The CIO in 2020: a brave new world?

The year is 2020. The world is prepar­ing for the results of the US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and UEFA Euro 2020 has seen some excep­tion­al foot­ball with Eng­land mak­ing it to the final.

The CIO of a fast-grow­ing com­pa­ny takes a qui­et moment, hav­ing ordered a clean meat burg­er grown from plant pro­teins to be deliv­ered by drone, to reflect on the last two years in the world of tech­nol­o­gy. The company’s rela­tion­ship with the cloud and the way it man­ages dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, cyber­se­cu­ri­ty and tal­ent have all changed fun­da­men­tal­ly, as has her role as the CIO.

“By 2020 the role of the CIO will be almost unrecog­nis­able,” says Gary Richard­son, man­ag­ing direc­tor for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, data and ana­lyt­ics at 6point6, a lead­ing tech­nol­o­gy con­sul­tan­cy. “With­out being the exec­u­tive con­cerned with issues relat­ing to dat­a­cen­tres, enter­prise appli­ca­tions and IT pro­cure­ment, the CIO will act more like the founder of a start­up.

“They’ll be ensur­ing that dig­i­tal prod­ucts are deliv­ered, man­ag­ing prod­uct teams as well as deliv­er­ing out­stand­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. They’ll be sell­ing tech­nol­o­gy-dri­ven out­comes and will be very much at the cen­tre of the busi­ness, say­ing ‘yes’ and enabling, rather than say­ing ‘no’.”

Once con­sid­ered a cost-cen­tre own­er, ensur­ing that sys­tems such as email, file servers, print and tele­pho­ny stay up, com­pa­nies have put tech­nol­o­gy firm­ly at the heart of the busi­ness. In 2020 our CIO is now focused on inno­va­tion and embrac­ing emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies hav­ing been freed from deliv­er­ing undif­fer­en­ti­at­ed ser­vices.

CIOs must con­cen­trate on the three Cs, tak­ing the cost out, increas­ing com­pet­i­tive­ness and improv­ing com­pli­ance

CIOs must con­cen­trate on the three Cs, argues Mr Richard­son. “That means tak­ing cost out, increas­ing com­pet­i­tive­ness and, as more com­pa­nies become more heav­i­ly reg­u­lat­ed, improv­ing com­pli­ance,” he says. With a relent­less focus on deliv­er­ing busi­ness val­ue using a prod­uct mind­set, our CIO has now become the chief inno­va­tion offi­cer.

“Today dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is so fun­da­men­tal that it’s increas­ing­ly the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the chief exec­u­tive rather than the CIO,” points out Chris Porter, 6point6’s man­ag­ing direc­tor for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. “The chief exec­u­tive wants the CIO to move ahead with this trans­for­ma­tion, oth­er­wise they’ll start spawn­ing oth­er roles with sim­i­lar titles whose job it is to do it.

“This means that we’ll see more non-tech­nol­o­gist CIOs emerge because they’ll be able to out­source the tech­ni­cal work and con­cen­trate on the busi­ness skills need­ed to keep the company’s busi­ness mod­el rel­e­vant. The length of time these mod­els lasts is being reduced dra­mat­i­cal­ly from two decades to less than two years.”

As part of this dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, over the last few years our CIO has moved the com­pa­ny away from run­ning its own dat­a­cen­tres. Man­ag­ing racks of com­put­ers and cool­ing sys­tems, as well as try­ing to ensure their secu­ri­ty, added no val­ue to the com­pa­ny and would have been a dis­trac­tion. With exter­nal spe­cial­ists man­ag­ing them, our CIO has been able to focus on inno­va­tion and dri­ving the busi­ness for­ward with new prod­ucts and ser­vices.

How­ev­er, dur­ing this dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion our CIO of 2020 didn’t rush to the cloud as did many oth­er firms. The com­pe­ti­tion was daz­zled by new tech­nol­o­gy and bam­boo­zled by what Justin Day, man­ag­ing direc­tor of 6point6’s Cloud Gate­way, a com­plete secure path­way for cloud enable­ment, calls “cloud evan­ge­lists”. Instead, our CIO put the needs of the busi­ness first and ensured the tran­si­tion was dri­ven by real­is­ing val­ue along the way.

“Often when you talk to CIOs and chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cers, their open­ing gam­bit will be ‘We need to lever­age the cloud more’,” says Mr Day. “I’m cer­tain­ly not a cloud scep­tic and I love what the cloud can offer, how­ev­er the pace of adop­tion needs to be mea­sured, and we need to strike the right bal­ance between gov­er­nance and con­trol.”

Take billing. “Tra­di­tion­al­ly you’d have to buy a serv­er by rais­ing a pur­chase order going through pro­cure­ment which was time con­sum­ing and cost­ly. With the cloud, you just click a but­ton and you’ve got more stor­age. It might look cheap, but spin up ten servers, leave them going 24 hours a day and your bill could be sub­stan­tial. You need to look at the whole busi­ness strat­e­gy and see where cloud can work in it. That’s why we cre­at­ed Cloud Gate­way, so com­pa­nies can migrate to the cloud at the pace and in the man­ner that suits them.”

As well as changes in the rela­tion­ship with the cloud, the CIO of 2020 has watched cyber move up the agen­da. Com­pa­nies have strug­gled with how much to invest in cyber and how to jus­ti­fy that invest­ment. “Spend­ing will increase as com­pa­nies trans­act more online and com­pa­nies look to become more respon­sive to threats,” says Eddie Lamb, man­ag­ing direc­tor for cyber­se­cu­ri­ty at 6point6.

“Sus­tain­able cost-mod­el­ling allows CIOs to demon­strate a return on invest­ment. They per­form a bal­anc­ing act between cost and secu­ri­ty. They need to iden­ti­fy what is in-sourced and what presents more val­ue being out­sourced.”

Stake­hold­ers often have more con­fi­dence, our CIO has noticed, because the com­pa­ny has a direct con­nec­tion with those han­dling its cyber and the process is now con­stant­ly acces­si­ble. Com­pa­nies can still use a cloud plat­form with all the ben­e­fits it offers, such as host­ing man­age­ment sys­tems, while keep­ing the ser­vice in-house.

“It builds val­ue into the com­pa­ny and address­es the skills gap through train­ing,” explains Mr Lamb. “Com­pa­nies will also need to cre­ate the right cul­ture – secu­ri­ty isn’t an add-on. It must be inte­gral through­out the busi­ness and prod­uct devel­op­ment.”

As the clean meat burg­er arrives in a drone, our CIO begins to eat, while she con­sid­ers how the CIO’s role will con­tin­ue to evolve.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it www.6point6.co.uk