Each year, we poll our member CIOs to determine which topics will be most important for them to get right over the next 18 months. This year’s survey revealed that CIOs are looking ahead to three significant efforts:
CIOs expressed considerable interest in making their contribution to business partner >innovation more scalable. While innovation has been a longstanding (and often addressed) challenge for IT organizations, this feels different. CIOs are telling us that their traditional approaches (e.g. idea fairs, hackathons, dedicated funding pools for innovation) can’t scale to accommodate the volume of ideas coming from business partners today.
At the same time that CIOs voted in favor of making IT’s contribution to business innovation more scalable, few CIOs picked two topics that could genuinely help business partners experiment faster and more safely on their own. A topic on improving the quality and impact of partners’ shadow IT and a topic on helping business partners make better third-party technology purchasing decisions both scored low amongst nearly all CIOs.
Business partner-led experimentation (aka “shadow IT”) has become the main source of innovation ideas for IT, so it would seem to be a natural pair with the innovation topic. We’ll ask CIOs about this dichotomy during our research interviews over the next several months.
Enhancing the organization’s collaboration and knowledge sharing capabilities is top of mind for many CIOs. As noted in a previous blog post, though, it’s out of a sense of frustration that the problem hasn’t been solved rather than with excitement at new, emerging possibilities. For all of the time, energy, and money invested in helping the enterprise share ideas and collaborate across teams, few organizations have gotten better. At the same time, the ability of employees to impact the work of others has become more important.
One point made by a number of CIOs is that improving IT’s ability to find and deploy the right tools isn’t going to be what makes organizations more successful at collaboration. CIOs will need better approaches to help teams outside of IT understand their own collaboration needs, and they’ll need to engage in an active campaign to get employees across their organizations to exhibit different skills and behaviors.
This is a mission that many IT groups will be reluctant to take on, but one that several CIOs say is necessary.
While CIOs’ interest in adopting end-to-end IT services remains high, it’s not an easy transition for most organizations. CIOs have told us that one of their top priorities for 2014 is to mature the processes that support IT’s ability to operate in an end-to-end service model.
In particular, CIOs have asked us how the high-level concept of IT services defined around business capabilities translates into specific changes in budgeting, team coordination, and operational processes. Getting these nuts and bolts of the service model right is important, but can often be overlooked in the initial stages of a transformation.
Implicit across all three of these topics is a broader issue about talent. IT leaders will need teams of individuals who have the necessary competencies to be effective contributors in the new work environment. It’s not always easy to hire or develop these competencies, though, so CIOs will continue to consider talent an essential enabler of their major initiatives.
Source : CEB
