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New pressures on the CIO

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10 September 2014

There is certainly pressure on the CIO because you have the demand for innovation, flexibility and speed that can all too often contradict your architectural boundaries. So you have to balance those demands for flexibility with the necessity for a stable environment. That is the essence of the pressure on the CIO, Conor O’Brien, Capita

In many ways the constant hype and talk about the changing role of the CIO and the new and changing pressures on the job actually serve to prove the most salient point: this is a pivotal role in the modern organisation. As plans are drawn up and projects organised, only some of which may be inherently digital, the CIO and IT department are on everyone else’s critical path. The ICT industry’s marketing voices continually point to technology as an ‘enabler’, which is true but hardly new. Since the earliest punched card days, organisations have used technology to accomplish tasks, usually more accurately and faster than limited human ability. With the obvious exception of the ICT industry, technological advance is never an end in itself but a step towards the better accomplishment of the work we humans delegate to it.

“Ultimately today it’s all about the convergence of SMAC technologies — social media, mobility, analytics and cloud — which used to be separate issues. But for me that’s not really what ‘digital’ is today,” according to Daniel Benton, a 26-year Accenture veteran who now leads its global IT strategy consultancy. Based in London, his CV includes secondments as Group CIO for Bank of Ireland and CIO for Prudential in the UK. “Your life as a CIO used to be really straightforward, joining the business and technology agendas together — the right IT plan for a well-defined business strategy. But in recent years we have seen global uncertainty, which makes traditional three-year business planning even more difficult.”

Consumer driven
“The other major factor is that, increasingly, it is customers and consumers who are driving the digital agenda. They all have very strong views on what they need and if you can’t provide it they move on elsewhere. It’s also true that every executive, every employee is also a modern consumer and at least a partial expert in using technology. So instead of the CIO working out how to serve the business strategy, increasingly the business strategy discussion itself is about how to create new value out of technology.”

So what does the CIO have to do, what does that mean for the role? “In theory it has always been the CIO who has worked with the business to look at how technology can create value. But in practice, I think they have tended to be reactive. Today, if the CIO is not the critical person driving that debate and digital agenda, someone else is going to do it instead. Yet the problem every CIO has is like that famous old Irish response to a request for directions — ‘If I were you I wouldn’t start from here.’ Because all CIOs have legacy systems. There is an organisation and architecture I have inherited, plus the decisions I made in the past.”

Digital definition
Benton refers to Accenture research that has been going for 10 years into high performing organisations in IT. That 2013 report was pointedly titled ‘Defined by Digital’. “The thing that has been there right through but is particularly true this time is that CIOs need to succeed in three key dimensions. The obvious one is Execution, delivering reliable IT at reasonable cost. That is just table stakes. The other two that have come very much to the fore are Innovation and Agility.”

Daniel Benton_web

Instead of the CIO working out how to serve the business strategy, increasingly the business strategy discussion itself is about how to create new value out of technology, Daniel Benton, Accenture

The innovation element is not about anything exotic or futuristic, Benton emphasises: “It is about owning that debate around delivering business value out of technology. Then comes agility, which is all about responding quickly to changing business priorities. We are seeing a huge move towards people trying to deliver IT in a different way in the digital world. The problem is that in the corporate world that is not always the right way to do it. So the smart CIO has to find a way to manage a hybrid. That hybrid can be in architecture, so for the foreseeable future we will be combining on-premise systems with various types of cloud although we can expect the balance to change over time.”

“Now that is what most people think of as ‘hybrid’,” says Benton. “For me, the more interesting hybrid is how to manage the old waterfall legacy way of delivering technology with this new smart agile way. I believe that means working closely with the business through a set of experimental innovative projects and incubators and understand which projects respond well to that new process.”

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