CIOs mean business
What does it mean to be a chief information officer? More than ever, businesses are leaning on their CIOs to deliver digital transformation on a large scale — and that means understanding a vast and ever-changing landscape of technologies.
That’s the word from Foundry’s 22nd CIO survey, in which a majority of 837 responding executives, 77%, say their roles have been elevated due to the state of the economy, making them one of the most visible proponents of change within their organizations. The top three activities CIOs plan to focus on in next three years are driving business innovation; redesigning business processes; and modernizing infrastructure and applications.
Most CIOs (85%) believe their role is becoming more digital and innovation focused. Another 70% anticipate their involvement in cybersecurity to increase over the next year, and just over half (55%) also anticipate their involvement in data analysis, data privacy/compliance, and AI/machine learning to increase.
The CIO’s role now demands greater immersion, inspiration, and insight — into both technology and the business. “The CIO role is very quickly becoming much more technical hands-on, as well as being the delivery engine of transformation for the business,” says Fletcher Previn, CIO of Cisco, in an interview at the company’s New York offices. “A lot of companies require a less of a CIO generalist and more of an IT practitioner with deep subject matter expertise on how technology can deliver what the business is trying to do.”
That means leading with technical expertise, as well as leading with business expertise. Sixty-eight percent of IT leaders say they currently have revenue-generating responsibilities, up from 65% a year ago. While last year when cybersecurity was the top-cited business and technology priority, this year “it was all about transformation in pursuit of higher efficiencies,” the Foundry survey authors state. Increasing operational efficiency was the top business initiative, cited by 45%. Transforming existing business processes through tactics such as automation and integration was the third-ranked objective, cited by 38% of respondents.
Security and risk management technologies are still expected to drive the most IT investment in 2023, cited by 38% of IT leaders. IT leaders also cited data and business analytics (34%), application and legacy systems modernization (28%), and machine learning or artificial intelligence (26%) as other target areas for investment.
Previn foresees CIOs assuming greater roles in supporting hybrid workplaces, along with design roles to enhance workplace technology as well as corporate enterprise systems. “It’s a very servant kind of role,” he relates. “We serve those who serve others. I’m here to enable everyone to do the best work of their lives. Every minute people spend struggling with something is a distraction from the thing they were hired to do. Our job is to get after those experiences, remove friction from the environment, and enable people to do their best work.”
Design thinking within enterprise technology areas “was a really novel concept for people, thinking about it from the lens of the experience first, and the solution second,” says Previn. “Before, we just accepted the fact that things were difficult to work with — a clunky bad experience. Now people come to work and think, ‘you know who I am, you know what my job is, and people spend billions of dollars on this.’ They should be better than this on experience, it should be the best experience of my life. That’s easy to say and hard to do, but that’s directionally where the CIO job is headed. Surrounding people with the things that they need without them being aware of it, and enabling hybrid work, which is going to be a very significant set of IT challenges which need to be solved right – with security, remote access, ways of working, and culture.”
