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March 29, 2023 - by Synoptek
A company’s chief information officer (CIO) is responsible for overseeing the people, processes and technologies that comprise its IT environment to support business objectives. In today’s information-focused business landscape, the performance of an organization’s CIO is often critical to its overall success.
The role of CIO’s and the specific responsibilities of the position have undergone significant evolution and now demands a more enlightened and holistic approach to the issues that affect the way IT impacts the current and future goals of the business.
Conventionally, the CIO’s primary concerns were focused on managing and operating the organization’s technology infrastructure. Specific responsibilities of a traditional CIO include:
While the above expectations still remain relevant, today’s market of economic uncertainty, fierce competition, and rapid technological advancements requires a lot more from the CIO to flexibly navigate an increasingly complex business landscape.
With ongoing challenges related to accessibility, recruitment, attrition, and the rising cost of skilled labor, it’s imperative for CIOs to not only uphold their own organizational duties but also effectively build, manage, and/or outsource a team of skilled and nimble technology professionals who can implement, support and stay in lockstep with ever-evolving technology systems and business models.
At present, technology has a more definitive impact than ever on organizational outcomes. In turn, the CIO’s role has expanded to include the promotion of digital transformation and collaboration with other C-suite executives to ensure business objective alignment across all areas of the organization.
Modern CIOs need to be keenly focused on customers, revenue-generating technological solutions, and innovative methods to reduce organizational risk. They need to provide their company with a path forward that leverages technology with agility and modernization to increase speed to market, enhance the customer experience, and reduce cybersecurity risks to enterprise data resources.
CIOs have a new set of duties related to driving business growth and improving operations. The role demands a more collaborative approach that incorporates input from all business units to determine the most optimal way to leverage technology to improve performance throughout the organization.
An enlightened CIO does not accept the status quo of a company’s technology stack, but instead, continuously searches for new solutions and disruptive trends that will further benefit the business. The CIO views digital transformation as a crucial and ongoing process that evolves with business requirements and innovative technological developments.
In the current business landscape, every organization is a technology company, despite the industry. For this reason, CIOs should always have a pulse on new and emerging technological solutions and advancements available that can enable new ways of leveraging an organization’s data resources. Using these solutions wisely can determine the difference between a company that becomes a market leader and one that languishes in mediocrity or eventually becomes obsolete.
The following are some areas of particular interest to enlightened CIOs for ensuring their organization stays relevant and ahead of the curve within its respective industry:
Certain risks must be addressed by the enlightened CIO when implementing or scaling up technology solutions. The ways these risks are handled must be balanced with business requirements that result in the addition of technological solutions designed to focus on both economic and security-related concerns.
Economic risks include deciding the viability of implementing new technology versus relying on obsolete or inefficient solutions that can negatively impact performance and damage the business. A CIO must know when to pull the plug on inefficient solutions and adopt innovative new processes to drive greater, long-term success.
Potential threats related to cybersecurity abound in today’s computing landscape, and defending against them should be a major CIO priority to protect the company’s valuable data and IT environment. This includes addressing the security talent shortage, dealing with budget constraints, improving readiness in the event of a cyber-attack and supporting the challenges posed by a remote workforce.
An enlightened CIO is crucial when it comes to driving business success. The most important facets of this include:
The CIO should also look to become strategically involved in:
Enlightened CIOs realize the benefits offered by strategic outsourcing. They understand that the challenges around addressing rapidly changing business and technology concerns can be significantly minimized by an increased reliance on consultants or third-party managed service providers. The most common and impactful reasons to leverage outsourcing include:
A CIO, like any other individual within an organization, is accountable for his/her performance. Board-level management is responsible for regularly assessing the CIO’s business achievements, attributes, and contributions to ensure those endeavors are results-driven and in full alignment with the organization’s main priorities.
Following are some of the key areas that top internal stakeholders and decision-makers focus on when measuring a modern CIO’s level of success:
Today’s CIOs need to move away from the traditional mindset around their role and take several steps to promote a more enlightened and improved long-term approach. They need to work with other members of the executive team to keep everyone in the organization focused and committed to leveraging and utilizing effective technology that will yield long-term benefits for the business.
Rather than running siloed departments, CIO should push for developing and incorporating a strategically aligned, holistic approach across all teams where technology becomes a consolidating force that instrumentally moves the business needle in a positive direction.
Original Article posted on BetaNews, Inc.
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