‘Ecosystem’ is another important term for the strategic CIO to get comfortable with. Modern business ecosystems are complex, adaptive and networked. They are also in continuous flux, shifting with each disruptive digital advance. One of the more unsettling effects of this emergent world is uncertainty about the location of the centre of business gravity. Lachal pointed out:
As cloud-centric digital transformation blurs all boundaries, such as vertical market boundaries, cloud computing becomes the context for new partnerships as well as increased competition between vendors and between vendors and their customers. So think outside the box and partner with competitors along with customers across a variety of vertical markets to create new cloud solutions. These solutions should help enterprises shift from a SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud) stack to a MANIACS (Mobile, ANalytics, IoT, Ai, Cloud, Social) one.
Read more: Why you need to constantly validate your cloud strategy
It’s easy enough to buy boxes and sign up with SaaS providers, but it’s a much tougher ask to bring people up to speed in terms of their business beliefs and associated behaviour.
This blurring of boundaries and increase in uncertainty challenges the strategic CIO to help his or her colleagues understand what digital transformation really means. And it’s a difficult journey as Dion Hinchcliffe notes in a March post on his blog,
The primary lesson here: Deeply understand the rules of digital ecosystems and build one that solves a real pain point for a lot of people. Optimize the results relentlessly and pour the returns back into growth. Don’t stumble along the way. This is a playbook that is simple enough to understand, but that most industrial era organisations don’t fully embrace in a meaningful way, despite all the marketing talk — and I’m guilty as many of us in this regard — about digital transformation.
Digital transformation is about the behavioural implications of organisations shifting to a MANIACS technology stack. It’s easy enough to buy boxes and sign up with SaaS providers, but it’s a much tougher ask to bring people up to speed in terms of their business beliefs and associated behaviour. Hinchcliffe,
The real obstacle is one which I’ve been exploring in various forms over the last several years: Most organisations have accumulated and/or designed in enormous amounts of legacy culture, process, mindset, and infrastructure that got them where they are, but now has to be undone to a large extent to be fully realized and effective digital organisations. The world of agile, lean startup, OKRs, open APIs, devops, relentless A/B testing, and growth hacking are all words or phrases sometimes heard in the halls of the average classical business, but they just don’t lie at the heart of them, and won’t any time soon.
Read more: When innovators and implementers work together
This is why the cloud play is one of the most decisive options available to the strategic CIO. Somewhere will be a business unit that is learning its way to an effective means of moving past legacy business mind-sets. This business unit is likely to be an irritant to centralised ICT, as well their own functional colleagues. The task of the CIO becomes one of searching these groups out and identifying what behaviours to encourage and champion across the rest of the enterprise.
This means challenging the centre of gravity within enterprise ICT as well as influencing the development of emergent technological expertise. This breaking of the centre is an unavoidable task of the strategic CIO. Hinchcliffe noted:
Worse, we’ve greatly over-centralised technology enablement so that it’s become a profound chokepoint in many organisations. CIOs and CMOs feel this acutely when this is the case, and yet a few are now reaping the benefits of going in the opposite direction. There are indeed solutions, but they require more ideas that traditional organisations aren’t good at: Open innovation, Kickstarter-style ideation programs, app stores, customer co-creation, change agent programs, hackathons, employee incubators, BYOT, enterprise architecture that’s designed for loss of control, and more.
Lachal and Hinchcliffe point the way towards the value of cloud enabled network effects for the strategic CIO. Working with and learning from 'the cloud generation' provides the CIO with the option of enabling the enterprise to exert more influence into its business ecosystem by increasing its network connectivity. Cloud value becomes multiplicative outside the boundaries of the firm and this exposure will help change the legacy mind-set within the firm. Hinchcliffe observes how this plays out,
Most digital contenders fail to understand even the most basic concepts of digital, such as the network itself is the single biggest resource you can and must use to digitally fuel your ecosystem to transform. It will do almost all the work, as long as you have a vision, a value proposition, and a platform which truly embodies and orchestrates both. Network orchestrators, in fact, are at the top of the Internet food chain.
Getting cloud right for the strategic CIO means weakening the centre and sifting through the mess of the enterprise Frankencloud. It’s difficult and unpopular work that requires significant commitment to change. But if done well, it gives the enterprise a rare opportunity to move towards genuine digital transformation.
Read more: The strategic CIO
Spot on. Cloud provides a platform now let's focus on the human drivers to enable adoption. https://t.co/ywum9pbk7t @cio_nz @neuromarketing
— Frank Zanotto (@frankzanotto) April 5, 2016
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.
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