Dear fellow CIOs, d What a difference a decade makes. Back then, the world of IT was a very different place. Social media was in its infancy. For the CIOs I worked with, smartphones essentially provided email on the move and little else. Cloud computing was hardly on the radar. For any CIOs wanting to introduce an innovative new application, one of the first steps would be to build the or necessary infrastructure internally. In today’s more digital world, things look rather different. A cloud-based service can be provisioned and scaled from 1 to 100,000 users at the tap of a button. Customers expect w to engage on a more real-time basis, using social media platforms. Staff members wonder why their work tools aren’t all available as mobile apps, as they are in the rest of their lives. e All of these changes provide huge opportunities for those leading businesses able to move quickly to adopt and exploit these technologies. But they also present stark challenges to CIOs. Once the masters of their domains, this digital world is challenging them to change and to evolve their skill sets and thinking. or Those leading CIOs who are embracing digital find themselves grappling with a new set of demands: learning how to transform business processes around the potential of digital, or identifying where and how they can provide new product and service innovations. The CIOs F who can master this, however, are finding their roles more influential and more strategically engaged than ever before. Unsurprisingly, they are more fulfilled. From our experience in working with CIOs, and research on this characteristic group of executives, we know that there is a distinctive subset of CIOs who have already embraced the digital world and seem to have been born digital. With this timely report, we aim to provide help and advice for those CIOs seeking to navigate these shifts. I trust you will find it as useful as I would have if I was still a CIO at Anheuser-Busch International. I look forward to continuing the conversation with you in person. Norman Lonergan, Global Advisory Leader at EY 2 | Born to be digital