Will the chief product officer grow up to be the chief data officer?

Digital transformation is introducing more than new technologies to enterprises. Data monetization and digital consumption models are bringing business people and techies into closer collaboration. While they stretch to adopt methods and tools like virtualization, cloud computing and big data analytics, individuals themselves must grow to match the changes.

Many demands of digitization have fallen on the Chief Information Officer’s shoulders — increasing agility via developer operations and fleshing out a partner ecosystem among them. The new CIO role can span a lot of ground, but some emerging domains, like big data strategy, require full-time overseers, according to Wendy Pfeiffer (pictured), chief information officer at Nutanix Inc.

“Sometimes we come to the table and we understand how to monetize data; sometimes we come to the table and we know how to efficiently manage operations,” she said of CIOs and other C-level executives.

Even as the CIO role shape-shifts, some duties remain constant, Pfeiffer told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the the Nutanix .NEXT event in Washington, D.C. (* Disclosure below.) 

This week, theCUBE spotlights Wendy Pfeiffer in our Women In Tech feature.

One evergreen in the CIO wheelhouse is operations stewardship, according to Pfeiffer. “So whether it’s taking operational expertise and transforming that into code for DevOps or whether it’s transforming it into process for on-premise infrastructure, you have to have that knowledge and you have to have that leadership,” she said.

Building applications with code in the cloud contrasts sharply from traditional on-prem methods, but many underlying principles remain the same, namely agility and scalability, Pfeiffer explained.

Now five months into her role as CIO for Nutanix, Pfeiffer draws on her experience as both a mother and a woman in the tech industry. “Being genuinely myself, it was all I could figure out how to be. … It’s been something where my entire career I’ve had to just keep my own counsel and be genuine. And the fact that I’m female and feminine and a mom doesn’t diminish the fact that I’m also a brilliant technologist, that I’m good at leading people,” she said. “I can feel empathy and care in my heart for a person at the same time that I’m firing them for non-performance. I can be multifaceted.