Why today’s CIOs must look outside their organisation
“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.”
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.
