Why today’s CIOs must look outside their organisation to succeed

“The door­way to suc­cess swings out­wards, not inward,” says author and spir­i­tu­al­ist Robin S Shar­ma. Should CIOs pay atten­tion? 

That philo­soph­i­cal wis­dom could cer­tain­ly be seen in recent com­ments by Rash­mi Kumar, HP senior vice pres­i­dent and CIO. She argues that CIOs must stop focus­ing inward and look out­side to thrive in an increas­ing­ly tech­no­log­i­cal and dig­i­tal world. 

“Being CIOs, our pur­pose should be to put the cus­tomers first and not have a tech­nol­o­gy dri­ver deci­sion around how we imple­ment that tech­nol­o­gy,” the Senior VP and CIO sug­gest­ed to CXOTalk’s Michael Krigs­man in Sep­tem­ber. “Don’t try to solve a tech­nol­o­gy prob­lem. Try to solve a cus­tomer prob­lem.” 

That’s a chal­lenge even when you have the vast resources of HP. The glob­al giant is evolv­ing but relies on process­es that have been in place for 30 years. 

“It’s not easy to take an 85-year-old com­pa­ny that has a very dif­fer­ent mind­set and our part­ners who are them­selves busy in their own trans­for­ma­tion, to pull them togeth­er to cre­ate that end-to-end, more effi­cient ecosys­tem” from a process and tech­nol­o­gy per­spec­tive, she says.  

Kumar’s advice – to con­cen­trate on cus­tomer prob­lems – delights Pro­fes­sor Simon Mosey, direc­tor of inno­va­tion and entre­pre­neur­ship at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Nottingham’s Busi­ness School. 

“Most com­pa­nies have got inno­va­tion envy, so their chief infor­ma­tion offi­cer will con­stant­ly be hit over the head to ask: ‘Why can’t we be more like Ama­zon? Our cus­tomers expect deliv­ery on demand, to be kept informed at all times and for every step in the process to be easy and con­ve­nient – if Ama­zon can do all that, why can’t we?’”

Famous­ly, all Amazon’s inno­va­tions begin with a cus­tomer prob­lem, Mosey notes. This means that “in a meet­ing of the high-ups, you have to set out on a page what prob­lem a cus­tomer is hav­ing that you’re going to solve or why your idea would improve on what they’re doing already … that entre­pre­neur­ial approach is baked into their deci­sion mak­ing at board lev­el.”

A changing role

We tend to think of the CIO as an inter­nal­ly focused role, tasked with help­ing employ­ees work in a slick­er, more effi­cient man­ner, aid­ed by IT. In the past, some CFOs per­ceived CIOs as spenders on IT infra­struc­tures “that don’t seem to impact the bot­tom line pos­i­tive­ly, a neg­a­tive dent with not much to show for it unless you under­stand the frame­works being bought”, says Lucy Kallin, man­ag­ing direc­tor of the exec­u­tive search agency Noven­ture.

This view has been rev­o­lu­tionised by the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, Kallin says, when IT depart­ments ensured their col­leagues could work remote­ly. While most were seen as heroes, oth­er com­pa­nies thought “that’s what they should do as stan­dard,” she adds. 

Chief human resources offi­cers (CHROs) and oth­er board mem­bers are now faced with a work­force that’s inter­est­ed in hybrid work­ing con­tracts. The mar­ket is more open than ever, enabling lead­ers to access skills beyond their geo­graph­i­cal bor­ders. In this con­text, “CIOs have to ensure that the solu­tions they imple­ment­ed to solve a cri­sis have the legs to go the dis­tance,” Kallin warns. 

Hele­na Nim­mo is CIO at soft­ware com­pa­ny Enda­va. She thinks an increas­ing­ly out­ward-look­ing focus is a ques­tion of not just adapt­ing to real­i­ty but embrac­ing it.

“Tech­nol­o­gy has bled into every aspect of mod­ern-day life and can have a huge­ly detri­men­tal effect on a business’s abil­i­ty to func­tion if it fails,” she says. 

Technology’s cru­cial oper­a­tional role means that more and more prac­ti­cal tech­nol­o­gists are embed­ded in senior lead­er­ship teams, Nim­mo adds, mean­ing “the val­ue of tech­nol­o­gy to solve cus­tomer prob­lems, not just inter­nal ones, can be bet­ter realised. In my role as CIO, being a busi­ness leader – not just a tech leader – is essen­tial to cus­tomer suc­cess.”

As Bill Gates has point­ed out, “infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy and busi­ness are becom­ing inex­tri­ca­bly inter­wo­ven. I don’t think any­body can talk mean­ing­ful­ly about one with­out talk­ing about the oth­er.”

