5 minute read 30 Sep 2021
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4 ways a Transformative CIO supports the CEO

By Tammy Alairys

EY Americas Consulting Technology Transformation Leader

Technology transformation thought leader. Passionate about bringing people and ideas together. Optimist.

5 minute read 30 Sep 2021
Related topics Consulting Technology

Rapid digital transformation has greatly expanded the CIO role, making them a major part of the CEO’s agenda.

In brief:

  • The CIO enables business operations by providing trusted data sources and enabling innovation at scale.
  • Putting humans at the center of technology initiatives, upskilling and diversifying the workforce enables the CEO’s long-term strategy.
  • The CIO can create value for the board through ESG reporting, ecosystem partner expansion, and governing technology partnerships

Today’s CIO must work closer with the CEO and other leaders than ever before if they want to excel at digital transformation. Organizations that can pull this off are 45% more likely than laggards to unlock annual revenue growth of more than 10%, according to a 2020 EY survey of 570 C-suite and senior business leaders. The study, “Tech Horizon: Leadership perspectives on technology and transformation,” spanned 570 global companies and nine industry sectors. 

Collaborating with the CIO helps the CEO make better decisions in the present while reframing the organization’s future. It is a collaboration in constant motion. There are many ways that a Transformative CIO helps the CEO be successful. Most are related to four key areas:

  1. Operational enablement
  2. Putting humans at the center
  3. Board initiatives
  4. Innovation and governance

Operational enablement

Trusted data

Data-centricity as a feature of successful enterprises will only continue to grow in prominence. Yet, only 34% of 305 CEOs responding to a recent EY survey, the CEO Imperative Study, said customers trust them with their data. This apparent trust gap, between what intelligent technologies and data can do and what people are willing to let it do, poses a significant risk to an organization’s growth and innovation.

Enhanced data cleansing is a smart, straightforward use of AI that builds trust with customers. 

As an example, a US oil and gas company’s mismatched data from various business units was causing inventory issues that were directly affecting customers. Using AI, and in just 10 weeks, EY teams improved data collection and quality efforts for 28,000 data fields and identified pricing and lead times for 1,684 materials. This saved hundreds of hours in data cleansing efforts, and now all business units within the company are using the same master data to harmonize data collection efforts.

The CIO’s efforts to improve efficiencies should include the automation of recurring IT processes, to keep the organization nimble and prepared for growth. CIOs can help CEOs to not only appreciate the value of data but also to reframe how they obtain, manage, productize, monetize and scale it. Viewing data as an enterprise asset means embedding trust at its core to make the intelligence being delivered trusted by customers, employees, partners and regulators.

CIOs can help CEOs to not only appreciate the value of data but also to reframe how they obtain, manage, productize, monetize and scale it. Viewing data as an enterprise asset means embedding trust at its core to make the intelligence being delivered trusted by customers, employees, partners and regulators.

Technical debt

Keeping the organization nimble after years of IT inattention is a challenge. Now, as organizations try to meet customer expectations, many find an expectations gap between goals and IT capabilities.

“We see this challenge in much of the transformation work we do. The customer team can design a leading-edge CX, expecting the technology teams to build quickly and iteratively. Unfortunately, the enterprise’s legacy environment is outdated and brittle, and budget has not been prioritized to perform upgrade,” says Tammy Alairys, EY Americas Consulting Technology Transformation Leader.

We see this challenge in much of the transformation work we do. The customer team can design a leading-edge CX, expecting the technology teams to build quickly and iteratively. Unfortunately, the enterprise’s legacy environment is outdated and brittle, and budget has not been prioritized to perform upgrade.
Tammy Alairys
EY Americas Consulting Technology Transformation Leader

While CEOs are increasingly aware of technology challenges, CIOs must be able to drive a business case for IT improvements that enable business transformation, working with the front-end teams on how to get the funding. Ultimately, the CIO needs to convince the CEO that to lead in the market or even keep up with competitors, the organization must rethink their legacy environment. 

Putting humans at the center

If leaders’ strategies are not driven by a desire to improve the human experience, true business transformation will remain out of reach. The most advanced innovations or cutting-edge technologies can fail if the organization loses sight of human values. The CEO and other leaders must view every decision, every technology implementation, and every product or service innovation through the human lens.

In the EY CEO Imperative Study, leading with compassion, setting an example of experimentation and risk-taking, and driving a transformative mindset across the company emerged as the top three characteristics of CEOs most capable of managing challenges and opportunities over the next five years. 

A key factor preventing CIOs from effectively engaging the rest of the business on new digital initiatives could be the lack of a digital culture. Implementing new technologies involves behavioral changes and mindset shifts, particularly for technologies that require the workforce to connect, collaborate and learn in new ways.

Upskilling and diversity

In the EY Tech Horizon 2020 study, 59% of the business leaders said there is a shortage of the type of skills that would help to accelerate their digital transformation efforts.

