Emerging role of the CIO in the C-Suite.

Do you need a CIO?

Before diving deep into the role of CIO, let us talk about the C-Suite and the important roles of the same.

C-Suite is a definition given to a set of executives who lead a company and define its day to day operations to achieve the objectives and goals.

The traditional C-Suite:

When we speak of the C-Suite, people often mis-understand it to only consist of:

A.CEO(Chief Executive Officer):

A CEO can be termed as the face of the company. He/She works with other C-Suite Members, seeking advice and insights about the company and its major decisions.

B.CFO(Chief Financial Officer):

A CFO takes care of all the finances in the company. From investments to expenditure, he/she advises the strategic use of the money. The prime goal of a CFO is to make sure that the company’s expenditure is not more than the investment and/or inflow of cash.

C.COO (Chief Operating Officer):

A COO works on to devise strategic plans to work with the Talent resource of the company to achieve the company goals. But, also, advises the company about the recruitment of talent resources, legalities, payroll-prediction and administration.

A leader, a Financial manager and an Operations manager meaning Vision + Money + HardWork = Brand’s success.

This is a mantra that has been followed by the brands for years but with the recent integration of Technology or as we like to call Digital Transformation, Brands can not achieve their goals perfectly with only the above executives. They even need a CTO or now, termed as a CIO.

A leader, a Financial manager, an Operations manager and Technology enthusiast/analyst. Meaning Vision + Money + HardWork + Digital Influence = Brand’s success.

Who is a CIO?

And what is the difference between a CIO and a CTO?

A CIO or a Chief Information Officer is an executive with a skill-combination of a CTO and the traditional C-Suite executives.

Oh wait, aren’t a CTO and CIO the same then?

Well, even though their work profiles match, they do share a lot of differences. Let’s just break it down into two individual profiles.

Chief Technical Officer:

A Chief Technical Officer works to design, build and improvise the technological requirements for a company to represent it digitally, manage work-flow output, connect the employees to a common digital space and to maintain and upgrade the systems.

Meaning, he/she enables the company to be digitally well represented and internally well connected via the means of Technology.

Now, that you’ve understood what a CTO does, let’s now talk about the CIO and why a CIO is valued more than a CTO?

Understanding the role of a Chief Information Officer

The Chief Information Officer implements technology to build the business on the global platform from scratch to suit the market requirements.

It’s not just about being digitally present, it’s about designing and adopting various strategies to focus on the technology-driven consumer markets.

Consider Bata, a few years ago, Bata would only focus on building their physical stores and focus on only their physical aspect of the consumer market.

But,with the increase in the technological consumer market, Bata divided it’s focus onto the Internet store as well. Now, here’s where the CIO comes into play.

The CIO leads the brand to understand the digital space and build business strategies according to it. The CIO is the CEO of the digital brand.

Now, the CIO of Bata manages the digital strategies of connecting to the consumers and servicing them to be able to buy your products.

The CIO is a person who is aware of the technological finances meaning, he/she has a clear understanding of the investments required to build, function, advertise and market the brand and its products/services on the Internet.

Meaning, the CIO is the CFO of the Internet subsidiary of the brand.

The CIO of Bata also looks into the investments required and manages the investments into the building the digital infrastructure of the brand.

And lastly, the CIO of a brand must be skilled enough to understand the use of talent resource and talent management. He/She must be projective of the talent resource required to build and improvise the digital holdings to the brand to develop and embrace new technologies with agility thus, building a better digital brand and tapping better into the digital consumer space.

In-Short, the CIO is a combination of CTO,CFO,CEO & COO.

Importance of a CIO:

The digital space is not concrete. Meaning, there are no perfect strategies to succeed in the digital space. It is all about experimenting.

The CIO is an executive who can perfectly experiment with building the digital holding and designing the strategies tapping the digital consumer market without negatively impacting the Brand’s physical reputation and market credibility.

The CIO works on improving the digital CX of the brand.The CIO’s strategies must not only tap into the digital consumer space to get leads but also must work to intactly maintain the brand’s credibility if not, increase.

Oh, and is that it?

Do his/her roles end there?

Again, not exactly. What you read was just a brief description about the CIO.

The key roles of a CIO are to make sure that the brand is digitally agile.

Meaning, the CIO plays the most important role during the Digital Business Agility Phase of a brand.

It starts with digitally transforming the brand.

Remember how we were a poly-branch apparel brand in What is Digital Transformation?

Our CIO was the reason why we could digitally transform. He first set-up our omni-channel touch points, allowing us to connect to our customers and vice-versa in a better comforting manner.

The omni-channel touch points meant that our customers could purchase our products from not just our store but, from anywhere in the world based on their comfort.

Thus, we could provide a better customer experience. And, speaking of the customer experience, the most important aspect of it was the fact that we could automate the entire process involved in buying a product from both the ends.

Meaning, the digital payments from the customer meant that both of us got notified with an e-receipt of the purchase and neither of us go through the hassle of producing invoices while taxing, thanks to the automation.

And, let’s not forget the fact no-contact delivery took place to avoid the spread of germs.

And on our end, our system directly notified the ful-filment center with possibly every detail required about the customer from his/her phone-number to the house address and printed it on the invoice to be sent.

Speaking of returns, it was easy too. Not that, we provide products that need to be returned but, we do value the customer’s choice. And, the automation made the return experience seamless in every way possible.

The in-house impact of the above strategic implementations were and are:

1.Optimized investment efficiency: We could get the same amount of work done with an optimized investment meant to save costs and without compromising on the customer experience and product quality experience.

2.Increased Efficiency: The implementation of the strategies helped us understand our work-force better and helped our work-force to become efficient and thus, indirectly improving our product quality, service quality and customer experience.

How did our CIO achieve it?

Well, the credit goes to the digital agility of our CIO and how he implemented it across our brand to make sure we are digitally agile too.

Oh yes, I remember reading about the Digital Business Agility on this publication.

Yes, let’s just refer to the concept in an easier way again.

Our CIO’s agility helps us improve our brand based on the constant feedback of our customers and the consumer market analysis.

We understand the current market needs and possibly forecast the future market needs based on the customers’ needs.

To top it up, we keep an eye on our competitors to make sure we step our game to the next level than theirs.

And, he uses the above obtained analytics to plan and devise new strategies and make informed decisions on a rapid scale to provide the best customer experience without compromising on quality.

It finally ends up helping our brand become better.

To understand the concept in detail, we’d recommend checking our blog post on why Digital Transformation is essential for brands.