“I spend little time on back office and a lot on what you could Chart 9 categorize as digital,” explains UCB’s Herman de Prins. “I made a Priority of tasks compared with five years ago choice not to micromanage projects and get caught up in steering committees and so forth. We do 150 projects per year but I trust my team to manage them well. That frees up my time to do different things, such as being more connected externally and focusing on a few areas that are transformational,” he says. Even Shaping the future Controlling the so, he still finds scope for innovation. For example, UCB’s IT team T of the business impact of IT spend E N with the right on the organization X deployed a new flash memory-based system that boosted the E technology E M C overall performance of the company’s statistical programming by a P 100% U O T I factor of 20. “Is that a back-office thing? I don’t think so, because L O E N efficiency is good for everybody and most importantly for patients.” V 52% E Preparing and 55% Ensuring the D 48% developing the IT and security SAP Americas CIO Michael Golz agrees. He sees that embracing organization needs are up digital has meant a much clearer focus on more radical innovation for change and running elsewhere in the business, rather than on trying to squeeze limited 100% 54% 61% 78% gains from the company’s core IT systems. “You can optimize 48% endlessly, and it’s going to create some incremental improvements, 54% but the real spending is being redirected into platforms, around 68% analytics, big data, mobility and the cloud or whichever area has 81% the highest benefit for your company,” he says. Sustaining and extending the Providing insight This is borne out in the survey results. While for IT-intensive organization's strategies to support business and objectives decisions industry CIOs, the most notable increase in their focus has been on issues relating to ensuring basic IT needs are up and running, E T N N A E B M L digital-ready CIOs have been putting more attention on other E issues, such as enhancing business processes and preparing the organization for change. Even so, they do not forget the operational Digital-ready CIO IT-intensive industry CIO elements — understanding that smooth operational running is what allows them to have other focuses. (Percentage of respondents who have chosen 8, 9 or 10 on a scale from 1= much less a priority to 10 = much more a priority) Nevertheless, digital-ready CIOs do seek out bigger opportunities in IT infrastructure. But with one such opportunity, the cloud, the attraction for many IT leaders is that it has the potential to reduce the time and money spent on systems and infrastructure. Born to be digital | 27