Organizations that are not putting humans at the center in efforts to solve the skills gap will find it difficult to remain competitive when it comes to productivity, innovation and growth. Transformative CIOs actively embed talent considerations into the way technologies are designed and deployed for use. They pursue conversations with the board to make a case for an aggressive approach to bridging the skills gap. For the CEO, upskilling improves the bottom line by obviating the need to hire and onboard outside tech talent for new projects.

CIOs must also be more active in leadership-level conversations about diversity and inclusion, steering the organization to take meaningful action, such as partnering with historically black colleges and sponsoring local Girls Who Code programs.

In environments where all people on diverse teams feel a sense of belonging, employees are more than 3.5 times more likely to contribute their full innovative potential. Similarly, companies with diverse teams are 45% more likely to improve market share — And they’re 70% more likely to capture a new market.

Board initiatives

ESG

Retaining and attracting employees today requires organizations to demonstrate a sense of purpose and a responsibility to the broader community. For that, and many other reasons, boards consider environmental, social and governance (ESG) measures a leading priority. Since the pandemic, people are more outspoken about their desire to make a difference in the world.

By integrating ESG initiatives into core strategies and processes, companies can enhance performance as well as appeal to investors, customers, and current and potential employees. But the organization must do more than talk about ESG. It must demonstrate, in quantifiable ways, a meaningful commitment. The CIO has a strategic role in helping the board demystify the technology, data capture and reporting methods that make that possible.

Ecosystems 

As the workforce has moved from remote working to hybrid models, the CIO has maintained network agility. CIOs will need to continue to foster this agility to realize the value of ecosystem partnerships that satisfy the board’s concerns about business security and continuity. 

In the past several years, we have seen industry boundaries erode and threats emerge from non-traditional competitors. More companies are shifting to “coopetition,” cooperation between competing companies, as well as adopting ecosystem business models to deliver superior customer value.

The EY CEO Imperative Study largely affirm the growing importance of ecosystems, with 88% of respondents agreeing the ability to lead and manage ecosystems will define successful leadership teams. 

Innovation and governance

Managing partnerships

CIOs, CEOs, and other leaders must begin with a “future-back” approach and look outside themselves to enrich their innovation potential. The value an enterprise can create within an ecosystem is directly proportional to how well the relationships are managed. Design principles for agreements should be addressed very early in the partnership discussion. Waiting to address this aspect of the partnership increases the likelihood that it will come undone.

“The first challenge is getting the culture right with respect to teaming, and an ‘open architecture’ mindset. Equally important are the agreements you put in place to govern the relationships — everything from who owns the IP, to what you do with the innovation that is co-developed, and how you manage that,” says Dan Higgins, EY Global Consulting Technology Leader

The first challenge is getting the culture right with respect to teaming, and an ‘open architecture’ mindset. Equally important are the agreements you put in place to govern the relationships — everything from who owns the IP, to what you do with the innovation that is co-developed, and how you manage that.
Dan Higgins
EY Global Consulting Technology Leader

Scaling innovation

In addition to enabling safe, agile ecosystems, CIOs must also leverage cutting-edge intelligent technologies and cloud infrastructure to scale innovation more rapidly.

38% of CEOs in the EY CEO Imperative Study said they expect to implement change in their innovation processes over the next three years. These respondents are focused on faster idea generation and trialing, as well as reorienting their organizations toward greater risk-taking. 

But the engine of innovation — human talent — must be leaders’ first consideration. Humans are intrinsic to these objectives, and achieving them requires equipping employees with the tools and permissions to appropriately take risk. As companies look to leverage large volumes of data as part of their innovation engines, they must safeguard human privacy and security. To truly unlock the value of innovative products, services and solutions, stakeholders must trust them. 

Data democratization

Besides looking outside themselves to achieve quick, agile innovation, companies are also looking at data. The CIO should be seen as a facilitator, not a gatekeeper, of data usage across the organization, helping users acquire data and ensuring that it is accurate and complete. Of the leading companies in the EY 2020 Tech Horizon study, 83% use data to innovate faster.

The importance of data democratization

83%

of leading companies use data to innovate faster.

Organizations want information to be in the hands of the people closest to the markets and the customers they serve, but data democratization is hard to achieve when data elements are scattered across the organization, tucked away in various silos. Senior leaders should lead by example and use the same information as the rest of the organization. A data fabric that can access data irrespective of where it is located and combine it across multiple platforms makes this possible.

Summary

To be a transformational organization requires C-suite collaboration. At leading organizations, CIOs and CEOs work together, pairing technology and business strategies to drive continuous transformation. Anchoring every decision and process is one unifying imperative: putting humans at the center.

About this article

By Tammy Alairys

EY Americas Consulting Technology Transformation Leader

Technology transformation thought leader. Passionate about bringing people and ideas together. Optimist.

Related topics Consulting Technology