Top Key Skills Needed For Today’s CIOs (Part 3)

As the third post in the series of “Top Key Skills Needed For Today’s CIO”, in this article I will be discussing how to drive value through Operational & Technical Excellence.

Operational & Technical Excellence
In the current economic climate, organisations are being increasingly forced to examine opportunities for cost compression and complexity reduction to drive business growth.

This can be achieved through a process of operational and technical excellence across technology and the wider business organisation.

Central to this is a clear understanding of the business dimensions through defined corporate goals and objectives. Only by looking at the business domain can the CIO identify wider issues, identify opportunities and resolve business challenges.

Increase Organisational Effectiveness
To drive enhanced real times decisions across the organisation, CIOs need to radically simplify business processes. This process simplification needs to be achieved from the point of view of the end customer as opposed to the business owner. It should focus on stream lined operations, industrialised processing and organisational effectiveness.

This will need to be achieved through a detailed focus on cost control alongside the rationalising, renewing and consolidating of application hardware portfolios. In parallel is modernisation and potential outsourcing of non critical IT functions.

Dashboard
Delivering value through operational and technical excellence requires an investment management approach.

Key to this is identifying and capturing key indicators and metrics to detail the investment story. This will include measuring all key indicators, both quantitative and qualitative, from return on investment through to total cost of ownership.

By using an investment management approach, as opposed to a typical Red/Amber/Green ‘RAG’ status, the CIO has the opportunity to map IT metrics onto business KPIs. The mapping of IT metrics will then be directly linked to strategic objectives and business outcomes.

Summary
Driving value from Operational & Technical Excellence requires a concrete value proposition for the organisation to drive top live revenue growth and bottom line earnings. Processes need to be reengineered to provide scale and elasticity centred on the customer proposition and benchmarked using investment management performance indicators.

In the next post, I will discuss Detailed Product Leadership.

IAN ALDERTON
Email : ian@IanAlderton.com
Tel : +44 (0) 7702 777770

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