The CIO Role: Very Much Alive and Rising in Influence

Doubters of the CIO role and function, here’s some bad news for you: a new global survey reveals “an undeniable increase in the influence of the CIO.”

The survey, conducted by Harvey Nash, a leading professional recruitment firm, and consulting major KPMG, notes that more CIOs now report directly to the CEO (34%) than at any time in the past decade. And before I share other insights from the 18th edition of this global survey that received almost 3,400 responses from CIOs and technology leaders across 82 countries, let me pull out a happy tidbit: CIOs with a direct report to the CEO are also the happiest (87% report job fulfillment).

While there could be multiple reasons for this “happiness,” my surmise is that such a direct reporting structure would certainly take away many irritants for technology leaders and untangle them from other CXO/peer “issues.”

Another indicator of the increasing CIO influence is that 57% of CIOs now sit on the executive board or other senior leadership committees (up by 50% over 11 years), as per the survey. (I know it’s a long, relatively slow march, but hey, it’s happening :)

Among other highlights is the fact that one in four CIOs now spend at least one day each week outside their core function of IT. The CEO focus, too, is shifting from projects that save money to those that make money (see graphic).

The survey (titled Harvey Nash/KPMG 2016 CIO Survey) reveals that traditional IT priorities are seeing major shifts over the past four years: increasing operational efficiencies has dropped 16%, and delivering stable IT performance has dropped 27%.

These statistics not only point to the growing influence of the CIO in a company but also that they have more time for top/bottom-line improvement and innovation.

What continues to hold them back, however, is what this media release on the survey terms as “the greatest technology skills shortage since the Great Recession almost a decade ago.”

As many as 65% of CIO respondents say they believe a lack of talent will hinder their organizations’ ability to keep up with the pace of change—which is a 10% rise in the past year alone.

For the second consecutive year, data analytics is the most in-demand skill (39%). A high 89% of CIOs are worried about talent retention. (It’s another matter, perhaps, that there have been ample job movements and career shifts within the CIO community itself: 31% of the CIOs have been in their current role for less than two years and 15% moved job last year.)

The changing talent and CIO career dynamics could also be the result of the growing acceptance and impact of Digital.

One in five organizations now deploys a CDO (no, the CDO is not off the radar, though the initial euphoria on a separate digital officer seems to have come down a bit). More important, 58% of respondents reported that their organization has a clear digital vision and strategy.

In his executive summary for the report, Dr. Jonathan Mitchell, Non-Executive Chair, Global CIO Practice, Harvey Nash (a former CIO of Rolls-Royce and a tech veteran), writes: “There is little doubt that our industry is changing rapidly. In the last two years, IT leaders have become newly invigorated. The days of budget cuts and staff losses are well behind us. New challenges such as ‘digital’ have emerged. Was this yet another technology fad? No, was the resounding response from last year’s respondents. Digital is most definitely real and it is changing the way in which everyone thinks about IT.”

While there are many challenges for CIOs in the disruptive days ahead, let’s hope that the CIO role stays invigorated for many, many years to come.

(Lead image credit: Pixabay.com. This blog post first appeared on dynamicCIO.com.)

Disaster Management: Can Internet of Things Make a Difference?

What happens when disaster strikes? The answer depends, among other things, on where you are located. And if you live in a third-world, hot, crowded and messy country like India—all hell breaks loose.

Millions among India’s billion-plus citizens have seen that hell from up, close and personal: in the ruthless form of floods, earthquakes, cloudbursts, landslides and other disasters that destroy lives, livestock and the lock, stock and barrels that help people sustain their existence.

In fact, as I write these lines, the country is in the midst of disastrous rains and flooding in several states across its length and breadth.

On such occasions, the administration goes into an overdrive, the army and paramilitary forces are called in and the voluntary organizations are roped in for relief work. But Nature’s fury often proves too much and, despite all their efforts and hard work, the scale at which misery unfolds in the aftermath is astounding.

Can technology play a role in anticipating, mitigating, controlling and managing this misery? And if so, to what extent and in what ways?

Those were the questions that came flooding to my mind as I attended the launch recently of a white paper titled “Internet of Things (IoT) for Effective Disaster Management.” The paper was brought out by Digital India Action Group (DIAG), a think tank set up by IT vendor lobby group MAIT for “ideating and monitoring policy initiatives to support the Indian Government’s mission of Digital India.”

The objective of the paper is “to create awareness and appreciation about the potential use and applications of IoT for different aspects of disaster management.”

Alongside, DIAG also released another white paper, “Aadhaar-Enablement: A Framework for Citizen-Centric Services”.

For the uninitiated, Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique identity issued by the Government’s Unique ID Authority of India. Over 1 billion of these IDs have been given thus far in what is billed as the largest such exercise in the world.

While discussing Aadhaar and the potential of Aadhaar-based services is a Pandora’s box in itself, let me confine myself to IoT in disaster management for this post.

The role of IoT in disaster management, in keeping with the huge potential of this mother-of-all-technological-paradigm, is critical and wide-ranging. A multiplicity of agencies, infrastructure, devices, policies, and applications, among others, must come together to make the whole exercise “effective”, as the DIAG paper rightly highlights in its title.

The presence of a cross-section of officials and executives—from government, industry and consulting organizations (see pic)—is, one hopes, symbolic of the coordinated, on-ground effort that will be required in the days to come to give actual shape to the vision laid out in the document.

The IoT white paper recommends a “Seven-Point Action Plan” to shift from a “relief and recovery” model to “risk and vulnerability assessment” and address key issues and challenges related to management of natural and man-made disasters in India.

