Three Roles to Make CIOs Stand Out

CIOs today must stand out as a unique business leader by wearing multiple personas and taking many hats on to run IT as the business partner and digital engine.

Due to the exponential growth of information and continuous technology-led disruptions, it is increasingly important to run a business-driven digital IT organization for dealing with “VUCA” digital new normal and driving digital transformation proactively. CIOs today need to be dynamic people with multidimensional intelligence, multi-faced personas, multilayered professional competencies and have a multitude of leadership qualities in order to lead IT as a trustful business partner and business growth engine.

Digital Strategist: Traditional CIOs are often perceived as the tactical manager to run IT as a support center, but digital CIOs need to become a real part of the senior executive team for running IT as an integral part of the business, especially as more and more enterprises are leveraging IT for revenue generating initiatives; CIOs need to be empowered and engaged at the most senior level to help influence and shape the business of the future, co-develop the organizational strategy, and drive changes relentless.y. They should “keep the end” in mind, make IT strategy as an integral part of the business strategy, focus on solving critical business problems, not just overcoming technical challenges. It means that CIOs must adopt the attitude and styles of strategic leadership, share their technological vision, provide the fresh insight and offer something in their dialogue that really helps business partners see how they can capture business growth opportunities and develop unique business competencies. Re-imagining the future of business is exciting, but reinventing business takes both bold leadership and strategic planning. IT needs to be influential enough to offer customers premium solutions in the right manner at the right cost. The CIO as the transformative digital leader must move away from a pure IT manager and become the trustful business partner and insightful strategist.

Digital fundamentalist: To run IT as a credible business partner, keeping the lights on with the bottom-line efficiency is always fundamental to achieve operational excellence. Make sure IT systems running following the preplanned schedule and performance standards. Because IT maintainability is decided by the quality of IT delivery, reusability, module design, and process flow, etc. But to move the step further, in the digital era with the increasing pace of changes and overwhelming growth of information and lightweight digital technologies, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work to engage diverse workforces, develop new business models and delight customers. Either individually or as the team, learn how to do the 'basics' well, such as listening, asking questions, giving and receiving feedback, as well as dealing with conflict or even constructively advocating a point of view for building trusted relationships. Don’t confuse the digital fundamentalist CIO as the micro-manager who keep the hands-on mundane tasks only. In fact, high-effective CIOs can play a great leadership role by delegation, automation, and hands-off. They can take a step back for understanding thing holistically and build solid groundwork for keeping things work smoothly.

Digital Experimentalist: Digital is the age of innovation; it provides the opportunity to think the new way to do things. It forces business leaders today to get really creative on how they architect and implement innovation and be experimental to try new things. The essence of innovation is made of trying the new combination of known things to create new stuff and figure out the better way to do things. Digital innovation processes need to be rigorous, not too rigid; an organization that has a lightweight process which allows creative ideas flow, get protected, channeled and nurtured will succeed more often than an organization that does not have such a process. CIOs as digital experimentalist can help people feel more comfortable with chaos, uncertainty, ambiguity, and risk-taking in order to cultivate a culture of creativity. Often, innovations come from the floor and not the ceiling: the bottom-up employees have a better understanding of customers and appreciation of business processes and keep aware of organizational structures. They have first-hand knowledge about how to make things working better and faster. The pace of change is increasing. Yesterday’s solutions cannot solve the emergent problems in the digital era. Digital CIOs should help to foster integrity, trust, and transparency to build a creative working environment for ensuring that IT is strategically positioned to be ahead of where the business is moving next. It is about running IT as a business, with a healthy and shortened business cycle of planning, funding, designing, experimenting, scaling, building, operating, securing, optimizing and maturing.

CIOs today must stand out as a unique business leader by wearing multiple personas and taking many hats on to run IT as the business partner and digital engine. From doing digital to going digital and being digital is the journey which is full of opportunities and risks. It’s crucial to leverage unique IT knowledge and capabilities to build business competency as the key success factor in making the seamless organizational digital transformation.

Posted in: CIO Leadership,CIO Master