Agile CIO- Transformation from an IT Leader to Business Leader – challenges ahead.

Agile CIO- Transformation from an IT Leader to Business Leader – challenges ahead.

In reality, technology is changing quickly, but the CIO’s responsibility is to understand the needs of the business and then translate that need into how they meet them. New technology is not that interesting unless it solves our business problems. We need to understand the business problem first and then understand the technology. What is important is to decide where one can apply new technology to the business. CIOs need to be literate but need not be updated on every single technology. One of the key challenges for IT is to keep up to the business. Business keeps changing. There are talk around how to align IT with their business. Main challenge for CIOs would be how to globalize and start connecting with the rest of the world. As companies become more global, being a CIO of that single country company is actually easier than being a global CIO of a global company. It is challenging due to issues such as regulatory requirements, understanding the culture and connect with business leaders.  

With unprecedented business growth and IT being the key driver for it, expectations from a CIO are increasing. Technology enables the ‘C’ suite to run a sound business. That said, technology investments need to be made wisely, otherwise they can adversely affect a business. The role of IT is defined in most organizations today as a business partner. There is complete awareness at the top about the potential of IT to facilitate fulfillment of business objectives. If an organization gets results from a few IT deployments, those strengthen its positive conviction about IT. Once this happens, the sky is the limit for the growth of the IT function in that organization. This is the most opportune time for IT to grow by aligning with the business. It’s time to act as business partner and to be a CIO Leader not merely into a support function.

“If you are in Production kind of set up than bottom line is that production should go up with cost coming down,” says Manik Pal CIO, Orica “ So you need to come out of technology kind of thinking and say YES to innovations”. True CIO leadership requires two important abilities. Firstly you must lead with your business colleagues to set expectations and to identify what is valued by enterprise leaders and secondly, you must lead your IS Team to deliver on that.

“Legal and regulatory issues, New products introduced by competitors, the entry of new competitors, their success or failures, product pricing, raw material pricing, trading and there are other issues you must know to be a leader.” Continues Manik Pal.

It is prime importance for a CIO to have in-depth knowledge of business processes in order to identify a problem and than suggesting technology oriented solution to it. “So identify Key Performance indicators in given environment. This is where your actual transformation strategy starts taking place.” Explains Subroto Banerjee General Manager IT, Sterlite Group. “When you implement a system it is very important to relate it with business processes and do a thorough profitability analysis before identifying Key performance indicators.” Any investment needs a return visible in profitability of company. And first stage to show that visibility is sound planning of any system. Anything devised should be close to Product management having direct impact on sales of product. “A value proposition analysis will help but most importantly you must put your house in order. You must create effective governance weaving Business strategy and IT strategy. IT strategy is the content of key IT domains – IT maxims, infrastructure, architecture and application strategies and investment.” Advocate Shyamal Raichowdhary CIO Tata Tea, “once you have developed a vision aligned with business goals you must develop team to achieve business goals. Develop such teams and building competencies required for IS organization one that relies much more on internal and external relationships. Than comply issues like Information security, data privacy, cyber terrorism with regulatory structure of business.”

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worse when they despise him....But of a good leader who talks little when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, "We did it ourselves. Another challenge in way to become Business leader from IT Leader!

Learning Transition process

CIO	CIO Leader
Help to let business function	Help to business grow
Technology up gradation	Business up gradation
Serve department requirements	Serve organizational requirements
Concern about cost, quality and security	Strategic partner in decision making
Technology process improvement	Business process improvement
Contributing to technology innovations	Contributing to Enterprise agility