Top 3 Priorities for the CIO of the Future in 2014

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Digital business leadership and increasing business productivity

Editor’s note: This article is the submission to our CIO of the Future – 2014 Project from Marco Orellana. We are delighted to get a global view from a Latin American perspective, given CODELCO-Chile’s role as the world’s largest copper producer.

From Technological Information Manager to Digital Business Leader

The CIO is becoming a business digital leader and his journey is based on the following points:

    • More Technology to the Core of the Business. Incorporating technology to the core of the business is more and more necessary, since nowadays the traditional relationship methods aren’t a clear competitive advantage, as opposed as technologies used in instances where they really add value.
    • More Education in Business Digital Innovation. Significant changes are required in the innovation of both business processes and products. These changes must enable non-traditional ways to approach business problems; today the technology is a distinctive factor that pushes organizations to develop new spaces in business relationships and interactions. The CIOs role is precisely to enable a digital technology-based innovation culture in order to make the company distinctive in an increasingly competitive world.
    • Moving From Chief Information Officer to Chief Digital Officer. The fundamental change we’re encountering is incorporating digital technologies throughout the business footprint. That’s why the new CIO must be immersed in the business he serves, where there should be not only traditional information technologies but also any kind of digital technology that helps corporations meet their strategic goals in a more effective and efficient manner.
  • Support the Business Strategy: Being the CEO’s Innovation Partner to Address Business Challenges. Today corporations’ challenges are ever-changing, subject to market ups and downs and with more and more government regulations. The CIO’s challenge is to enable the CEO’s strategies, becoming the company’s innovation branch and supporting the business strategies with ad-hoc solutions while meeting deadlines and budget constraints required by the business. A skilled CIO customizes solutions, aligning them correctly with the business strategies, at the right time and with competitive budgets.

Provide Real Support to Increase Business Productivity

    • Transform Technology into a Productivity Tool. Nowadays, digital technologies shouldn’t just automate the organization’s processes, they should be the tool that powers and guides its productivity everywhere, from strategy to operations. Businesses are under intense pressure to provide returns that are shrinking in markets that are increasingly demanding and competitive, making digital technologies exceptional productivity icons.
    • Enable Business Process Transformation: Deploy the Right Technology with Business Sense. The CIO’s job is not just providing the digital technologies required by the business. Today, there is a trend for CIOs to be immersed in business processes, redesigning them with a strong use of technologies that make the business more profitable, efficient, competitive and sustainable. Not only must technology follow the business, but also push it to find new spaces that were unthinkable in the past.
  • Use Business Intelligence to Analyze the Past and Create the Best Future. Digital technologies’ current role in information management is to let us know what has already happened. They allow us to understand very clearly what happened to us. But this is like driving while looking in the rear-view mirror. What is really needed today is to look ahead, towards the future from the present and that can be done with Business Intelligence, which gives us new ways to analyze the same information, finding key insights and modeling probable future scenarios which allows us to anticipate and make decisions today so we are still competitive tomorrow. Clearly the CIO’s role will be centered in this new generation of predictive information systems, which give the company access to new dimensions of the business.

Make the New Technology Wave Run The Business

    • From Social Media To Social Business: Build Social Culture with Customers, Partners and Staff. The same technologies used in social networks will be used in business networks. The CIO’s role in this context is that of a pioneer, championing the use and development of this kind of digital technology. Conversations and decision-making revolve around managing great quantities of unstructured information that must be massaged, transformed, interpreted and distributed. Here the CIO’s support is key to guide the adoption of best practices in managing these kind of technologies within the organizations and also in the relationships they have with their environment. The CIO will have to strike a balance between the information made available and the new intellectual or industrial property being generated.
    • Using Big Data and Business Intelligence to Create Business Knowledge: Real Time Predictions. These two components, Big Data and Business Intelligence, converge in the organization as two complementary trends that allow the generation of new knowledge within companies. This new knowledge allows the business to create new competitive advantages. Here the CIO is the main proponent of these new digital technologies.
    • Transform BYOD and Mobility into Business Opportunities. Another trend that the CIO must approach in 2014 is related to mobility and the users’ own devices. In both cases his role will be to provide safe, stable, reliable and robust mechanisms in order to transform both trends into business opportunities. Mobility enables new ways to carry out business tasks, basically anywhere and anytime. The key is that the access and associated security mechanisms are aligned with the business requirements and enable the digital worker to make use of all his skills, feeling comfortable with the technology that suits him best for his day-to-day job.
  • Create a New Cloud Perspective: The Business Personal Cloud. The business has become the sum of micro-businesses that interact among themselves in order to meet goals and execute the overall strategy. Each digital worker needs his own space in cyberspace to host his information, knowledge, tools and everything he needs to develop his role. That’s why, besides having a global strategy, the CIO must at the same time know each and every one of the usage profiles and must provide the virtual environments that enable this new digital way of conducting business.