Say Goodbye To The Old CIO and Hello To The New CIO

It's time for the technology CIO to leave the building…
It’s time for the technology CIO to leave the building…
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I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but it turns out that it’s time for all of the old school CIOs to get up and get out. I’m talking about those CIOs who are in love with technology for technology’s sake. Yep, their time is now officially up and they need to gather their things and get out.

Say Hello To The New CIO

It’s time to say hello to the new world of innovation. Yeah, yeah – I know that that “innovation” word has been overused as of late. However, this time it is really starting to become a key part of the CIO job in part because importance of information technology has finally started to be realized by the rest of the company.

Gone are the days where the CIO could sit back in his or her office and think about the various new types of technology that were coming their way. The ability to select a technology for the company to implement just because it seemed like it was a good idea is something that has gone away. Moving forward CIOs are going to have to do things differently.

The IT department has always been a strong supporter of innovation. There seems to be something about the people who are drawn to the world of IT that motivates them to look at problems differently and to try to find creative solutions to them. The CIO now needs to tap into this built-in spirit of innovation and put it to good use.

What Is Going To Be Expected From The New CIO

The reason that the old style CIO has to leave is because they were never able to figure out how best to use innovation. The new CIO needs to understand that innovation within the IT department needs to be put to use. The reason that the IT staff should be busy innovating is because their efforts can then be used to create new and better business services.

These are the business services that the company is going to use to become more productive, create new products and services, and to enter into new markets. Innovation is not just limited to creating new things – it can also be used to cut the costs of the things that the company is doing today.

Let’s face it, your IT department’s budget is not going to be increasing significantly any time soon. Yet, the rest of the company is going to be relying on you even more to help them move faster and to be more successful. This means that your job as CIO is to find ways to harness innovation in such a way that it will allow the IT department to do more with less.

What All Of This Means For You

We are going to be witness to the changing of the guard among CIOs. The old style of CIO who was in love with technology simply because it was new and shiny is going to have to go.

In his or her place is going to be a new type of CIO. This new CIO is going to understand that yes indeed the IT department is going to have to innovate; however, it’s not for innovation’s sake. Rather, it’s so that the IT department can find ways to boost the company’s overall productivity.

Nobody ever said that all of this innovation was going to be easy. However, since you are in the CIO position, you need to make sure that innovation is not done just for innovation’s sake, but rather it is always focused on moving the company forward!

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: What do you think the best way to measure the impact of IT innovation on the company would be?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

One of the things that makes having the CIO job different today from how it was in the past, besides the growing awareness of the importance of information technology, is the arrival of so-called “big data”. We’re talking about terabytes or even petabytes of data and all of the headaches that come along with it. As CIO, figuring out what to do with all of this data is your job, but since nobody has ever had to do this before, just exactly what should you be doing?