7 Actionable Strategies to Help CIOs Deliver Real Value

Many tech leaders still find themselves receiving technical requirements from their C-suite counterparts and executing pre-defined strategies. This approach results in fragmented systems, competing priorities, and solutions that fall short of being genuinely transformative.

Furthermore, as technology progresses at breakneck speed, organizations are in a constant race to not only catch up with the latest innovations but also acquire the talent to harness these advancements, differentiate their offerings and achieve business objectives. Staffing and budget constraints often complicate these efforts, presenting significant challenges to sustaining a competitive advantage.

To propel business growth and boost your competitive advantage, CIOs and CTOs must turn up their influence and demonstrate how holistic tech transformations deliver real value. Top technology leaders achieve success when they operate as change agents, working with other executive decision-makers to develop strategies that improve productivity, scalability, profitability and customer experiences.

This resource is presented by Growth Acceleration Partners (GAP), a consulting and technology services company deeply engaged with CIOs and their challenges. It outlines strategies to help CIOs cultivate strategic skills, boost CxO-level collaboration, and drive overall business results with technology. Relevant success stories exhibit the value of engaging a collaborative business partner to build custom solutions, speed up implementations and optimize resources.

1. BE A STRATEGIC LEADER

CIOs must be strategic, aligning and melding transformative technology solutions with the business’s overall strategic imperatives. This endeavor doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the best ideas won’t come from a one-hour meeting. Well-thought-out strategies culminate from a series of conversations.

Start by nurturing an open dialogue with the CEO. You should gain a clear understanding of the CEO’s vision and the organization’s strategic priorities to best determine how technology can drive business value.

According to GAP’s CEO and Cofounder Joyce Durst, “The most effective tech leaders excel in actualizing strategic vision by skillfully infusing the power of transformative technology solutions. They tell the story — and sell the vision, thereby turning ambitious goals into tangible realities.”

Initiate conversations with C-level peers to discuss how the overall company objectives relate to their departmental goals. Gather diverse perspectives from cross-functional managers, learning about day-to-day priorities, challenges and how technology may be able to facilitate (or hinder) success.

By expanding your knowledge and network across the business, CIOs can transition from being viewed as an IT leader to becoming highly-respected as a well-rounded strategic executive.

2. COLLABORATE TO ARCHITECT ALIGNED STRATEGIES

By intimately understanding strategic requirements, departmental goals and pain points, CIOs can collaborate with leaders to build aligned technology strategies centered on business needs. When you are actively engaged in proactively shaping and architecting holistic solutions, you avoid getting flooded with disjointed initiatives from each department.

The big picture lens and cross-functional perspectives also allow CIOs to identify force multipliers, which are single initiatives that address multiple issues, benefiting the overall organization. For example, connected systems can mitigate errors, improve productivity and boost satisfaction across multiple departments.

In these discussions, CIOs face the crucial challenge of striking a balance between demonstrating technical expertise and effectively communicating strategies, while keeping the audience’s wants and needs in mind. Avoid alienating non-technical colleagues by translating complex concepts into clear, accessible language to facilitate smooth collaboration.

Besides collaborating cross-functionally, be sure to connect with your technology-focused peers and colleagues. Communicating with your CTO, CDAO, CISO and CPO — and collaborating with other tech-savvy leaders who see the value of digital innovation — can give you a well-rounded view of the potential risks and benefits before making decisions on increasingly complex topics.

Identify where projects, resources and goals might intersect (or conflict), and determine how synergies can improve outcomes. Sharing knowledge and diverse perspectives can lead to novel solutions and accelerate innovation.

Aligned and unified digital priorities bring the C-suite together and encourage a co-ownership model where IT and the business share responsibility for digital initiatives. These partnerships reduce resource and budget constraints while mitigating risk. IT feels better supported, and the business feels more engaged. Experts estimate that CIOs who co-own digital projects with their CxO counterparts are more than twice as likely to be successful with these investments.

However, even with a strong collaborative environment, it can be challenging to design and execute long-term strategies when technology is rapidly evolving. Gartner recommends that, in some cases, a “minimum viable strategy” might be suitable. Instead of getting hung up on unknowns or stuck executing outdated initiatives, develop plans that allow for ongoing iterations and improvements.

3. DELIVER ON DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Non-IT executives may think of digital transformation as a project with a start and a finish. CIOs need to help colleagues see digital transformation as a journey, enabling the achievement of near-term business objectives and positioning the organization for long-term innovation and success.

Digital transformation initiatives have evolved with technology, starting over 20 years ago with record digitization and the adoption of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Today, many organizations are focused on optimizing operations through advanced data analytics, IoT and AI.

As a visionary leader, you must also think about what you need to do today to prepare for groundbreaking digital transformation initiatives in the future, such as:

• Quantum computing to supercharge machine learning algorithms
• Robotic process automation (RPA) for complex and creative tasks
• Digital twin technology for real-time monitoring, analysis and simulation
• Augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) applications for immersive learning experiences
• Voice recognition and natural language processing (NLP) to make digital interactions more intuitive

A comprehensive digital transformation strategy is multi-faceted, has infrastructure dependencies and requires multi-year commitments, even in times of uncertainty. CIOs must communicate a long-term roadmap that ties to the top strategic imperatives — and show value delivered along the way — to assure sustained support.

