What does it take to become successful CIO? Part 1. Strategy

You have just become CIO of a big enterprise and now want to see what to start with? Surely a lot of different things will be tearing you apart - business stakeholders who would like their problems to be solved and consider you being a direct way to that, CEO who expects now that a new strategy of IT will bring the services and products to market effectively, cheaper and fast... Surely, all internal problems of IT also now are going to be on your shoulders.

This article will be dedicated to the strategy selection and might be applied not only to Information Technology domain. In the following articles the questions of how to conduct analysis of situation, hard decisions to be made, KPI and metrics system to use and when, which communication style to use and when, how to negotiate, how to influence performance of teams and other questions that every CIO is facing with will be considered.

A lot of things will be much easier if not jump the gun by trying to solve all problems at once without any changes.

There are mainly 3 main strategic approaches which might be applied:

1. Innovation

2. Adaptation

3. Combination of Innovation + Adaptation

When going toward Innovation the most important things are to understand why your company needs it, what we are going to achieve, what risks are, how to avoid them, costs of Innovation, the time-to-market, tangible and intangible benefits afterwards. Traditional way to achieve this is to create the business case and conduct cost benefit analysis.

Innovation may give you great competitive advantage on the market but at the same time may bring a lot of risks to the business if it is not estimated correctly. And it is really true that IT drives innovation but it takes place not in vacuum – you need to renovate corporate culture and even change people’s mindset to get your company on the new level.

Adaptation is to embrace the truth that the world has changed and we need to do something about it to stay on the market and be competitive. The market is forcing you to accept existing fait accompli and its rules. E.g. business stakeholders want to change their requirements frequently (once per 3 months) because of the market’s changes but your development team doesn't get used to working in such fast changing environment, it means the team needs to adopt and probably become more agile in this situation by elaborating some changes (optimizing CI/CD, implementing agile development approach, etc.).

But beware of just following or responding to the external changes. Being proactive is very important here – you should not just monitor but predict future changes of the market and presume how competitors will react to make the best outcome in your company.

Combination of the former and the last approaches can be applied if targeting different market segments with different basic conditions: e.g. a new developing market might demand Innovation strategy while a market with your major presence where a new direction emerged (like on-line payment through mobile) might demand Adaptation to that market trend.

The success of implementation of any of these strategies is mainly dependent on the team and the key people in place. But your qualities of charismatic leader, who is capable to keep up with what he has promised to and who is able to build, develop and manage the team, are also the key success factors.

Simply put – take care of your people and you will get them by your side when you need them.

To implement the strategy you need to set up a system of metrics and indicators in place as with just a single project - you should be able to understand where you are on the long path to the final goals. On that road every milestone completed should be made known to all stakeholders.

Visibility and objectiveness are enablers of success because no stakeholder will agree to see the result only at the end, especially if one puts a lot at stake. We are going to consider an example of such a system of KPI and metrics in later articles.