When we talk about digital transformation here at Perficient, we are often talking about big data, cloud, mobile and social.
In a recent Forbes article titled “CIO Lessons Learned: My Approach To The Top 10 Strategic Issues Of 2015“, Mark Sunday of Oracle says, “the CIO must be adept at understanding and responding to business requirements, executing on technology projects, and supporting customers in new and better ways.”
We couldn’t agree more. Sunday then outlines 11 strategic issues that CIOs are facing in 2015, and digital transformation has a lot to do with them. I’ve summarized each of his 11 points here:
- The Digital Disruptor – how big data, cloud, mobile and social have changed the way we think about business. CIOs must be out in front of reinvention of the business, new market segment exploration, and/or inorganic growth into new areas.
- Chief Acceleration Officer – the CIO must “respond and meet the challenges of business at the speed of opportunity.” This essentially speaks to big data – enabling insights and decision-making in real time from business data. Sunday says this trend is also all about driving value faster than ever before – “innovate and orchestrate” model of IT.
- The BFF of the CMO, CFO, CHRO – We all know that marketing is growing in its portion of IT-related spending. Now more than ever, IT helps drive talent attraction and retention for HR, employee efficiencies and communications in day-to-day tasks and business process automation.
- The Champion of Big Data and Analytics – Sunday says the enterprise deployment of analytics has had the greatest impact on the business by IT that he’s seen in 40 years!
- The Customer Loyalty Enabler – IT enables employees to share content, communicate, build community, and help foster brand loyalty, and it helps marketing and business groups listen to and understand their audience better (take things like social listening tools and sentiment analysis.)
- The Cloud Change Agent – What helps businesses respond to business opportunities quickly? IT. A successful CIO will “be the cloud promoter as well as its enabler — ensure cloud capabilities are integrated enterprisewide.”
- The Security/Privacy Strategist – IT has to help protect the enterprise as well as the data of its customers.
- The Social Champion – Social networking can have a positive impact on companies when it is integrated into enterprise operations. Social collaboration in portals, for instance, can reduce email threads and inefficiencies, and it can give customers a voice.
- The Talent Hunter – Sunday reminds us that only IT and HR span all lines of business. Collaboration, insights, efficiency, and employee engagement are all positive benefits from mobile, social and cloud technologies that enable HR.
- The Positive Partner – A successful CIO is one who is always thinking about how he or she can add value and accelerate innovation.
- Prepare for IoT – The Internet of Things is here. Everything is becoming increasingly more connected. IT has to get at the forefront of this and pay attention to the trend so that we can see how it’s going to impact systems and processes.
Mark Sunday is the Chief Information Officer at Oracle.
In our Digital Transformation webinar series, we discussed mobile and customer experience. See the replays here:
Build a Mobile Foundation to Drive Digital Transformation Initiatives
How Customer Experience Drives Digital Transformation
And join us on April 2nd for our next webinar in the series when we’ll discuss Harnessing the Power of your Digital Marketing Toolbox.
