How Covid elevated the role of the CIO

The shift to hybrid work­ing dur­ing the pan­dem­ic has high­light­ed the impor­tance of Chief Infor­ma­tion Offi­cers (CIOs), with tech­nol­o­gy more cru­cial than ever in enabling oper­a­tions. 

CIOs have always col­lab­o­rat­ed close­ly with senior exec­u­tives and oth­er man­agers. How­ev­er, Covid-19 has ele­vat­ed the role of IT lead­ers. The rapid shift to remote work­ing in the ear­ly days of lock­down accel­er­at­ed tech­nol­o­gy adop­tion by around three years, says Chris White, head of con­sul­tan­cy at IT con­sul­tan­cy QuoStar. It also “high­light­ed the need to have the right per­son in the right role, and to bring them into the heart of the busi­ness”. This was par­tic­u­lar­ly true of those organ­i­sa­tions that had a “CIO in name only, who wasn’t act­ing as a strate­gic busi­ness leader”.

Veron­i­ca Mil­lan, glob­al CIO of mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work Mul­len­Lowe Group, which has 90 agen­cies in 65 mar­kets around the world, agrees. “The pan­dem­ic showed every­one that the CIO and their team are one of the most crit­i­cal in the organ­i­sa­tion,” she says. “If they’d made the right deci­sions pre-pan­dem­ic, the busi­ness was able to tran­si­tion smooth­ly into remote work­ing, but if not they strug­gled.” 

Those who got it right demon­strat­ed the “val­ue of a CIO with the vision to imple­ment a strat­e­gy based on resilien­cy, and just how crit­i­cal the role is to oper­a­tions”, Mil­lan adds. If it wasn’t hap­pen­ing already, today’s CIOs report into the CEO or COO.

A strategic turn

As a result of this shift, senior exec­u­tives are now “prop­er­ly reach­ing out” to CIOs in a way that was not nec­es­sar­i­ly the case before, when the sit­u­a­tion was often more about IT lead­ers “strug­gling to gain trac­tion”, says White.

“It’s opened up a con­ver­sa­tion about how tech­nol­o­gy can be used more effec­tive­ly in the busi­ness, which means the dis­cus­sion is becom­ing more strate­gic,” he explains. “In many instances, we’re mov­ing from how CIOs can pro­vide the nec­es­sary infra­struc­ture to how the organ­i­sa­tion can make bet­ter use of tech­nol­o­gy for busi­ness suc­cess.”

Exec­u­tives at wealth and invest­ment man­age­ment ser­vices firm SEI, for exam­ple, now have a clear­er under­stand­ing of the impact tech­nol­o­gy can have both exter­nal­ly and inter­nal­ly, says CIO Ryan Hicke.

While tech­nol­o­gy was in the past main­ly con­sid­ered an “enabler to dri­ve new ideas, prod­ucts and solu­tions”, the pan­dem­ic “exposed and mag­ni­fied how impor­tant the organisation’s tech strat­e­gy is not just to busi­ness devel­op­ment and rev­enue gen­er­a­tion, but also to the effec­tive­ness of the work­force”. As a result, Hicke is now work­ing “clos­er than ever with HR and busi­ness heads” to “under­stand what teams need” and how to make them “more pro­duc­tive and effec­tive”.

Empowering collaboration

This col­lab­o­ra­tion, which pre­vi­ous­ly tend­ed to be infor­mal at SEI, has been facil­i­tat­ed by the cre­ation of a stand­ing com­mit­tee, which met week­ly when it was first cre­at­ed in March 2020 at the start of the pan­dem­ic but now meets fort­night­ly. 

The com­mit­tee con­sists of about 15 mem­bers, includ­ing a mix of busi­ness unit heads and exec­u­tives with glob­al respon­si­bil­i­ty, who dis­cuss “the most effec­tive way to man­age the work­force”, includ­ing a pro­posed move to hybrid work­ing as the sit­u­a­tion allows in the US and Europe. Any rec­om­men­da­tions for action are then sent for approval to the exec­u­tive com­mit­tee, on which Hicke also sits.

Mul­len­Lowe Group has tak­en a sim­i­lar approach to ensur­ing more effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Since the pan­dem­ic struck, Mil­lan has tak­en part in week­ly meet­ings with about 20 HR and oper­a­tions lead­ers, which include the CEOs of large or region­al groups of agen­cies, to dis­cuss every­thing from what is hap­pen­ing on the ground to require­ments, poli­cies and future vision.

“When we start­ed hav­ing our ‘Covid calls’ we thought they’d just last for a cou­ple of weeks, but they’ve been so ben­e­fi­cial we’ve kept them going to dis­cuss issues around the return to the office and hybrid work­ing,” she says. “There’s so much use­ful input and feed­back on what’s hap­pen­ing around the world that I can use in build­ing a strat­e­gy, which my teams then imple­ment at a local lev­el.”

Anoth­er key ben­e­fit of this approach is that both HR and oper­a­tions exec­u­tives now under­stand and are much more “invest­ed and inter­est­ed” in the idea of cre­at­ing a “con­tin­u­al learn­ing cul­ture” around tech­ni­cal skills devel­op­ment, Mil­lan adds.

The future of the CIO

The wide­spread shift to hybrid work­ing has also clar­i­fied just how broad-based and inte­gral the CIO’s role actu­al­ly is.

“In con­trast to HR lead­ers, who focus on peo­ple, and mar­ket­ing lead­ers, who focus on mar­ket­ing, CIOs are able to see across, and are involved in, all parts of the busi­ness,” says White. “So they have a huge part to play in help­ing to devel­op strat­e­gy across the busi­ness, which is also where tech­nol­o­gy comes in – to enable that strat­e­gy to hap­pen.”

This means that as grow­ing num­bers of organ­i­sa­tions embrace dig­i­tal and busi­ness change, the “huge wealth of exper­tise in trans­for­ma­tion, inno­va­tion and dri­ving effi­cien­cies” devel­oped by the major­i­ty of CIOs over a con­sid­er­able peri­od has increas­ing­ly start­ed com­ing into its own, enabling them to “help shape the future”, White adds.

Mil­lan agrees that most CIOs know exact­ly how the com­pa­ny oper­ates, not least because it’s vital to under­stand how every­one uses tech­nol­o­gy. 

“In future I don’t think there’ll be a sep­a­ra­tion between the CIO and COO – they’ll have the same job title, or a dif­fer­ent, new­ly cre­at­ed one. So I think we’ll see the CIO is real­ly the COO in dis­guise — and that will be the future of the CIO,” she con­cludes.