Simon Wijckmans, CEO, c/side.
What’s in a name? Or in this case, what’s in an “I”? The role of the Chief Information Officer is undergoing significant scrutiny, expansion and, within many organizations, confusion. Traditionally, the CIO has been the guardian of a company’s IT infrastructure – ensuring the security, efficiency and reliability of information systems. However, the pace of technology, particularly post-COVID, has seen the scope of the CIO’s responsibilities grow considerably. Those responsibilities have increased the pressure to usher in seamless and scalable technological transformations, turning the “I” in CIO into Innovation, whether implicitly or explicitly.
But the re-assessment of the role goes further. Again, because of the pace and breadth of technology advances, innovation can no longer be realistically confined to a single role or department.
It has become a collective responsibility, one that must be embedded into a company’s culture (hint: CIOs should lead that change). This need for collective responsibility raises the argument that the CIO, as a sole innovation leader, might already be an outdated concept. Instead, technology innovation should be driven by a collaborative effort among leadership—and be an integral part of all of their roles.
It’s also worth noting the emergence of the Chief Information Security Officer role is playing a critical part in the reassessment of the CIO role. Initially focused on cybersecurity, many CISOs have evolved into impactful change leaders across broader technology decision-making, adept at managing complex processes without hindering organizational agility. Despite the diffusion of innovation responsibility, the need for a central figure to oversee information security and technological processes remains, and will remain, vital.
The CIO in this role – and really no matter what “I” actually stands for here – must be a strategic leader who not only understands the intricacies of IT systems (the traditional role) but also drives and encourages innovation in collaboration with other executives. This more hybrid CIO role requires a balance of technical acumen and visionary leadership. With technology advances over the past few years, many organizations (especially larger enterprises) are still playing catch-up on the latter.
Justin Perkins, Chief Technology Officer, Image Relay
By necessity, the CIO’s role is modernizing from that of a traditional IT manager into a more proactive, more strategic leader who can usher in real and lasting digital experience transformation across their organizations. Employees’ digital experiences have an increasingly decisive impact on company productivity, talent recruitment and retention, and market competitiveness. Smooth digital experiences are no longer a “nice to have.” With CIOs’ decisions having an ever-greater influence on broader business success, the role is under more pressure to improve these experiences with the right technology and automation strategies.
Employees’ goals for their own careers and day-to-day happiness (especially among high-demand talent) are fully aligned with those of the CIO. Where employee digital experiences include shortcomings – such as being forced to work with legacy technologies, overcome outdated workflows, and perform tedious busywork – it’s no surprise when employees update their resumes and set out for greener pastures where they can be more effective. CIOs who make it their role to eliminate obstacles to efficiency (and, frankly, the boredom that dampens employees’ digital experiences) do their organizations a tremendous service. Where a CIO implements a digital experience blueprint that empowers employees to take initiative and do their best work, the direct results are more employee satisfaction, greater operational agility, and an edge over competitors.
In pursuing process automation to improve digital experiences, CIOs are smart to work closely with employees themselves to get the strategic details correct. Employees are eager to remove pain points from their processes—and they understand those pain points better than anyone. Often, existing processes can be streamlined even before introducing new automation technology, thereby improving the ultimate success of these initiatives.
As part of their evolving role, CIOs should also leverage employee knowledge to select appropriate metrics for success and ensure that employee expectations around new workflows are positive and realistic.
Becky Trevino, Chief Product Officer, Flexera
The role of the CIO has been through a series of challenges the last few years, starting with the intense demands on IT to facilitate remote work during the pandemic, continuing to post-pandemic budget decreases, attempts to right-size IT use and leading us to the current AI hype cycle. While generative AI (GenAI) has only been publicly available for a year and a half, adoption was extremely fast. According to Flexera’s State of the Cloud Report, a quarter of survey respondents stated they were already using GenAI from public cloud providers extensively. An additional 38% of respondents were experimenting with it in their organizations; only 14% of survey respondents were not using GenAI at all.
While some organizations are already seeing competitive advantages from early AI adoption by improving employee productivity, CIOs are now left trying to reconcile the costs. Budget decreases in 2022 and 2023 have left CIOs with little room for AI investment, but this work cannot happen within a vacuum.
The role of the CIO is now more collaborative, with a significant interplay between IT and finance. The role of FinOps has become integral to mitigating cloud costs, and the collaboration between engineering, finance and business teams at the heart of the FinOps framework is also being replicated in the c-suite. As 71% of survey respondents say their organization is heavily reliant on cloud, it is no surprise that managing cloud spend is the top priority, which requires collaborative efforts from the top-down.
This cautious approach must also filter to how GenAI is being implemented; managing spend is key, but in order to manage spend, you must ensure the technology is being used in the most strategic ways. This again goes back to the importance of collaboration; strategic planning needs to align for the entire organization, and organizations need their CIOs to collaborate with various stakeholder groups to foster a culture of teamwork. CIOs can bridge various operational functions including revenue, sales, marketing and product operations to enable faster innovation while still maintaining cost efficiency and mitigating sprawl, on top of maintaining security positions.
Now that the rush to implement AI is subsiding, a more thoughtful strategy can be implemented to right-size the tech stacks that keep every business functioning. CIOs need to optimize in order to innovate and reduce wasted spend to further invest in GenAI and other innovative technology. Continuous improvements, leveraging collaboration, are at the core of technology optimization, rely on the right tooling and a strong ITAM and FinOps practice.
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