The ‘C’ in CIO Stands for Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Years devoted to building out advanced applications and convincing colleagues in other units that, yes, IT can drive new business opportunities, appear to have paid off. Chief information officers say their role has become more strategic and will continue to evolve in that direction in the near future.

“Technology now has become every person’s business versus just enabling the business,” said Carol Juel, CIO at Synchrony Financial. “This has shifted the IT infrastructure conversation from a technology discourse to a strategic discussion.” Ms. Juel was among 30 IT executives who responded via email to CIO Journal’s annual end-of-year questionnaire about how their role is changing, among other issues.

The proverbial seat at the table is theirs. Technology’s expanding reach in the corporate world—from cloud computing to artificial intelligence—means chief information officers are taking a bigger role in developing business strategies and customer services. They have also emerged as key cultural influencers, spreading the gospel of agile, DevOps and other practices with deep technological roots across their organizations.

But just because they’ve left the data center—sometimes quite literally—they haven’t completely abandoned the data-center mindset of explaining technology, leveraging it and making sure everything works. CIOs remain the most technically literate leaders in their respective companies.

“On any given day, I work the spectrum—from the executive team on strategy and execution and down into the lower levels of the organization on the nitty gritty details,” said Sue Bergamo, Epicenter’s chief information officer and chief information security officer.

“This is the toughest time to be a CIO, but also an exciting time,” Steve Van Kuiken, a senior partner at consulting firm McKinsey & Co., told CIO Journal earlier this year. “You have the challenge of being both a business strategist and a technology expert,” he said.

With that in mind, CIO Journal asked CIOs how their role has changed in the past year and how they expect it to change in 2020. Here are edited highlights:

“One of my first priorities here, after connecting with people across different business units to understand the opportunities and challenges we faced, was to develop the platform strategy to support our digital transformation. As we enter 2020, I’ll spend more time with business leaders to bring new, revenue-generating opportunities to the table that they may not have considered and that our technology team can enable.”

“For 2020 my role will continue to focus on driving a commercial mindset—being flexible and multidisciplinary, going deep in technology while leading, developing strategy, and executing. Driving innovation. Building partnerships across the technology landscape and continuing to focus on talent and culture. This is in addition to the core role of the CIO, to make sure that we move very efficiently, very effectively, with scale, stability and security.”

“My role is always evolving, though I don’t believe it’s changed, only become more refined as the business evolves and grows. We have a culture at Episerver, where we all roll up our sleeves and accomplish what is needed.”

“My organization is taking a leadership role in defining end-to-end solutions to run our business, defining our enterprise architecture and guiding our technology choices proactively. This is a modern role for IT—we don’t expect to own and run all the technology, but we are guiding choices, defining architecture and solutions and developing the services they all connect to.”

“We have spent recent years focused on acquisition integration, foundational system consolidation and modernization, and service optimization.