This week’s five is a weekly column on five recent reads from all over the web. This week, we’ll talk about the chief information officers.
“More and more, every company is becoming a technology company. We CIOs are the leaders and stewards of this new economy.” – Rob Meilen, CIO, Hunter Douglas
Chief information officers. Who do you think they are? They are senior business executives who handle a company’s IT strategy, implementation, and operations. With companies beginning to use multiple and new technologies, the role of a CIO has only become more pronounced. According to a recent survey, in the UK alone, a tech company is born every hour. Such an exponential growth further underlines the crucial role that CIOs play. Read on to find all about CIOs.
They know the impact of technology on core business activities.
Let’s consider BYOD. Most modern employees bring their smartphones to work. As discussed in the previous posts in this series, security is the major issue around BYOD. There are several ways to tackle security. And, a CIO formulates and implements BYOD policy guidelines to ensure IT security.
“If the agency doesn’t undertake due diligence to create the rules of behavior for bringing a device, then people will simply do it, and put agency data at risk by doing so.” – Kimberly Hancher, Former CIO, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
But the overall adoption of these policies can only be checked with an MDM (mobile device management) application. .
[To learn how BYOD is evolving for a cyber-conscious age, click here.]
They understand the efficiency of their IT.
Nobody understands an organization’s IT better than its CIO. But, with new technology emerging each year, maintaining the efficiency can be an arduous task.
According to a study by Capgemini, 48 percent of the CIOs surveyed think that their businesses have more applications than required. Also, 70 percent believe that at least one fifth of their applications can be consolidated. This means only one thing. As the head of the IT teams, a CIO is not only challenged with new technologies and solutions, but also with the consolidation and elimination of various functions, due to overlaps, maintenance costs, and deployment issues.
They know the importance of new IT technologies.
New technologies always impact IT efficiency. Cloud is one of those. It’s a widely accepted innovation that provides flexibility and freedom to IT systems. But, along with flexibility, comes the risk of breaches and compatibility issues. IT leaders, including CIOs, realize that instead of doing something that can affect the potential of the cloud, it’s better to bring on board the solutions that are designed for it. Take ITSM, for example. For maximum leverage, new cloud-based ITSM solutions have come up with features like comprehensive asset management, preemptive problem solving, automation, and self-service function. Solutions like these stand to get the most from the cloud.
[To learn how CIOs can use service management to get the most of the cloud, click here.]
They identify IT talent quickly.
“How to attract and retain talent for a digital future?” asked George Westerman, principal research scientist at MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.
“Think differently about talent, where it resides and how you access it.” – Gerald Chertavian, Founder and CEO, Year Up
According to Gerald, talent doesn’t come only from four-year college programs, it can come from anywhere. Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, and Evan Williams all dropped out of college. To identify new talent, CIOs have to look everywhere, and to retain employees, CIOs have to give them the right jobs and make them feel important.
[To read more CIO advice on building skills for the digital future, click here.]
[Learn more CIO knowledge by clicking right here.]
CIOs are the masters of new age information and hold data that can boost or kill a whole organization. And that is why CIOs must look beyond their IT responsibilities. They also have to act as a data analyzing storyteller; a big picture, far-sighted futurist; a change-leading team player; and an influential networker. They are no longer in charge of just system implementation— they are in charge of the whole big transformation.
“Your job is not to keep the business running or to partner with the business. You are the business.”– Kim Stevenson, VP and CIO, Intel Corporation
[To learn more about the soft-skilled roles of CIOs, click here.]
[P.S. Check out the tools that CIOs can rely on to help run their businesses efficiently, right here.]
Check out the last week’s five here.
