A few years ago CIOs and IT organisations were looked at as back-office support functions, but now there's a lot more pressure on CIOs to add value to the business.
This is according to Chris Miller, chief technology innovation officer at Avanade, who explains IT skills required from businesses are changing from the times when organisations needed hardcore engineers and developers to them now requiring IT employees who will better understand the vision of the organisation.
These employees, he adds, should be capable of doing experience design and working alongside business analysts, thus increasing the responsibility of the CIO to drive digital transformation.
"The business expectation from IT departments has changed significantly. Organisations are now asking how can IT departments help grow and transform the business?
"We are seeing organisations starting to bring together a different set of skills and capabilities such as business experts, functional design experts, and technology teams in order to provide better solutions that are targeted and focused on the end-consumer," observes Miller.
The skills needed by the IT departments continue to evolve, he explains. As people continue requiring IT skills, organisations will transform from being more focused on engineers, developers and testers, to providing software-as-a service and infrastructure-as-a-service.
Businessses have to think about how to transform, digitise and revolutionise their services at a fast pace and add value for clients in the process, he notes.
According to a research conducted by EMC, most South African CIOs and business leaders say they are not at all prepared for the technological shifts taking place in the economy, with the result that their current business plans will have lost their relevance within only three years.
Jonas Bogoshi, country manager for EMC Southern Africa, says the research found that part of the problem is that 66% of SA businesses still isolate IT departments, possibly because IT is seen as a behind-the-scenes function that has little to do with customer service.
"Every company needs to think of itself as an IT company. In this regard crowdsourcing new product ideas from across all parts of the company becomes important.
"As companies look to increasingly leverage digital technologies for competitive advantage, having a strong leader and a strong digital strategy is becoming increasingly important," he points out.
The ability to then take this digital strategy and rapidly turn it into products or services becomes the logical output from this, adds Bogoshi.
"Companies competing in this space need to ensure that they have strategies that can outperform the new entrant, and maximising IT departments is key to being successful here," he asserts.
Lourens Swanepoel, senior director and chief technology innovation officer for Avanade SA, says international companies are penetrating the African market and at the same time many South African companies are expanding into Africa and Austrailia.
This expansion, he adds, will change the role of CIOs. Pressures are moving away from optimising IT towards optimising businesses to become disuptive within their market.
"The transformation within IT departments will have a huge impact on the role of the CIO as the expectation from the board and business leadership from IT departmens has changed.
"The role of the CIO is now being shared with the CMO role and some companies have succeeded in breaking down the silos between CMO and the CIO.
There is a need to transform the workplace to provide a higher employee value proposition in IT departments, he observes.
"We need to transform the workplace to look after, attract and foster quality IT skills. There is a battle for talent in SA as we have a lot of good IT employees being grabbed by international organisations," advises Swanepoel.
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