Home Depot, Cameron told me, a checkout clerk can ring you up, of course, but he can also let you know about a sale the store is having that day or check on the availability of another item you might need.

“All of a sudden it’s not a point-of-sale transaction,” he said. “I’m now invoking marketing systems, bundling systems, inventory systems, shipping.” Integrating these systems and making the data available to that checkout person is how IT organizations help their companies compete for today’s customers.

By inspiring meaningful change, Cameron meant using one’s CIO position to pave the path to becoming a full-fledged digital business — making all the necessary technology changes your customers are demanding and doing it fast. But it’s largely a cultural puzzle for IT, Cameron wrote, and one of the missing pieces for many CIOs remains communicating in a language the business side understands. In his report, Cameron quoted a CIO at a U.S. defense agency: “We need to enhance the competencies that we have as humans — using words that the others understand. But sometimes the best IT guys are the ones you want to keep locked in a room and let them out only when the coast is clear.”

To work well with the business, IT needs to keep business goals top of mind — and drop the tech speak.

Technical debtor’s prison doesn’t sound like a particularly nice place to spend 40 or more hours a week in — so stay out, Cameron advised. It’s not that old technology alone will put you there — some old systems can in fact help you build a digital business. But if outmoded systems are holding you back, that’s when you should bust the joint.

Oil companies should take the hint, Cameron said. Many still use IBM 3270 computer terminals, which look at home in 1980s James Bond films but not in modern organizations.

“I’ve had CIOs from oil and gas recently sit down and tell me, ‘Oh, it’s fine for us; we don’t need anything else. We don’t want to pay to upgrade.'”

Though starting small in IT is generally considered a good thing, thinking small can spell doom for CIO positions, Cameron wrote. Popular technologies today shouldn’t be implemented as replacements for something that’s broken but rather as pieces of your emerging digital business. One way out of the fix is by funding the business outcome you’re targeting, not the project.

Not being customer-obsessed is Cameron’s final career killer, but it overlaps all the others. Customers are the reason the CIO position is under fire in the first place. They’re pushing the buttons, so CIOs must cater to them. That means having one, integrated view of all customers. It means having proper data governance policies and procedures. And it means using customer-focused performance metrics in IT as well as in sales and customer service.

CIO career Rx

Cameron said the first step for CIOs is simple: Recognize the need to change. Businesses that embrace change innovate and create new opportunities. He gave an example from the industrial sector: Manufacturer Timken Bearings put sensors in its roller bearings that would let a customer know when they were about to collapse. Those sensors now phone home, and Timken does maintenance and repair on equipment fitted with the bearings.

“It’s a brand new business, and they’re making a lot of money at it,” Cameron said.

Are there really CIOs who are guilty of all five items on Cameron’s career-ending list? He cited the example of a CIO from a life insurance company — “the most Luddite sector in the universe” — who got a directive from a new CEO to “go digital.” Sure, she told him.

“And then she calls me in and says, ‘What did our CEO mean?’ She’s probably not very long for this world,” he said with a sad chuckle. “And that’s not uncommon. It’s just the way it is.”

Source: searchcio.techtarget.com-People in CIO positions should stay off this list by Jason Sparapani

CIOs spur business agility and growth

The economy in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is starting to recover, which means  investment in IT across the region is also starting to return. This issue of CW Europe  investigates how the boost in IT is changing the role of the CIO, from supporting the business to driving its growth.

In this issue hear from Michel Clement, head of Oracle in the CEE region, discussing how the present state of technology development is providing CIOs in CEE with unique capabilities. Read how CEE enterprises are using a more forward-looking approach to IT tools, with
more CIOs realising they can undergo more business activities with less hardware and software by restructuring their whole ecosystem.
Also find out why the Dutch Cyber Security Council (DCSC) says privacy will be one of its main focuses in 2015 and going forward.
The Netherlands has one of the highest percentage of internet users in the world and 80% of its citizens use online banking. Furthermore, 62% of the nation’s retailers are connected to the internet. This issue reveals why the DCSC is set to focus on cyber security this year and how the organisation plans to tackle the issue. Just how will the Netherlands remain an open and economi‑cally promising digital society – and secure at the same time?
On page 10 read about Easynet’s poll which suggests that cloud computing is
now the IT deployment model of choice for 74% of European enterprises – is it
the model of choice at your company?
According to the report – which surveyed over 600 European IT decision makers – public cloud is the least favourite source of off-premise service and only one in five respondents (17%) ticked the option for a hybrid cloud model.
Hear from Easynet’s unified communications, hosting and cloud services division managing director, Phil Grannum, as he tells CW Europe why he believes the private cloud is most popular with businesses right now – and how this is likely to pave the way for wider
hybrid cloud adoption in the future.

