What do Volvo Cars, Quicken Loans and India’s BJP party have in common? Their CIOs used a digital first mindset to deliver innovative value to their customers and constituents. These business technology leaders exemplify a broader trend from the Gartner 2015 CIO Agenda of 2,800 global CIOs, representing $12.1 trillion in revenue/public sector budgets across industries and our interviews with 11 CIOs.
Notably, that digitalization has taken center stage, moving out of the shadows and into an arena that is creating winners and losers in all industries and geographies. Cloud, mobile, social and big data (the Nexus of Forces) are already central to business thinking, and the next set of digital technologies, trends, opportunities and threats drive yet another competitive frontier.
But with opportunity comes risk and the overwhelming majority of this year’s CIO respondents (89%) agree that the digital world engenders new, vastly different and higher levels of risk. Furthermore, 69% acknowledge that agility is increasingly important relative to risk management. For CIOs to thrive in this new digital now, digital first reality, we recommend they “flip” the following three leadership behaviors.
No. 1. Flip Information and Technology Leadership From Legacy First to Digital First
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Instead of getting stuck in the complexity of managing legacy systems, CIOs should focus on the future by starting from the perspective of what is now “digitally possible,” then working backward. Take the example of Klas Bendrik, Volvo Cars’ vice president and group CIO. He applied digital first thinking to solve a typical customer problem: getting home in time to receive a delivery. Instead, why not allow your delivery to come to wherever your car is located? Using digital technology, Volvo has piloted creating a temporary digital key for retail deliverers to place a customer’s order directly into the trunk of his or her Volvo car.
No. 2 Flip Value Leadership From What’s Visible to What’s Valuable
Traditionally, IT value has gravitated to what is most visible; cost reduction and efficiency. Digital business creates new value. Not all IT-intensive investments are the same, and they should be separated into categories based on what motivates them: fear (keep the business running), fact (extend the business within its business model, markets and tools) or faith (transform the business beyond the known). The digital business opportunity requires faith-based investments and management capable of dealing with them.
For example, India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party used holograms of its candidate, Narendra Modi, so that he could virtually attend 2,000 rallies versus the 180 he could attend in person. Arvind Gupta, the party’s innovation evangelist and information and technology head, used digital channels and social media to increase voter turnout by 12%, including the highest-ever turnout of voters younger than 40, and helped win the election for Modi. Mr. Gupta and his staff created faith-based value with digital technology.
No. 3 Flip People Leadership From Control-Led to Vision-Led
Digital leadership is almost always about vision and inspiration, not command and control. CIOs determined to be digital leaders must focus on education and inspiration. In the survey, 75% of CIOs plan to change their leadership style over the next three years, most commonly by amplifying their vision (47%) while reducing their command and control (65%).
At Quicken Loans, CIO Linglong He’s vision to digitize the loan origination process has delivered superior outcomes such as shorter cycle times and an industry-leading customer experience. She emphasizes the importance of an innovative and entrepreneurial culture as keys to the company’s success with activities, such as Monday afternoon’s “Bullet Time” (undirected experimentation), and a full day of culture training for every new employee with both the founder and the CEO.
Dave Aron is vice president and Gartner Fellow, and Graham Waller is vice president and executive partner at Gartner.
Date: December 3, 2014