One of the strongest messages I hear from my fellow CIOs – especially those in the US and Europe – is the all-consuming focus on cutting costs. The mindset is to optimize growth in order to overcome cost increases, while at the same time looking for ways to reduce the workforce.

In Asia – where I am based as a regional CIO in a multi-national company headquartered in Germany—businesses have a different view about resources and investing. This presents some interesting opportunities and challenges to my role, and I am curious how other Center members in a similar position approach this.

In Asia, the mindset is to lead today for business that comes in the next year or two. We are innovating for two years from now, rather than looking to cut costs today. The appetite is to take more risk today, to make sure we are looking ahead. In the case of building an innovative technology team to support this forward-looking focus, we are always looking at what can we do to find the qualified people that we will really need in one to two years. As a CIO in this region, if I am to continue to provide both the vision and execution on innovation to drive the future business, I have to participate in this active recruitment and acquisition of talent in advance of current need.

My challenge is – how do I convince my European-based headquarters to understand this perspective? How do I make the case to an executive team focused on cutting costs that competing in the Asia region requires a different approach to investing in resources? How do I construct a view into the longer term returns of laying the path to innovation? The response I get is “show me the business case” and this is a challenge in the context of risk-reward mindsets that have significant regional differences.

Here is the way I have approached this. I would be very interested to hear other experiences and ideas.

• One of the challenges in getting global buy in for investment in the regions is to get alignment across the enterprise on what we mean by “internationalization of IT” and what it means to operate as an international company. The vision and needs of one region may be very different from the others, and we need to set priorities that balance the regional needs with the global strategy and vision for growth of the company.
• At a recent international meeting of the IT services organization and the regions, I posed this question to the group. We had a useful conversation on how to approach communicating the needs of the international regions, and mapping an approach to manage regional vs global prioritizations for both investments, as well as defining expectations on returns based on what is growing, and how they deliver to the global strategy. We need to continue to push this common understanding to ensure our IT investment strategy ties to our goals as well as our outcomes.
• In terms of trying to make the case from my own regional perspective, I start by taking the overall strategy and goals for where growth will come from within the enterprise and break it down to show how, where and when you need to invest in IT resources to make the growth strategy happen. I consider the whole enterprise when I develop this map, because we can often use the strength of the global nature of the business to fulfill the needs, making the acquisition of new resources more targeted and strategic. It may not be a linear solution. Sometimes it requires we bring new people in to a particular region to have them in place, but often I can show how others within the existing global organization can be re-deployed and work by taking advantage of the time zones to achieve the goals. Showing how you can maximize the global organization helps to make the case for selected new investments within the region. And even with shorter term investments and projects, linking the resources to the enterprise goals helps bring buy in and alignment.
• As a final note, one of the areas where I do not have trouble getting investment buy-in is in the area of security and compliance. This done at the Group level and thanks in large part to the many high profile news stories of the cost and impact of security breaches, the Board and the Group leadership have a very keen awareness of why we have to invest in to protect the company. This is a case where I benefit from the enterprise perspective.

How does my approach and my experience resonate? What other experiences do members have that might help CIOs in my position?