Waking Up to the Potentials of Being Digital: Time for Strategic CIOs

Authored by Rajesh Janey, President and Managing Director, India Enterprise, Dell EMC

An unprecedented period of change is gaining momentum, buoyed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. With the rapid proliferation of smart and connected devices, mobile services, and big data and the growing demand for real-time insights, data is, understandably, transforming traditional businesses into digital ones. 

Against this prevailing landscape, it’s no longer a privilege but an imperative for organizations to shift from ‘doing digital’ to ‘being digital’. It’s the time for initiating a paradigm shift throughout the organization, which will provide agility and innovations for technology platforms, processes, and people in the organization that, too, under a unified vision and leadership. And this has put the role of CIOs at the center of all business activities, morphing them into hybrid, strategic CIOs. As revealed by a study1, 31% CIOs are increasingly able to devote time to strategic tasks, while maintaining oversight of IT operations. 

Strategic CIOs—A Blend of Tech & Business Acumen 

Strategic CIOs are the ones who are not only prioritizing the appropriate digital technology and delivering necessary capabilities to initiate digital transformation, but are also going beyond these activities to assimilate digital into organizational DNA, thereby delivering enhanced value to key stakeholders. 

Now, they are also getting entrusted with overseeing people, processes, and technologies so that IT outcomes can support business objectives. They're arguably loaded with operational duties to drive necessary business transformation across the organization. Bearing a testimony to the fact is a 2018 Gartner CIO Agenda Survey, revealing that 56% of CIOs are spending their time related to business outcomes. 

However, in this growing digital business, CIOs are also compelled to rise to several challenges, such as: 

• Leading a Culture of Transformation across Digital, IT, Workforce, and Security verticals within the organization so that it gains a competitive advantage over their competitors. 

• Building and Empowering Teams with the intents to accelerate innovations and give opportunities for data scientists, application developers and other members in IT to assist senior executives in identifying new opportunities. 

• Setting the Budget: In recent years, IT budgets have usually stayed flat or lessened. However, there has been a significant rise in IT expectations. With budget constraints, CIOs need to explore different ways to provide economies of scale as well as scope while being able to cater to specific business objectives. 

• Partnering across the business and providing ‘as-a-service’ offerings to cater to business requirements. 

Navigating through this challenging landscape 

To win over these challenges, strategic CIOs are capitalizing on technologies and creating more connected organizations by focusing on: 

• Digital Darwinism: To create a culture of transformation, strategic CIOs are looking beyond technology and embracing new and different business models, as technology and society are evolving faster than businesses can naturally adapt. For example, some CIOs are considering hybrid cloud-computing model to innovate faster while reducing costs. On the other hand, some are using digital co-creating platforms to capitalize on third-party intelligence in their innovation projects. Here I can cite the example of Tasmanian Atlantic Salmon producer, Tassal. The company was looking for a way to enhance decision-making and productivity. Under the leadership of its CIO, the company adopted an IoT-connected approach wherein it started gathering, analyzing and modeling huge amount of IoT sensor-generated data using Dell EMC solution. This helped the company reduce costs while increasing output. Further, it enabled the company to improve productivity, its decision-making process, and ensure sustainable salmon production.

• Reskilling the IT workforce: To deliver high-quality services to end-users and stay relevant for the business, strategic CIOs are developing their IT workforce with a key focus on building strong relationships with the LOBs and thus are expanding the business skills of their IT employees. They’re also empowering their IT employees so that they can see the bigger picture, develop their people, communication and financial skills, and identify new ways of using technology to move the business forward. 

• Renewing focus on security transformation: Strategic CIOs are best-placed to protect their companies’ data and guarantee business continuity. When embarking on the security transformation journey, strategic CIOs are mainly focusing on integrating security into their endpoints, network, and data to ensure that the infrastructure is proactive rather than reactive. They are also advancing security operations by renewing their focus on an automated response to intrusion, and most importantly, changing their approach to risk management, given the fact that technology is the business today. 

Seek Limited, for example, was challenged by its ability to capture all the risk information it needed and actively report on it in a timely manner. Following the implementation of best practice tool, RSA—a decision undertaken by its IT leadership, the company was able to create up-to-date, centralized reports for use by executives and senior managers, drill into the details on particular risks, and take a very quick decision. 

The time has finally come for CIOs to don their strategic hat and make digital transformation real all across their organizations, leveraging a seamless blend of people, processes, and technology. At Dell EMC, we are providing strategic guidance and expert integration of Dell EMC products and solutions to help CIOs accelerate transformation across digital, IT, workforce, and security so that they can achieve optimal business outcomes. To know more about our services or the changing role of strategic CIOs, stay tuned with us as we’ll provide in-depth insights from our forthcoming event, Connected CIO, at Dell Technology Forum. 

Sources:  1 CIO.com, State of the CIO, 2017