The role a CIO performs is in the middle of a maelstrom of technology and business change. As technology has become more intertwined with business strategy, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish where technology ends and business starts or if there should be a boundary between the two at all. The goal of aligning business and IT is being replaced with fusing business and IT, and the pressure of executing this change falls squarely on the CIO’s shoulders. The essential nature of IT, having both tactical and strategic effects on the business, makes prioritization and business balance extremely difficult to execute. The CIO role must simultaneously reduce costs, quickly respond to business needs, and improve the quality of services provided to employees and customers. The CIO is responsible for managing and ensuring ongoing operations, mission-critical systems, and overall security, from help desks and enterprise systems to service delivery and program management.
CIOs are responsible for making strategic investments in information technology solutions that support their organization’s business objectives. They are focused on using data to improve their business. They know that making better decisions increasingly depends on having real-time access to large, diverse data sets, and sophisticated analytics capabilities. In addition, as executive leaders, they’re also ultimately accountable for the bottom line.
Despite exponential data growth, the rising expectations of end-users, increasing IT complexity, evolving security and compliance requirements, and the ever-growing demands of the business — IT budgets are not scaling in the same fashion. In addition, every CIO is becoming a “cloud operator,” ensuring their business services can scale.
In fact, most IT budgets, while sizable, are fixed, leading to zero-sum scenarios where the introduction of one new tool or technology means another is being let go or left behind.
To complicate things, the actual cost of switching to new tools or platforms is a risky endeavor. New technology may require new training and/or new hiring. And, given the accelerating pace of change within the technology landscape. Think about it. One wrong move on a given technology could both slow a company down and erode its competitive advantage. Put, CIOs have too much data in too many places and an urgent need to find signals through the noise, fixed budgets, and accountability for the bottom line.
In turn, they are seeking an integrated and proven set of capabilities that allow them to:
- eliminate data silos,
- transform data into insights, and
- have an impact on day one — while scaling to address multiple use cases.
CIOs are a crucial part of an enterprise’s digital transformation. Cloud computing, big data analytics, mobile computing, and collaboration platforms pose new challenges for CIOs. And AI, the Internet of Things, and digital disruption are having more influence on the direction of consumer products. With these technologies in the driver’s seat, the CIO is less concerned with running the IT department. Focus has shifted to service analysis, data security, and market reach. The explicit impact of a CIO can be determined with a variety of metrics, though improving the company’s bottom line is a must.
Remember, a CIO typically looks inward (inside the company), aiming to improve processes within the company, while the CTO looks outward, using technology to improve or innovate products that serve the customers.
Responsibilities
- Drive digital transformation and migrate to the cloud.
- Develop cloud-native operations and processes.
- Invest in edge computing as appropriate to drive innovation (A.I., machine learning, IoT, etc)
- Harden and secure IT apps, infrastructure, and data against cyber-security threats.
- Education and change management up, down, and across the business.
- Digitize and modernize IT infrastructure.
- Define and implement consistent strategic planning to accelerate business growth objectives.
- Ensure tech systems and procedures lead to outcomes in line with business goals.
- Oversee the development of customer service platforms.
- Manage IT and development team personnel.
- Managing all technology infrastructure
- Overseeing IT operations and departments
- Aligning and deploying technology to streamline business processes
- Increasing the company’s bottom line
- Focusing on the requirements of internal employees and internal business units
- Collaborating with ISPs and vendors to drive productivity
- Approve vendors and clarify their role in IT architecture.
- Information risk management (IRM).
- Establish IT policies, strategies, and standards.
- Develop and approve technology roadmaps, migrations, and budgets.
Pain Points (Moving Away From)
- Culture Change. Culture change is the most challenging part of any technology leader’s job. At its core, culture is about the way people think, talk, and interact with each other. If that foundation is not in place for the leadership team and your line-level employees, dysfunction, finger-pointing, perceived bureaucracy, and missed opportunities will creep in.
- Increasing the time spent managing vendors. Vendors often confuse this responsibility with cost-cutting and thus mistakenly avoid it when they speak with a CIO. The CIO role indeed has a responsibility to reduce costs, but not across the board, just with commodity suppliers. CIOs actually have a responsibility and motivation to increase spending with vendors that partner with them to create new ways of adding value.
- Increasing the time spent on regulatory compliance. This responsibility includes protecting the business itself, protecting it from the loss of intellectual property (IP), and protecting against business disruption. This area of the CIO’s responsibility has become of such importance, and so intertwined with primary business operations that large or highly exposed organizations have a dedicated chief information security officer (CISO). Given the impact that failing to protect against one of these losses has on a company’s share price, this is a responsibility that likely keeps many CIOs awake at night.
