The way organizations operate, share information, buy supplies and sell services has been completely transformed. New technologies -- mobile, cloud computing, etc. -- have changed the way people work and expectations of both senior executives and employees. All parts of the organization are expected to do more with less and actively contribute the bottom line – either through direct revenue generation or elimination of costs. As a result, CIOs have switched from managing a cost center to becoming a business driver. Moreover, given the CIO’s unique role at the intersection of technology and business, he/she is being asked to head up an IT organization that supports, and sometimes leads, transformation throughout the business.
Traditionally, the CIO role mainly involved attending to the technology needs of the organization on different fronts -- providing Internet connectivity, deploying telephone systems and installing desktops. Today, the role of the CIO has become an integral part of the way enterprises interact with their customers. Organizations are no longer requiring IT to deliver infrastructure, instead, CIOs are asked to deliver the services and applications that make the organization function.
The modern CIO is obligated to switch focus from low level tasks to high level projects with two primary goals: adding value and driving efficiency through the use of technology. CIOs and their IT organizations now have the opportunity to deliver services that drive revenue, moving away from just delivering IT infrastructure like storage, computing systems and networking. Today, it’s all about the direct management of application performance. This means, cutting the unnecessary layers and making the CIO and the IT organization responsible for assuring the performance of business-critical applications, like sales management and e-commerce.
Cloud computing plays a key role in enabling this refocus of the CIO and IT from technology management to strategic technology deployment. Through the cloud, manual operations become automated, freeing IT organizations to focus on initiatives that either add value or increase efficiency throughout the organization. Consider a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) requesting resources from the CIO for a new database to store consumer data, with the goal of selling current customers additional services in the future. A reputable cloud provider would be able to offer a cloud solution in which cost and deployment time are significantly less than in traditional in-house environments. This allows the CIO to achieve both of its goals: add value by enabling the CMO with a new database that will potentially bring new revenue and drive efficiency by using cloud instead of buying and deploying servers.
The role of the CIO has been going through a drastic transformation over the last few years. This change can be attributed to many things: the speed of business, the need to do more with less, etc., but the cloud has played a critical role. The benefits of current cloud offerings have allowed the CIO to drive efficiency and increase revenue through the use of technology; and this is just the beginning. CIOs around the world are demanding cloud providers to step up with better performance, more flexibility and greater value to meet the challenges of the modern information environment
