CIO Insight – The Essential Requirements of a Digital CIO

Here’s another excellent Dennis McCafferty slide deck on the modern CIO.

CIOs are becoming more central to overall business strategy, and a full arsenal of soft and hard skills are needed to meet the challenge.

What’s the difference between “yesterday’s CIO” and the modern-day digital one? Digital CIOs maintain a higher profile in the corporate board room, where board members have raised their expectations of IT performance and the delivery of new, business-benefiting innovation, according to a recent survey from BT. The resulting “The BT CIO Report 2016: The Digital CIO” also indicates that, given these challenges, board members increasingly recognize that today’s CIOs must be more creative than in the past. Indeed, in assessing the “must have” qualities of digital CIOs, survey respondents were most likely to cite the need to work in a flexible manner with new business models and remaining open to new ideas/solutions, along with “soft skills” such as effectively responding to feedback and looking at situations from different perspectives. However, even with these shifting needs, CIOs still spend more time maintaining IT systems rather than looking for new solutions, but that balance appears to be reversing. “Digital transformation is under discussion at the board level, in IT and operational teams, in every organization and in every industry,” according to the report. “That’s exactly how it should be (because) the scope of what is digitally possible is uncertain

More of the CIO Insight post from Dennis McCafferty

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