Survival of the fittest CIO

Evolve or else: that's the stark reality facing CIOs. Grow yourself into a business-centric role and win that coveted place on the board, or be relegated to keeping the lights on in the server room. Unfortunately, it looks like most of South Africa's CIOs aren't evolving yet.

Twenty percent of South African CIOs are looking at these issues.

Pieter Bensch, Oracle South Africa

Bob Evans, chief communications officer at Oracle Corp, draws up an annual list of top priorities for CIOs. Evans' list is a global perspective: to find the local parallels, Oracle hosted a CIO Summit in Johannesburg, bringing 50 of the country's top CIOs together to discuss areas of concern. And while the discussions closely followed Evans' predictions, a relative minority indicated they had successfully evolved their roles into a business-centric position.

"Twenty percent of South African CIOs are looking at these issues," said Pieter Bensch, MD at Oracle South Africa, after the local event. "They're addressing the strategic question of what the CIO will do in the next three years. The other 80 percent are still IT managers. The good news is, they know it."

That 20 percent is typified by an emphasis on business strategy, and that lies at the core of many of the CIO priorities identified by Evans. CIOs are at a crucial moment in their careers: Gartner's famous 'nexus of forces' of social, mobile, cloud and information has profound implications for businesses, and it's the CIO who should preside over the realisation of that strategy, supported by a team of business and technology analysts.

1) Your job - Prepare for major changes in your role and how it offers value to the business, or prepare to be relegated to a support role.

2) The Internet of Things - anticipate disruption in your supply chains, operations management or customer engagement, and position your company to take advantage.

3) Adjust expectations and focus on innovation - Most IT departments spend the majority of their budgets on maintaining the status quo, not on innovation. But paradigm shifts in business need innovation, and it's IT that should be facilitating it.

4) Dazzle your customers - As with IT users, so with customers: stop maintaining the status quo and look for ways to innovate and astonish. It's the delightful disruptors that steal a march on incumbents, but being an incumbent doesn't mean you can't take the lead.

5) Embrace cloud, mobile and social - That doesn't mean allowing users to hang out on Facebook, it means changing the way the company thinks. And that, of course, requires a CIO offering strategic business guidance. The IT manager can worry about the web filter.

6) Blend art and science - Data visualisation, for example, can offer astonishing insights into business performance and opportunities, and it takes the right combination of skills and awareness to do it. IT departments are adept at producing reams of data - it takes art to capture the board's imagination. Of all the priorities, this is one of the more challenging, Bensch observes. It requires CIOs, with their empirical, structured technology backgrounds, to step far outside their comfort zones and bridge the gap to talking business.

7) Don't fight tomorrow's war with yesterday's technologies - The average age of enterprise IT systems is over 20 years, Bensch notes. Accelerate the adoption of new technologies, with evolution plans to maximise the return and minimise the impact on critical legacy systems, with a view to the sort of business you expect to be doing three to five years from now.

8) Embrace your ultimate metrics - Like the blending of art and science, this is a poser for traditional CIOs. How is the success of your job measured? If it's in uptime KPIs, you lack strategic influence.

9) Tie employee compensation to knowledge-worker productivity - In other words, encourage and reward intellectual output. Everyone has ideas: the companies that succeed are the ones that identify and execute them.

10) Build a transparent enterprise - CIOs have the rare luxury of insight across the entire enterprise, with access to information from all nooks and crannies. Embrace that, expose it to the cold hard light of scrutiny, and ensure that the CIO has either the business chops, or the support of business analysts, to actually turn that business telemetry into strategic influence.

Read the full detail of Evans's CIO priorities, with contrast to 2013's list, at http://on.itweb.co.za/111752

First published in the June 2014 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.