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The findings do not suggest all business leaders need to become IT experts, but that they should understand the opportunities fast-evolving digital technologies offer and know how they might be applied. As one CIO from a large media company told the Harvard Business Review research team: “My business partners need to be great consumers of technology — curious, aware, engaged and willing to experiment in their own lives so they come armed with great ideas.”
Companies with a business model grounded in digital naturally tend to see a greater blending of roles among the leadership team, with digital skills more evenly distributed and not contained within an IT silo. In the case of an online financial services company, says its CTO, “it’s hard to look at our teams and know where IT ends and marketing begins; the CTO and CMO [roles] bleed into each other.” But again, this doesn’t mean the CMO is doing the CTO’s job. Rather, the CMO fully understands the value of data and the opportunities offered by analytics, and can apply the tools provided by the CTO, observe the authors. This reinforces enablement as a key facet of the IT team’s role, and as more digitally savvy employees graduate to leadership roles in the coming years, the relationship between IT and the other business leaders will continue to evolve in line with the technologies they respectively supply and apply.
Chief education officer
The Red Hat report also indicates that business leaders want their CIOs to go beyond digital enablement to active education. While IT training and development might have traditionally been the remit of HR or a dedicated team, the business-changing nature of digital makes that different. And there’s an expectation that CIOs should take the initiative – 46% of the survey’s respondents said they would like to learn more about digital trends directly from their CIO. However, close to two-fifths said that, currently, their CIO doesn’t seek to educate and empower other business leaders with digital knowledge.
Almost half of those surveyed agreed that the biggest barrier here is the lack of an appropriate forum in which this can take place, while more than a third said their IT leaders are simply too busy to be available to pass on this knowledge. The CIO’s role in digital leadership must therefore include the creation of opportunities for knowledge sharing throughout the business, the report’s authors conclude.
Insights from the report will support CIOs who are seeking to make a business case for increased digital learning throughout the organization, and offers the following advice:
• Analytics is a great place to start your digital education efforts. 73% of respondents rated analytics as extremely important to their area of the business, but only a fifth rated their own knowledge and skills in this area highly.
• Either infuse digital into existing leadership committees or create a dedicated digital advisory board made up of both internal and external experts to guide the company’s digital vision.
• Embed IT staff in the lines of business so that digital learning happens on the job, not just in dedicated meetings or training sessions.
• As with all IT/business engagement, establish a common lexicon to increase understanding and communicate in language that speaks in business activities and outcomes, not to IT projects.
• Partner closely with key business leaders to identify which digital knowledge and skills need to reside in the lines of business and which should remain in IT.
• Work with the training and development organization to establish both formal and informal learning forums, including bringing in external experts.
As the report concludes: “Understanding new technology capabilities is no longer the exclusive purview of the IT organization. Leaders across the business must learn about and stay abreast of digital trends, the implications of those trends for their business, and how to leverage the new technologies. CIOs have a central role to play here — and business leaders want their help to better understand digital trends. This starts with being the voice of digital innovation — evangelizing what’s possible and what business leaders' peers in other organizations are doing. The bottom line: CIOs should lead.”
• Download the full report from HBR
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