What Should be the Digital CIO’s Outside-in Business Focus

Most of the top CIOs understand that the digital transformation of most of the organizations depends, to a large extent, on their capabilities to transform IT from an inside-out focus into an outside-in focus. They must devote their time and energy, understanding the business and the potential of digital technologies to optimize customer experiences, improve business processes and work with other senior executives to develop new digital enabled business models. This should be the focus of the digital CIO. Digital CIOs should continue to ask themselves? Can you understand the focus / goals of the company to ensure IT is focused on those goals? Does IT have the vision necessary for the business to succeed and grow? And what’s your 360 degrees of the business view?

CIOs need to expand their lenses to both the business dimension as well as the technology dimension with their team: Today’s organizations are at a crossroads where the segregation or siloing of business units are at a need to reach across the aisles and respectively work with each other. Even go one step further, the top digital CIO understands what current technology innovations can add business value and transfer this to the business. The best IT leaders and managers always have a strong understanding of what the business does, how it does it, and how it could be better with 360 degrees of business view. IT delivers the best solution to the business problems which meet business’s requirement or tailor customer’s needs. IT should facilitate the business partners to the right solutions and help to implement them.
Learn the business via empathetic listening: The best way to achieve partnership is to listen to what the business says they need. Let them tell you their stories, challenges. LISTEN to your clients, stakeholders, vendors, partners and staff. Be careful, you do not want to come across as having a solution looking for a problem. You have to know and relate to what they value and how they quantify that value first before you can add real value. The CIO needs to take those needs and translate them into an IT investment to support that vision and fix the “lost in translation” syndrome. Hence, ensuring that you have the commitment from the senior executives to engage in both formal and informal dialogue to derive a viable business strategy that is enabled or driven by IT would be good. To listen, comprehend and understand the people and the business they are part of, before embarking on any new way of thinking to know where you have come from enables you to move to a new place even quicker. The CIO need to understand the needs of the different business units, but their needs / vision would be spelled out by their leaders, not the CIO.
Make IT more shared, integrated, flexible, reliable, and fast: The best CIOs are good sales people who see opportunities to save money, become more customer experience oriented, or come up with definitive competitive advantages, and with a business mindset. Get engaged in the investment process prior to the decision already being made. Develop and socialize a strategic business plan that aligns both business strategies and technical direction. As a result, you'll have an IT organization that is viewed as a business partner that adds business value, and become the business. It starts with building strong and value-creating relationships with C-suites, between IT and vendors or suppliers; and build a strong team with a strong bench. Conduct presentations with management on new technology areas that have a short-term business impact on broadening their view of the team. Setup idea forums to engage the business and build business liaisons proactively to help shape the problem or opportunity before it becomes a project. This starts to build credibility outside of just managing the "run" side of things. Grow, and catalyze business transformation, IT can become a strategic business partner.
As CIOs will continue to be put on the front line, they need to ensure their organizations are ready for change, space and time are made to scope, plan and execute the project. CIO can help business to improve net by improving both the top line revenue growth and at the same time decreasing expenses to improve the bottom line.  And more importantly, run, growth, and transform, IT can strike the right balance to both reap the low-hanging fruit and drive the business's long-term digital transformation.


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