Technology is changing everyday, it is beyond their control. It is not being driven by their strategy, it is driven by customers who want to engage with them
The CIO role has changed rapidly from being inwardly focused and delivering services to the business, to one that is outwardly focused.
“The really good CIOs look to aligned industries to see what is happening. They are thinking how this is going to affect their business or how they can use these insights for their customers," observes David Lindsay, CEO of Jade.
As well, they are focused on areas like user-centred design.
Lindsay says a number of New Zealand CIOs have done this transition really well.
“We are at a point of technology moving at an extraordinary fast pace,” he says.
CIOs have to work out a way to be more agile. They have to have a ‘fast fail mentality' to trail things rapidly, rather than the slow burn of 'let us get everything right first'.”
''The whole business is going to have to be really flexible, adaptable, agile and fast moving and get into that ‘fast fail’ space,” he says.
“Technology is changing everyday, it is beyond their control. It is not being driven by their strategy, it is driven by customers who want to engage with them.
Lindsay notes how Jade is working on two major areas in the market.
The first comprises organisations that are moving towards a more digital business mode, but have to deal with existing infrastructure and legacy systems.
The second comprises ‘corporate startups’.
They are quite different, but Jade works with them through a similar process.
The first group has a more complex starting point. They already have their legacy systems they try to grapple with.
“You can spend five years trying to sort out your backend system and not deliver anything on the front end for your customer,” he says.
So the focus is if you are going to deliver this first thing for customers, you have to change your backend, but not the whole backend. It is a phased delivery right across the business top to bottom.
“For corporate startups, we work with them and say we build your canvas of where you want to go that incorporates your strategic digital vision and then incorporate the level of infrastructure and their readiness at the moment . We build them a pathway to get there and deliver value on every point of the pathway.”
“Everything you do on that canvas or landscape, you are delivering value to the customer .”
The platform for disruption
He believes the concept of platforms that are cloud based and globally accessible, can provide value to people and businesses in myriad of ways.
“The creation of these global platforms will be disruptive to so many industries around the world in ways we can't even conceive,” he says.
One of the biggest problems for any industry that spans the globe is access or visibility to information.
“When there is a number of parties involved, the ability to seamlessly share information and the ability to high levels of transparency of information is often an impediment to new market entrants and disruption," he states.
“The really successful businesses will work out ‘how can I get information from lots of different people seamlessly onto my platform, to make my platform more valuable?'”
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