Read more at: CWEurope- CIOs spur business agility and growth

How to find the next generation of IT leaders

If you know where to look and you take a strategic approach to creating a pipeline of IT talent, you will have many options for filling your management bench.

The next generation of IT leadership is hiding right in front of you. Do you know how to tap into it?

An often-debated but never-resolved question in the world of IT outsourcing is “where will our next generation of leaders come from?” Strangely enough, it’s usually the very executives who are now outsourcing in record numbers who ask the question. And they have a point. It’s difficult to see how enterprises are building management bench strength to lead the corporate IT departments of the future.

The issue, in my view, is framed the wrong way. While outsourcing is part of the talent problem for corporations, it is also part of the solution. And, yet, the talent problem is very real; there isn’t a single CIO in my network of clients who doesn’t wish for greater access to talent.

Why is this happening? Three reasons:

1. Corporate IT is not sexy. In my generation, IT was an attractive career. We knew the Internet would shake things up, and corporations had big appetites—and big dollars—for people who could implement and manage corporate systems. Today, few young people get excited about a career in corporate IT. For one thing, they know it is a job they could lose to outsourcing—they might as well work for the service provider and have more job security. The truth is most won’t even do that. Young people with technology skills want to be with Google, Uber, Amazon or the next Facebook. Not only do these employers offer fun, millennial-friendly work environments, they also offer jobs that are quite lucrative, and their employees can enjoy knowing they really are changing the world.
2. Experienced people are expensive, often unwilling to change and about to retire. Most enterprises today are facing a serious brain drain due to the retirement of so many baby boomers. The average age of IT employees in many large industries is in the 50s. Many companies, therefore, are looking to outsourcing as a business continuity strategy. The odds are small that someone who is close to retirement and who has not yet been in management will suddenly become a great manager. And the odds are smaller still that someone close to retirement will invest in learning emerging technologies. Add exceptionally high salary and benefits costs for these experts, and it is not hard to understand why industries such as utilities, oil and gas, automotive and many others have leveraged outsourcing just to make sure they can keep the lights on.
3. IT changes too often. It doesn’t make sense anymore for corporations to invest in developing an employee’s career as they might have in the past. To prepare someone to be a deep specialist in mainframe or client server, for example, is to equip that person with obsolete information. While an IT career yesterday might have undergone one generational technology shift, today’s workforce undergoes a major technological change about every five years. To keep up, an enterprise needs scale. And even the largest corporate IT department can’t match the scale of service providers that, in many cases, have more than 200,000 employees specializing in IT services. With this kind of scale, outsourcers are much better prepared to absorb generational technology changes while they mitigate risk for their clients. And even at their gargantuan size, service providers still receive complaints from their customers about a lack of access to top talent.

So we know some of the reasons why the talent is scarce. But we still haven’t answered the question “where will the next generation of IT leaders come from?” I believe we are asking the wrong question. Will we even need a CIO 20 years from now? Or will we need someone who manages a portfolio of relationships in order to deliver business services? And if so, where will this person be trained?

Assuming IT remains a separate function within the corporate structure, the IT leaders of tomorrow are likely to come from the service providers themselves. Perhaps outsourcing buyers should consider their outsourcing contract as a chance to audition thousands of skilled people for future leadership roles. If they choose to see it this way, they will need to change how they treat those employees, how they engage with them, how they develop them, and how they contract with their current employer. The bench is there, and it’s stronger than ever. It is up to corporations to learn how to take advantage of it.

