#CIO100EA: Digital disruption age is changing the role of the CIO

Digital disruption age is changing the role of the CIO but the question is “changing into what?”

A question Nik Nesbitt, Chairman at Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA)  posed to his audience at Enashipai Resort and Spa during the CIO100 Symposium and Awards.

“As a CIO your transformation is determined by the changes in your actions,” said Nik.

The changes are becoming more evident as Digital Disruption can be summarized as Digital war which is about better customer experience and Disruption which changes the rules of the game meaning new competition can come from anywhere hence being complacent is lethal for a CIO.

“How much have YOU changed as a CIO or are you still the CIO who sees themselves as a Chief Infrastructure Officer dealing with the day-to-day task of keeping existing IT infrastructure going or the Chief Information Officer dealing with finding the insights that you need to be competitive or better yet are you still the Chief IT Budget Spending Officer.” Nik added.

Staying ahead of the curve of the digital disruption age a CIO needs to become a Chief Innovation Officer this means that you not only have to be a Chief Integration Officer who reshapes their ICT, a Chief Insights Officer who leads business transformation but also a Chief Experience Officer who creates engaged customers.

The important question a CIO should be asking themselves is how they achieve all this?

A Chief Integration Officer should strive to improve the performance and productivity of your existing operations, identify your core areas of value and turn the rest into SLAs and Op Ex, embrace cloud – both on premise and in the sky – as your new hybrid reality.

Chief Insights Officer should strive to feed the appetite of business executives for data-driven decision making, build a data science competency that turns data into insights and integrate, combine and enrich data into diamonds for the API economy.

Chief Experience Officer should strive to design thinking compelling experiences and aligning everyone to deliver, create an agile DevOps practice to rapidly bring ideas to life and enrich the user experience with Mobile, Cognitive, IoT, Blockchain.

Nik concluded the presentation stating, “Your Future is in Your Hands Chief Innovation Officer”