Embracing revenue responsibility
As part of their business and strategist charter, the modern CIO is shouldering new profit and loss responsibilities. A sizable 68% of respondents in the 2021 State of the CIO research have been tasked with revenue generation, including creating and managing teams focused on innovation and serving as a strategist to come up with new product and service offerings.
As part of these responsibilities, CIOs should encourage entrepreneurship and an inventor mindset across their technology organization in a way that complements business strategy. Moreover, understanding market dynamics, creating the tooling and funding to support innovation, and orchestrating collaboration with an expanded ecosystem of partners will help them accelerate and scale innovation.
Promoting digital literacy
CIOs need to nurture an innovation culture to help their organization digitally transform. Beyond upskilling employees and recruiting new talent versed in technical competencies such as cybersecurity and data science, it’s equally important to burnish the IT organization’s business chops and develop soft skills in areas such as change management, project management and communications. CIOs also need to collaborate closely with the HR team to define and build-out the new career paths that will help technologists transition to a more business-aligned future.
At the same time, the modern CIO needs to champion digital literacy well beyond the IT organization. You can’t move at an agile pace with sprints and scrums if it’s only the technology team running at that speed. Those expectations now fall into the role of CIO.