Friday, December 2, 2016

The Spotlight on Digital CIOs -CIOs as Chief Improvement Officer Dec. 2016

Modern CIOs have many personas and face great challenges.

Modern CIOs have many personas and face great challenges. It is not sufficient to only keep the light on. Regardless of which industry or the nature of organization you are in, being a digital leader will need to master the art of creating unique, differentiating value from piles of commoditized technologies, but more specifically, what are the digital-savvy CIOs doing to run IT as a growth engine and innovation Hub? Here is the monthly spotlight of the CIO.       

                      CIOs as Chief Improvement Officer


  • CIO as Chief Improvement Officer: The “I” in CIO title is full of imagination; Chief Improvement Officer is a right fit for modern CIO role. CIOs need to have unique business insight, technological vision to understand the business not only from the inside-out viewpoint but through outside-in customer’s lens. With that knowledge, CIOs can drive innovation to improve the hard business process and soft organizational culture by implementing technical solution, and improve IT and overall business agility and maturity.
  • CIO as Chief Improvement Officer -How to Run a “Future-Proof” IT ? Technology becomes pervasive in modern enterprises today, on one hand, CIOs play one of the most significant business leadership roles, to manage one of the most valuable business assets -information in digital organizations; on the other side, the rapidly changing business climate also makes CIOs feel like to live in the tropical jungle, facing many attacks, in the danger of getting dismissed as techies without business savvy by their executive peers.With emergent IT consumerization trends, businesses sometimes bypass the internal IT to purchase on-demand services with potential risk compromising. At the dawn of Digital Era with an abundance of information and lightweight technologies, how can CIOs act as Chief Improvement Officers in the organization, continue improving services and solutions, craft a set of unique capabilities and run a “future-proof” IT organization for achieving operational excellence and high-level agility and maturity?

  • How to Leverage DevOp to Improving IT Agility: IT plays a significant role in building the organization’s change capability to adapt to the digital new normal. Need for agility arises due to changes in underlying assumptions. Every CIO may ask self: Is IT responsive and proactive enough to find answers and solutions in case of emerging chances? Does IT have a platform which is scalable, secure, resilient and well interconnected? For achieving agility, IT leaders should both apply the digital management philosophy based on a set of Agile principles, but also leverage DevOp and take a series of  practices to improving IT effectiveness and maturity.

  • CIO as Chief Improvement Officer II: How to Improve Application Development? Given the dynamic nature of the business today, any CIO has to play the role of key change agent and Chief Improvement Officer. Do they see application development as an innovator for driving business change? Or would they prefer to just "abstract the problem away" by outsourcing it? Since technology (and hence application development) is the key driver and support function for any change,  CIOs do need to ensure that the application development being carried out is well aligned with the business needs and the change that is taking place accordingly?


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