Gain Points (Moving Towards)
- Drive business outcomes. Increase revenue and profitability (shareholder value), drive innovation (be more competitive), and enable the business to respond to market changes (be responsive) as efficiently as possible (reduce costs).
- Streamline customer experiences. Align the organization’s technology and operations teams in order to better meet the changing needs of its clients in an increasingly digital market. By combining technology and operations, CIOs align the technology fabric to deliver seamless end-to-end client experiences effectively.
- Reducing the time spent maintaining existing IT systems. The rule of thumb is that organizations invest 70% of their IT budget on maintaining existing systems and expanding existing capacity to support business growth. This makes this an area that CIOs currently have to invest large amounts of time and effort into and see significant value in eliminating.
- Leading Change. Good IT teams manage change, but the best ones lead it. As the pace of change accelerates today—and at a time when technology is, in many respects, a critical asset of a company—organizations are demanding their IT departments demonstrate more leadership than ever before.
- Increasing the time spent focusing on future needs. The 30% of the IT budget that remains after maintenance costs is far too little to realistically allow the CIO to pursue alternative investments in new revenue-generating strategies. This has led CIOs to demand that their vendors go beyond “meeting a specification” to suggest new and clever ways to solve internal business problems and improve their customers’ experience. In short, as your customer, how will you become a problem-solver for them?
Typical Tasks and Activities
- Collaborates with members of the executive team to identify ways IT can assist the company in achieving business and financial goals
- Building out new infrastructure without jettisoning what works. Blending new and legacy to create well-managed hybrid ecosystems
- Identifies new IT developments and technologies; anticipates resulting organizational modifications
- Ensures that IT and network infrastructure adequately support the company’s computing, data processing, and communications needs
- Develops and implements the IT budget
- Communicates goals, projects, and timelines of the company to the department; plans ways to execute those goals within the department.
- Establishes long-term IS needs and plans and develops strategies for developing systems and acquiring software and hardware necessary to meet those needs
- Assists as top-level contact for end-users in determining IS requirements and/or solutions
- Ensures compliance with government regulations that apply to systems operations
Business Questions to Ask CIOs
Business Questions
- What is your biggest challenge in trying to grow the business?
- Where are you migrating to the cloud, and how are you prioritizing those workloads?
- What are some of the challenges you’re seeing in evolving your infrastructure?
- How are you giving people access to see the same thing so they can be more proactive?
- How do you analyze your specific environments and workloads to get in front of challenges? (i.e, server environment, mobile environment, or email environment, etc.)
- How are you capitalizing on customer data to proactively arm and equip customer-facing employees to elevate the customer experience?
- A lot of our customers in your industry are struggling with <xyz>. How are you handling that issue?
- What do you regard as the most critical factors when working with your IT partners?
- What are your growth plans? What markets or verticals are you trying to get into?
This article will outline 3 focus points on the CIO role to help you understand what they do to offer them real value.
FOCUS POINT 1: A CIO’s Goals
The goal of aligning business and IT is being replaced with fusing business and IT, and the pressure of executing this change falls squarely on the CIO’s shoulders. The essential nature of IT, having both tactical and strategic effects on the business, makes prioritization and business balance extremely difficult to execute. The CIO role must simultaneously reduce costs, quickly respond to business needs, and improve the quality of services provided to employees and customers. In addition, the CIO manages and ensures ongoing operations, mission-critical systems, and overall security, from help desks and enterprise systems to service delivery and program management.
FOCUS POINT 2: Being in Love with Data
CIOs are responsible for making strategic investments in information technology solutions that support their organization’s business objectives. They are focused on using data to improve their business. They know that making better decisions increasingly depends on having real-time access to large, diverse data sets and sophisticated analytics capabilities. In addition, as executive leaders, they’re also ultimately accountable for the bottom line.
Despite exponential data growth, rising end-user expectations, increasing IT complexity, evolving security and compliance requirements, and the ever-growing demands of the business, IT budgets are not scaling in the same fashion. In addition, every CIO is becoming a “cloud operator,” ensuring their business services can scale.
FOCUS POINT 3: Balancing Technology with Budget
Most IT budgets, while sizable, are fixed, leading to zero-sum scenarios where the introduction of one new tool or technology means another is being let go or left behind.
To complicate things, the actual cost of switching to new tools or platforms is a risky endeavor. New technology may require further training and new hiring. And, given the accelerating pace of change within the technology landscape. Think about it. The wrong move on a given technology could slow a company down and erode its competitive advantage. CIOs have too much data in too many places and an urgent need to find signals through the noise, fixed budgets, and accountability for the bottom line. In turn, they are seeking an integrated and proven set of capabilities that allow them to:
- Eliminate data silos,
- Transform data into insights and
- Have an impact on day one — while scaling to address multiple use cases.