What should strategic CIOs focus on in 2013?
That’s a profoundly important question for businesses operating in a highly volatile global economy in which customers have become far more demanding and fickle than ever before, in which traditional business models are being stressed more than ever before, in which distribution and marketing channels are being scrambled like never before, and in which technology has become inseparable from business processes, customer engagement, and consumption, and much more.
As a result, the coming year will see intense CIO involvement in optimizing customer experiences, exploiting analytics, transforming Big Data to Big Opportunities, accelerating all facets of enterprise execution, mainstreaming social capabilities, and enabling co-creation of value with customers.
At the same time, on the internal side, CIOs must be primarily concerned with bending the IT budget curve away from low-value legacy infrastructure and toward new technologies that liberate precious funding for innovation, because those rapidly emerging marketplace realities touched on above will simply overwhelm traditional systems and traditional IT approaches.
The business challenges of 2013 and beyond—steeped in business analytics, Big Data, intimate and real-time customer engagement, personalized customer experiences, deeply ingrained social capabilities and outcomes, elegantly synchronized global operations and distribution—will simply crush systems that were built for very different purposes and very different outcomes.
Where to begin?
To answer that, I’ve pulled together in this column not only some of my own thoughts but also those from a couple of other industry observers whose opinions I greatly respect, and I’m presenting this as the Strategic CIO Agenda for 2013. First, let’s start with the outside experts:
In a column headlined A Proposal For IT: Set Just One Goal For 2013, Murphy suggests that intimate customer knowledge is the single pursuit that can be a disruptive difference-maker for CIOs in the coming year. Murphy recommends a 3-step approach through which CIOs can gain deeper understanding of customer wants and needs, and summarizes the challenge this way:
We're living through a historic shift that makes technology more important -- in fact, indispensable -- to building close customer ties. IT leaders can seize the moment by ruthlessly focusing 2013's goals on the customer who buys their products.
I find myself in violent agreement with Murphy on his overall premise because the only way that CIOs can continue to deliver increasingly higher levels of value to their companies and to their customers is by delegating more and more of their administrative responsibilities so they can foster meaningful engagements with those customers.
No one’s suggesting IT organizations become front-line salespeople—but what Murphy is suggesting is that without clear and first-hand awareness of customer needs, desires, and concerns, CIOs and their IT teams are at great risk of becoming less and less relevant to the ultimate goals and purposes of their companies.
Over at the IDG Enterprise media family whose primary focus is CIOs and enterprise IT, CEO Michael Friedenberg recently published his list of the Top 10 priorities for CIOs in the context of famous quotations. Here are a few that hit home for the strategic CIO:
7. "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." Leonardo da Vinci's saying reminds us that the era of IT complexity must end. What legacy systems will you retire this year?
6. "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Aristotle wasn't thinking of cloud or mobile devices here, but his aphorism still applies to technology. How will you integrate these tools to create new business opportunities?
5. "It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing." Steve Jobs reminded us how much design matters. Where can CIOs put good design to work?
4. "Resistance to change is often just a lack of clarity." Business author Dan Heath nailed it. Where can you clarify the mission for your IT troops?
In addition to those insights from Chris and Michael, in Q4 of last year I wrote several columns here on Forbes.com in which I analyzed the rapidly evolving role and responsibilities of the CIO. Here are the links to the full articles, and then I’ll offer a summary from each:
The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013
The CIO As Revenue Rainmaker: 7 Excellent Examples
Reinventing America: The Transformational Power of Technology
Want To Kill Your Career? Just Ignore The Big Data Boom
Career Suicide and the CIO: 4 Deadly New Threats
In The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013, I noted that “As you’ll see, each of these 10 is rooted in change, and calls for the CIO to be a leader instead of a follower; a disrupter instead of a go-alonger; and a business-driven executive instead of a tech-focused manager. Several themes reverberate throughout: analytics, breaking down silos, social, the cloud, and particularly customers, opportunities, growth, and innovation. I hope these prove helpful, and please share your feedback in the comments section below or on Twitter at @bobevansIT.”
Here are the top 10 issues I proposed:
1) Simplify IT and Transform Your Spending: Kick the 80/20 Budget Habit.
2) Lead the Social Revolution: Drive the Social-Enabled Enterprise.
3) Unleash Your Company’s Intelligence: Create the Enterprise-Wide Opportunity Chain.
4) Embrace the Engagement Economy: Merge the Back Office and the Front Office into the Customer Office.
5) Future-Proof Your IT Architecture.
6) Upgrade “Cloud Strategy” to “Business Transformation Enabled by the Cloud.”
7) Transform Big Data into Big Insights, Big Vision, and Big Opportunities.
8) Preside over a Shotgun Wedding: Systems of Record Marry Systems of Engagement.
9) Lead with Speed: CIO as Chief Acceleration Officer.
10) Bend the Value Curve: More Innovation, Less Integration.
In The CIO As Revenue Rainmaker: 7 Excellent Examples, I wrote, “For far too long, most CIOs have been insulated from the core missions of every business: generating revenue and profit, and delighting customers. But that old-fashioned construct is changing rapidly as technology becomes more deeply infused in every facet of business operations and almost every facet of our individual lives, and as a challenging global economy forces companies to wring new revenue out of new ideas.”
The CIO.com article on which that column of mine was based said that only about 25% of CIOs generate revenue for their organizations. Looked at another way, 75% don’t generate any revenue—and we all know the trendline for cost centers in today’s economy. So which camp do you want to be in?
