Six distinctive traits of digital-ready CIOs Digital-ready CIOs Six distinctive traits of digital-ready CIOs: 1have a strategic vision of how technology will transform the Digital-ready CIOs have a strategic business — and know 1vision of how technology will how to implement it. transform the business — and know how to implement it. Digital-ready CIOs 2innovate relentlessly. By definition, all of these CIOs have a clear vision about the future state of the business. They have a powerful sense of how and where digital can transform product development or sales and Digital-ready CIOs marketing, and how it can open up new lines of revenue. While the focus closely on CEO knows where the wider business is headed, the digital-ready 3driving growth — and CIO can show how technology can enable and support that journey. the relationships they Close to 9 out of 10 (87%) digital-ready CIOs focus tightly on making the case to the executive management team for IT’s role in need to support this. business transformation. That figure is well ahead of the 72% of IT-intensive industry CIOs. “It’s very important that a CIO has a Digital-ready CIOs vision for the company that is directly linked to its business model,” ensure their vision is says Nykredit CIO Lars Mathiesen. And as InformationWeek Editor 4 in Chief Rob Preston puts it: “You need to be something of a understood. visionary, an innovator and a big thinker, not just an order taker.” All this implies that the digital-ready CIOs have a close Digital-ready CIOs understanding of their companies’ underlying business models, and move beyond products and services. EY’s Dave Ryerkerk notes that, in the past, 5operations and businesses would draw up a major initiative — setting out the infrastructure. required processes and the associated operating model — before “throwing it over the fence to IT to set it up and automate it.” Today, digital technologies shape the design of a firm’s processes Digital-ready CIOs and operating models. Indeed, Bob Sydow, Americas IT Advisory are courageous risk- Leader at EY, notes that one of the core capabilities needed for 6takers. digital-ready CIOs is an intimate knowledge of the firm’s business architecture, along with the ability to manage and drive complex implementation programs. “Our technology team has an open process creation approach, rather than simply receiving processes and supporting them. We are able to describe the target processes, and define how to go about transforming them,” explains Zalando’s CIO Philipp Erler. 20 | Born to be digital