Because of these changes, the CIOs Gartner surveyed were nearly unanimous (95%) in their view that their jobs will changed or be remixed due to digitalization. While world-class IT delivery management of IT projects is a given, it is expected to take up less of the CIO’s time. Survey respondents expect that the two biggest transformations in the CIO role will involve becoming change leaders, followed by assuming increased and broader responsibilities and capabilities. Inevitably, Gartner concludes from the survey results, the job of CIO will extend beyond the traditional delivery role to other areas of the business, such as innovation management and talent development. The survey also showed that a majority of CIOs say that technology trends, specifically cybersecurity and artificial intelligence will significantly change how they do their jobs in the near future. Cybersecurity continues to threaten the global landscape in 2018, and 95% of CIOs surveyed said they expect cybersecurity threats to increase and impact their organization. “In response to these concerns, the survey found that digital security ranks high on the CIO agenda as 35% percent of respondents said they have already invested and deployed some aspect of digital security, and 36% are in the process of planning to implement some form of digital security,” said Rowsell-Jones. “CIOs are also increasingly adopting AI in their organizations. Predominantly, AI is being used initially, either to boost the customer experience or to fight fraud.” CIOs surveyed rank AI, followed by digital security and the Internet of Things (IoT), as the most problematic technologies to implement. The big reason why is that these technologies, particularly AI, demand new skills which are in short supply, which speaks to CIO’s view that an increasing amount of their time is spent on talent development. Another key finding was that CIO’s listed as their top 2018 priority driving revenue with digitized products and services. This finding is particularly telling about how much the world of technology has changed the CIO’s role from implementation to value creator. “CIOs are on the road from digital experimentation to digital scaling. However, a wall exists between those early digital experiments and pilots, and those that have achieved digital scale,” said Rowsell-Jones. “Perhaps the biggest brick in that wall is organizational culture. CIOs need to identify the cultural behaviors that currently exist and what the future state vision is. In doing so, they must recognize existing cultural
strengths and position cultural change as ‘the “CIOs are also next chapter,’ rather than a massive overhaul, to increasingly respect employees’ contributions and invite them to come along on the journey.” adopting The Gartner survey and research on digital AI in their changes highlight that the evolution of the CIO role is also evident in expectations around inorganizations. novation and transformation. When asked about their success criteria, top CIOs report they are Predominantly, already close to the ideal split where more focus AI is being of their performance metrics is on business outcomes rather than IT delivery. The survey used initially, found that CIOs are spending more time on the business executive elements of their jobs comeither to boost pared with three years ago. In fact, CIOs from top the customer performing organizations are spending up to four days more on executive leadership. The more maexperience or to ture an enterprise’s digital business is, the more likely the CIO will report to the CEO. fight fraud.” In a change from previous surveys, respon—David Cearley, dents were asked to name the top differentiating a Gartner Vice President technologies compared to prior years when they and Fellow were asked about investment levels. Business intelligence and analytics still retain the top spot on the list, with top performers most likely to consider them strategic. “This new focus represents an opportunity for the CIO to become more deeply involved in this differentiating technology,” said Rowsell-Jones. “Data and insight drive the creation, delivery and life cycle of digital products and services. Flow of information in the context of user interactions leads to better engagement and value creation for all parties. Analytics connect the CIO and the IT organization to far-flung parts of the organization where they can cultivate new relationships.” While the role of CIO varies across industries, by company size and country, the commonality is that the “I” in CIO still stands for information but top tech executives know it is their Signing throughout Gartner’s annual Symposium/ companies’ most valuable ITxpo reminded the roughly 7,500 attendees who asset and they are expect to descended on Orlando in early October of their stature extract value from it. RL in the technology world. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017 Retail Leader.com
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