Gartner Survey Confirms the Changing Role of the CIOs

Gartner Survey Confirms the Changing Role of the CIOs
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Gartner's annual global survey of CIOs showed that the CIO role is transitioning from delivery executive to business executive, from controlling cost and engineering processes, to driving revenue and exploiting data.

Digitalization and technological innovation are changing the nature of the job of the CIO. Leaders are rapidly scaling their digital businesses, making the remainder of this year and 2018 a defining moment for CIOs who don't want to be left behind.

The 2018 Gartner CIO Agenda Survey gathered data from a record number of 3,160 CIO respondents in 98 countries and all major industries, representing approximately $13 trillion in revenue/public sector budgets and $277 billion in IT spending. For the purposes of the survey, respondents were categorized as top, typical and trailing performers in digitalization.

The survey results show that 95 percent of CIOs expect their jobs to change or be remixed due to digitalization. While world-class IT delivery management is a given, it will take up less and less of the CIO's time. Respondents believe that the two biggest transformations in the CIO role will be becoming a change leader, followed by assuming increased and broader responsibilities and capabilities. Inevitably, the job of CIO will extend beyond the traditional delivery roles to other areas of the business, such as innovation management and talent development.

The survey showed that a majority of CIOs say that technology trends, specifically cybersecurity and artificial intelligence (AI), will significantly change how they do their jobs in the near future. CIOs surveyed rank AI, followed by digital security and the Internet of Things (IoT), as the most problematic technologies to implement. Respondents agree that the most common pain point is the fact that these technologies, particularly AI, demand new skills, some of which can be hard to find.

Growth is the No. 1 CIO priority for 2018, as reported by 26 percent of them. The use of digitized products and services is expected to drive new forms of revenue, business value and engagement of customers and citizens. The challenge for CIOs is how to grow it to deliver economies of scope and scale.

At least 84 percent of top CIOs surveyed have responsibility for areas of the business outside traditional IT. The most common are innovation and transformation. They are spending more time on the business executive elements of their jobs compared with three years ago. In a change from previous surveys, respondents were asked to name the top differentiating technologies (in previous years they were asked about investment levels). Business intelligence (BI) and analytics still retain the top spot on the list, with top performers most likely to consider them strategic.

Seventy-nine percent report that digital business is making their IT organizations more "change-ready," which suggests that now is a good time to implement change to the IT organizations, and, in turn, should make the transition to the new job of the CIO easier. The first part of the new job of the CIO is to build the required bench strength to scale the enterprise's digital business through support for the digital ecosystem.