The Monthly “12 CIO Personas” Book Turning: CIOs as “Chief Investment Officer” Apr. 2019

The digital CIOs have to wear different colors of hats and master multiple leadership personas and management roles effortlessly.

This book “12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practices” is the extensive brainstorming and logical content expansion of my book “CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of IT,” to reimagine and reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence. The important thing is that CIOs as the top leadership role must have a strong mindset, a unique personality, and a clear idea of what needs to be done, yet creative enough to not hold the company back from growth. Regardless of which personality they have, digital CIOs need to be both transformational and situational, innovative and tactical, business savvy and technology insightful, communication-effective and operation-efficient. Here is a set of blogs to brainstorm CIO as “Chief Investment Officer.”

CIOs as “Chief Investment Officer”

CIOs as "Chief Investment Officer": Improve IT Investment and Visibility? With the exponential growth of information and emerging digital technologies, IT faces an unprecedented opportunity to refine its reputation, also needs to take more responsibilities as a true business partner. IT has to catalyze change, focus on innovation, and enable business growth. Digital CIOs should understand business outside-in, help the organization generate revenue, improve IT visibility, investment transparency, as well as the overall organizational maturity.

CIO as "Chief Investment Officer": Running Digital IT with Pragmatic Advancement: With the increasing pace of changes and emerging on-demand IT service models, many IT organizations are at the crossroad to either transform themselves as the strategic business partner or gradually turn to be irrelevant. When IT becomes only the mechanism for realizing a vision described by other C-level executives, it becomes a commodity. An effective CIO is a true business partner! Leading CIOs must be able to convey the technological vision, run a high-performance digital IT organization with pragmatic advancement and drive changes proactively.

CIOs as “Chief Investment Officer”: How to Manage IT “Yield On Return”? The digital mantra for IT leaders is to run IT as a business. Statistically, Information Management investment represents one of the largest categories in the business budget. Thus, for many CIOs, they need to be able to support the essential investment with sound Return On Investment reasoning. It tells business management how well IT investment repays the company. When CIOs can present the measurable business value of IT investment, they are on the right way to reinvent IT from a cost center to the value generator.

CIOs as Chief Investment Officer: Three Aspects to Unleash IT Enabled Digital Potential All ambitious businesses strive to unlock their business potential. Performance keeps the business lights on, the potential could enable the organization to reach the next level of business growth cycle and maturity. Nowadays, technology is the disruptive force behind digital transformation and information is the gold mine all forward-thinking businesses are digging in, and companies across the industrial sectors claim they are in the information management business. CIOs as “Chief Investment Officer”: How to unleash IT-enabled digital potential?

CIO as "Chief Investment Officer": How to Present IT Value to the Business Successful CIOs know not only know the IT side but also understand the business, as the CIO is not just the guy/gal running the PC help desk anymore. There are far larger, business-oriented responsibilities on the horizon, the skill set of the CIO is going to transition from running IT infrastructure to best applying IT to business problems. Thus, on one side, the CIO is a Chief "Intrapreneur" Officer to run IT as a startup, on the other hand, the CIO acts as a “Chief Investment Officer” to scrutinize business case, master business language, and well prepare what if you have a seat at big table, how do you present effectively.

Modern organizations have their own sophistication with silo functions, the sea of information, and the pool of talents. The CIO is an inherently cross-functional role, to bridge the business and IT; the data and insight, the business’s today and tomorrow. The digital CIOs have to wear different personas and master multiple leadership and management roles effortlessly. They need to lead at the strategic level for conducting a complex digital orchestra; they should be handy managers to plumbing information and keep it flow smoothly; they also have to be like the diligent gardeners, to build a unique IT landscape via tuning technology, removing waste, nurturing culture, and empowering people.

Posted in: CIO Leadership,CIO Master,IT Finance,Sum UP