I‘ve just returned from a CIO Forum in Cape Town where, according to Prof Pete Janse van Vuuren, an Executive Partner of Gartner in South Africa, business is demanding three things of the CIO:

1. That they be more flexible.
2. That they deliver quicker.
3. That they become easier to do business with.

Many CIOs feel squeezed. The easiest thing for you to do in these tough times is to cut back and lay off. Yet that may be exactly what your competition wants. What they don’t want is for you to be introspective (improve business processes), innovative (deliver products that enable growth), and positive (attracting and retaining new customers). Although CIOs will have similar budgets to those of 2007/2008 to meet these challenges, overcoming them will see you in a great position in the next upturn.

Splitting ‘I’ and ‘T’
Along with other business units, IT will need to reduce costs and improve performance. But IT is in a unique position to lead enterprise change initiatives, and to harvest value from core technologies already implemented. A focus for CIOs in the next few years is going to be on business intelligence and security technologies, Gartner predicts.

Many of the companies polled by the survey see the possibility of splitting information technology into its component parts, with the CIO taking charge of information whilst the CTO deals with technical issues. CIOs would then outsource their technical needs to the CTO, who would have the decision of how to smartsource the requirement. In any event companies want the CIO to get a lot closer to business than they have in the past.

So big challenges lie ahead for CIOs as you come alongside business to strengthen and extend your position in the market, whilst at the same time matching cost structures and expecations with the reality of lower business activity. Oh, yes. One more thing… be more approachable.

Tagged as: agile, cio, competition, competitor, cto, introspection, outsource, smartsource