There’s a big shift going on among CIOs. By managing boxes and pipes, they make operations hum at top efficiency. They have these tasks down pat. Instead, increasingly, CIOs say their main job is setting strategy by helping their organizations craft new business models, tackle risks and forge closer relationships with customers.
This high-stakes evolution is the key finding of research we conducted with 1,600 CIOs around the world. Tech is shaping companies’ destinies and no one knows this better than the CIOs on the front lines.
Still, these tech leaders concede they have ground to cover before vaulting into this new role of strategy setter. Only 66 percent think their IT departments have mastered the basics of tech. More than 50 percent say that when it comes to performing complex activities, there’s room for improvement.
So what are CIOs doing to move forward? Our survey found three main steps that CIOs at the top-performing companies are taking. They all revolve around forging stronger ties with customers:
1) Engage digital savvy customers: First, smart CIOs are teaming up with Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), who are also pushing the digital envelope. Next, instead of launching projects piecemeal for melding the physical and digital world to reach out to customers and create new products, they’re crafting broad, cohesive strategies.
Even more crucially, CIOs at top-performing businesses realize that to improve the client experience, they have to know customers better. Many companies have plenty of data — carefully collected from social networks, apps, Web sites, supply chains — but what they lack is actionable insight. That’s why so many respondents want to invest in new technologies for crunching all those bytes with two goals in mind:
Using sentiment mining and social network analysis to identify behavioral patterns and predict trends before the rest of the market.
Using analytics to quickly and effectively analyze the profitability of products and services so they can change their offerings on a dime.
2) Shine at the basics: of data centers, office automation, architectural standards and policy framework. CIOs have to get the basics right before turning their focus to business strategy. Yet, more than 50 percent of the CIOs we spoke with say their big data platforms, which underpin their businesses, aren’t scalable or extensible.
By comparison, outperforming companies were 42 percent more likely to have exactly this kind of platform in place. This can be a very costly difference. Keeping servers running typically gobbles up 65 percent of an IT budget in a company with a basic data center, but only 47 percent in a corporation with a highly efficient one, according to a separate survey by IBM and researcher IDC.
Meantime, when it comes to handling nuts and bolts, few CIOs have mastered the challenge of managing IT risk. On average, a company is pelted each week with 1,400 security attacks. That’s going to get worse as organizations rack up more information about customers and open up corporate networks with the rise of mobile devices and the cloud. Which is why CIOs at top companies are getting aggressive about improving their defenses. They’re 60 percent more likely to invest in more sophisticated tools for measuring and managing risk.
3) Boost collaboration inside and out: It’s not just what people know that makes them valuable, it’s what they share. When employees, suppliers, and partners cooperate, they’re more productive and innovative. Some 70 percent of CIOs expect to work with a broader group of partners in the future — not to boost efficiency or cut costs, but to bolster strategy. Which is why 82 percent of CIOs at leading organizations are putting in tools to improve collaboration, compared with just 69 percent at under-performing enterprises.
Mobile plays a big part in these plans, with more than 50 percent of the most successful companies reporting that they’re now equipped to do business anywhere, via any device. Still, CIOs struggle to address legal, security and privacy issues with employees who want to bring their own devices (BYOD) to work. More than 25 percent of the CIOs we spoke with report they’re holding off on BYOD, though ultimately they may have little choice but to consent.
Over time, playing a strategic role will come down to another fundamental kind of collaboration: working with the rest of the C-Suite including “new” IT buyers such as CMOs, Chief Financial Officers and HR. Part of managing the expectations that companies are placing on CIOs will mean getting buy in. This comes down to crafting partnerships at the top. Over time, every aspect of a company’s business will depend in one way or another on technology — and the CIO.
via IBM Smarter PlanetVoice: Three Things CIOs Can Do To Improve Company Strategy – Forbes.
Three Things CIOs Can Do To Improve Company Strategy
