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In an effort to share insights and advice coming out of the great conversations CIOs are having as a community, the Center launched a new and exciting six-part video series, CIO Perspectives.  This series brings together leading CIOs as they discuss topics, exchange ideas and compare experiences on important topics for CIOs to enhance their impact as business leaders.

This two minute video captures highlights from the CIO Perspectives video series.  In this series, Harvey Koeppel, Executive Director, Center for CIO Leadership and Center CIO Members, Jeanette Horan, CIO, IBM, Peter Whatnell, CIO, Sunoco, Inc. and Ron Bergmann, Vice President and CIO, Lehman College/CUNY, explore the role of CIO. 

CIO Perspectives | Series Compilation

In an effort to share insights and advice coming out of the great conversations CIOs are having as a community, the Center launched a new and exciting six-part video series, CIO Perspectives. This series brings together leading CIOs as they discuss topics, exchange ideas and compare experiences on important topics for CIOs to enhance their impact as business leaders.

In this installment Harvey Koeppel, Executive Director, Center for CIO Leadership and Center CIO Members, Jeanette Horan, CIO, IBM, Peter Whatnell, CIO, Sunoco, Inc. and Ron Bergmann, Vice President and CIO, Lehman College/CUNY, discuss how leading organizations are embracing business analytics and they explore what their respective organizations are doing with big data and unstructured data.  Additionally, the panelists provide their views on tips to take advantage of and pitfalls to avoid.

Episode 4: CIO Perspectives | Business Analytics

“Governance is like a diet: everybody thinks it’s a good idea, but hardly anybody does it well and nobody is successful.  Effective IT governance starts with understanding the strategic direction of the larger organization and then having a clear IT strategy—that people buy into—that aligns with that.” —University CIO

The topic of IT governance has always been one of great importance to the successful operation of the corporate technology function.  But in today’s environment it is even more critical for driving strategic opportunity for the business.  Well-designed and executed enterprise IT governance makes roles, responsibilities, and paths to execution transparent and creates the platform for generating business value.  Forward-thinking CIOs are exploring ways to take IT governance to the next level—to enable their businesses to pull ahead in this hyper-competitive, global business environment and position IT in a leadership role delivering technology-enabled innovation.  They are also experimenting with relaxing governance standards to foster innovation in high-growth areas of the business, by allowing the business to take responsibility for the added risk.

Center CIO members across industries and geographies shared their insights on the obstacles and opportunities that exist for CIOs in establishing or evolving their IT governance models and mechanisms in order to cement IT’s role as a strategic business partner.  The following themes emerged from the qualitative research:

• Integration between enterprise IT governance and the larger organization’s governance structures is critically important
• Strategic alignment and cost control are the two biggest benefits of mature IT governance
• CIOs are working hard to figure out how to create new aspects of IT governance to support today’s business needs: innovation, speed, and agility
• Change management is the single biggest challenge when introducing new aspects of IT governance
• IT governance processes must be transparent and inclusive

Read this white paper to gain peer advice and insight on approaches that CIOs are implementing to take a leadership role in IT governance and deliver benefits to the business.

If you do not see the file below, click here.

Vinod Sivarama Krishnan – CIO Global, Jubilant Life Sciences Limited, India.

Jubilant is a global leader in Pharmaceuticals – specifically Contract Manufacturing and Contract Research, Generics & Specialties. The group also has a significant presence in Food Service, Oil & Gas Exploration and Prospecting and Retail.

Vinod is a Business Technology Leader with over 18 years of global experience in delivering business solutions and creating and leading IT organizations across several business domains.

The Center for CIO Leadership has requested CIO members and other industry experts to answer three questions regarding predictions for the CIO in 2012. Here are my answers to these three questions.

What are your top 3 CIO priorities for 2012?

1. Data to Information using Analytics – In the highly dynamic world we live in with increasingly short business cycles, my businesses need to understand where they stand in near real time and to be able to determine the impact of changes in the environment to their business model and performance and make better decisions based on this information. While we are able to collect more data, we’re certainly not able to process it into useable information quickly enough for businesses to actually use in their day-to-day operations. I expect just the process of working on this initiative to lead to more internal visibility of the key drivers and that the very process of measurement will drive improvement.
2. Flexibility of Infrastructure and Applications – Better analytics will lead to more frequent changes of direction, both strategic and tactical, leading to a need for more flexible infrastructure and applications. This will challenge me and my team to rebuild (or in some cases, build) our platforms in a more granular, more flexible way to allow for these changes and respond to them as quickly as possible. Already the inability to scale (or reorient) our systems emerges as a big constraint in business flexibility, and that concern will have to be taken off the table as quickly as possible.
3. Finding and Retaining IT Management Talent – Frequent changes in direction and scale will require IT leaders with a different set of skill sets – more flexibility, more platform or tool agnosticism with the ability to view business requirements and processes as services to be provided using standard sets of tools. Significant empowerment of business users (by design) to reconfigure their processes within broad controllership lines will be essential, requiring IT to step out of the business of managing simpler aspects of process redesign. This will require a very different mindset, and the challenge will be to find (or build) and retain the right people.

