IBM’s inaugural CIO study paints a new portrait of the CIO’s shifting role.

In a fast-moving business environment, how can today’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) make the biggest impact on behalf of the entire organisation? Not content to be known just as accomplished IT experts or perpetual seekers of savings, CIOs are redefining their role and progressively influencing at board level.

The voice of the CIO is being heard in new

ways, as CIOs are increasingly recognised as fully-fledged members of the senior executive team. Today’s successful CIOs are much more actively engaged in setting strategy, enabling flexibility and change, and solving business problems. The industry is witnessing that increasingly, the days of the CIO solving just IT problems are quickly disappearing.

With the majority of businesses in New Zealand and Australia being either small or midsized and having fewer layers of management complexity, it is no surprise that CIOs from this region are highly involved in business strategy – more so than their global counterparts. In general the ANZ market is dominated by a high number of medium-sized distribution and industry sector businesses, with 60% of CIOs working in organisations with 1000 to 10,000 employees.

Interestingly, today’s CIOs spend an impressive 55% of their time on activities that spur innovation. These activities include generating ‘buy-in’ for innovative plans, implementing new technologies and managing non-technology related business issues. The remaining 45%  is spent on the essential, more traditional CIO tasks related to managing the ongoing technology environment. This includes reducing IT costs, mitigating enterprise risks and leveraging automation to reduce costs elsewhere in the business. This proves that today’s CIO, whilst focused on the day-to-day job, is equally focused on driving business value and continually improving efficiencies and overall business operations. With CIOs becoming more involved in the business, they are increasingly forced to juggle a number of different roles.

CIOs universally acknowledge that some of their most important objectives too often seem to clash, including how to support the introduction of new services while avoiding the disruption of existing services. How can you reduce costs while improving services? How will you balance the need to influence business strategy with the need to provide top-notch IT support?

Complementary or conflicting roles?

On any given day, CIOs are poised for the unexpected, leading an organisation that solves a myriad of problems for customers, both internal and external. Without question, IT functions represent the lifeblood of most businesses, but CIOs increasingly find they can only turn more attention to new technology ideas after addressing current IT needs.

Successful CIOs today are actually blending three pairs of roles. These dual roles seem contradictory, but they are actually complementary. At any given time, a CIO is:

• An insightful visionary and an able pragmatist
• A savvy value creator and a relentless cost cutter
• A collaborative business leader and an inspiring IT manager.

By integrating these three pairs of roles, the CIO drives innovation, raises the return on investment (ROI) of IT and expands the business’s impact.

Driving innovation perspective It’s not enough to just plan for innovation; it needs a robust foundation.

When acting in their insightful visionary capacity, a CIO offers perspective by promoting a broad technology agenda to help the business profit from leading-edge initiatives. The flip side of the insightful visionary is the ‘able pragmatist’ role. As an able pragmatist, a CIO deals with the realities of the business. The able pragmatist also facilitates the productivity of current IT solutions to allow more time and budget for innovation.

Raising the ROI of IT

Using IT to produce greater business value, accompanied by an ongoing focus on lower costs and higher efficiency, is vital. As a savvy value creator, the CIO finds new ways to help customers and the organisation profit from how data is used. Meanwhile, the relentless cost cutter, its counterpart, is focused on managing budgets and processes to eliminate or reduce costs.

Expanding business impact To contribute the most to an organisation, proven expertise in both business and technical matters is vital. Part of the time, CIOs will engage with the enterprise as collaborative business leaders, to drive new business initiatives and cultural shifts jointly with fellow Chief Experience Officers (CXOs). At other times, the inspiring IT manager role occupies centre stage to motivate the IT organisation and deliver superior IT performance.

Adjusting the mix, one pair at a time It’s no surprise that CIOs must reconcile seemingly opposing mindsets, but every role requires at least some attention. The realities facing each individual influence how that CIO can and should manage change at any given time. Many factors impact the decisions about how much emphasis to place on any single role. Among them are macroeconomic and regional conditions, industry-specific forces and various organisational characteristics, as well as the CIO’s own skills and aspirations. But despite the multiple forces in play, successful CIOs discover ways to focus on high-value projects in support of their organisations.

CIOs have discovered and will continue to discover ways to focus on what matters most to them and their organisations. Over time, we expect CIOs to regularly assess how much emphasis is appropriate on each of the three pairs of roles and continue to be key strategic decision makers for their organisations.