Career Talk JDR

CIO Perspective: Business Transformation, and the Role of Strategic CIO Leadership

Transforming Business Culture into Creativity, Collaboration, and Innovation

There is an emergence of Boardroom-level recognition of having a technology-grounded, business-savvy CIO leader as a competitive advantage – to facilitate innovation of new products and services that are attractive to customers. To inspire higher levels of innovation in an organization, it is essential to leverage communication and collaboration technologies that enable people to work better together, produce more, and deliver “hospitality-quality” service experiences for customers.

There are several levels at which a CIO can play a critical role in cultural transformation. One traditional way is to listen to colleagues across all business units, then translate their input into a technology strategy that supports their collective needs. However, although valuable, this is still somewhat operationally focused. A more strategic role would involve the CIO, teaming with peer executives, to infuse technology-powered business objectives at conception. In these early, gestational stages of business strategy formation, a strategic CIO can introduce unforeseen opportunities made possible by emerging technology developments – some of which may be only perceived by the CIO – offering recommendations to the executive team, or perhaps even consideration of new business models.

Part Three of this blog post to follow…

If you’d like to read the full article, you can also find it at

http://cioleadershipcenter.com/images/Alcatel-Lucent_CIO_Business-Transformation.pdf