CIOs may be plagued by marketing departments that are gaining more C-suite influnce and business executives bypassing them in technology purchases, but information technology research firm Gartner believes the time is ripe for CIOs to take a leadership role in the enterprise.
At a time when corporate risk managers mistakenly believe that big data and analytics initiatives are too costly and not suited for the enterprise, CIOs can prove their mettle by being “agile, responsive and efficient in decision-makin, development and rollout, while looking at non-traditional services for new revenue opportunities and growth,” accoring to Gartner’s report Survey Analysis: Telecom CIOs Are Harvesting Existing Assets and Hunting for Digital Services in 2015.
A recent article in Forbes.com, said CIOs need to establish IT platform architectures that are flexible, scalable and develope “nimble business solutions.” CIOs need to use predictive analytics to produce intelligence from both existing and new data streams that can be important for marketing, sales, supply chain management, risk management and finance.
A survey of 88 CIOs by Gartner revealed what the CIOs’ goals were in relation to their organization’s business processes
- Helping to gain a clearer understanding of business strategies and priorities (21 per cent)
- Helping to identify which initiatives and projects to focus on (19 per cent)
- Helping to build more collaborative relationships with business executives (17 per cent)
- Helping to establish a clear linkage between business and IT strategy (16 per cent)
- Providing a common language for business and IT leaders to communicate (12 per cent)
- Providing a way of identifying opportunities for IT innovation (11 per cent)
- Enabling their enterprise to develop a better business architecture practice (4 per cent)
The Forbese article said all these responses point to joint efforts. To deliver value-added IT services that enables the entire organization to grow, CIOs need to integrate their business and IT strategic planning. IT must partner with business lines within the organization and become a trusted advisor and ally.
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