A CIO’s role transforms manifolds

Redefined CIO role
The role of a CIO has been redefines as understanding new technologies and creating innovation hubs to benefit business, becoming a champion of industry and organizational digital business strategies, engaging middle and senior managers to co-create innovative solutions in partnership with vendors, introducing collaborative tools and self-service portals to reduce human capital costs, educating Boards, CEOs and senior executives about disruptive trends and opportunities, actively engaging with vendors, industry bodies, experts and thought leaders to understand strategic trends in the industry to leverage innovative opportunities, adopt a lean start-up approach to developing new ideas, products and services

Innovations & ROI
Preparing for a digital future is no easy task. It means developing digital capabilities in which a company’s activities, people, culture, and structure are in sync and aligned toward a set of organizational goals.

Collaboration: To solve business problems and operate productively, organizations need the ability to leverage knowledge across the enterprise with online, seamless, integrated and intuitive collaboration tools that enhance your employees’ ability to work together.

Communications: As information continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, more tools exist that enable people to create their own content, rather than simply consuming existing content. To ensure the right information reaches the right audience, employees need tools that support two-way communication and the personalization of content.
Connections: Employees need tools that allow them to connect across the organization, leverage intellectual property and gain insight from one another. The digital workplace delivers on these goals by fostering a stronger sense of culture and community within the workplace.

Key Priorities
The key priorities are:
Invest in new business models and revenue opportunities: In the coming year, CIOs should consider investing in R&D, prototyping, innovation and emerging technologies.

Get to know the customer: Most customers expect consistent and predictive digital experiences. Creating these experiences requires complex, multifunction effort in which CIOs are key stakeholders. In the coming year, CIOs should become better acquainted with and actively engage end customers in order to create end user experiences — emphasizing usability, simplicity and utility — across all solutions. Play a larger role in driving strategy and investment: Increasingly, CIOs are being asked to lead technology — enabled business transformation opportunities within their organizations and many are stepping up to the challenge.

“IT budget is the amount of money spent on an organization’s IT systems and services, including compensation for IT professionals and expenses related to the construction and maintenance of enterprise-wide systems and services. It also encompasses hardware expenditures; bills for laptops, organization-issued mobile devices, servers, routers and other networking equipment.”