Strategic Priorities of A CIO

Bangalore: The primal role of the CIO has undergone a massive paradigm shift. From being mere cost-cutters for an organization to generating revenue, a CIO is now viewed as the backbone of numerous enterprises of the tech savvy corporate arena. For a CIO, it has now become a prerequisite to analyze their job preferences and prioritize them accordingly, reports Bob Evans of Forbes.

Excavating the most viable strategic plan has been a thorn in the path of a CIO towards forming a dynamic IT sector. As such, giving priority accordingly will pave the way for a more clear vision based on which a CIO can go about in his corporate obligations.

Let us analyze the top ten strategic priorities for a contemporary CIO –

1)Allocating budgets: Intriguingly, it has been observed that 80 percent of the allocated budget is devoted to the already existing projects whereas a meager 20 percent are catered towards formulating new ventures. This leaves negligible resources to devote towards growth-oriented innovation. In order to overcome this issue, CIOs need to come up with appropriate strategic plan after a thorough consideration with board level executives.
2)The advent of Social media: CIOs need to exploit the benefits that social media has brought forth and incorporate them in realization of their objectives. They need to oversee the risk factor and embrace this new trend else be prepared to be pushed aside by their counterparts.
3)Welcome the opportunity chain: The opportunity chain, built on the bedrock of     supply chain and demand chain, open up new realms for CIOs as they lead to customer-centric and growth-driven opportunities, which the CIOs need to utilize in order to surge ahead in the competition and meet the targets set aside for them.
4)Engage Customers uniformly: Customers of today are armed with various tools using which they analyze carefully before procuring a product or a service. As such, opening the back-offices would seem like a convenient idea to earn the trust of consumers who are ever hungry regarding the knowledge related to their purchase.
5)Think ahead: CIOs need to think ahead of time and procure the technologies that would be best suited for the profitability of the company.
6)Revise cloud strategy: CIOs of today need to understand the implications that cloud has on the functionality of a business. As such, it becomes imperative for them to upgrade their ‘cloud Strategy’ to ‘business transformation enabled by cloud.’
7)Explore big data: CIOs also need to explore the various challenges and opportunities of Big Data with a view to improve their customer base and consequently earn revenue for the organization.
8)Combine social with mobile: CIOs should contemplate to annex social media with mobile which might give them an edge in keeping up with the ever changing needs and demands of the consumers.
9)Being fast paced: CIOs should also consider in accelerating the way IT functions in order to meet the required deadline for projects within the allotted time frame. This will result in the faster delivery of products and services to consumers, earning the company goodwill in return.
10)Generating system for Innovation: CIOs should focus on innovation that would lead to customer-centric products and services. This would ultimately cleanse their image of them being viewed as ‘budget gobbling’ executives without producing the desired business value. All it would take for them is to come up with a pre-tested system that would free the customers from the hinges of fruitless integration procedures.

These are the top ten strategic concerns a CIO should emphasize upon before going about their operations.