The modern business era is characterised by disruption, resulting in a highly challenging operating environment. CIOs have to balance current IT needs of the business with planning for future growth of the organisation, while driving innovation and doing so with a reduced budget, says the CIO Council of South Africa.
No longer can the CIO be an operational employee working in the background to ensure systems run effectively, or the manager who is content with transforming an organisation's support functions with newer technologies. The CIO for the mobile-first, cloud-first era has to utilise digital technology to drive business innovation to cultivate direct relationships with customers, boost revenue and profits. They must also manage as well as run the business more efficiently, and assist staff to better communicate and collaborate with customers, partners, vendors and contractors. No mean feat.
As technology and business leaders, CIOs are perfectly placed to identify end-to-end technologies that can help create new value for the business across all divisions. Innovation within a business context is about solving business problems, delivering enhanced products and services, and by so doing improving the organisation's market results. The modern CIO has to drive innovation within the company by discovering and applying technology to improve existing processes.
For this to happen, technology and digital innovations have to be discussed and reviewed by management as part and parcel of the business strategy as well as investment planning. CIOs need to be strategic in developing an end-to-end innovation plan and executing it to ensure the company is keeping up with technology trends, converting innovation into profits and operational efficiencies.
If done correctly, conventional problem areas for the CIO like cost-cutting, as well as local issues such as keeping the business functioning during loadshedding, will also be addressed. For instance, by employing the latest technology for day-to-day operations the business will increase efficiency and improve staff productivity. Newer technology also translates into a faster and more responsive organisation, resulting in the business offering a greater degree of customer service.
Transforming a business for the modern era will also involve the incorporation of cloud-based services, which allows a company's data to be stored remotely and made available as a service by way of a secure network connection, translating into businesses no longer needing to have expensive UPSes running servers during power cuts.
Whatever the size of your business, technology can help it grow. The CIO needs to be the person in charge of translating digital innovation into business innovation, greater revenues for the business and organisational efficiencies.
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