CIOs now control the majority of organizational budgets and are second only to the CEO in terms of shaping and delivering business strategy, research from Citrix, a business unit of Cloud Software Group, has found.
The study, with respondents across the US, the UK, Australia, Brazil, Colombia, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico and the Netherlands, was based on interviews with 3,300 business leaders working in large and mid-market businesses.
As companies strive for success against a difficult economic backdrop, they are looking to tech leaders to act as strategic business partners. According to the data:
- 67% of business leaders say the CIO is now second only to the CEO in terms of shaping and delivering the business strategy
- 64% of business leaders say the CIO has control of the majority of their organization’s budget
- 73% of business leaders believe that having a vision for the future is important for being a successful tech leader in today’s working world.
“Businesses are in a state of flux, and CIOs are right at the center. CIOs are expected to be agents of change but are still caught up with legacy infrastructure and transformation projects,” said Sridhar Mullapudi, General Manager, Citrix, a business unit of Cloud Software Group. “Additionally, they must play a key role in navigating the current talent crisis, both by providing tools to maximize employee productivity and by leading automation projects.”
Therefore, today’s tech leaders find themselves caught between a ‘traditional’ CIO role – gatekeeping infrastructure and managing Digital Transformation projects – and a ‘transitional’ role – defining and refining workplace technology and driving business strategy.
Today’s CIOs are responsible for technology transformation to supercharge tomorrow’s world of work. The hardest part of that role is managing the introduction of new, game-changing technologies without losing the value of existing systems currently powering the business. Successful CIOs will invest in infrastructures that help them both manage the past and prepare for the future, as tech leadership is now intrinsically tied to organizational success, and CIOs must adapt to their role as change agents.
Diego Vargas, Director, Kroll Colombia
In recent years, we have seen enormous advances in the Digital Transformation of organizations, which has increased the challenges and risks to overcome in the economy recently. Just as new technologies are rapidly evolving to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of operations, creating significant challenges for companies to stay ahead of the curve, so are cyber risks and threats growing in scale and sophistication.
Cyber risk has become a major concern for organizations. The Allianz 2022 Risk Barometer shows it as the most significant risk in the last year due to the increase in digitalization and remote working driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Information hijacking (ransomware), data leakage and disruption of IT services are the most significant threats companies face that can directly affect their operations or the supply chain when suppliers are involved.
The challenge is to keep adequate capabilities to protect critical information and technology assets, commonly known as the ‘crown jewels’.
At this point, the CIO becomes a vital change agent within organizations, taking the lead in breaking the organizational paradigm where cyber-risks are exclusive to the technology area and begin to have relevance at all levels within the enterprise.
The CIO must be a leader who helps the entire organization, from top management to the most fundamental operational and support levels, understand that cyber-risks affect the business and require joint solutions across the organization. But more emphasis must be placed on people, as they are the most critical point inside and outside the organization.
The big challenge facing the CIO is to achieve a cross-organizational approach that helps non-IT managers understand their roles in cyber risk management. This approach also allows IT managers to work more closely with managers in the organization. The management side understands and permanently includes the legal, financial and compliance implications of cyber risk on their agenda.
The leadership of the CIO and his relationship with people at all organizational levels is critical to helping organizations address the new risks and challenges created by the evolution and implementation of new technologies.
Felipe Silgado, Head of Cybersecurity Services, KPMG Colombia
CIOs who successfully lead organizations in an evolving digital environment can provide a cohesive vision toward moving the organization to one entity and becoming change agents.
To do this, they must consider aspects such as:
- Having a specially assembled team with the skills and talents required by the organization. The CIO can evaluate the current team, train it, and seek and attract external talent.
- Develop a product-centric IT operating model (Experience Design, Design Thinking and Dynamic budget). The CIO can start with customer-facing digital products.
- Build a modern enterprise architecture. The CIO must ensure that its employees understand the business and can respond quickly to market events and competitor actions.
- Introduce ‘Security by Design’ and the Zero Trust model. The CIO can adopt this principle for all new technology initiatives and migrate their current technology to Zero Trust.
- Take advantage of value-based managed services. CIOs should look beyond traditional service level agreements and pricing agreements and focus on integrating their vendors with their business strategy.
- Adopt modern software innovation and delivery practices. To do this, CIOs can help their companies innovate faster and with less risk by building and deploying IT systems using modern development and security practices (DevSecOps).
- Adopt a cloud-centric IT strategy. CIOs choose the cloud as an enabler of DevSecOps and ‘security by design’.
- Develop next-generation IT operations. To achieve this, CIOs can take advantage of technologies that work from the cloud to manage on-premises platforms, integrate automation into all layers of IT support and treat data as an asset.
The CIOs of the future are business technology leaders, not administrative managers, as they help drive innovation and business results. By doing it, CIOs are good assets to the organization and its customers while attracting and retaining ambitious and creative engineers, developers and data scientists.
Marcelo Ruiz, Director of Telecommunications and Technology Consulting for Latin America, Frost & Sullivan
As Digital Transformation advances in companies across Latin America and worldwide, the CIO is moving from being strictly an ICT director to a more strategic role. There is an important focus on promoting innovation in products, services and processes, and, at the same time, they have become business accelerators.
This process of CIOs as change agents in organizations considers 10 key aspects:
- The CIO evolves into a change agent on three pillars: innovation, business and development.
- Digital Transformation is at the core of their corporate strategy.
- Great importance is given to cybersecurity.
- Focus on an orchestration-integration management mode.
- Search for new technologies to have a better approach to customers.
- Profits from future projects come from technology-based business innovations.
- More emphasis is placed on the I of Information rather than the T of Technology.
- There is more active participation on boards of directors.
- Development of soft skills. Inspirational manager with less technical profile.
- Talent management and leadership in cultural changes in a Digital Transformation process.
A vital aspect is communication as CIOs need to speak the language of business and communicate effectively in the language of top management executives, the board of directors, and the development and innovation teams, increasingly focused on agile processes.
The CIO must have a different vision and a strategic mindset to be a partner, assertive, resilient to change and able to share their point of view with the various parts of an organization.
The CIO must have the ability to manage both operational and strategic perspectives. First, on the one hand, link operations to the development of the company’s day-to-day activities. Second, to simultaneously promote innovation and change by establishing new business models to make all business processes more efficient, agile, and vital to business growth and the organization’s future vision.