Agile development and design thinking play pivotal roles in the digital transformation landscape to ensure quick development and user adoption. Agile development emphasizes flexibility, continuous feedback and iterative processes, while design thinking is a problem-solving approach that focuses on understanding the user, challenging assumptions and redefining problems to come up with creative solutions. This combination accelerates the delivery of value by allowing tools to be developed and refined quickly in response to user feedback and changing market demands.

Meanwhile, some organizations have been burned by digital transformation projects that didn’t deliver the expected value or ROI. Deloitte research identifies three elements to successful digital transformation:

1. A clearly articulated digital strategy
2. Commitment for specific technology investments
3. People and process readiness for the change

Although it may seem overly simplified, the key is to take deliberate actions on each of these elements to ensure you have a solid plan, budget for implementation and change management support. By following this framework, organizations are more likely to derive the most value and achieve a high ROI from digital transformation initiatives.

4. DEMYSTIFY THE VALUE OF INFRASTRUCTURE

Building technical literacy within the C-suite builds trust and ensures colleagues recognize the value and necessity of infrastructure projects. Demystify this behind-the-scenes work and connect the dots on how infrastructure supports—or harms—strategic imperatives and departmental goals. This foundational knowledge facilitates discussions and improves decision-making.

Transparency about timelines and complexity for infrastructure projects is also critical to secure the necessary resources and set expectations. For instance, many executives may assume transitioning to the cloud is as simple as “lift and shift.” But CIOs can share insights about capturing the full value of cloud technology to enable flexibility, scalability and speed. And to achieve these benefits, the organization must invest in cloud expertise to design an optimized solution.

Virtually all technology projects depend on flexible and scalable infrastructure. Securing buy-in from the entire C-suite is crucial to ensure infrastructure is prioritized to support broader organizational objectives.

5. ENGAGE WITH CUSTOMERS

All too often, customer interactions are limited to the sales and marketing teams. Customer requirements are typically relayed to IT, and as a result, IT is disconnected from the customer’s pain points and strategic goals.

As technology touches every part of the business, it becomes a critical element that impacts the customer experience and delivers growth. Online platforms, mobile apps, social media and chatbots have created new channels for customer interactions. Subscription services, platform-based ecosystems and freemium models are examples of how technology has enabled new revenue streams.

Additionally, cross-functional initiatives, customer journey mapping and data-driven insights can highlight opportunities to enhance product offerings, personalize customer experiences, predict future needs and drive loyalty.

6. COMMUNICATE AND MAINTAIN VISIBILITY

An approachable, transparent and engaged leader stays connected to the ground level and gathers valuable feedback from employees, stakeholders and customers to make better decisions (and course corrections, when needed). Your openness can inspire employees and build trust as you drive impactful digital initiatives that transform the business.

As you deliver updates, standardize the frequency and presentation style so the audience becomes familiar with the format and sees ongoing progress. Include a review of the overall technology roadmaps and status scorecard with each initiative pointing to the correlated strategic imperatives. When applicable, include technical literacy refreshers and translate why initiatives are important.

Your presentations and outreach are opportunities to be transparent about priorities and dependencies. Regular communication is also a great way to gather stakeholder feedback and raise red flags if additional resources are required to stay on track. Proactive communication reinforces the connections between IT and business strategies, fostering a motivative and collaborative environment.

7. LEVERAGE A STRATEGIC PARTNER TO BRIDGE TALENT GAPS

McKinsey research shows people and talent-focused initiatives can yield high-value business outcomes, including reducing costs, increasing revenue from new and existing streams, and improving the employee experience. In today’s dynamic tech landscape, top talent is among a CIO’s most valuable assets, and cultivating a high-performing team is the cornerstone of disruptive innovation.

Training and upskilling initiatives are necessary to support rapidly evolving technology, but difficult to prioritize against existing systems and projects. Moreover, niche projects and new technology often require completely new disciplines of knowledge, making it unrealistic to expect existing staff to get up to speed.

Many companies struggle to hire, onboard, and develop talent quickly enough to keep up with business needs and develop optimized solutions in this ever-changing landscape.

If tech talent acquisition is preventing you from achieving goals, it’s time to leverage an external resource with skilled experts on hand when you need them. External consulting and technology specialists like GAP invest deeply in diverse teams and ongoing education, offering a breadth of capabilities and a depth of expertise for building custom solutions. Our specialists integrate seamlessly with your organization, so you can focus on your core product offering and customers.

No matter where you are in your technology journey, GAP offers specialized services in every stage of the software and data engineering process — technology consultation, strategy, architecture, design, build, automation, delivery and even managed services — to help you evolve from ideation to final product.

Now is the time to amplify your impact on business outcomes and spearhead technology-driven transformations. Success hinges on embracing a strategic leadership approach, collaborating with clear communication, modernizing infrastructure, prioritizing the customer experience, and partnering with experts who can accelerate your growth.