How CIOs Can Help CEOs Drive Innovative Growth Strategies

Businesses today face constant pressure—from traditional competitors and new upstarts alike. Staying successful in the market and growing requires innovation, agility, and a willingness to embrace change. For companies that can successfully navigate the wave of disruption, the reward is market leadership, financial stability, and long-term viability.

CEOs need the support and participation of other C-level executives to help them achieve organizational goals, and they look specifically to their CIOs to deliver innovative technology solutions that make their companies more efficient and competitive.

While IT is still expected to manage its day-to-day operations and teams, the CIO is increasingly being asked to chart a digital strategy that changes how companies reach and interact with customers. This includes helping transform their companies to take advantage of digital business opportunities that support CEO-driven growth initiatives.

IBM conducted a survey, “Redefining Boundaries: The Global C-suite Study,” that gathered the thoughts of more than 5,000 C-suite executives in 21 different countries. Among other things, it highlights the CEO’s dependency on the CIO, and shows how technology factors like digital disruption are critical to strategy.

For example, 58 percent of market-leading CEOs pursue disruptive innovation, not purely incremental improvements. They see that both speed and efficiency are critical differentiators from their competitors, and they view the CIO as the person who can best align business and technology goals to help them get to market faster.

In this environment, the CIO has become a champion of harnessing disruption to define a better path for how the business operates. Identifying and employing the right business solutions can change how work across the enterprise is delegated, completed, and assessed.

New and innovative mobile, cloud-based, and user-centric solutions can create an environment of increased technology usage and deeper understanding of how to address business goals. The cloud, meanwhile, is increasingly seen as the new standard in how to manage the business without having the burden of IT infrastructure management costs and hassles, freeing up IT for more strategic, growth-oriented work.

The IBM study explains C-suite thinking around technology decisions and strategy: “One of the most notable trends of the past decade has been the increase in the significance CEOs attribute to technology. Ten years ago, they put it sixth on the list of most important external factors they expected to exert an influence on their enterprises. Now, it consistently tops the features that light up their radar screens.”

While the increasing emphasis on technology is certainly good for IT departments, CEOs often focus on the end-user experience—they see anything that reaches more potential customers, such as mobile apps and user-friendly web sites, as a solution for driving growth. However, they may not have the perspective to think through the full repercussions of new solutions and how they impact the organization internally. What may be good for customers may not necessarily be a logical solution to implement with an existing IT architecture. Things like flexibility to configure applications as needed and capabilities for integrating services, data, and applications may not intuitively seem to support those customer-centric goals.

CIOs, therefore, must assess the impact of innovation and how it will apply to business goals. They need to understand the demographics and behaviors of both their own workforces and their customer and partner bases. A well-designed IT architecture has to have the right technology foundation to meet the needs of internal stakeholders as well as customers and third parties. This balance can only come from the direction of an insightful CIO who recognizes that long-term benefits can result from the willingness to embrace short-term disruption.

How a company reacts to change and disruption can be the difference between riding atop the wave or being rolled beneath it. CIOs need to help their organizations see the possibilities presented by disruption and drive a technology strategy that ensures that their company is ready for whatever wave rolls their way next.