What CIOs Should Learn in 2016
In the PR-company-masquerading-as-magazine, Forbes, I came across this article written by Bob Evans. It never occurred to me that technology companies have the role of Chief Communications Officer.
The article does contain a few nuggets of truth. The technology infrastructure and processes are increasingly becoming front of center of how companies develop products and services, do business and serve customers. The CIO has a tough job now.
Adding to the worries is the fact that the CIO office has traditionally been a back office function to support internal customers/employees/functions. They mostly did mundane jobs of custom development, application maintenance, data center management, negotiating with vendors, etc.. Their record of doing those jobs well has been dismal, however.
But the stakes are high now. External customers and stakeholders will not put up with poorly designed products and services. There is high risk that traditional Enterprise IT (with lots of outsourcing, limited skill sets in product development and no consideration of cost, quality and customer satisfaction) function is not up to the task in terms of delivering high levels of quality in a cost-effective manner.
It’s not all bad news, however. The techniques and processes to provide high quality products and services are well known in the traditional product development and production operations domains. CIOs and their teams should adopt techniques and processes from the production operations world whole-heartedly and become good at them. So, here is my list of things CIOs and their teams should become good at in 2016 and beyond.
Originally published at Cloud Computing Excellence.