The Essential Requirements of a Digital CIO

What's the difference between "yesterday's CIO" and the modern-day digital one? Digital CIOs maintain a higher profile in the corporate board room, where board members have raised their expectations of IT performance and the delivery of new, business-benefiting innovation, according to a recent survey from BT. The resulting "The BT CIO Report 2016: The Digital CIO" also indicates that, given these challenges, board members increasingly recognize that today's CIOs must be more creative than in the past. Indeed, in assessing the "must have" qualities of digital CIOs, survey respondents were most likely to cite the need to work in a flexible manner with new business models and remaining open to new ideas/solutions, along with "soft skills" such as effectively responding to feedback and looking at situations from different perspectives. However, even with these shifting needs, CIOs still spend more time maintaining IT systems rather than looking for new solutions, but that balance appears to be reversing. "Digital transformation is under discussion at the board level, in IT and operational teams, in every organization and in every industry," according to the report. "That's exactly how it should be (because) the scope of what is digitally possible is uncertain. Every enterprise is working out their unique approach of adapting in this digital era and already using technology in new and creative ways to transform their business … CIOs are becoming ever more central to the boardroom and overall business strategy. The creative use of technology is absolutely accepted as a differentiator, not just in transforming costs or efficiency, but in improving customer experience and enabling disruptive growth." A total of 1,030 global senior IT decision-makers took part in the research, which was conducted by Vanson Bourne.