FEATURE: STATE OF THE CIO
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THE SURVEY SHOWS THAT
NEARLY TWO-THIRDS (63%)
OF CIOS BELIEVE BUSINESS
AND LEADERSHIP SKILLS
ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN
TECHNOLOGY ACUMEN.
concept around the prevention of breaches
has become a board level issue tailored with
CEOs tending to be the ones driving the
digital agenda because obviously, it’s an
organisation-wide transformation that needs
to happen.
But the CIO owns many of the platforms, the
systems and the capabilities, whether they’re
on-premise in their data centre, or they’re
using a cloud-based service, like ServiceNow.
Because of that capability, they can deliver
more quickly and therefore, their voice has
been heard.
What advice would you
give to CIOs who wish to
position themselves as
business visionaries?
For years, there’s always been this thing
around the idea that IT must align itself
with the business, which almost became a
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INTELLIGENTCIO
cliché. I think it’s now at the point where
CIOs actually talk in terms of value or
outcomes – where they have to understand
the customer journey or the employee
journey and what they are actually trying
to achieve. Technology is obviously a major
enabler of that.
But unlike the way IT departments once
were, being able to own everything, manage
everything and monitor everything with
public cloud capability and platforms is no
longer the case.
You might be using something from
Microsoft or AWS and it’s really around
proving that you can deliver value quickly,
easily and autonomously at times. Gone
are the days of not being on time or over
budget. Because we have seen many
instances where a business has said, ‘if you
can’t deliver it to me, then I’m going to go
around you and do my own thing.’
So, I think for the CIO, it’s about alignment
and delivering value, but also truly
understanding the outcome that the
business is trying to reach. And in some
cases, helping to support this and in other
cases, getting out of the way and saying:
‘A cloud-based platform like ServiceNow is
the right way to go. Go and do it. We can’t
do any better, so we’re going to get out of
the way’.
With other members of the
C-suite unlikely to be IT experts,
how can CIOs educate them on
how IT is providing value for
money for an organisation?
I think it’s educating them on what it is
they’re trying to achieve and how technology
enables that. I actually think that the better
CIOs who have done this well speak less about
the technology and the gadgetry and say, ‘we
know what you’re trying to achieve, we know
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