The role of CIO as Chief Infrastructure Officer is becoming increasingly irrelevant. IT budgets have shifted to Marketing. Corporate infrastructure is moving to the cloud. So what’s left? Data.
Enter the Chief Data Officer
Data belongs to the business, not just to IT. The CDO represents these business interests. If the CIO’s job is simply to keep the lights on, that’s not something the rest of the business will relate to. If CIOs are to survive, they must evolve, much like the technology for which they have been responsible.
Business intelligence, data analytics, and the value delivered to the business from SCAM (social, cloud, analytics, mobile) will become the primary driver of strategy. We already see this transformation occurring, and CMOs continue to wrestle away not only dollars, but also organizational ownership of the customer. The CMO becomes the CDO’s best customer.
The CDO is a Hybrid Executive
The most effective CDO will be a hybrid executive. Often graduating from a CIO or CTO role, their responsibilities will overlap several disciplines:
- Data Management
- Decision Management
- Digital Transformation
The CDO is a transformational leader, driving business value by integrating emerging technologies with external marketing and customer facing initiatives with internal processes and applications.
How the CIO can Thrive
The successful CIO will be the one who can take their organization and gear it toward the ability to program infrastructure as code, and serve new application development, driven by social, cloud, analytics, and mobile.
Challenge Questions for Leaders
- What opportunities do you have for creating and enhancing the business value of data?
- What is your strategy for responding to SCAM (social, cloud, analytics, mobile) requirements of the business?
- How will you reshape the business to take advantage of data and technology?
© 2015 Mark Richman. All Rights Reserved.