6 reasons why the CIO will be the next Chief Innovation Officer

6 reasons why the CIO will be the next Chief Innovation Officer

We live in times where Business volatility, new technologies, globalization and increased competition force Business leaders to step back and question every aspect of their businesses.

Organizations must be continuously looking for breakthrough developments in their business models and the value they provide to their customers. So radical change and Innovation is a must to meet the challenges ahead.

Effective Innovation management should be led from the top, the CEO and the leadership team, and permeate through the Organization.

But the reality is that everybody's business is nobody's business or, in other words, many commanders sink the ship.

So, assuming you have to designate a person to focus exclusively on driving innovation for your company, who's the best bet?

The solution can be right in front of you. The person who leads the IT in your Organization is a serious contender for this role. The CIO has several skills that make him/her the right person for this vital job.

Nowadays IT is vital in all aspects of the company. There is no department within the company that does not manage all its processes through computer systems. This means that the IT department must understand in detail how each department of the company operates to propose, configure and support their computer systems. IT is the Big Brother within the organization. It doesn't mind if we're talking about the marketing team, the sales team, the financial team, the human resources team or the product management team. At some point, every team must explain its internal working procedures to the IT guy.

This is a specific advantage to the IT department. Other departments need to collaborate between them but none of them has the in-depth knowledge of how other teams operate. Even Financials or Human Resources, that also support all the other business departments, need not understand so deeply how the rest of the departments work.

And this extensive knowledge is crucial to propose innovations in the innermost workings of an enterprise.

But the IT department also views the interrelationships that take place between the different parts of the company. They can see how the information flows around the company.

In fact, I've received multiple times similar requirements from different departments to develop software that covers the same functionalities. Even worse, I've received requests to develop functionalities that should be responsibility of a different department, uncovering that this department tried to keep under its control information that should be centralized. And what's even worse, I've received requests to develop utilities to help them prepare information to be sent to a different department that I knew for sure was absolutely unnecessary because we had developed a workaround to collect this information two years ago and nobody reported to this department they could stop sending this information.

So, functional and divisional "silos" reduce efficiency in the overall operation, create frustration, and may lead to long-term harm to the organization by creating conflicts and resentment within the teams. The silo mindset results from the inability of team leaders to change something that is out of their control.

The first step to solve this silo mindset is to have this unified vision of the organization and be able to propose cross-functional changes that can improve productivity, save resources and to boost the achievement of goals. This is the responsibility of the leadership team but the support of the IT team is invaluable given their in-depth knowledge of how the information flows in the organization.

Perhaps this is the most obvious point. Technology is what makes most innovations possible today.

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