Digitization will allow CIOs to expand their careers and make a greater contribution to business value, but they must be flexible and ready to understand the maturity of digital efforts across the company.
Despite the hype about chief digital officers and other dedicated digital leadership roles, the most successful companies are making digitization a core competency of the existing leadership bench. For them, digital has become the way effective business leaders meet their strategic objectives and operate day-to-day, rather than a separate initiative.
This shift has implications for CIOs. It means that their role will now be shaped by the digital ambitions and abilities of the rest of the corporate leadership team, and as others’ ambitions and abilities change, so will those of the CIO.
As their business counterparts become more engaged in digital, many CIOs are pursuing a multi-year career path that will lead them into one (or more) of three emerging roles.
1. Digital Evangelist. The first step for many CIOs is to help the rest of the company’s leadership team understand and embrace digitization’s potential. This step is crucial, as CIOs’ ability to deliver digital capabilities is extremely limited until the rest of the C-suite is onboard. Digital evangelists put next-generation technology capabilities such as big data, machine learning, and the Internet of Things into context and explain how they enhance or transform the enterprise’s products, channels, and operations. They also highlight and help lead organizational changes that are essential to digitization’s success, such as ensuring that the digitization strategy is clearly communicated to the organization as a whole and that incentives and objectives are aligned to digital goals.
2. Modernizer. If done well, the role of digital evangelist is a transitory one that requires less time from the CIO as business leaders become digitally savvy and the momentum of digital transformation picks up. At this stage, most CIOs will shift their focus to being a modernizer. As modernizers, CIOs build and manage the next generation technologies and platforms that support digital transformation and enable interoperability of digital product portfolios.
