IT Leaders Event - Digital Business Transformation 'Step In and Drive IT'
The 'Executive Leaders Network' delivering the 'IT Leaders Event' met last week with over 100 CIO and CTO directors from key UK organisations. There were keynote presentations mixed with roundtable discussions.A common theme through the day was digital transformation and the CIO role, with a particular emphasis on CIOs needing to reinvent themselves to stay abreast of new delivery methods, to drive new digital opportunities and to see IT from the customer or user perspective.
Chris Day spoke of 'Addressing the Digital Challenge' at AstraZeneca. He defined six traits of digital ready IT leaders: (a) Delivering strategic vision of how technology will transform business, (b) Relentlessly focusing on innovation, (c) Focusing on driving growth, (d) Ensuring vision is understood, (e) Moving beyond infrastructure and operations, and (f) Embracing smart risk taking.
New IT skills need to be developed to deliver the transformational digital opportunities.
The meeting gave strong support to the view that today's CIO must play a dual role: builder of technology and builder of the business. A very good article, 'The dual roles of the CIO in the digital age' examines this principle further.
2 comments:
Absolutely. Being "just" a CIO doesn't mean that a myopic IT-centric view should be maintained.
A bigger perspective is needed - what will this do for the whole business? Can we transform things, or will it be a poor investment?
Sometimes a degree of pragmatism is needed - some innovation can easily be ignored if all it will do is to serve as a spanner in the works in the short term. Many of today's CIOs seem to be unaware of life outside technology and IT projects.
We need CIOs that understand the whole of the business, whether it's assembling test kits for diesel engines or running a public internet service. CIOs must have a bigger picture than just project management and technology.
Thanks for your comment. This discussion leads on to the concept of a Chief Digital Officer (see blog entry).
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