Source: CIO.com-How to find the next generation of IT leaders by Esteban Herrera

How much do CIOs really make? Pay packages of 25 Fortune 500 execs revealed

CIO salaries in the U.S. average between $157,000 and $262,500, according to Robert Half Technology. But salary is just the beginning. Cash bonuses and equity awards can propel pay packages into the millions. To find out how much CIOs at giant global companies really earn, we scoured the proxy statements of the 500 largest U.S. companies (according to Fortune’s ranking) and found 25 that disclosed CIO pay. Here are the details on their pay packages, organized from lowest to highest paid. If available, compensation for these individuals in prior years is included.

Compensation for CIOs includes cash, equity, perks.

To see all the data in one place, check out our sortable chart of CIO compensation.

See more at: Networkworld-How much do CIOs really make? Pay packages of 25 Fortune 500 execs revealed

How cloud is changing the role of IT

Picture this: Someone calls IT, and he’d patronise and insult his way through fixing minor (to him) computer problems. He’s always irritated because he is having to react to someone else’s issues.

IT was a reactive maintenance and administrative function. In a mainframe environment, those in IT were doing the development, security, monitoring, testing, issue resolution, and logging themselves – there was no time to get ahead.

Now, It’s time for CIOs to have a seat at the boardroom table and shed the “cost center” image. However, we need to remove the business of maintenance and watch-dogging. Tickets in and fixes out.

Resolving critical issues or patching code could take days, and no one knew why because the IT team lived in a back office on the basement floor.

How the Cloud Changed Everything

No one talks about the “back office” as it is expected to run. The days of IT acting as support and execution for the direction set by executive leadership are over. The systems, services, information and processes that IT maintains don’t just drive the business – they are the business!

The “cloud” has been great for IT as competition is always good. The cloud hosting and applications pulled back the curtains and exposed the condition of legacy IT equipment. Whilst the rest of the world wondered what this cloud thing was, business and line managers jumped on early cloud offerings. Finally, a way to avoid IT projects!

Savvy CIOs grasped that they could outsource non value-added activities and use these third-party systems for everything from storage and Salesforce automation to enterprise systems plus more.

As people voiced concerns about security, some CIOs started to build private clouds. Today, many cloud companies are using hybrid clouds with both private and public cloud offerings. Most providers invested in security because it is core to their business, making it better than security at commercial enterprises.

CIOs and other IT leaders realised that they needed to become service brokerages instead of break-fix shops. They could integrate private clouds with their partners’ private clouds for services. Using these services instead of doing the work in-house freed them up to do more.

The New Face of IT

Now, successful CIOs have become: thought leaders, visionaries and strategists. Success before was the lack of failure, today CIOs must move the company forward.

They are responsible for generating revenue and helping set direction for their companies, but must maintain focus on traditional core responsibilities to keep systems in working order, robust and safe.

A Q4 2014 survey by Skyhigh Networks found:

• The average employee uses 27 apps at work
• The average company uses 897 cloud services (10 per cent more than IT expects!)
• 92 per cent of companies have users with compromised identities

CIOs now have a variety of new roles that were not available before the cloud:

Strategist: the CIO sees what technologies will be best to use in a month, a year, in five years, and works with the CEO to set direction for the company. IT used to be support for the business, but in today’s digital world, IT is helping to set the strategy for the business.

Facilitator: the CIO understands the needs of each department. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work because business has become complex, big and fast. Marketing has different needs than engineering than finance. Setting up each department for success is becoming a benchmark for IT departments. APIs are making applications behave more like platforms, and CIOs have to be flexible in using them to their best advantage.

Politician: the CIO has to balance the advantages of BYOD, shadow IT and remote work with the potential dangers that these activities invite.

Orchestrator: the CIO chooses the cloud platform that the IT department will use. Often large enterprises use a mix of public, private and hybrid clouds, dependent on integrations and appetite for risk. Employees, partners, customers, and the public have different needs, and CIOs have meet their demands.

Service broker: the CIO manages integrations with strategic partners and in-house development. With the addition of APIs, CIOs can often choose from a menu of potential partnerships to accomplish services that used to exhaust internal resources

The modern leaders of IT departments are strategists and thought leaders. Cloud technology has given CIOs, CTOs and IT managers a tool set that once seemed unthinkable.

As someone once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” As a result, technical leaders are implementing their own ideas and following their own decisions, and they are held accountable.

