Daniel Burrus writes in his blog entry on the HBR’s Blog Network that Today’s CIO Needs to Be the Chief Innovation Officer. He writes in other post, The New CTO: Chief Transformation Officer, the new role of the CTO.
The CIO needs to be able to understand how to leverage information for intelligence to go beyond the here and now and ahead of competitors.
The old way was about technology-centricity; the new way is about technology-empowered business strategies. The old way was information management; the new way is information intelligence. The old way was IT systems management; the new way is platforms that enable new value chains and integrated ecosystems. The old way was cost management; the new way is driving business transformation and accelerating growth.
The CTO needs to be able to understand how to manage the technology that drives the organization.
CTOs must embrace the role of Chief Transformation Officer. No longer will this position’s relevance be tied to how well he or she can oversee the development of technology. In the near future, the CTO will need to oversee the transformation of every business process, including how you sell, market, communicate, collaborate, and innovate.
We, at the Anant Corporation, have known this empirically for a long time. It is the reason our firm exists: to help teams leverage the brain trust of Internet knowledge, experience, and innovation that we cultivate in our firm.
In a series of other recent articles on the HBR, we can see that the mainstream business community is starting to fundamentally understand that the new C-suite is a group of peers that manages the company together, as one.
The New C-Suite is Here
- The New CTO: Chief Transformation Officer
- Today’s CIO Needs to Be the Chief Innovation Officer
- Google’s CIO on How to Make Your IT Department Great
- Become More Data-Driven by Breaking These Bad Habits
- IT on Steroids: The Benefits (and Risks) of Accelerating Technology
- IT Has To Deliver Great Tools — and Teach People to Use Them
In the research we’re doing and the methods we use at our firm, we have found that all companies are collections of People, Processes, Information, and Systems. For each of these important contexts in an organization, a leader needs to take ownership and responsibility across several areas.
- People – The CEO needs to understand, gather, and organize people inside and outside the enterprise (customers, staff, vendors, partners).
- Processes – The COO needs to understand, gather, and organize processes inside, outside, and between the organizations that the enterprise works with while supporting the people for which the enterprise exists ( customers, staff, vendors, partners).
- Information – The CIO needs to understand, organize, and add intelligence to the information that supports the needs of the processes.
- Systems – The CTO needs to understand, organize, integrate, and create technology to support the information and intelligence needs of the enterprise.
The HBR has been doing an excellent job gathering good opinions on the subject of the emerging importance of the CIO and the CTO. In our experience, all officers have an important job, but ultimately it is the job of the CEO to gather his or her C-Suite to manage the enterprise that they are leading.
