The CIO’s role isn’t just about technology enablement these days — it’s customer facing, and it requires leadership, innovation, and strategic use of data.
IT has never been as close to the customer as it is today.
In the digital era, CIOs are building upon their IT infrastructure knowledge, systems integration expertise, and data capabilities to enhance the way their companies engage with customers. Since the role emerged 30 years ago, CIOs and their teams have moved from a back-office function reacting to business demands to being on the front lines of improving the customer journey, influencing product development, and helping teams deliver personalization via data insights.
As brands double down on putting the customer at the center of everything they do, IT leaders must evolve into what I’d call customer-centric CIOs, business transformers who architect the future possibilities of customer understanding and interactions. Here’s a road map for how to embrace this new role:
Develop leadership
With the demand for providing always-on and personalized services to customers, exceptional digital leadership is critical. There’s an opportunity for business-savvy CIOs to act as centralized leaders — with a view of the entire business environment — to advance their company’s efforts. Strong digital leadership requires increasing collaboration with other parts of the business, developing a culture of innovation, and shifting the IT team’s mindset and operational approach:
- Cultivate strong business alignment and collaboration: Organizational silos are the biggest threat in today’s environment, so for CIOs it’s crucial to have a collaborative mindset. With SaaS services, technology is managed across the company, and this requires IT to have strong business alignment and the ability to integrate well with other teams. This is especially important when it comes to working with CMOs and their teams as they seek to leverage more robust data capabilities to inform their marketing aspirations. To successfully partner with senior leaders across the enterprise, CIOs need to understand their key challenges and keep the needs of the whole company in mind.
- Foster innovation internally: CIOs face people-oriented and skills-oriented challenges as they drive their organizations’ customer engagement strategy. Building a team with the right set of values and skill sets is increasingly difficult. To overcome this, CIOs must take an expansive approach to driving innovation internally. It can be driven from anywhere within the organization — from an engineer, to a program manager, to a marketer. Task teams to tackle issues without constraints or micromanaging. Give them the freedom to think creatively. This may lead to failure, but failure is the foundation for iteration.
- Shift from project to product delivery: To keep pace with business growth and scale, CIOs and IT organizations need to accelerate delivery to the business while improving quality and operational excellence. This requires a shift in the operating model, moving from project-based thinking to product and road map-based thinking. This operating model builds trust and credibility by showing stakeholders the road map and feature build-outs on a consistent basis. It entails an end-to-end strategy for developing, delivering, and maintaining capabilities for the business. With transparency and consistent communication to stakeholders, CIOs can foster the type of collaboration necessary to achieve their customer-focused goals.
