Innovation perspectives: outside-in and yet inside-out

Digital transformation is now core to any corporate strategy, and the roles of Data, Technology and Digital Officers some of the most sought after in the industry.?Through the pandemic, corporations have gone from responding - across supply chains, sales and commercials, finance and planning, remote and distributed work - to sustainable recovery. This means re-architecting the technology backplane to drive simplification, modernization, growth and deliver new value. All of this has driven significant acceleration of the digital journey. But even as the pace of change picks up rapidly, it’s actually the slowest it will ever be. As a result, as corporate leadership teams get structured to drive digital success, the top question on most board’s and CHRO’s minds now becomes this – how do you define the role of a technology leader and what skill sets must we bring into this role.

Genpact did some work with the MIT Sloan School to look at the role of the CIO across 500 large global organizations and found that they self-defined their roles in one of two ways. First were a set of “pilots and co-pilots” that saw their role as leading, or co-leading along with key business stakeholders, the entire digital transformation of their corporations. The other set saw themselves as “flight-engineers” that were responsible for leading the value delivery engine of technology and serving the needs of the corporation.?The most interesting takeaway was that the first group – pilots and co-pilots have significantly increased over the past few years and now represents 83% of the group. And so, the evolution of the technology leader role in the industry is clear – they own the digital transformation of the corporations they are at.

The skills that technology leaders bring to the job have also evolved – clearly the ability to unleash the potential of the cloud, data and AI is high on the list. What’s come to be just as important as the technology chops though is the ability to drive large-scale institutional change. And this ability to lead through that change comes at the paradoxical intersection of being an outsider and an insider.

First, it’s critical to have a really strong?outside-in?perspective - to think outside the contours of their company, separate themselves from the internal inertia, and incubate and innovate with emerging technologies. There is a need to leverage the innovation ecosystem, look through new capabilities and quickly figure out what's going to work and what's not. And to attract and build a team around them that is innovative, entrepreneurial, and change agents. For all of these reasons, they need to think like an outsider.

But the reality is that true transformation is fundamental – it’s actually a groundswell that requires deep internal change and orchestrating across four different assets in a company – technology, data, people, and process. In order to drive transformation, stakeholder relationships are key - the internal credibility and the buy-in of a broad set of business leaders. All of that requires technology leaders to also be insiders?– to understand the business, nurture the connections, leverage the operating history, and get the people behind the change they are driving.

This is the defining attribute that drives success in the role: the balance between the outside-in and the inside-out mindset. And equally, tough to find.