During digital transformation, CIOs are the secret weapon
These are uncertain and sobering times for everyone in the workforce, but the moment is particularly stressful for chief information officers.
Even before COVID-19, organizations asked their CIOs to do more with less, and the pandemic has only exacerbated and added to the demand with financial difficulties and layoffs facing many organizations. The pandemic has forced businesses to reckon with employees working from home. Still, questions remain about whether teams can maintain their productivity 12 or 18 months from now should the world stay in a protracted lockdown.
Many companies made long-lasting announcements about how their teams will work moving forward, ranging from allowing teams to work from home indefinitely to permanently closing their physical offices. Others face immediate budget cuts and long-term uncertainty around their revenue streams.
The state of flux is increasing the uncertainty many CIOs and other company executives feel, and should serve as a wake-up call.
On the surface, digital-focused companies should have been ideally situated for a prolonged period of working from home amid the pandemic. The reality is that despite the shift to digital in the last two-plus decades, the approach hasn’t always been successful. In recent years, many organizations have started to employ chief digital officers (CDOs), a sort of majordomo for all things digital. Many experts said the rise of the CDO meant the CIO had to evolve or otherwise face corporate irrelevance. These new officers were sometimes called “transformers in chief,” but looking back with some years of context, it is clear they didn’t always deliver. According to McKinsey, 83% of all digital transformations fail, while 94% of all executives globally surveyed are unsatisfied with their firms’ innovation performance. The problem is more acute when considering that a mere 12% of executives surveyed “strongly agree” their business leaders have the right mindsets to lead them forward. That’s because for too long, organizations have chased the “shiny object,” hoping it would be a brass ring of sorts. They took chances on all kinds of solutions, rolled them out, then rolled them back when they didn’t produce the intended results. However, these organizations confused “new ideas” with “great ideas.” They either forgot or didn’t ensure that what they were chasing had a relevant business purpose that could help further their mission — in other words, they forgot to ask, “why?”
The opportunity for CIOs to shine In response to the pandemic, organizations have rolled out a series of software and technology suites in the name of productivity.
