CIOs need a transformation as much as the industry

The recent IDC CIO Summit in Dubai attracted a large group of CIOs. IT transformation was the underlying theme, as digital transformation gains traction and becomes a reality for many companies — and whole industries — and nowhere faster than in the UAE and Dubai.

Any transformational change is disruptive, but the speed of IT transformation is what makes it especially challenging — and CIOs are in the vanguard of this change. Business expects IT to transform from a functional tool to a business enabler adding real value and sustainable competitive advantage through cloud, mobility, the internet of things, helping transform the business.

This means the role of CIO is changing — and transforming — just as dramatically and they are increasingly in the firing line. The media stories about IT security and the risk of advanced persistent threats and privacy breaches may be high profile, but they are at least well understood.

For many CIOs, there are other less obvious risks lurking in the background but which they need to recognise and face — starting by looking in the mirror.

Here are the five risks that CIOs need to consider:

Running before you can walk

CIOs can be transformational, and they can be operational, but it’s not always easy to be both. Many organisations don’t want the status quo. They want IT to bring new innovations to bear.

The trick for CIOs is to balance the visionary aspect of the job with the mundane tasks of keeping the engine running. It takes experience to do both. Without this balance, it creates the perception that you want to do transformational things but aren’t interested in the operational.

Not running at all

The inverse of running before you can walk is not running at all, That’s an equally troubling risk. CIOs can often get stuck in the operational part of the job, bogged down in a quagmire of maintenance and support.

Budgets only stretch so far, and if infrastructure expands, it quickly becomes a sinkhole for financial resources. This can happen organically, as business managers require new functionality, or through mergers, as new acquisitions bring applications that mirror existing functions in a business.

Being risk-averse for the wrong reasons

CIOs must grapple with a range of technology options, some of which may challenge traditional notions of IT operations. Cloud is a good example. CIOs will reference security issues as a reason not to embrace cloud computing concepts. Those risks do exist, of course, but they are manageable, and can be addressed as part of a broader risk analysis.

Steering away from enabling technologies for the wrong reasons can be a big risk for CIOs.

Being made irrelevant by shadow IT

CIOs that ignore the potential benefits of cloud technology may end up watching powerlessly as their users slip away. IT departments that are slow to respond to user demands risk business departments buying their resources ad hoc from third-parties, creating problems in terms of data visibility and security.

From a business department’s perspective, it can be easier to expense a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution on a credit card, rather than endure a long, painful negotiation with IT for an internal solution that may not even yet exist.

Figures bear this out. According to a January 2014 survey from Amazon Web Services, 93 per cent of enterprise business departments have opted for cloud-based services. Of those, two-thirds (61 per cent) of them are choosing and financing their own, without the IT department’s help.

This is creating widespread problems for private and public sector organisations alike.

Neglecting governance

Not putting effective governance structures in place can cripple CIOs in various ways. Not having a comprehensive governance structure in place can make everything from security breaches to poor business performance more likely.

Underpinning many of these risks is a common problem: isolation. CIOs that don’t build alliances among business managers and end-user groups alike risk being marginalised from key decisions that will affect IT in the business.

For example, CIOs can’t build IT governance frameworks alone, argue the experts. They must enlist the help of internal business chiefs to attain management consensus across the business, and make governance frameworks binding.

The days of the purely technical CIO are over. Today’s IT leaders must be political animals, too.

They need to understand what is going on, what motivates business leaders, what their mandate is, what they’re trying to get accomplished.

This is the new CIO role in the era of digital transformation.

The writer is Senior Vice-President, Middle East North Africa and Turkey, Orange Business Services.