The role of the erstwhile MIS manager has today expanded and transitioned into that of the CIO or Chief Information Manager. The CIO is entrusted with managing the information assets of the company and not IT assets alone. This enhanced role entails that the CIO is responsible not only for keeping technology ticking, but also proactively charting out and implementing IT strategies through which IT can be used to differentiate the company in the marketplace.  Hence, alignment of IT with business strategy will become key to driving business growth.

The CIO needs to not only be adept at managing IT operations and delivering IT solutions, but also focus and direct his attention towards enabling businesses grow and innovate using business transforming information technology solutions.  

To achieve this, the CIO needs to work very closely with business users to chalk out a business process transformation roadmap and integrate IT into the business operations. In line with this strategy, many progressive CIOs are partnering with business and taking accountability to realize ROI benefits from the IT investments.

So how can a CIO transition to be a value creator in today’s environment. In most of the organizations, CIOs would have already put in place a robust base foundation IT platform comprising of –

1. IT Infrastructure : Enterprise-wide VPNs to connect operating locations, strong IT security policies,   secure enterprise mail messaging, network and security monitoring, high-availability centralised servers and datacentres (either own or third party) will enable business users to tap into IT services on demand

2. Enterprise IT Solutions : Best business-fit transaction processing backbones such as SAP ERP, Oracle Financials, etc. to integrate, streamline and standardise business processes across the organisation

As a next step, the CIO’s priority should be to move into a harvesting phase, where the base IT platform could be leverages to implement innovative and business transforming IT solutions. Some of these solutions include -

1. Extension of ERPs to integrate with shop floor, sales force automation and customer relationship management tools
2. Enable effective decision making of ERP data through data warehouse and business intelligence solutions

3.  Help businesses attain strategic competitive advantages by implementing solutions for predictive analysis, lead indicator analysis, etc.

4.  Implement optimisation and planning systems for various business functions like Demand Planning, Supply Network Planning, Financial Planning, Advanced Production Planning, etc.

5.  Risk Management : With businesses today being critically dependent on IT systems and solutions, the CIO should ensure that processes and tools exist to identify, monitor, manage, mitigate and eliminate risks to the IT assets that are commensurate with the importance of the asset to the organisation

6.  Extend BPO model for master data management, accounts payable, payroll processing, loyalty management, etc.

7.  Free up business managers time by creating business analyst teams that operate on a KPO model to analyse specific business scenarios and generate reports that are pushed to the business managers on a need basis

8.  IT for Sustainability : Going beyond implementing Green IT technologies like blade servers and virtualization, IT solutions exist that that help identify, improve, measure and manage energy and resource efficiency across business processes and departments, thereby saving costs and earning carbon credits

To measure the business impact of IT investments, CIOs can implement standardised IT portfolio management tools / frameworks like IT scorecard.  These frameworks can assist the CIO accurately map the business benefits and ROI of IT systems.  It is estimated that the total cost of ownership of any IT system is approximately 10 times its cost of procurement.  

A value creator CIO while concentrating on deriving value for IT investments should not lose focus on optimising IT costs and continuously benchmarking the IT systems in the organisation with the business benefits they bring in.

By VVR Babu, Group CIO, ITC Infotech