The CIO Agenda: Leading Business Transformation

Economist Conferences

As this year’s vigorous debate demonstrated, these are interesting times for CIOs. Aside from the frenzy of activity around “cloud”, the expectations of CIOs are changing, and the focus on business outcomes is greater than ever before. But the traditional challenges are intensifying too: the straitened world economy is affecting most of us, and the threat of cyberterrorism is only likely to rise.

The first of our roundtable discussions took the provocative theme “Is this the end of the CIO?” This debate seems to be perennial, but some new angles emerged. There was broad consensus that the role is likely to get more complicated before it gets simpler, and so the successful CIO will need to be versatile above all else to best handle future uncertainty. More specifically, the CIO should become the major agent of change in the modern organisation. This change must be both incremental but also disruptive; both business-led and technology-led. We predicted that in future, there might be more harmony between the CIO and COO roles.

These perspectives resonate quite strongly with the views of Fujitsu’s thought leaders. We believe that the role of the CIO is likely to diverge: In any organisations which can afford to remain late adopters of new technologies, the CIO’s job will ultimately align with procurement. IT will truly become a utility, and related IT directorships will no longer be justified. In contrast, organisations which use IT as a primary driver of differentiation will continue to need a guiding hand. Even here though, we should expect the role to mature as IT becomes more of an investment portfolio, for which we should expect substantial returns. Either of these courses steers the CIO even closer to the business, so should be welcomed.

We began to discuss the kinds of skills a CIO would need to attract in the medium-term. There was much debate about the merits of higher education, but also about the need for innovation and entrepreneurship. At Fujitsu we’ve been making a similar argument for some time: That the CIO is uniquely well-placed to act at the intersection of “demand-pull” and “technology-push” innovation.

The subject of cloud computing punctuated the morning, and on this subject the group found much to agree upon: We quickly put paid to any suggestion that cloud was a new concept or a disruptive technology. The general consensus was that the IT industry has finally caught-up with our aspirations to procure IT as a utility, and that significant flexibility and cost benefits could be the rewards for a carefully considered adoption of “cloud” in selected business functions. I was keen to emphasise that cloud is not one-size-fits-all, and so organisations should think carefully about timing, about public vs. private vs. community vs. hybrid, and also about whether they choose to buy IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, or even leap directly into buying business outcomes. The important thing is to plan, and get good advice, because organisations which leap without looking are sometimes falling as a result.

We closed with a well-informed discussion on cyber-security. Our challenges in this area are just beginning, as the world gets better-connected, and as attacks get more sophisticated. In response, the authorities are coming out of the shadows, and seeking to work both internationally, and also in partnership with the private sector, to better address the evolving threat.

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