What’s on your CIO’s mind?
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Sat, Jan 16, 2010
IBM did a study across CIO’s of over 2500 CIOs in 78 countries
and across 19 industries. The objective
was to understand how can today’s CIO make the biggest impact on behalf of the
entire organisation? Largely CIO’s spoke about what they are doing to achieve
three primary goals: to make innovation real, raise the ROI of IT and expand
business impact.
The findings really struck me, as the key message pointed
to exactly the type of problems we at Cequity, help organizations tackle every
day.
A few important points from the survey(as quoted from the
findings):
- When asked to
identify their visionary plans for enhancing their enterprises’
competitiveness, business intelligence and analytics was the top answer,
selected by 83 percent of our sample. A Media and Entertainment CIO in
Belgium told us better business intelligence will “bring marketing
analysis to a higher level, to improve buying behaviour and increase
advertising ROI. Many others agreed that they seek information-led
innovation based on information as an asset. “Facts drive decisions,” said
an Insurance CIO. “Plans for imbedded analytics need to enable data
capture at the customer touch point.”
- CIOs have
typically made data collection a top priority. Yet even when data exists,
no CIO can take its availability for granted. Just 67 percent of High-growth
CIOs said data is readily available for relevant users, versus 51 percent
of Low-growth CIOs. “The benefits of making information available are
beyond comprehension,” an Education CIO in Saudi Arabia told us. Many CIOs
admitted that their users can’t always access the information they need in
a timely manner. A Government CIO in the United States noted:“Data is
readily available to users, but it’s tough to find if you’re a novice”.
- Some of the key
findings of the India PoV of the CIO study 2009 are: 70 per cent of Indian
CIOs are integrating business and technology to promote innovation for the
entire organisation as compared to 47 per cent of global CIOs; and 64 per
cent Indian CIOs proactively push IT as an innovation element compared to
55 per cent of global CIOs.
- One key area
where global CIOs rank ahead of Indian CIOs is around proactively crafting data into actionable information.
However, this is also an area which both global and Indian CIOs have
ranked as number one for their visionary plans for future.
Some thoughts basis this:
1.
Analytics is often spoken about as a strategic
area. But what are the elements required to really embed analytics into the corporate
strategy. I think you need the following:
a)
huge
mindset towards data based decisioning from top-typically CEO
b)
Aggressive CFO questioning marketing spends
c)
Strategic CTO/CIO who creates the enabling environment
d)
Most
importantly you need a passionate evangelizer-in either marketing, finance or
customer operations. Typically a senior person in these functions who
passionately believes in data led decision making
e) Data is there but is awfully difficult to put
together for analytics. Smart companies are able to create “Data capability” by
bringing disparate data streams together –first manually and eventually into a
datawarehouse