Being a CEO has never been easy. Shouldering responsibility for all of your employees while being accountable to your shareholders and reporting to a board of directors requires assembling a team of expert operators. You rely on your executive team to build a competitive product, run effective marketing, deliver sales, manage finances, and keep operations humming. For the past decade or two, you’ve also come to depend on a technology leader your chief information officer.
The CIO’s scope of responsibility has grown substantially over the past decade. Whether you’ve started your digital transformation or not, your CIO is already running many critical components of your business. From the external website to your intranet, document management, resource planning, logistics, human resources and finance systems, you depend on your CIO for day-to-day company operations as much as you depend on sales for delivering revenue.
Now in the digital world, your customers have come to depend on your CIO as well. Mobile and web-based ordering, automated shipping, tracking, support operations and patient scheduling must run smoothly in order to bring in a steady revenue stream and grow your customer base. And as you start to invest in innovative technologies to better serve customers, that dependence on your CIO deepens even more. Technology becomes more than just a business enabler. It becomes a critical component of how your business operates.
Yet for most companies, technology is the weakest link. I’ve spoken with plenty of CIOs who built their careers on pre-digital transformation technologies, and are still stuck operating using these techniques. They only monitor systems that are deemed mission critical, collect performance data samples and keep them in separate silos, and manually react to issues that get reported.
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Your ability to roll out competitive products now depends heavily on the technology required to support your business. Every new system you add in order to better support the changing expectations of your customers is a new security loophole. Today, these knowledge gaps are the biggest risk to your business.
Like a central nervous system, having a complete view into operations informs how to prepare for and respond to all that is known and unknown across the business landscape. Maybe you are looking at your hands, but you’d still like to know if your feet are on fire. Similarly, in a world where being blindsided by even the smallest technology glitch can mean catastrophic downtime, total visibility is a prerequisite to digital transformation.
To better understand and close these operational intelligence gaps, CEOs can ask their CIOs three fundamental questions:
- Are you thinking holistically? Make sure your CIO approaches technology problems by thinking of the business as an integrated system, not just a collection of servers, networking and applications. It may sound zen, but everything in your business really is interconnected and interdependent. For example, staffing social media channels will better connect you with your customers. When they get a response, your customers will start to expect support, which means your social media systems just became as critical as your call center and the social media staff now must be able to address and resolve customer issues. Once a system is important to the business, it quickly becomes a critical and integrated part of your infrastructure.
- Do you know our business technology pain points? Make sure your CIO comes to every executive and board meeting equipped to discuss 3 Ps: past, present and prediction. Know how technology has been supporting the business, the current state of effectiveness and efficiency as of right now, and what the business should expect to change in the coming weeks and months. CIOs are used to getting regular reports of all the tickets and outstanding issues. Preparing a historical view means showing how the IT infrastructure performed comprehensively, not just discussing specific issues. This historical view gives context to the present work being done to enhance infrastructure and improve processes to better support the business. Every CIO should also have a perspective on what is going to change, whether it’s an incremental update that will reduce downtime or an entirely new technology that will make the business more agile.
- Are you focused on the future? Technology moves faster than culture. Neither one can be swapped out en masse. Make sure you’re looking forward at least two years, and always be making incremental changes and upgrades to both in order to support what the organization will need from technology. It’s not enough to have a one-year project list. Given the requirements of modern businesses, CIOs need to have a multi-year plan that they are tracking and adjusting. Each quarter, the business should see benefits from infrastructure improvements or new technologies that move the needle, and right behind those. they should be giving feedback and providing requirements on the next iteration. In between those, the CIO’s team is evaluating new solutions and hardening them for deployment. They should be thinking at least in four six-month cycles of requirements, evaluation, planning and deployment.
Closing the operational knowledge gap boils down to one fundamental change: shifting away from thinking of your systems as a collection of independent assets that need to be monitored in order to gain total visibility into how the company is functioning across the board. With the pace of convergence and technology innovation increasing, the primary skill set CEOs need in their CIOs is not asset management or cost reduction, but the ability to keep up with the technologies that push the company forward. They need to understand the business drivers and urgency behind digital transformation. And ideally, they should be leading the charge.
Date: December 12, 2016