What role does the CIO play in creating a customer-focused organization?
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It's also part of the organization understanding what the role of the CIO is. And I think now, every big company had a chief digital transformation officer, that looked very nice, but nothing rarely happened. And then all of a sudden COVID happened, and the CIOs showed they can get the job done. That halo is now something which has been capitalized on, and large companies are saying, "What's the roadmap that we need to deploy?" It's not just about admin anymore. CIOs are organizational engineers of a different caliber now, and we really have to look carefully at reengineering large companies for this different way of operating. And my thesis is that the CIO is the only real capability that can do it at scale in a way. And Julie, your point about speed, I think CIOs showed it can happen quickly if need be.
I'm an academic, so I don't have the same practical expertise that others have, but one of the things that I see right now is that pragmatic solutions are needed. I'm seeing now that 5g didn't completely work, it’s had 15 minutes of fame, but there are parts of it that did work. And so now, a lot of people are putting LTE mesh network corridors in that are by definition secure, because unless you've got the right equipment, you can't get onto it. And so there's a coexistence of different network technologies. And CIOs are the only people that can figure out how to organize that mess, and try and systematically plan on how to move forward.
The CIO role is still to this day defined differently, depending on obviously industry, but then also even just what rolls up to the CIO. Now with cloud and everything, there is no traditional IT anymore. CIOs own so many different facets of the production operation sometimes, and you get some people that are super purist about, "Well no, that should be in engineering". And I'm like, it should be wherever it needs to be to make sure it's secure and that there's an operational lens on what's being done. To me, it doesn't matter where it sits, what matters is that there's this discipline around these other things. I think a CIO is often going to be in a better position to look at how to optimize, make sure that that thing can scale, is resilient, all these other things, that that's more in their DNA. Now I know we get the hit sometimes about speed, but sometimes you gotta take the slow down to speed up approach.