Cultivate value through AI solutions and data operations
New roles and opportunities for today’s IT leadership
An evolving agenda for IT leadership and changing CIO strategy
The purview of IT leadership is expanding. CIO strategies are increasingly expected to produce and maintain more than a stable and secure technical infrastructure while managing costs.
Shareholders and boards demand that technologies contribute directly to growing revenues and profits, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence (AI) solutions and analytics to enable innovation and drive competitive advantage. Customers expect relevant, personalized, consistent experiences at every digital touch point. Line-of-business leaders need trustworthy data, real-time insights, and automations that help their organizations streamline manual processes and become more agile, scalable, and collaborative.
That’s a lot more than just “keeping the lights on.”
The evergreen enterprise depends on evergreen IT leadership
Data-driven analytics, AI solutions, and machine learning (ML) tools are capable of revealing opportunities and activating insights in ways that are effectively impossible for humans alone to achieve. Today’s CIO is expected to cultivate that potential by leading data and AI strategy—while still maintaining operational resiliency, security, and stability.
For most roles in IT leadership, this is not a trivial shift. But it is increasingly essential. Your success depends on three interrelated moves:
- Redefine how you manage data, analytics, and AI solutions
- Recalibrate your definition of impact, with a focus on value generation
- Reposition your role as a business co-creator and change agent
Many in IT leadership find themselves unable to contribute impactfully to business strategy and growth due to a range of issues including:
- Insufficient understanding of how data and AI solutions differ from traditional IT assets—and how that difference necessarily impacts the role, priorities, and strategic activities of the CIO.
- Conflicting views and/or overlapping roles among IT leadership regarding ownership of data and AI solutions.
- A lack of fluency and shared language among IT leadership around the relationship between data, AI solutions, and value
- Enterprisewide mistrust of AI solutions—and often of the IT organization itself—leading to insufficient adoption of new capabilities and/or “shadow IT.”
As CIO, you can’t stand by while others blaze the path forward. In this report, we reveal principles and priorities that help solve these challenges as you work to cultivate your role in driving sustainable, evergreen value.
As you move to reposition your CIO role, strategy, and impact, here are some questions to ask.
- How well do you, others in IT leadership, and your C-suite colleagues understand the interplay between data and technology capabilities and the commercial side of your business?
- How can you better measure and articulate the impact of data and AI solutions on business outcomes in language that resonates with members of your executive team and board of directors?
- How are you staying current with the latest changes in technology and balancing hype with reality for your business?
- What are your biggest obstacles to partnering and building trust with other tech leaders and/or business customers across the enterprise?
- How should you balance your time and responsibilities between maintaining a robust technical infrastructure with the need to imagine and build business initiatives aimed at producing evergreen value?
Light the path to evergreen value
There has never been a more important and exciting time for CIOs to help guide and support enterprise strategy. Across industries, IT leadership is repositioning itself—and, in the process, the entire IT organizations—to serve as guiding lights for the next era of innovation.
Don’t let yourself get left in the dark. By redefining how you manage data and AI solutions, recalibrating your definition of value and impact, and ultimately repositioning the role of IT leadership, you can help create a brighter future for your entire enterprise.