I encourage everyone in these leadership roles to take advantage of the tools available and lead your teams and companies because your competitors will be doing the same.

Source: itproportal-How cloud is changing the role of IT By Teon Rosandic

The CIO of the future is integrator and cultural enabler: Coleman, Unisys

Information Age sits down with Ed Coleman, CEO of technology veteran Unisys, to find out how IT will stay relevant through the era of the social, software-defined enterprise, as the pieces of the truly software-defined data centre fall into place 

A company that has been a pioneer in the technology industry for over 130 years, Unisys’ antecedents rolled out the first commercial typewriter and adding machine and later the first commercially-available digital computer.

It was the second largest computer company next to IBM in the 1980s, and focuses now on projects as diverse as developing biometric technology for national ID schemes, to providing systems integration for airports.

As Ed Coleman, Unisys CEO explains, the company owes its remarkable longevity to keeping a sharp eye on IT’s next big sea change, and in today’s industry this means a focus on software.

See the interview at: The CIO of the future is integrator and cultural enabler: Coleman, Unisys

The transformational CIO: a customer-centric visionary

How CIOs must shift their focus toward systems that support their organisation’s ability to win, serve and retain customers

With digital technologies continuing to create disruption in the enterprise, CEOs require a partner on the C-suite that can combine technology expertise with business skills to successfully navigate the change.

Indeed, in today’s marketplace, CIOs are no longer just responsible for “keeping the lights on”, they play a pivotal role in making the company successful and driving the use of new technologies in a way that adds value to the business.

Gone are the days where CIOs had to manage the day-to-day processes of transactional systems that record everything but provide the business with little operational value.

Consumer technology has worked its way into the enterprise, which means that today’s CIO needs to manage on-premises systems and infrastructure, as well as cloud-based systems.

In addition, they need to deal with structured data coming from sources such as spreadsheets and databases, alongside unstructured data being generated from channels like email and social media.

Ultimately, it translates into dealing with the consumer-grade offerings often favoured by users, but still applying the enterprise-grade security required by customers, regulators and shareholders.

Fundamentally, the end-user’s priority is simplicity and ease – which employees tend to favour over data classification processes or regulatory compliance.

However, mismanaged information across an organsation can cost the enterprise millions of pounds in costs associated with litigation and compliance.

Increasingly, CIOs are assuming more responsibility for massive volumes of enterprise information and the systems that house the data. Yet, with this responsibility comes the key challenges of data governance, information security and authenticated access.

As such, today’s CIOs are responsible for keeping information processes simple but secure and compliant – and at the same time having to unlock the unrealised business potential that IT can enable.

Digital governance

It is therefore no surprise that research from analyst firm IDG shows that, according to 140 technology leaders, an enterprise information management (EIM) strategy should be a top priority for CIOs and IT business executives.

Indeed, CIOs need to be responsible for implementing the best effective digital governance frameworks across the business, in order to ensure that information is secure and managed correctly.

While the role of information management is undeniably paramount, many CIOs struggle knowing where to start.

Digital technologies stretch across every facet of a business, and organisations have rapidly growing amounts of information to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

At the same time, it’s becoming even more crucial that people within the business have quick and secure access to the information available, whenever it is need.

To solve this challenge, CIOs need to combine information management platforms with digital governance frameworks to secure the flow of information throughout the business but also provide a platform for digital transformation.

For many organisations, the CIOs ability to effectively drive digital transformation will ultimately decide whether the company remains competitive or not.

 Next wave of transformation

The role of the CIO is continuing to evolve and is centred around embracing disruptive technologies to truly deliver on the operational excellence and business enablement that new technology affords.

The pace of change is not relinquishing, and the next ten years are shaping up to be just as disruptive as the last.

Embracing the next round of disruptive IT will require more dramatic changes to internal operations and customer relations.

With products and services becoming increasingly commoditised, using technology to deliver business benefits will become the key differentiator for enterprises looking to get ahead.

This is where the transformational CIO has an opportunity to lead the way. CIOs that adopt this approach will be able to create IT infrastructures that improve the quality of products and services provided, whilst simultaneously driving efficiencies and cost reductions.

Source: The transformational CIO: a customer-centric visionary by Ben Ross