What’s on your CIO’s mind?

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):

1. 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.”
2. 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”.
3. 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.
4. 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

Drowning in data!

Companies around the world are literally drowning in data. A typical airline or retailer, for example, is collecting data from many operational systems and storing terabytes, if not petabytes, of data. But how closely do CMO’s and CIO’s actually work or are they often at cross purposes! In India and I am sure in other furiously growing markets as well, IT is so busy building the basic infrastructure to manage the business that they often ignore the strategic priorities that Marketing is trying to drive!

 Paul Barsch writes about how the chasm between Marketing & IT can be bridged in this interesting article “Preparing for the Future: How the CIO and CMO Must Collaborate to Win”

Paul has some very interesting view points that you can have a look at http://paulbarsch.wordpress.com/

He has this interesting take

“However, two powerful exponential trends (growth rates of data and technology), will dramatically affect enterprise operations, forcing the marketing and IT functions to communicate and collaborate like never before.

Moore's Law, conceptualized by Intel pioneer Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors per microprocessor will double every two years. This exponential increase in processing speeds for various machines/devices will eventually enable advances in economics, biology, technology, business, and other key fields.

The second powerful exponential trend is the increasing amount of data that companies must contend with on a daily basis. According to a Forrester Research report titled "Data, Data Everywhere," the "volume of the world's data doubles approximately every three years"!

 

And for most companies data isn't conveniently stored in one central location—it is often found on spreadsheets, data marts, and storage devices strewn across the enterprise. In fact, in many organizations, marketers are a key culprit in the creation and upkeep of separate "pocket databases" containing customer lists and purchase histories.

And while capturing and storing relevant data is a challenge, an additional obstacle is analyzing and translating this data into actionable information to improve the customer experience or drive operational efficiencies.”

Paul makes this interesting comment: “Marketers need fresh and accurate data for advanced marketing functions such as better segmentation, more effective campaigns and offers, and relevant interactions with the customer across multiple touchpoints. And CIOs realize that the benefits of creating a single source of relevant and accurate data for business analytics go far beyond helping marketers get closer to customers—and in fact benefit all aspects of company operations. Both the CIO and CMO have a stake in the development and implementation of an analytical infrastructure capable of turning data into actionable information that in turn enables better decision-making not just in marketing but across the enterprise.”

Our take at Cequity

1.    Are you creating forums by which the IT department can better understand your marketing agenda?

2.    Is the CMO championing areas where there is an overlap with the CIO/CTO- eg Data quality, Service oriented architecture etc?

What excites the CIO & why the CMO should care?

 Do Marketing guys need to understand technology? Why should CMOs really try to understand what turns the CIO on? Well the truth is that Marketing has silently changed and in many busineses it is more closely wedded to technology than you can imagine.Especially in Services marketing-in banks,Retailers & telecom companies, the Marketer is hugely dependent on technology to drive customer engagement.But often the Marketing team sees its role as the sexy part of business and IT as only the "grunt part". IT organizations often would spend much more effort in the "mission critical" part of the business rather than in enabling marketing. This requires the Marketing organization,especially the CMO, to invest time & effort in communicating their vision to the IT team.

Chris Curran, a Partner at Diamond and the firm’s Chief Technology Officer has this interesting take on the CIO

http://www.ciodashboard.com/cio-careers/cio-tenure-what-is-wrong-if-anything/

Also check out this article at the CIO.com about the various kind of CIO personalities.

http://www.cio.com/article/162250/State_of_the_CIO_What_Kind_of_CIO_Are_You_