Making IT a strategic business partner: Step one

Today’s digital landscape is an IT and business revolution, empowering the CIO to better add and drive value.
So what is stopping so many CIOs from being key business leaders?

In my second ever interview for meettheboss.tv, I asked Austin Adams, former CIO of JPMorgan Chase about the secret to being a successful IT leader. His advice: 

“You have to be a partner to the business.” 

That was 2009, and I’m off to a tech leaders conference next week, where this issue is still on the agenda. Back in 2009, the gap was more understandable. IT was still geeky, maybe, keeping businesses running, but not fundamentally a value driver. For many companies, however, that has changed. And here’s Dr Werner Vogels, Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer and expert on ultra-scalable systems, with just one reason why: “Cloud computing provides the democratisation of business creation. Now you no longer need access to huge sums of money to actually get access to physical resources, to compute resources, to get your business or your product off the ground, and in that sense, it has a globalisation effect.

“Will we see more technology development? I think technology development will shift from having to manage physical resources and having many system administrators around just to keep your service going day and night, towards building better applications for your customers, because that’s where the focus will be. I believe that cloud computing will trigger a whole new range of application building that wasn’t possible before because we were so focused on just getting the basics right.”

That was from 2010. Dr Vogels saw cloud computing as nothing less than an IT and business revolution, empowering the CIO to better add and drive value, and everything he said is right.

So genuine question: what is stopping so many CIOs from being key business leaders?

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