How will 2012 be different from 2011 for you as a CIO?

For me, 2012 will be a year of

1. Broadening (more geographies, more P&Ls) and deepening (more functionality, more interconnectedness) of the standard platforms put in place for the group. I will also need to create appropriate cost-effective support mechanisms for the standard platforms. My team and I will need to succeed in our ongoing implementations, create a track record of successful delivery and ensure that we build momentum for these platforms by measuring and highlighting business impact and benefits achieved. In contrast, 2011 was more about building the base of the standard platforms, creating several quick proofs-of-concept to understand the technology and illustrate benefits and investing in building expertise on these platforms.
2. Increasing uncertainly from the business. I expect more starts and stops as the business responds to market and economic challenges, or moves to address opportunities being created. This will mean an increasing need to find or create flexible business systems. The cost of this flexibility and its impact on the current and future bottom line will need to be quantified and reviewed on a continuous basis. Business units which understand the value of this flexibility and are willing to fund it will reap significant advantages over 2012 itself, and certainly over the next three years, and it will be my job to help them understand this value.
3. Increasing demands on IT. As we move from the more basic deliverables to more evolved needs, demands and expectations will grow. Increasing consumerization of IT and greater understanding of IT in the executive suite will lead to increased pressure to deliver. Now that most CEOs and Directors come from a generation that has grown up with a good understanding of IT, it is significantly harder to expect key technology decisions to be made from within IT or expectations to be set solely by IT. Expected lead times to new functionality (in line with shorter business cycles) will now be significantly shorter, and my teams can expect to work on several smaller projects with defined benefits simultaneously as opposed to larger projects with longer payback periods.

What organizational or industry shifts are you expecting in 2012?

1. As a diversified conglomerate present in many high-growth verticals, I expect several new opportunities and threats, possibly simultaneous, to come out of the current economic conditions. I expect that responses will range from hunkering down to growing aggressively, making common strategies across the group difficult to come by and requiring more nuance to allow for specific market and economic differences globally and across industries. As growth slows in some segments, I expect some consolidation of processes and adaptation to last year’s growth.
2. I expect a shift to basics and more focus on controllership and compliance to minimize the probability of incidents due to rapid change of systems and processes. Specifically there will be a focus on ensuring quality of process, product and service irrespective of internal changes within the organization (which will be mostly focused on efficiency and cost).
3. Rapid increase in customer mobility and the availability of connectedness will call for large-scale redesign of business models, processes and systems to enable shorter reaction times and quicker responses to market and economic conditions. Mobility will fundamentally alter business models in several parts of our business and render some historical advantages redundant – and hopefully create some new advantages for first movers!

The Center launched a special blog series on CIOs’ predictions for 2012 to hear from members on  top-of-mind issues and expectations for 2012. We have invited a few Center CIOs and industry experts to weigh in on three questions regarding what 2012 will bring for CIOs. These are the three questions each Center member responded to:

1. What are your top 3 CIO priorities for 2012?
2. How will 2012 be different from 2011 for you as a CIO?
3. What organizational or industry shifts are you expecting in 2012?

Some took a more direct approach, answering the questions as written and others took a more indirect approach to answering these questions in their blog post. In both cases, the Center members took the time to develop unique and interesting 2012 predictions that will be valuable to your own preparations for next year:

• Carlos Francavilla, Director, BIT Company, Argentina, argues that the convergence of the Internet, Web 2.0, and mobile technologies have created a disruptive shift in business for 2012.
• Arun Gupta, Customer Care Associate & Group Chief Technology Officer, Shoppers Stop Limited, India, offers 11 predictions for 2012 and beyond.
• Paul Ingevaldson, Former Sr. V.P. International and Technology, Ace Hardware Corp. (Retired), U.S.A, believes that three world events will have more effect on the IT department’s priorities in 2012 than any time in recent history.
• Javed Mushtaq, CIO, Pakistan Telecommunication Cooperation Limited, lists cost rationalization, it commercial lab - cloud computing and security / business continuity as his top three priorities.
• Vinod Sivarama Krishnan, CIO Global, Jubilant Life Sciences Limited, India. suggests that 2012 will be different from 2011 because it will bring broadening and deepening of the standard platforms put in place for the group, and it will bring increasing uncertainly from the business and increasing demands on IT.

