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The Changing Role of the CIO

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It is difficult to find another role in today’s business world that has changed as rapidly as the Chief Information Officer (CIO). Only a few years ago, IT heads were there to make sure the basic infrastructure to keep a business communicating was in place and up and running. So while they do have to maintain current and past systems, their new most important role is to drive internal and external innovation. And because innovation is increasingly technology-driven, the CIO is in a perfect position to lead this evolutionary revolution.

Role Diversity

The role of the CIO over the past few years has become more diverse and challenging. CIOs now need to cover a whole lot more ground and stay on top of a rapidly changing field defined by quick shifts and advances in technology, and to incorporate these new methodologies and applications into business.

This fundamental shift in the role of the CIO reflects the changes business environments undergo on many different levels. The single most important factor in CIO recruitment is what new, innovative and efficient solutions they can bring to the company. In stark contrast to the old image of the CIO they are now supposed to ‘wow’ the board with amazing schemes to facilitate company growth,performance, efficiency and collaboration with full user adoption and experience.

Collaboration

Since technology and infrastructure investment have become a central focus, the CIO’s role is becoming more integrated into business process than ever before. In the past, it was the IT department that controlled technology and infrastructure purchase decisions. But with application usability needs such as cloud-based technologies, social media, the abundance of mobile devices, purchase decisions have become more collaborative.

Previously the focus for the CIO was delivering IT solutions and infrastructure, but with minimal collaboration between the IT and other departments across the organization. Now the primary focus is for the businesses and CIOs to work collaboratively and adapt and adopt useful technology with the C-suite firmly on board. Not to mention the need to embrace new employee demands with user-driven technologies, BYOD and social media. Employees are now demanding the usability and mobility in their professional devices that they have with their personal ones.

CIOs need to be a true business partner and support their counterparts in delivering results and differentiation; to help Sales grow the business, to help Engineering deliver a better product to the market, to help our Marketing teams drive new business acquisition.

Bimodal approach

With these fundamental changes to the CIO role and the requirement to deliver both basic IT for an organisation while preparing it for new challenges around big data, the Internet of Things, cloud computing and up-skilling workforces, it may require a “bimodal” approach to IT.

The first accountability will remain as a conventional IT role and manage risk and governance; and the second accountability will be more creative with the need for innovation, agility and new skills.

What is becoming clear is that the mounting challenges at the crossroads between technology and business innovation are leaving CIOs in need of the right tools to enable positive change for their companies.

So in today’s world CIOs need to be agile and innovative to support the growth and performance of the company, they need to adopt a more collaborative approach with their C-Suite colleagues as well as carry out the more traditional tasks around purchasing decisions, risk and governance. So the CIO’s role must shift from protecting and defending the status quo to embracing and extending new innovative capabilities, it needs to transform into the Chief Innovation Officer. In order for CIOs to survive in this ever changing and challenging role they need an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. Of course it is not the ERP system in itself that provides the innovation, it is the possibilities it creates through the delivery of better business intelligence that enables better decision making.

 

For more information about ERP Solutions and the changing role of the CIO download our whitepaper: http://www.sageerpx3.com/landing-page-cio

The post The Changing Role of the CIO appeared first on Sage South Africa Online.


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