Drive your organisation to become ‘customer obsessed’: Forrester

CIOs need to pursue the “big picture” in order to drive digital transformation, says Forrester analyst Bobby Cameron

Comments

In this age of the customer, CIOs need to think end-to-end to drive a customer obsessed organisation, says Forrester analyst Bobby Cameron in a recent report.

This means traditional CIOs need to change in this age of the customer, he says.

Providing reliable, cost-effective, on-time, and on-budget technology is a given in a world where technology management underpins the digital revitalisation and restructuring of entire industries, he states.

Today’s CIOs are also being asked to enable, manage and occasionally lead digital transformation across the enterprise, he points out.

Drive an integrated view of the customer, turning data into insights and insights into actions – and focus these efforts with outside-in performance metrics.

Bobby Cameron, Forrester

The report calls on CIOs to pursue the “big picture” in order to drive digital transformation.

Many of the CIO’s challenges still stem from the traditional, limited focus on point solutions and business unit level objectives, he says. While CIOs still have to deliver these, their future success will come from their ability to plan and act end-to-end on behalf of the digitally empowered external customer.

He calls on CIOs to become “customer obsessed”.

“Drive an integrated view of the customer, turning data into insights and insights into actions – and focus these efforts with outside-in performance metrics.”

He says organisations need to have an integrated view of the customer.

Customers’ experience suffers when each business unit has its own view of the customer that they cannot or will not reconcile and share, he states.

Customers do not understand the ins and outs of management cultures and business politics that result in incompatible sets of information about a single customer — they expect all parts of the organisation “to act as a single entity”.

In tandem with this is the need to establish an “outside-in, customer focused performance metrics”.

“To help drive your organisation to become customer obsessed, these metrics should focus on the desired business outcomes as well as your organisation’s ability to rapidly change in order to meet those outcomes.

“And, like Kaplan and Norton’s original scorecard, your scorecard should include the tech management organisation’s health and service levels — especially as they affect the external customer,” he concludes.