Welcome to the inaugural edition of Transformer, the official magazine of the CIO Council of South Africa. In this issue, we introduce the council, explain its work and provide, what I hope you find to be, some insightful content around the increasingly-important and ever-changing role CIOs play in organisations. Simply put, the CIO Council of South Africa provides CIOs with help and support, where needed. It also creates a community that is able to share best practices and even advice, if requested.
The role of this publication is to add further depth to this community, and with our extended digital versions provide you with extra content from our quarterly events. This first issue of Transformer is themed 'The business value of IT' and contains articles that provide insight into how the different functional areas of business are fast-realising the value that technology plays. We also look at how the role of the CIO is vital in helping these functional areas maximise the return on their technology investment.
CIOs operate in a changing world, and need to be transformers themselves if he or she wants to survive. The increasing variety of tasks and technology demands resulting from megatrends, such as mobility and analytics, and the functional tech areas that would have traditionally fallen under the CIO's responsibility have grown exponentially. Another megatrend, cloud computing, has also changed the dynamics in organisations and suddenly there's a plethora of functional leaders who all want to play a part in IT decision-making.
The chief marketing officer, chief financial officer, chief human resources officer - the CIO has to work together with all of these folks in order to stay abreast of the times and meet business needs. In addition, the CIO is undergoing their own change as they are being expected to move from being inward-facing on pure technology issues to playing a vital role in enabling innovation and differentiation and being a strategic change agent for the organisation. More than ever before IT needs to partner with business for growth and transformation. CIOs need to embrace this challenge if they want to grow the business and prosper in our beautiful country.
I hope you find something of interest in these pages, whether you're viewing the hard copy or flicking through our digital version. This is our first issue, and we want to make Transformer a valuable resource that gives you insight and interesting information.
We would appreciate your feedback and input, so if you want to get in touch, you can e-mail the CIO Council of South Africa at uweitz@microsoft.com.
We'd love to hear from you.
Happy reading
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