In that “Revenue Rainmaker” piece, I wrote this:
As we’ve argued in this space before, strategic CIOs are ideally positioned to drive or at least help drive such new opportunities because they understand their companies’ end-to-end processes, they see where the pain points are in operations and customer engagements, they know with great intimacy what the sales organization says it needs, and more and more they are part of front-line engagements with customers and prospects because those relationships are so highly dependent upon IT.
In Reinventing America: The Transformational Power of Technology, I summarized some strategic insights offered in a recent speech given by Oracle chairman Jeff Henley and inspired by his 20+ years of working with CIOs. Here's a sample:
Henley emphasized that established companies are entering this period of profound change with some enormous advantages if they exploit them properly: “Established companies with strong corporate assets – from integrated global IT infrastructures and world-class business processes, to recognized brands and strong partner networks – are often better poised to win over disruptive start-ups in this new era of innovation,” he said.
The piece includes Henley’s descriptions of several great Oracle customers and the ways in which they’ve used technology to transform themselves to deliver not only better outcomes for their own customers but also a better future for their own organizations.
In Want To Kill Your Career? Just Ignore The Big Data Boom, I analyze a variety of trends that underscore the potentially massive impact Big Data can deliver for companies—and CIOs—that aggressively attack it as a business opportunity rather than isolate it as a hard-core tech problem.
In that column, I ask a series of questions, including these two:
Did you know: While there are now 9 billion devices connected to the Internet—mostly computers and smartphones—that number will soar to 50 billion by 2020 and include everything from cars to pharmaceutical packaging to drill bits on oil wells? (See Big Data Set to Explode as 40 Billion New Devices Connect to Internet.)
Did you know: One of the world’s leading healthcare systems is looking to “unlock the secrets of human health” by integrating and analyzing data that had been trapped in 200 disparate silos of clinical, genomic, financial, and administrative systems? (See UPMC Picks Oracle to ‘Unlock Secrets of Human Health’.)
And finally, in Career Suicide and the CIO: 4 Deadly New Threats, I make the case that if CIOs want to be treated as equals by their C-suite peers, then they have to accept the same levels of responsibilities as those peers do:
A Twitter comment yesterday quoted a CIO as saying, “It’s hard to be strategic with your pants on fire.”
No doubt about it–unless that CIO’s wearing asbestos long-johns, that’s definitely a tough maneuver to execute.
But if we’re trying to conjure up truly difficult scenarios, I’ll see that pants-on-fire bet and double it: what’s really hard for CIOs is to be strategic when they’re unemployed. Out of a job because they couldn’t juggle the brutal but essential loads imposed by the strategic urgency of today’s always-on global economy.
In that clever pants-on-fire line, substitute CEO for CIO: how much confidence will a CEO earn if he or she attempts to hedge responsibilities with the conditional qualifier that “It’s hard to be strategic with your pants on fire”?
And the four threats to CIOs I cited in that piece?
- Threat #1: Lack of Vision. No matter how technically astute, no matter how many wildly complex projects have been completed, no matter how dependable, CIOs today will not succeed and will need to be replaced if they don’t have an ability to see not only where their company and industry are and have been, but where they are headed, why they’re headed that way, and what all-new minefields and opportunities are looming….
- Threat #2: Lack of Leadership. For too long, many CIOs have been willing to sit at the kids’ table, waiting for the grown-ups at the big table to decide what would be done and how it would be done and why. CIOs today need to be active and inspiring participants in those conversations and relentless contributors to new ways for their companies to get closer to customers, find new sources of revenue, create new products more quickly, accelerate all facets of their operations, and embed value-creating technologies in not just the IT infrastructure but in the company’s products, services, processes, and culture.
- Threat #3: Trying to Resist the Social/Mobile Revolution. Whatever the objection to them and however valid those objections might be in theory, social and mobile technologies and processes are triggering sweeping improvements in how companies communicate with customers and employees, monitor discussions around their brands, engage customers and prospects more immediately and precisely, and gain real-time insights into powerful market trends and possibilities….”
- Threat #4: Surrendering to the 80/20 budget trap. In a recent column called The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2013, I ranked this as the #1 priority for CIOs in the coming year. The rationale is simple—not easy, but simple: unless CIOs lead the way in reducing the portion of their overall IT budgets now spent on low-value infrastructure and keeping the lights on (it’s typically between 70% and 80%), then they will never liberate the funds necessary to invest in and create customer-facing applications and other innovative approaches to growth and engagement….
Well, there you have it—just another ho-hum year ahead for CIOs expected to imagine and deliver indispensable market intelligence and insight, optimized business processes, unmatched customer engagement and experience, bullet-proof global security across systems of record as well as tens of thousands of handheld devices, social opportunities, and the perfect blend of cloud and on-premise systems that will ensure their companies remain healthy, wealthy, and wise.
All the best in 2013 and beyond!
RECOMMENDED READING FROM ORACLEVOICE:
Oracle's Secret Sauce: Why Exadata Is Rocking the Tech Industry
Steve Jobs, The $60 Light Bulb, And The Future Of Technology
Larry Ellison Doesn't Get the Cloud: The Dumbest Idea of 2013
The Biggest Big-Data Opportunities: How to Choose the Right One
The CIO As Revenue Rainmaker: 7 Excellent Examples
The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013
Steve Ballmer Joins Larry Ellison as Software-Hardware Evangelist
The Deadly Cost Of Ignoring Big Data: $71.2 Million Per Year
Big Data Set to Explode as 40 Billion New Devices Connect to Internet
Java Helps Twitter Outmuscle Massive Traffic Surge
Want To Kill Your Career? Just Ignore The Big Data Boom
