Data Leverage: How CIOs Are Leading Cultural Change
After years of business process transformation and the ongoing transition to cloud and mobility platforms, strategic CIOs are now working to transform entire business models and operations to help their organizations compete in digitally disrupted markets.
Data as trusted currency is the new norm, but data-driven digital transformation involves far more than just data—it also requires a shift in the organization’s collective mindset. Unlike past resets where CIOs took their cues from business leadership, the pivot toward data-driven digital transformation is an opportunity for CIOs to lead the cultural changes that will make intelligent data and actionable insights accessible to every initiative and every person, enterprisewide.
CIOs are a natural choice to lead the charge because they have a unique, cross-enterprise view and are responsible for the applications, processes, and data that power modern business. CIOs understand that trusted data is the underpinning of digital transformation and are committed to breaking down silos to deliver high-quality, reliable information designed for reuse and accessibility. With a bird’s eye view of what’s possible, the CIO is well positioned to drive intelligent data management strategies and enact the requisite cultural change.
“For new systems to take hold and for silos to fall away, attitudes and behaviors must also change,” Informatica Senior Vice President and CIO Graeme Thompson says in a recent eBook, titled The CIO’s Guide to Developing a Data-Driven Culture. “To do this, [CIOs] must evangelize other companies’ data-driven transformations and embrace the role of Transformer-in-Chief—if we don’t, nobody will.”
This “transformer-in-chief” role involves taking on both legacy systems and legacy thinking, which collectively stifle innovation by limiting how data is viewed and leveraged. To address these dual challenges, CIOs need to integrate new enterprise cloud data management technologies into their IT blueprints, while also evolving the overall perception of data beyond something that exists in a particular system for a specific purpose. They need to foster the mindset that considers data as a strategic asset that can be used horizontally across every individual, application, process, and function within the enterprise.
In many organizations, it’s typical for functional areas like sales and marketing or customer service to have their own applications, processes, and data warehouses that are specific to how they work. These operational silos impede a data-driven culture because they prevent other areas from benefiting from potentially critical information while making it difficult to leverage the data where it can have the greatest impact. At the same time, silos encourage individual departments to narrowly focus on solving a specific problem without regard to its impact on other areas of the business.
Moreover, without cross-enterprise access to a single source of truth, companies can’t deliver a seamless customer experience – a critical differentiator in today’s multichannel marketplaces.
Here are four important steps CIOs can take to foster a data-driven culture:
Move from alignment to outcomes. The 2017 State of the CIO study shows that CIOs are spending more time aligning IT initiatives with business goals (53%) and cultivating IT/business partnerships (38%). Even better, 46% of CIOs say the CIO/CMO relationship has gotten better or somewhat closer.
However, the story can’t end with better IT/business alignment.
