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The strategic CIO

The strategic CIO

Being ‘more strategic’ is a career requirement for many of us


Read more: Analytics now a boardroom conversation

Given this situation, our aligning CIO just isn’t going to be able to prevent powerful vendor forces from deploying consumerised applications into the enterprise. Dyche defines the function of the 'aligning CIO' as “Supporting business objectives of individual business units through technology”. One reason why consumerisation is proving successful is that the functional model of organisation is failing to satisfy business units’ technology needs. Hence the raison d’etre of the ‘aligning CIO’.

Taken together, the aligning CIO might choose to harness the powerful supply-side forces and the internal demand for consumerised technology and help solve an emergent problem: figuring out who pays for enterprise mobility applications. As Absalom notes,

“We also expect to hear the question over who pays for mobile usage – employer or employee – asked more in 2016. The prevalence of "bring your own device" (BYOD) and the willingness of many employees to use their own devices on their own dollar has made this a very pertinent question… The upshot of this trend is that we will see more integrated employee-employer solutions on offer from telecoms operators, though often developed through collaboration with their IT vendor partners.”

The big challenges always lie outside our sphere of business-as-usual.


Read more: ​Coming to terms with bring your own (enterprise) apps

The obstacles the CIO faces will cluster around financial rules of cost allocation, professional caution on the part of the business users, self-serving behaviour on the part of the vendor partner network and obsolete sections of the human resources policy. The technical challenges are already within the CIO's domain and can be solved from within the existing capability set of her people. The big challenges always lie outside our sphere of business-as-usual.

The strategic play for our aligning CIO becomes heading off at the pass the problem of how the enterprise handles expenditure on enterprise mobility platforms used by employees in pursuit of business objectives. The CIO assigns a team to work with vendors and service providers on security and integration issues. He or she hires several new business-facing professionals to embed with business units and shape up the use cases in the light of observed behaviour. The CIO works with the CFO and Chief People Officer on a peer-to-peer level and makes sure that they have the opportunity to appoint their own people into a cross-functional strategic work team to guide the whole process.

Being strategic means being specific, and being specific is contextual to who the CIO is, who he or she aspires to be and the vision for maintaining continued relevance in the face of significant external and internal forces that may be beyond the CIO's ability to control.


Rohan Light worked at the enterprise level in Inland Revenue in a series of specialised roles in the risk, design, portfolio management and business group domains. He began to be consulted by business people on issues of strategy, management and execution, which led to the formation of Decisv. His formal strategy work led to teaching strategic thinking as an Associate at VUW’s Professional and Executive Development.

He cofounded the Enterprise Analytics Forum, a community of practice that meets to discuss issues relating to the fundamental challenges analytics poses to pre-digital business models. He extended his involvement in the analytics sector when he was appointed Chairman of the SAS Users of New Zealand.


Send news tips and comments to divina_paredes@idg.co.nz

Follow Divina Paredes on Twitter: @divinap

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