For a CIO to be effective and add value to business, it is indeed a no-brainer that he or she has to be aligned with the business leaders of the organization.  While a CIO is squarely responsible for technology, his decision today is not being micro managed by his higher-ups. In this context, the CIO position has evolved, from being the back-office enabler to being a business driver. So how did this evolution happen? 

With the growing automation and proliferation of technology in almost all fields of business strategy and operations, IT has got weaved into a multi-threaded business environment. Being an enabler of decision making process and business workflows in a company, the CIO has not only become the most informed person after the CEO, but also a trusted partner for other business leaders in the organization.

Not so long ago, a Gartner study had gone to the extent of declaring that the CIO species may become extinct. But what we see today is the CIO has mutated, evolved to become an integral part and trusted member of organization leadership.  He or she is now considered the person with business insights and understands business impact, which makes him or her worthy of being on the board of a company.

In large organizations, no longer is a CIO needed to throw tongue-twisting technical jargons to push for IT implementation; it is given and understood that IT is inherently required to improve business processes and productivity.  The emphasis now is on value derived from IT implementation.  In choosing a solution, a system integrator is largely the one who is sought-after as opposed to betting on the technical superiority of the solution since business transformation or benefit can only be achieved by successful implementation.  Hence there are two high impact areas where CIOs are steadily becoming quite indispensible in the organization development: innovation and transformation.

Business intelligence gained through the analytics of organizational data positions CIO in an advantageous position, thereby nurturing innovation that and enhancing productivity.  By continuously improving the business processes through a ‘package-to-process’ approach, the processes prescribed in mature packages are utilized to empower industry learning, bring in significant time-to-market advantage.  The need of customization in the packages is getting lesser as these packages mature over the years, encompassing and improving the business processes that make an organization much more flexible.

With the advent of the next wave of applications and services being heralded by cloud computing, the CIO community will have to don its innovation cap to find avenues that create multi-faceted advantage for overall organization benefit.  The journey through the cloud maybe a daunting one, but only a CIO can tide an organization through the technology challenges and take it to the next level.

The author is CIO, MTS.