According to data from the IoT white paper, as much as 57% land area of India is vulnerable to earthquakes; 12% of this area is vulnerable to severe earthquakes. Besides, 68% land is vulnerable to drought, 12% land vulnerable to floods and 8%, to cyclones. The paper notes that many cities in India are also vulnerable to chemical, industrial and other man-made disasters.

The benefits of IoT in disaster management are easy to visualize (though difficult to implement, given the current realities of India): agencies can gain a clear picture of operations with real-time visibility of data as well as model data from multiple sources. This can further be transformed into accessible, actionable intelligence for faster, better-informed decisions. It is important, therefore, to create “a single, federated information hub.”

The paper calls for building an information backbone which all parties—government agencies, NGOs, infrastructure operators and community—can contribute to and work from.

One term in the paper that specifically caught my eye was “intuitive analytics” which seems to take the capabilities of the current big data analytics technologies to their optimal level.

In this context, SAP’s Lovneesh Chanana presented an insightful video of the city of Buenos Aires in Argentina. After the disastrous floods in the year 2013, which resulted in loss of close to a hundred lives and millions of dollars, the Argentine capital decided to put sensors in over 30,000 storm drains that measure, as per this report on the SAP site, “the direction, level and speed of water.” One of the key technologies to gather and analyze this huge amount of data in real-time is SAP HANA.

Technologies lie SAP HANA (or IBM Watson, for that matter) are not cheap to deploy for funds-starved governments. But consider the impact of not using the most advanced technologies: A World Bank forecast puts the annual losses from floods alone to reach as high as $1 trillion worldwide if cities don’t take preventive measures.

Each city, in my opinion, will need to take a deep view of what’s the best fit for it in terms of technologies, including IoT and the use of social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. (If you think lightly of the idea, pause for a moment to consider that the US Geological Survey, a government entity, runs a service called the Tweet Earthquake Dispatch (TED). Under this, there are two Twitter accounts that send out earthquake alerts: @USGSted and @USGSBigQuakes.)

I remember reading a report a few years ago that was in a way precursor to the TED service. When, in the US, a 5.9-magnitude earthquake shook the Northeast in 2011, many New Yorkers learned about it on Twitter—seconds before the shaking actually started. Tweets from people at the epicenter near Washington, D.C., outpaced the quake itself, providing a unique early warning system. (Conventional alerts, by contrast, were said to take two to 20 minutes to be issued.)

Technology is advancing at a much faster pace now, especially with machine learning, robotics and drones appearing more frequently in headlines than ever before.

What should the Indian government and industry players be doing in tackling disasters with IoT and other tools?

The DIAG white paper gives some recommendations, the MAIT DIAG Seven-Point Action Plan, which includes:

- Release of cloud security and related guidelines as part of the Digital India policy framework.

- Inclusion of ICT in Disaster Management in the National Skills Development Framework and Plan.

- Release of IoT Policy for India.

- Development of framework for continuous industry participation in planning for disaster management.

- Back-end applications for asset management with disaster management authorities.

- Knowledge portal for sharing experiences and best practices.

- A comprehensive plan for prevention of cyber disasters.

Even if some of the above points are put into practice by a government-industry “action tank” (taking the think part to its logical conclusion), the disasters that certainly, unavoidably await the Indian multitudes can perhaps be mitigated and managed much better than before.

For CIOs, tech leaders and others who would like to dig deeper or get involved, here are some reference links:

Revised Draft IoT Policy of the Government

National Policy on Disaster Management

India Disaster Resource Network

UN ESCAP: ICT and Disaster Risk Reduction

 (The above blog post first appeared on dynamicCIO.com. Lead visual credit: Pixabay.com)

The Four Stages of Digital Disruption CXOs Should Know

It is easy for people within an industry to see something repeated quite often as clichéd, boring, hyped or done-to-death. But when it comes to the double dose of “Digital Disruption” (with two heavyweight words wrestling alongside), there is usually a lot of discomfort as well.

And while one often gets to hear the names of the usual “culprits”—the Ubers and Olas, the Airbnbs, the Facebooks of the world—who are causing or have caused a lot of disruption in the market, it is good to come across something that helps the existing enterprises or the incumbents chart digital territory with greater confidence.

McKinsey’s aptly titled “An incumbent’s guide to digital disruption” offers a few silver linings and plenty of hope. The introduction lures you in with these powerful words: “Incumbents needn’t be victims of disruption if they recognize the crucial thresholds in their life cycle, and act in time.”

It goes on to describe in interesting detail the four stages of disruption from an incumbent’s perspective, the barriers to overcome, and the choices and responses needed at each stage.

The four stages are identified in self-explanatory terms—Stage one: Signals amidst the noise; Stage two: Change takes hold; Stage three: The inevitable transformation; and Stage four: Adapting to the new normal.

The authors of the McKinsey article, Chris Bradley and Clayton O’Toole, also help the incumbent organizations in visualization of their current stage on an S-curve and mapping their moves and barriers along various inflection points on the graph.

The authors pepper these stages with real-life examples and insights, which makes for useful reading for companies that are in the midst of their own digital journeys and can take cues from those who have been there or done that (or not done that, for that matter).

Sample a few: as long as 10 years back, Norwegian media group Schibsted made the bold move to offer classifieds online—for free; Netflix “disrupted itself” in 2011 by shifting its focus from DVD rentals to online streaming; and Grocery retailer Aldi is said to have disrupted numerous incumbents globally with its low-price model.

You can read the full McKinsey article here or download an assessment guide that helps an organization in ascertaining its position in the digital journey by clicking this link.

It is always better to disrupt yourself than let someone else do it!