Shift in thinking 

Through­out the pan­dem­ic, organ­i­sa­tions have scram­bled to quick­ly cre­ate new dig­i­tal prop­er­ties, aim­ing to address busi­ness chal­lenges like sup­ply chain man­age­ment, cus­tomer rela­tion­ships and employ­ee com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Nim­mo says. CIOs are now increas­ing­ly vital to ensure a com­pet­i­tive busi­ness edge and are respon­si­ble for a wider land­scape.  

“The role should now be viewed as essen­tial to cus­tomer suc­cess as it incor­po­rates every­thing from oper­a­tions to inno­va­tion to deliv­ery, and most impor­tant­ly, cus­tomer expe­ri­ence – all at the same time.” 

It’s increas­ing­ly hard to define what a con­ven­tion­al CIO does because the role no longer exists in the tra­di­tion­al sense. Nowa­days CIO’s respon­si­bil­i­ties depend on the sec­tor and the size of the com­pa­ny. Tech­nol­o­gy is so per­va­sive and there are so many tech­nol­o­gy lead­ers and labels that it’s dif­fi­cult to draw a box around any C‑suite role. 

The board is an ever-expand­ing enti­ty. Begin­ning with a CEO, com­pa­nies soon found they need­ed a CFO, then a COO and then a CHRO. Now it feels like new roles emerge on a dai­ly basis. How­ev­er, the busi­ness­es built for future suc­cess will always put the end user at the cen­tre of their deci­sion mak­ing, as the giants of Sil­i­con Val­ley have shown. 

Ulti­mate­ly, the CIO’s approach will depend on their company’s needs. They must devel­op a full under­stand­ing of the end-to-end process­es that serve their cus­tomers. For exam­ple, Kumar is focused on chang­ing print­ing needs and how HP can facil­i­tate these to remain rel­e­vant in the future. 

Data is now invalu­able at a strate­gic busi­ness lev­el, as well as inter­nal­ly.  For many CIOs, lead­ing, man­ag­ing and imple­ment­ing a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion strat­e­gy is now a fun­da­men­tal part of the role. This means employ­ing tal­ent­ed peo­ple who can be trust­ed to deal with inter­nal chal­lenges, enabling CIOs to focus on exter­nal stake­hold­ers. Del­e­ga­tion is all impor­tant when offer­ing the best sup­port to cus­tomers. 

Diversity needs

C‑Suites that fail to embrace diver­si­ty and inclu­sion can hold busi­ness­es back. The mur­der of George Floyd in the US in 2020 “catal­ysed a reck­on­ing around racial injus­tice that led many cor­po­rate lead­ers to seek to evolve their organ­i­sa­tions to meet today’s tremen­dous soci­etal chal­lenges”, not­ed the Har­vard Busi­ness Review. 

A sur­vey of the publication’s read­ers found that 65% of respon­dents did not think their organ­i­sa­tions were diverse and inclu­sive. Its analy­sis showed that bet­ter diver­si­ty on the board improved deci­sion mak­ing.

Any­one in a posi­tion of author­i­ty – not just CIOs – should look at the busi­ness from the per­spec­tive of “oth­ers who are usu­al­ly under­served or not involved in the inno­va­tion deci­sion mak­ing”, says Mosey. A first step is to think of things from a customer’s point of view, both in terms of exist­ing cus­tomers and those the com­pa­ny is tar­get­ing. 

“With tech groups par­tic­u­lar­ly, they tend to neglect the cus­tomers that don’t fit the pro­file of the senior man­age­ment team, which is usu­al­ly ‘pale, male and stale’,” Mosey argues. “So you’re not look­ing at char­ac­ter­is­tics of gen­der, race or dis­ad­van­taged com­mu­ni­ties who aren’t in a posi­tion of deci­sion mak­ing – they don’t tend to be rep­re­sent­ed in inno­va­tion.” 

Com­pa­nies need to gain insight into lived expe­ri­ence and devel­op sys­tems and ser­vices to match. When the CIO thinks like an entre­pre­neur, they’re able to adapt before their busi­ness­es are dis­rupt­ed by nim­bler star­tups. That’s bet­ter than play­ing catch up or – even worse – find­ing they’re too late to react and the busi­ness is doomed. This means har­ness­ing the capa­bil­i­ties that the best CIOs have long cul­ti­vat­ed. 

“Put the train­ing wheels on first,” Mosey says. Before ask­ing cus­tomers about their prob­lems, change the way you work with­in the organ­i­sa­tion to ensure you can offer solu­tions. 

The first step is actu­al­ly to reach out to employ­ees to ask: ‘What prob­lems have we got that we’re not solv­ing?’” If your inter­nal sys­tems, pro­ce­dures and deci­sion-mak­ing become more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the work­force, you should find you become more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of cus­tomers.  

Ulti­mate­ly, the shift to suc­cess­ful out­ward think­ing begins by look­ing inward.