By Jay Sasidharan
BEING a chief information officer (CIO) is not what it used to be. One need only look at the growing coordination between marketing and CIOs in the runup to shopping frenzies like China’s Singles Day or Shopee 9.9 Super Shopping Day to see how the role of the CIO is expanding.
To successfully execute cross-platform strategies across mobile, physical retail and traditional web, marketing must involve the CIO from the beginning, or risk failure.
The same could be said about digital transformation in general, where the CIO is rapidly being shifted from the custodian of the company’s data, software and technical infrastructure into broader, leading roles in the enterprise.
This is seen across the globe, where more than four in five CIOs now have responsibility for business outside of traditional IT – for innovation, transformation and even marketing and strategic planning, in some cases.
This trend is even more pronounced in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. According to The Asia-Pacific CIO in 2025: Driving Fundamental Enterprise Change study, 64% of CIOs believe they will become key decision makers for corporate strategy with nearly 60% of CIOs in the region expecting to head a profit centre by 2025, and 56% expecting to become CEOs by 2025.
While it’s an exciting shift – and one clearly dictated by the transformation-focused landscape – it’s stretching many CIOs beyond their comfort zone.
To thrive in this global transformation, CIOs use their expertise in bringing together existing capabilities and disruptive technologies. They must expand their roles to become data-driven innovators, managing organisational change and keeping customer experience management (CXM) at the centre of it all.
Digital transformation and the evolving CIO
Looking at the digital transformation landscape, it’s clear why CIOs are being thrust into more diverse, more brand-defining roles. Today’s global CIO has a unique purview into the tools, technologies and systems needed to drive effective CXM.
And now CIOs have the platform to engage their companies across departments and job functions to get the whole business moving in the right direction.
Even though CIOs have this broad view, change isn’t a given. They must take the lead in focusing and enacting digital transformation efforts. Following are three things CIOs can do to step powerfully into this leadership role:
1. Become a change leader
Fewer than one in three companies have an enterprise-wide digital business vision and strategy, meaning many CIOs are being pushed to enact transformational shifts without a clear-cut, agreed-upon architecture. Driving change of this magnitude may require added internal training in change management and organisational behaviour.
With visibility into all parts of a modern business, CIOs can unify business leaders and IT under a clear data roadmap and be the catalyst for data-driven organisational changes that will help their companies remain competitive.
As CIOs drive CXM, they will need to cut through organisational silos, unify applications and systems across departments and standardise user experiences across channels.
It will mean closely overseeing business execution and cross-functional teaming to match business needs. It will also mean concentrating all efforts around the goal of accelerating adoption, utilisation and capturing value as each change gets introduced.
Then, it will mean repeating this cycle again and again to refine and broaden the organisation’s digital transformation.
2. Centre the technology stack on customer experience
Customer experience is the perfect focal point for any digital transformation effort. It has been proven to boost revenue, customer retention and loyalty as well as competitive advantage.
This focus on CXM will require CIOs to assemble and nurture a robust, integrated technology stack that collects and acts on structured and unstructured data from across the digital ecosystem.
Tapping into data, making it more contextual, and drawing actionable insights will help businesses add value at every step of the customer journey.
Fortunately, the average APAC company is well ahead of the curve in comparison to its global peers – 16% of APAC digital industrial professionals have such stacks, compared to 10% in North America and 9% in Europe.
Of course, this number also highlights the distance many APAC CIOs have yet to cover in getting their technology stacks CX-ready.
3. Evolve transformation to scale
Recently, 33% of worldwide CIOs say they’ve evolved their digital endeavours to scale, with the intent of increasing consumer engagement through diverse digital channels. In order to meet the digital transformation needs of their businesses, more of these next-generation CIOs will need to make scalability a top consideration in the purchase and integration of technology.
At the scale required to deliver the CX customers expect – hundreds of data points gathered into and analysed in a unified profile and decisions made in fractions of a second, for every point in each customer’s journey – human intervention will not be an option.
Only AI- (artificial intelligence) driven platforms can keep up with such demand. When integrated with all points of delivery and the configuration of content, AI can make such decisions with increasing precision and effectiveness, regardless of how many customers are being served.
It becomes the engine for ever-improving customer satisfaction and success.
Thankfully, APAC digital industry professionals are already poised to embrace AI. They show a broader acceptance (62%) of the need for AI than their peers in North America (49%).
However, APAC CIOs would do well to always consider how AI will change their organisation’s dynamic between humans and technology, training their people to respect the immense knowledge and capabilities of AI, while providing the much-needed context and empathy that AI is unable to duplicate.
Taylor’s University Malaysia, one of the oldest private universities in Malaysia, understood that there is a need for a deeper brand connection that also extends to education. With that in mind, its team decided to deploy Adobe Experience Cloud to help understand students and deliver personalised experiences at scale. Adobe Analytics delivers insight into students by digging deep into consumer behaviours across multiple channels.
Make no mistake: no role will have as great an effect on the success of digital transformation as the CIO. However, while the stakes could not be higher, CIOs can’t afford to overthink challenges or become paralysed by so many unknowns.
Digital transformation is usually accomplished by taking those first few steps where you see early business value, and then driving adoption across the organisation.
Next-generation CIOs will find more success as they approach their own leadership this way and train their managers to do the same. They should encourage their teams to question biases, rethink routines and make decisions based on imperfect data or lack of visibility into future conditions.
These are crucial skills for any leader of digital transformation, be they CIOs or the teams that work for them.
For sure, those CIOs that focus on managing this new change, centering efforts around CX and investing in scalability, will successfully navigate this unknown territory and enable unprecedented new performance from their organisation. – Feb 3, 2020
Jay Sasidharan is Asia Pacific vice president of Adobe Customer Solutions
