Businesses around the world are witnessing digital transformation today and CIOs have an key role in it. Read on to know more about it…
Businesses around the world are witnessing digital transformation today. Digital transformation is sweeping through businesses, giving rise to new business models, new and different constraints, and presenting a need for more focused organizational attention and resources in a new way. According to a Gartner report, 125,000 large scale organizations are launching digital initiatives. Digital transformation is expected to double from 22% to 46% by 2020.
Digital transformation is not just a technology or a trend, which anyone can learn and implement quickly. Only a few are there who has mastered the skill to take competitive advantage. It requires leadership, proper strategy & clear implementation. Digital transformation has been the main source to implement, control and manage all the technological innovations in the business process.
CIOs Role
With the innovation of digital technologies, a lot of CIOs are getting things on demand. It is the CIO who is responsible for any organization’s direction towards digital transformation. As organizations invent new business models through digital transformation and bring new strategies, they also carve new roles CIOs.
To support digital transformation agendas, CIOs face a set of journeys in which they need to dramatically modernize their traditional functions. They first must think about their relationship with the business. To meet the needs of the business in a much more intimate, proactive, deeper way requires more investment and organizations with deeper Industry domain knowledge and relationships. They need to move talent from remote centers back onshore to be close to the business so that they can better understand in a deeper way what the needs are and act on those quickly.
Second, the IT operating model needs to change from its historical structures so that it can deliver a seamless operating environment. The waterfall structures that still pervade IT need to change into a DevOps model with persistent teams that don’t change, teams that sit close to the business. IT also needs to accelerate the organization’s journey to automation and cloud.
To meet the new charter, the CIO organization also needs to change its mind-set, ensure deeper business knowledge and increase agility and speed. In addition to modernization, the CIOs should call into question the historical organizational structure of IT with functions such as network, infrastructure, security, apps development, apps maintenance, etc. In the new digital charter, these functions inevitably start to collapse into pods or functions aligned by business services.
Conclusion
As digital transformation is gaining momentum and clear initiative taken by enterprises are visible, the role a CIO in taking right decisions as well as implementing, and controlling the same becomes even more important. As mentioned above, substantial organizational technology and organizational change is required within the CIO’s organization to live up the new mandate.
CIOs are carrying the major responsibility of driving technological change. Those who are not willing to take the challenge to transform their business processes, always carries a risk of becoming an ordinary player in their Industry.
