Digital transformation now permeates across all organisations and industries, giving rise to new business models, products and services. Likewise, this upward shift has also led to the transformation of several roles within an enterprise, specifically the CIO, writes Wael El Kabbany, Vice President, MENA and Eastern Mediterranean, BT Global Services.
Moreover, as the scope of what is digitally possible remains uncertain and is characterised by the lack of a blueprint, boardrooms expect their CIOs to be a driving force behind transforming business in innovative ways by combining business knowledge and in-depth technological expertise.
BT’s recent global survey of more than 1,000 CIOs shows that CIOs are becoming ever more central to the boardroom and overall business strategy, in addition to leading strategic application of technology.
The creative use of technology plays a crucial role in not just transforming costs or business efficiency, but also in improving customer experience and enabling sustainable growth. It has evolved as a competitive differentiator influencing market paradigms.
CIOs have their eyes set on the most disruptive technology trends such as cloud, mobility, data and collaboration technologies. And network sits at the heart of this technology revolution and acts as the lifeline for businesses.
The disruptive impact of these trends requires a skill-set that embraces faster-paced change. The CIO and IT team are transforming to be more of innovators and an enabler than the command and control centre. Internally, they are also leading, leveraging and managing the rapidly growing ecosystem of partners and vendors. Flexibility around new business needs, faster adoption of technology trends and more agile working practices are now regarded as the CIO’s crucial assets.
Despite the fast-changing CIO role, old practicalities and pressures remain. Nearly two in three senior IT decision makers feel the CIO is forced to spend more time maintaining current IT systems, than to search for new solutions. Senior IT decision makers surveyed also cited pressures from digital transformation creating new challenges for the CIO, such as implementing digital strategy organisation-wide, developing new business models to cope with increased connectivity and engagement, and finding the right talent.
Our survey shows that many business leaders driving digital transformation are not in IT, with almost one-fifth of IT spending in the next two years taking place outside the IT department. The relationship between IT and the increasingly empowered end-user is more complex. However, CIOs are not threatened by this and see it as an opportunity for IT to work better in partnership with other parts of the organisation.
For example, choice, agility, flexibility, speed, security and reliability are key attributes for cloud. Hence, CIOs are looking for a cloud solution that combines network, cloud services, professional services skills, and security expertise to provide users with easy and safe access to required applications and data. This gives CIOs the confidence to let their partners and colleagues discover their Digital Possible.
When Digital Possible is viewed in the context of service management, it throws the spotlight on the traditional silo-based approach to managing IT and communications services, which has increased complexity and operating costs in step with the rise in technology adoption. The future of digital IT service management will be defined by the ability to manage your network, IT assets and applications from one solution, regardless of what it is, where it is and who is managing it. This requires a solution that isolates the fault domain in the first instance, in a matter of seconds – one that will also offer application visibility and control. True digital service integration calls for better visualisation of the service layers which are ICT vendor-agnostic.
Without exception, every CIO considers the digitisation of business to be a personal priority.
As champions of positive change, CIOs have started seeing their IT function evolve as a key enabler of innovation and disruption. The new role of IT is to increase business flexibility, whilst ensuring data security, robust infrastructure and efficiencies of scale across the organisation.
Technology has never been more vital, with one CIO telling us that “this is the age of the network”.
Today, CIOs need to be strategic, creative, growth-oriented and cost-conscious. They need to understand both technology and people, and balance control with empowerment. The most successful CIOs are embracing change rather than resisting it.
This makes the digital CIO one of the most demanding roles in business today.
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