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3 Ways CIOs are Reinventing the Workplace
When it comes to digitally transforming the workplace, companies are struggling to see the bigger picture. In order for an enterprise to truly transform, CIOs need to take the lead and combine cultural change with technical innovation. This article will cover the three ways that CIO’s can reinvent the workplace to help establish a seamless digital transformation.
Fighting the Silo
Organizational culture is the key to digital transformation – to succeed everyone needs to be on board, from stakeholders, C-suite executives to the employees. The one most likely tagged with establishing this digital transformation is the CIO responsible for unifying the business with technical solutions. Whoever the lead is they need to identify the key stakeholder groups, and bring them together to drive the change required.
Many organisations are still confined by a silo mentality and are not communicating a singular version of the quality service story. Take the Ryanair outage from 2017, for example. The airline announced an eight hour shut down to redesign their website. The outage left customers frustrated that they were unable to check into flights, and lost Ryanair a high volume of e-commerce traffic.
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Digital transformation is not just about modernizing the technology being use. To effect real change, organisations need to break down established norms within their corporate structure. Modern CIOs must act as a bridge between sections of their organisations to align tech perspective with wider company strategy and establish a communications pipeline.
Speeding up Digital Transformation
CIOs now play a central role in scaling systematic digital transformation efforts, and set out the criteria for what successful change looks like for their organisation. With this role change, CIO’s are expected to create the best value for their organisation, often through greater appreciation of customers and markets.
Digital transformation not only affects company culture, it affects the very foundation of any business. The era of standalone products is over – products are increasingly packaged together with a service, creating a new, product-as-a-service approach, and a whole new business model for CIOs to navigate. IoT is a prime example of the product-as-a-service business model that CIOs have to manage in order to successfully implement change.
In order to speed up the process of digital transformation, CIOs often launch a ‘speedboat’ setup, whereby a dedicated initiative, such as IoT, is fast tracked. Launching a speedboat setup in one specific area can create change momentum and enable organisations to surpass their competition for the short term, but if the overall project is to be successful, the whole organisation needs to be on board.
Adapting to survive
It is clear, the role of the CIO is as much in flux as wider business strategies, and good CIOs understand their role now covers far more than traditional IT maintenance duties. Some organizations have different initiatives that have changed the way they operate; finance is a good example. Traditional financial services firms now find themselves in competition with ‘born digital’ FinTech organizations, who are not confined by the restrictions of legacy systems. In order to compete, established organisations must undergo digital transformation. The barrier is usually not a technical problem, but a business model and culture issue. However, the multi-discipline CIO is still going to be looked at to take the lead and push on to an agile new frontier for their businesses.
Technological innovations are transforming the workplace, workers roles, and business approaches, at a rapid pace. The real challenge for CIOs and industry leaders is to ride this wave of change and pick out the benefits, without losing sight of their organisation’s objectives or the skills that placed individuals in their c-suite role to begin with.