Create Business Value with Technology: Navigating the Path from CIO to a Business Strategist

The first step is to involve the business partners, whether they are the supply chain, finance, or sales function. Align the IT teams to sit with the business partners, to help them craft very lucid requirements. For example, if the organization is building a CX platform, the CIO needs to align IT, marketing, operations, and finance teams.

Once these requirements are in place, the next step is to initiate conversations with enterprise technology leaders whose offerings check those boxes. Ideally, the solution should enable 80-90% of the functionality out-of-the-box, while the customizations should be used sparingly, only in cases where they enable the organization to activate differentiating capabilities.

A cloud and infrastructure modernization initiative will help enterprises lower their technical debt. However, because technology innovations are now available to everyone through leading enterprise technology platforms, the adoption roadmap significantly impacts the transformation outcome. This is a function of how well the roadmap is optimized so that the transformation becomes self-funding early on into the initiative.

In any transformation initiative, the key question is how it will make the lives of the organization’s teams and their customers easier. This means that the focus should not rest solely on the capabilities that adopting an application will activate but also on the change management requirements that will be introduced as a result. The CIO must devise their cloud journey per their organization’s people strategy. Instead of disrupting business-as-usual, the transformation should be optimized to ensure the organization can pick up the new systems and start running with them.

It is also essential to consider the impact of AI on the organization’s talent composition. Whether it is Generative AI or ML capabilities, no AI can run independently without human oversight today. Every implementation requires supervision because AI doesn’t have the ability to make judgments. That’s why, instead of displacing people from their current roles, it will move them around. CIOs must recognize that people will need to be re-schooled and re-educated, and this will enable them to do their current jobs in better and more exciting ways.

In the context of transformation, keeping the velocity of change in mind is essential. Transitioning to cloud-based systems will change the processes underpinning these systems and may also require your people to pick up new skills on the fly. During the period of cloud transformation, CIOs will need to keep a handle on the dichotomy of old and new systems – this places a new premium on the ability to balance innovation and stability. This is where it becomes imperative to find the middle ground between short-term operational needs and long-term strategic needs.

Moreover, cloud-based enterprise technology platforms also introduce new capabilities at a faster pace. For instance, Oracle now brings quarterly releases to its cloud portfolio, which is unfamiliar to multi-year upgrade cycles of the on-prem world. This means that after adopting cloud-based enterprise technology applications, CIOs should institute a process to decide which features to implement and what changes can be waited out. While leading providers like Oracle classify new capabilities into optional and must-implements, the CIO must ensure that the right people will continuously track which capabilities to adapt after every new release.

Lastly, the relationship between the partners becomes crucial in determining the business value an initiative delivers to the organization. The closer the relationship between partners from the senior level to the working level, the more successful the implementation. Consider a case where an organization is implementing an HCM application, leveraging Oracle as a delivery partner, another organization as an integrator, and yet another organization as its Application Managed Services (AMS) provider. In such a scenario, it is critical to ensure that three seamlessly work together so that at the point of handoff, it's not drop-bottom.