"The 15th annual State of the CIO report reveals that IT leaders are caught between the demand to ensure functional efficiency and security and the need to drive digital transformation as strategic business partners," says CIO.com editor, Dan Muse.
"While many CIOs face a complex balancing act between business operations and IT strategy, it's in their best interest to position themselves as strategic leaders."
The reality is that the modern CIO is facing a challenging environment where expectation spans across the need to significantly increase operational performance... while still, and most crucially, playing an active role in terms of formulating and delivering on the organisation's overall business strategy.
It is a complex and intricate portfolio to manage, with many CIOs pointing to functional areas of the business as a hindrance to their role in relation to larger organsational objectives.
In order to gain maximum strategic value from their respective CIOs, companies need to provide support in managing the unenviable task of reducing total cost of ownership (TCO), while improving the business services, operational performance, security and reliability of their ICT function.
Functional CIOs experience a disconnect between aspiration and reality.
With the emergence of digital business models and the continued pull of cloud computing, many companies today are undergoing continuous change, a state that appears to be reflected (at least in part) by the persistent dominance of the "transformational" CIO archetype. (See 2016 State of CIO report)
Asked how they expect to be spending their time within three to five years, 68% of CIOs indicated they would be focused on growth-oriented activities.
While it isn't surprising that most CIOs are eager to devote their time to business strategy, a disconnect between their aspirations and daily reality may be the reason why "functional CIOs" (in their survey response) indicated levels of frustration far surpassing other archetypes.
Strategic CIOs are influential partners
Relationships with business stakeholders have always been important, but they are arguably becoming more so.
The trend toward business leaders making more decisions about IT spending is accelerating faster than CIOs have anticipated, highlighting the need to collaborate more with their line-of-business (LOB) counterparts.
In companies where IT is seen as a business partner or leader, CIOs control more IT spending on average compared to companies where IT is considered a cost centre or service provider.
ITaaS can help companies gain a strategic advantage
"Challenging economic environments demand fresh perspectives and strategies," says Borwood Group's Paulo Borrageiro. "It requires clear metrics and analysis to support ICT in relation to business performance."
Due to the structure and environment of an enterprise-level business, the technology and (more specifically) communication requirements are usually:
* Wide-reaching, therefore complex;
* Multi-layered, therefore expensive; and
* Business-critical, therefore demanding.
Looking at the result from this latest survey, it is clear that the "state of the CIO" in 2016 is one of frustration between "wanting" a greater overall view and organisational input - and "having" to dirty hands as functional requirements continue to circle back to the CIO.
"Companies want their IT to become more effective and efficient, ensuring predictable performance while supporting increased business demands," says Borrageiro. "The future is cloud-based services that deliver value to business by automating everything from requests to deployment and configuration."
The future . . . is finding, and partnering, with global technology providers that specialise in the delivery of architecturally designed ICT solutions, geared to help organisations find that healthy equilibrium, where business and IT are aligned in terms of operations, innovation and strategy.
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