The State of CIO: Evolution of the CIO Mandate and Role

by
These days I am presenting the analysis of the State of CIO in this blog. So far I have summarised insights from a successful CIO in my 50 Things to Know Becoming CIO post, followed by analysis of the Priorities and Focus for 2012 and beyond based on the Harvey Nash CIO Survey.  In this post I will be analysing and summarising another influential industry survey from IBM. 

The 2011 Global CIO Study – Essential CIO is a comprehensive survey of 3000+ CIOs across Public and Private sector enterprises. More importantly is spans 70+ countries and 18 industries. So this is well rounded view of the CIO function in its true sense and any regional, industry biases and variations are essentially balanced by sheer volume of variety of insights in this influential piece of data collection and data analysis.


The key question which this survey is focusing on is, “How are technology leaders helping their organizations adapt to the accelerating change and complexity that mark today’s competitive and economic landscape?” The headline finding of this survey is “CIOs increasingly help their public and private sector organizations cope with complexity by simplifying operations, business processes, products and services. To increase competitiveness, 83 percent of CIOs have visionary plans that include business intelligence and analytics, followed by mobility solutions (74 percent) and virtualization (68 percent).“

Lonely Tree by Evgeni Dinev

The key takeaway for me from this insight is that the CIO and the IT function is no longer isolated or lonely in the evolving business and operational world. Rather the IT function and CIO role is stepping up to the challenge and evolving at similar or greater pace. The study classifies all the responses it has received in four distinct patterns called as “CIO Mandates”, namely Expand, Leverage, Transform and Pioneer. The editors of the report state, “These mandates were derived from iterative analysis, including state-of-the-art statistical and textual analysis of the thousands of CIO responses. It revealed typical response patterns associated with each mandate. Each pattern indicated a distinct approach to IT leadership derived from specific organizational needs.“


The Leverage Mandate is about demand from organisations for high-performance IT which needs CIOs to focus on managing essential IT activities and getting information to decision makers faster and more accurately. 52% of the focus of CIOs with this mandate is to provide fundamental services while 28% is to manage and boost the organisational process efficiency.

The Expand Mandate asks CIOs to focus on cross-enterprise growth while continuously tune business processes and internal collaboration to gain tighter integration. An overwhelming 98 percent of those CIOs said they would lead or support efforts to simplify internal key processes. A full 95 percent said they would lead or support efforts to drive better real-time decisions and take advantage of analytics.

The CIOs with Transform Mandate look beyond the boundaries of the enterprise to simplify business processes and generate real-time insights up and down the value chain. Organizations that operate with a Transform mandate expect IT, more than anything else, to be a provider of industry-wide solutions to support business. The survey reports that CIOs with this mandate are expected to spend more than 33% of their time and budget on this focus.

With a Pioneer Mandate, CIOs are seen as critical enablers of the organization’s vision and typically spend less than one-quarter of their time or budget on delivering fundamental IT services or business process efficiency. This group of CIOs ranked product/service profitability analysis and product/service utilization analysis as their top two priorities for turning data into usable intelligence.



The report concludes by stating that, “Whether an organization requires an emphasis on delivery of essential IT services or challenges the CIO to pioneer new opportunities, CIOs need to innovate. With ongoing technological shifts, the seemingly endless onslaught of data and the increasingly frenetic pace of change, making incremental improvements to operations may no longer be sufficient.” 

The message is loud and clear, The Role of CIO is Evolving. Innovative approaches to advance the business forward is IN. Efficiency improvements and “keep the lights on” are expected as “Business As Usual” and no longer enough to secure the seat at the Board. Modern CIO needs to be a true business leader who owns and manages to Technology to deliver true business value and advance the business forward.


CIO Insights is part of IBM Executive Exchange which can be accessed here.


If you liked this blog post, you may also like;

Understanding security aspects of Cloud initiatives

by

The Open Group recently published a whitepaper, An Architectural View Of Security For Cloud,which is the first in a series being produced by the Security For The Cloud and SOA project. In this whitepaper we introduce a method that helps organizations t…

Demystifying Business Innovation

by

Guest post by John Sviokla Why innovate? Because the growth of your business ― and, ultimately, its success and sustainability ― demands it. In the past two decades over a billion new customers have entered the market economy, mostly in the parts of the world we now refer to as “emerging markets”. In the eyes of today’s CEO ― regardless of his or her home market ― that’s where the action is: it’s among the […]

If you liked this, you might also like:

  1. Business Innovation or IT Innovation?
  2. Medical Technology Innovation
  3. CIO Guide to Technology Innovation

Strategically Federating IT

by

IT must rethink how to deliver on its promise to enable the business. IT-centric efforts are falling short and IT experts seem to be stumped what to do about it. This is why a few years ago in search of a solution I turned my attention from mainstream …

Categories Uncategorized

Governance, and Policy Management Processes: the Linkage with SOA

by

Business Rules and Process FlowIn a recent post, A Model of an Organization’s Control Function using IDEF0 Model, The OODA Loop, and Enterprise Architecture, I briefly described the Governance and the Policy Management processes within the context of t…

Who Drives an Enterprise Architecture Initiative? Part 2

by

Depending on the scenario, enterprise architecture projects can be led by different people and groups within an organization. In the first of our three-part series published last week, we discussed a customer case study where enterprise architects drove the need for implementing an EA solution, but this is just one example.  With a powerful enterprise […]

Related posts:

  1. Who Drives an Enterprise Architecture Initiative? Who drives an enterprise architecture initiative? Does it come from…
  2. Enterprise Architecture still delivers in recessionary times Enterprise Architecture (EA) increasingly covers a broader role in an…
  3. The Road Ahead for Enterprise & Business Architecture With a new year upon us it’s always exciting to…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Active Information Writing

by

I’m proud to share that Esther Schindler, a real writer and editor, invited me to contribute to her latest project, the Input | Output site, which is sponsored by HP.  On Input | Output, you’ll find me in the community section, writing about one of my favorite topics: Active Information.

Active Information is the term I use to describe accelerating the transformation of data to value.  From a technology perspective, Active Information covers a lot of ground, including (but not limited to) sensor/instrumentation (smart stuff), event-processing, data science, analytics, data visualization, data processing innovations and enterprise data management practices.

My first two posts are up:

McKinsey Global Institute: Big Data = Big Opportunity

Twitter as Mood Ring

Give ’em a read.  Check out the full site.

 

[Disclosure: This is a for-pay gig.  However, I’m under no obligation to write about HP, its products or services.]