The past decade has seen the evolution of the role of the CIO. The key driver is the accelerated pace of adoption in business technology and the change in the world of IT. Business competition and dependence on technology also cannot be discounted here.

Amidst technology advancements, ever-increasing regulatory compliance concerns, and increasing business competition, CIOs are pivotal in many business decisions. The CIO skill set has shifted from a preponderance of technology know-how to a fine balance of business technology, business management and leadership skills. It is the CIO’s responsibility today to create a vision with a compelling business case to get top management and stakeholder buy-in. An important skill for the CIO is to shape and manage expectations of the business from technology.
Over the year the importance of the role of the CIO in an organisation and his tenure has increased dramatically owing to the tangible benefits of IT for business growth and optimisation.
Today, the CIO’s role is to work in unison with management and key business heads to leverage IT to enable their strategic business objectives. The CIO’s primary challenge from a business perspective is to ensure competitive advantage by leveraging technology that enables business growth, as well as increase shareholder value and improve the bottom line.
It is this importance given to IT and the evolving role of the CIO that has brought about a correlation between business and innovation. It is need for aligning technology strategies of an organisation with the business goals that has led CIOs to focus on innovative ways of leveraging technology. Thus we see in the last couple of years CIOs focusing on technologies that enable a collaborative work environment and its ability to process, access and analyse information on real-time. The importance of real-time decision making, if you may.
Collaborative technologies and real-time information have become determining factors for success in the rapidly changing business environment. And the CIO is the most important catalyst in this environmental cauldron.
What’s more, entire nations are now looking at the technology function to stay competitive, and are leveraging the CIO function to bail themselves out of the economic morass that they find their countries in. The incoming Obama administration is planning to create the post of a federal CTO to help jumpstart the American economy.
And guess what? Both the candidates tipped for the top technology position in the US are of Indian origin. The great Indian IT saga continues to roll on. It really goes to show the extent to which India has become the backbone for world technology on the sheer strength of the nation’s technical human resources. That is why I am confident that we will weather the Satyam storm and emerge smarter and stronger from the whole sordid episode.