A CIO’s Top 5 Priorities for Digital Transformation

In this episode, we will cover five key priorities that an organization’s CIO or CTO should focus on to smooth their organization’s digital transformation efforts.

Creating a vision for the new digital platform: As CIOs play an instrumental role toward an enterprise’s digital transformation, accordingly they should also define the vision for their new digital-enabled enterprise. We know, for example, that more than offering one off digital products and services, a digital organization is realized through a larger digital ecosystem, which extends beyond the walls of the enterprise to include customers, suppliers, government regulators, and other stakeholders and partners. This ecosystem is built on digital platforms that in turn is built through various digital technologies. Building this larger ecosystem through the integration of internal systems and other digital platforms sometimes can take years and thus requires a coherent vision that the CIO must define and communicate to all parties. The vision of this platform should be sound and far reaching to support adoption of future technologies as well. Also, as the number of mergers and acquisitions have become common to adopt new business models, an organization’s digital platform should be versatile to absorb such changes.

In the context of building the right vision for an organization’s digital platform, we know that in today’s economy and digital markets an organization either creates its own digital platform to deliver digital services for its ecosystem members or uses an external digital platform to deliver its services. For example, GE has built its Predix platform to provide maintenance for its equipment that it sells to customers worldwide. It’s able to use that platform to provide services and has proved to be a major source of value for the organization. Other organizations such as Amazon have built a retail selling platform that it has opened to businesses to enable them sell their products and services through the Amazon platform. Thousands of businesses are successful due to selling on this platform. Similarly, almost every industry has organizations that have built successful digital platforms to provide services to their customers. So, part of defining a digital vision for its organization, a CIO will have to define their organization’s vision for either the development of new digital platforms or integration with ecosystems and the organization’s future position relative to that ecosystem and digital platform.

To ensure that the vision doesn’t sound as a wish or a dream, CIOs must embark on a transformation program and create and communicate a roadmap that shows the planned and progressive realization toward the new digital enterprise. The transformation roadmap should focus on all three dimension of people, process as well as technology along with working with all other stakeholders.

Use of analytics for business insights: The use of analytics within the enterprise has evolved to become a vital strategic tool and its use for getting business insights and making critical decisions is expected to exponentially increase over the next few years. The challenge for CIOs will be to use data and analytics effectively in all areas of the enterprise and to identify new customers and new sources of revenue, as well as understand existing customer needs and organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses. All in all, strategic use of analytics can transform the complete chain extending from customer facing systems to backend systems and processes. In fact, the use of analytics in all aspects of the enterprise will be so widespread and integral to an organization’s success that CIOs should define the vision for a larger analytics ecosystem and platform that can enable business insights at all levels of the enterprise. When defining the larger platform for analytics, CIOs not only should define and communicate the specific use cases but also link those use cases to specific business outcomes. To build such an all-encompassing vision, CIOs have to tackle a number of issues related to data quality, analytics governance, and potential applications of machine learning, and scaling the solution so it can extend beyond the enterprise to the larger ecosystem.
Digital platform and ecosystem Integration: As a CIO when you start building digital applications, systems, and platforms, one of the biggest challenge you may face is to ensure a smooth integration of the overall internal and external systems. This integration is vital not only to ensure that your overall ecosystem facilitates agility of processes but also ensures that your customer experience integrates smoothly with your backend systems. So, as an example, the frontend e-commerce systems that serve the end customer will integrate smoothly with the backend order fulfillment customer service systems and also that your overall supply chain systems integrate smoothly with external partners and suppliers. Building and integration of all such systems requires that your organization uses design thinking and customer journey mapping to ensure that all customers and other system users get a user friendly system that is agile, dependable, and delights your customers.
Adopting a Customer Obsession Strategy: As customer obsession has become an essential ingredient for the success of organizations, CIOs will have to find specific ways to include it in all aspects of their functions, processes, and products. We see how companies like Amazon have become extremely successful in building their systems and processes around their customers. CIOs today are under pressure to parallel the innovations of such digital giants. This will therefore involve factoring customer experience in the design, understanding the needs of the customers and the trends that inspire them, and then building and delivering systems that delight those customers and audiences. Transforming customer experience includes a number of facets that include capturing data across all offline and online customer touch points, understanding customer intentions and using that data to provide consistent and personalized experiences, optimizing customer journeys to increase conversion rates, and measuring all aspects of customer’s interactions with the organization. Doing such a transformation requires that the CIO creates a coherent strategy and implementation roadmap.
Resourcing Strategies: As IT organizations of today are transforming rapidly by piloting and implementing state of the art technologies and systems, CIOs are also facing challenges related to resourcing staff with requisite skillsets. Other than requiring resources skilled in digital technologies, many organizations also have the need for resources with legacy skillsets because those organizations still carry the baggage of mission critical legacy systems. To maintain this vast skillset portfolio of legacy and new technologies, the CIOs are already facing a shortage of skilled resources in local markets. Another challenge is that in today’s economy, resources are becoming increasingly specialized, and no longer feel the need to be tied to one organization. To tackle all these challenges, CIOs will need to adopt multiple strategies of resourcing staff both from local as well as from international markets. This resourcing strategy may include maintaining permanent staff, contracting short term resources from local markets, working with freelance staff from local and international locations, and so on. CIOs will have to know where to get these skilled resources on short notice to help them deliver on time.

In conclusion, these CIO priorities primarily centered on creating the right vision of a digital enterprise along with a proper roadmap with some strategy execution tips.

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