Much has changed for the chief information officer (CIO) since the job title emerged in the 1980s. The evolution of the CIO role has always mirrored the evolution of technology in business. Over the decades, it’s morphed from IT department management to service responsibilities to technology integrator. The current evolution is toward digital transformation, requiring that the CIO gains even more strategic influence over business outcomes.
Historically, IT innovation followed a path of ideation, considering, and then recommending various technology options. These events are now compressed into one holistic process in which the business, technology, customers, and partners are at the table brainstorming solutions together.
CIOs are looking to the cloud to further accelerate the speed of innovation and delivery of solutions. Rapid innovation requires a cloud that can deliver autonomous services that reduce risk and save time, productivity that’s cloud-scale and flexible, AI and ML that’s built in, application migration and development that are intuitive, and security architected at every level. Cloud services can help businesses adapt to market changes, while maintaining consistency in operations.
The role of CIO has become more central as it tackles more strategic priorities and has demonstrated how IT can deliver results with adrenaline and agility
Lead cultural shifts
CIOs are now thinking as both technology leaders and executives in their organizations, with responsibilities across those interests. They’re consolidating the functions of fragmented IT teams and implementing a strategy of “you build it, you own it.” This organizational and cultural shift fosters ownership and better understanding of the customer and can drive real change.
IT is also evolving how it engages with its partners to drive value. CIOs are looking for people who are broad enough in their education and management skills to engage leadership and have an approach of what’s right for the business.
View IT through a customer lens
Aligning efforts with the needs of the customer is one of the most effective ways CIOs ensure that IT’s work is strategically important to the business. These past two years have CIOs focusing more on analytics that can transform the customer experience. CIOs are now balancing legacy systems with digital enablement in a way that is conducive to producing value for the customer. This positions CIOs to engage with customers in new ways.
Looking ahead, the CIO is going to be on the front lines with other business departments, focusing on customer-facing products. The role of the CIO could evolve even further toward something akin to a chief innovation and product officer.
Enable the business to run on data
Every business is becoming a technology business, and data has been moved up the priority list. Working with leadership, CIOs are bringing the importance of data to their boards and are educating profit and loss leaders on how they think about their data.
With the volumes of data streaming in, analytics takes an important position. CIOs are investing in resources, such as data lakes, data lakehouses, and visualization tools. The value of data is realized more when examined across the organization, so CIOs look across the business to make better decisions faster. Companies are even establishing reporting and analytics competence centers that sit within IT and business units.
Data is becoming the differentiator for companies, which has created a need for technology and analytic data leadership within an engineering culture.
Focus on flexible workloads and automation
CIOs are aware of how workloads are migrated and managed, and they’re demanding better line of sight to capacity management. With flexible workloads, CIOs can meet the response demands of their organization and customers. Using the same pipeline in a repetitive fashion helps gain velocity when migrating various types of workloads. This flexibility extends to every application, ensuring that enterprise workloads can scale globally.
CIOs are also finding that workload management and governance models are important from security and span of control perspectives. As a core competency, they’re ensuring that workloads can continue to grow in a place that IT can still control.
CIOs are creating governance models to ensure oversight and structure around the provisioning of infrastructure that allows the organization to scale up or dial down as needed. Flexibility greatly matters when companies can easily have thousands of applications and workloads.
CIOs are the future orchestrators of innovation
The modern CIO is an organization’s leader, strategist, steward, and catalyst for all aspects of business solutions, computing systems, enterprise data, IT management, and technology.
To build the future, CIOs are cultivating cultures of intellectually curious, analytical, and emotionally intelligent teams that create value for the business. The CIO can be responsible for multiple sets of platforms and services that are fully enabled by the cloud with automation built in at every level, ensuring that data flows where it needs to go in an automated way.
The future role of the CIO has the potential to be one of orchestrators, making systems and teams work together. The CIO can become a catalyst, with the ability to identify and employ their organization’s data, knowledge, and talent, ultimately increasing strategic impact.
Much has changed for the chief information officer (CIO) since the job title emerged in the 1980s. The evolution of the CIO role has always mirrored the evolution of technology in business. Over the decades, it’s morphed from IT department management to service responsibilities to technology integrator. The current evolution is toward digital transformation, requiring that the CIO gains even more strategic influence over business outcomes.
