October 2012
Emerging Technologies and their Impact on the CIO
Takeaway: Emerging technologies are re-shaping the role of the CIO in every industry. A panel of CIOs at a recent technical symposium share their views and predictions.
At the Oct 29th Technical Symposium at the Santa Clara Convention Center, I had the pleasure of participating on the Emerging Technologies and their Impact on the CIO panel discussion who included:
- Rajib Arjun (Management Consultant, Price Water House Coopers LLP) – Moderator
- Lee Penning (CIO, Collabworks)
- Venky Rangachari (CIO, Thomson Reuters)
- Joe Cardenas (VP & CIO, Pacific Compensation Insurance)
Here are the general topics we covered with my summaries:
What is the evolving role of the CIO in enterprises?
The CIO role is rapidly changing with the advent of Cloud based services and the asset-lite strategies being employed by many companies to reduce costs and increase IT efficiency. CIOs are more and more leveraging external technology services rather than building up their own expensive, inefficient infrastructures and talent pools.
This shift is forcing CIOs to develop technology enabling and connectivity skills where they can quickly adopt and leverage Cloud Computing Services (SaaS, IaaS and PaaS). Such services, where they are mature (i.e. CRM, Email, Document Sharing), offload core IT functions allowing the enterprise to focus on their own inherent strengths.
This shift can dramatically free up the traditional role of a CIO from just “keeping the lights on” to working more closely with the business to align technology with the overall aims of the business and helping it to increase revenue and overall efficiency. In fact, I would coin a term to describe this new breed of CIO:
Chief Technology Enabler or CTE
Such a role encompasses the traditional role of a CIO with the added element of stitching together external Cloud services and the internal infrastructure.
This new paradigm shift exposes a new demand for technology workers in that enterprises will need fewer core development staff but more senior staff who are cracker jacks at connecting services and systems. Therefore CIOs need to develop such talent within the enterprise.
How asset-lite strategies are driving the re-thinking of IT’s capabilities?
Asset-lite strategies means eliminating fixed costs by outsourcing to other firms. Adopting Cloud Computing Services can dramatically speed up the adoption of new technologies within an enterprise and allow IT to be more nimble in supporting the business. This means that CIOs need to be more and more aware of available services in the Cloud and be ready to adopt them on demand.
However, moving to the Cloud has a number of barriers depending on the application:
- Concerns with data security
- Concerns with dependency on 3rd parties
- Potential service outages
- Difficulties with regulatory compliance
- Problems with user adoption
A wise CIO knows and understands these limitations and only moves those services to the Cloud that have a proven track record or are low risk. In any event, migrating to the Cloud is not an option when one has:
- Sensitive company data which cannot be put at risk in the Cloud (security)
- Complex systems which cannot be commoditized (legacy systems)
CIO Business Insights – what is your data not telling you about your operations?
Not knowing how the business is operating from a workflow perspective is extremely challenging and with so many new services being employed the situation becomes even more exacerbated. How much inefficiency is there within existing systems by the users themselves? What percentage of the technology is not even in use because users do not understand and utilize those systems? What if you could quickly identify bottlenecks in business operations across the enterprise?
In reference to the proliferation of adopting Cloud services, the analytical capabilities of such services may be poor or insufficient to the business needs. Thus, when evaluating any Cloud service ensure the enterprise will have an appropriate level of analytics and/or excellent data exporting capabilities.
Contract re-negotiations – what should you look for?
Many Cloud services push for multi-year contracts and offer reduced pricing: be sure to understand and add any exit clauses for your enterprise. What are the criteria for yearly renewal? If the provider does not perform well then which exit clause can you activate?
Where exactly are the Cloud services hosted? Are they at risk from a location perspective?
Be aggressive on price reductions – most Cloud services scale extremely well, meaning they have a lot of room to reduce pricing and keep your business.
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