Read these posts to learn what these members believe is in store for 2012 and beyond. We encourage you to comment and share your own views on what they predict — there is lots of food for thought in their comments and ideas.

Send us an email if you would like to provide your 2012 predictions in a blog post.

We will continue to update this post as other members provide their 2012 predictions.

In an effort to share insights and advice coming out of the great conversations CIOs are having as a community, the Center has launched a new and exciting six-part video series, CIO Perspectives. This series brings together leading CIOs as they discuss topics, exchange ideas and compare experiences on important topics for CIOs to enhance their impact as business leaders.

Listen to Harvey Koeppel, Executive Director of the Center for CIO Leadership as he leads a discussion focusing CIO and CEO alignment with Center CIO Members, Jeanette Horan, CIO, IBM, Peter Whatnell, CIO, Sunoco, Inc., and Ron Bergmann, Vice President and CIO, Lehman College/CUNY.

Episode 2: CIO Perspectives | CIO and CEO Alignment

In the video, Harvey Koeppel mentions the blog post he wrote, Essential Reading:  "The Essential CIO", about the 2011 CIO Study by IBM, the Essential CIO.

I recently came across an interesting article on the Dawn of the hybrid CIO which talked about a new strategic frontier focused around the opportunity for CIOs to lead more broadly through the power of customer data.

In reading this, I reflected on my own recent evolution of my CIO role, and wanted to share my thoughts on where I looked to have broader impact, and what other CIOs might consider if they aspire to play a broader business role, and position themselves to drive revenue and impact.

The opportunity

In my organization, we have been continuously transforming the technology, the company and our business over the last few years to stay competitive and look for new opportunities.  On the one hand, this has been a good lesson in the fact that transformation does not end after the first big effort, but must happen continuously.  On the other hand, at each stage of transformation, I have looked for the opportunity to not only work with my CEO and executive team peers to look for ways to leverage technology in the transformation, but to take the lead to transform the company through technology.  This – for me – has provided a chance to add bottom line value in new and different ways, as well as bring my executive team along to truly understand the power of technology to drive the business.  (As a side note, I shared some of the valuable things I learned about linking IT investments to business value in an earlier transformation effort in this Center case study entitled Linking IT Investments to Business Value.)

More recently we have been looking at new ways to leverage data and transform the services we offer to our existing client base.  In the course of this effort, we uncovered a significant challenge with our client services department.  I saw the opportunity to leverage the approach I had taken within IT to re-organize delivery support, streamline communications, and improve our interaction with internal customers, and use it to revamp our external client services function.  I was ultimately able to make the case for taking over the client services function along with IT, and the result is a significant improvement in client satisfaction and service delivery.

Making the case

While this step seemed to be an obvious one to me, it took some education with colleagues and clients for them to see why the role of the CIO should transform again. And the ultimate case touched on the points raised in the article I referenced earlier – it all comes down to the data.  Given that 99% of the issues that arise in our industry- and in our company’s service delivery – are data related, what makes better sense than managing that within the CIO’s office.  My own business background in consulting and service delivery was helpful to the case as well, but I see the data as driving opportunity for all CIOs to take on more aspects of driving the business and leading the company towards true customer centricity.  After taking the time to build the case and bring my colleagues along, upon presenting the new paradigm to the Board, they understood the need and agreed with the value immediately.

Where is your opportunity?

I know that I am not alone in seeing the leadership opportunities for CIOs in the exploding role of data across all industries and enterprises.  In fact, a number of my fellow Center CIO members have contributed to Center research on this topic.  My question is – how will you seize this opportunity in your own organization? What are you doing to become a “hybrid CIO?”

Harvey Koeppel and the Center for CIO Leadership were the hosts for the Virtual Roundtable, which focused on the ongoing education of CIOs, by providing real life examples from industry leaders from all facets of the industry.  Today’s session - Next Generation IT Governance continued to prove that Harvey has the right pulse on the industry and ongoing CIO needs. There were several key take-aways that surfaced from the conversation.

Leaders from Cranfield and Yale Universities led the group in a discussion regarding the need for IT Governance and in how to structure decision-making and create accountability when forging down the IT Governance path.  Having transparency and a framework for effective communications, aids in changing the organization’s behaviors that are necessary to implement successful IT Governance programs.  Another facet of the model is the need for companies to co-exist in a collaborative environment and to have a set of metrics and scorecards to promote the current state of the organization.

The speakers and participants shared their perspectives on this very important topic. How are you looking to evolve IT Governance and enable your businesses to succeed and thrive in this-hyper competitive environment?

Sue Bergamo

CIO

BTE Consulting