The responsibilities of CIOs in modern business are changing as the business landscape continues to change, says Cycan CEO Bryan Hattingh.
"It is more than clear to see that companies today are becoming more and more dynamic and competitive," he commented at Information Security World in Johannesburg this week.
This also brought with it many challenges for the CIO, which included exponential and hyper-lateral change, commoditisation, desegregation of business ownership, as well as cost versus value challenges.
Internationally, he said, the responsibility of procurement had also started becoming part of the CIO portfolio, and this was also resulting in the birth of a new position of the CPIO - chief procurement and information officer.
But he noted that it was sad that in some cases the CIO was not even represented at board level.
It was common to find that CIOs were often mistaken for operational managers of IT, as they found themselves ensuring IT served its purpose as a service to business processes, he said.
He added that a successful modern CIO had to have the following qualities: scalability, adaptability, creativity, agility, open-mindedness and a willingness to learn.
He stressed that they had to be able to embrace risk and have pragmatic, outside-the-box thinking to survive in today`s business landscape.
Although risk was always associated with disasters, CIOs should harness the lessons gained, as this knowledge could make for better business decisions.
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