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The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2016

By Christian on 15th January 2016 in CIO, Strategy

The toughest job in corporate America, says Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, is the CIO’s. While I agree with Hurd’s assessment, I also believe that business-minded, forward-looking CIO’s have an incredible opportunity to play leading roles in the digital/physical revolution that is transforming every facet of our lives.
CIO’s of the world, it’s time to jump into this revolution fearlessly and joyfully because your backgrounds, your perspectives, your expertise, and your imaginations are needed desperately by your companies as they attempt to engage deeply in this richly blended digital/physical mix—or risk slipping into a nonstop decline marked by unfixable difficulties, growing irrelevance, and, ultimately, oblivion.

As Oracle CIO Mark Sunday says, “This is the most challenging time in history to be a CIO, because in order to survive, organisations need to embrace new technologies at an unparalleled pace. But by the same token, CIO’s have never had a better opportunity to add value to their organisations—if they embrace the challenge.”

Welcome to the fourth annual list of the major challenges and opportunities global CIO’s will face in the coming year. In last year’s prognostication, we noted, “Throughout 2014, the CIO profession was subjected to a baffling series of apocalyptic forecasts and dire predictions that have proven to be laughably wrong,” and asked, “Where did all these distortions and misperceptions about the stewards of IT strategy and execution come from?”

And as we head into 2016, I have to say that those prophets of doom, who just 12 to 18 months ago were so doggedly insistent that CIO’s were about to take permanent residence next to the Dodo, have changed their tunes, rewritten their histories, and realised that the vectors of profound change in today’s global economy—cloud computing, the Internet of Things, mobile everywhere, social lifestyles blending with social commerce, and the blurring of enterprise tech and personal tech—point to nothing but a greatly enriched future for smart and aggressive CIO’s.

From our perspective, we see that future coalescing around four key activities or attributes that world-class CIO’s are embracing:

Creators of a new cultural outlook of aggressive possibilities, of new products and services, and of new capabilities, all of which are essential building blocks in their company’s digital transformation;
Evangelists for cloud computing and its transformative potential, for social business, for data-driven decision-making, and for digital-first thinking throughout the organisation;
Transformers of corporate culture as IT pivots from reactive responder to aggressive innovator; from “you’ll take what we give you” to “we’ll accelerate and enhance your initiatives”; and from analog paper-based processes to digital workflows and collaborative approaches driven by data;
Accelerators of everything from product development to procurement, and from decision-making to deployment of resources as the epochal shift to cloud computing liberates huge chunks of IT budgets and paves the way for truly customer-centric business.

Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2016

Create New Revenue Streams. The digitisation of our everyday lives opens up huge possibilities for IT-inspired innovation in new products, new services, new data-as-a-product offerings, and other innovations that enhance customer engagement while also boosting revenue.
Create a New Can-Do Culture. Cloud computing and the ongoing explosion of social/mobile services offer CIO’s superb building blocks for demonstrating to business units around the world that the IT organisation has permanently shed its “Dr. No” persona, with the initials “IT” now representing what the CIO’s team really stands for: innovation/transformation.
Create Dazzling—and Relevant—New Apps. What percentage of the IT organisation is now focused on building customer-centric apps? How does that figure compare to last year? How much will it grow in 2016? World-class CIO’s will find ways to transform their teams into engines of customer engagement, with app creation at the centre.
Evangelise the Business Benefits of Cloud Computing. Are you talking to the CMO about SOA, or about the lifetime value of customers? In the cloud, product-development cycle times are shorter, customer trends can be spotted more quickly, top performers can co-create career-development plans, and the CFO can stop being a historian. Are you telling these stories clearly and passionately?
Evangelise the Power of Digital Business. As GE CIO Jim Fowler noted above, the marriage of digital capabilities with traditional products and services opens up big possibilities for creating new value for customers—new insights into how products are performing, which new services are most profitable, where to promote certain products at certain times, and which high-performing people are at risk of leaving.
Transform Traditional Ideas/Silos of “What We Do.” Per the opening quotation of this article, wearable tech is starting to turn the medical field upside down, and we’re seeing digitally activated shelves in retail, intelligent sensors revolutionising preventive maintenance, ingestible medications, driverless cars, smart clothing, and much more. How can the CIO disrupt traditional thinking within her company by showcasing what already is, as well as what is possible?
Transform Customer Engagement. A while back, the newly named CIO of one of Asia’s leading airlines described his company’s eye-popping realisation that top customers desired zero human interaction until they were actually on the plane. What customers really want is often greatly at odds with what we as businesses are accustomed to—or comfortable—delivering. In 2016, CIO’s must help lead the way in bridging this gap and driving customer-centric engagements.
Transform Decision-Making from Gut-Level to Data-Driven. Think of the astonishing volumes of data residing within large organisations—and think how few of those valuable assets are being exploited to enhance the decision-making ability of employees at all levels of the company. CIO’s have a perfect opportunity to work with business leaders to unlock those data assets and put them to work in delivering real-world, real-time insights that create success for the business, for customers, and for employees.
Accelerate the Reversal of the 80/20 Budget Trap via Cloud Computing. Before cloud computing, the #1 enemy of the CIO was the economic reality that about 80% of his IT budget would be consumed by low-value maintenance and integration. Because cloud computing pushes that burden over to cloud vendors, CIO’s can liberate huge portions of their budgets and reallocate them to projects centred on growth and customer engagement. The faster this happens, the better.
Accelerate Deployment of World-Class Cybersecurity. The traditional IT operating model was a security nightmare because IT environments were made up of thousands of disparate components cobbled together, with each piece requiring its own unique security protocols. In the cloud, CIO’s have the opportunity to flip that model from thousands of vulnerabilities to a single, unified, top-to-bottom cybersecurity stack where the cloud vendor shoulders that burden. (Oracle believes security has to be built in at every layer of the cloud stack, and that’s become a competitive differentiator for Oracle Cloud.) And remember, cybersecurity is a journey, not a destination. As Sunday has said, “your cybersecurity capabilities need to evolve continuously in order to meet an ever-more sophisticated and ever-evolving threat landscape. Having world-class cybersecurity means having the ability to detect and remediate today’s threats, while maintaining the capability to morph to meet the needs of tomorrow.”

And as 2016 looms, best wishes to all you CIO’s out there for a year filled with achievement, excitement, engagement, and success. I hope it’s a year in which you get to flex those muscles that let you create, evangelise, transform, and accelerate in ways that dazzle and delight your customers, and bring opportunities and success to you and your colleagues. As Christopher Lochhead says, “Knock ‘em alive!”

Full credit for the article to Bob Evans, SVP and Chief Communications Officer for Oracle – Please share your feedback with him on Twitter at @bobevansIT

The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2015

By Christian on 3rd March 2015 in CIO, Strategy

Throughout 2014, the CIO profession was subjected to a baffling series of apocalyptic forecasts and dire predictions that have proven to be laughably wrong.
Where did all these distortions and misperceptions about the stewards of IT strategy and execution come from?

Well, times of extreme change and disruption in the business world—and 2014 surely qualified in spades for that designation—always breed lots of theories about what caused all that upheaval and where it will lead.

And since the CIO profession and its attendant IT organization have always been among the most misunderstood siblings in the corporate family, it’s not surprising that their decline, downfall, decimation, and demise were so grandly forecast and greatly exaggerated. Here are a few of my favourite crackpot theories:

The CMO would kill the CIO: The CIO and the CMO, we were told, were locked in a Texas Cage death match from which only one would emerge alive. Because CMOs have begun to embrace marketing automation technology, this theory went, the CMO would inevitably be in mortal opposition to the CIO.
Mobile technology would kill the CIO:The CIO and the entire IT organisation would become wards of the CFO as superb mobile technology rendered many/most traditional enterprise systems obsolete. According to this yarn, only core financial apps would require the rigour of traditional enterprise systems, so the CIO would be tucked deeply under the CFO and become little more than a mechanic wearing a green eyeshade.
Cloud computing would kill the CIO:In this daydream, the CIO and the entire IT organisation would join the woolly mammoth for a nice long dip in the tar pit, as the rise of cloud computing would eliminate any need for businesses to retain deep business-technology vision and strategy.
Big data and its data scientist masters would kill the CIO:The rise of the omniscient data scientist would lead to a Borg-like collective mentality that would know everything about everything, making IT irrelevant.

But a funny thing happened on those roads to CIO extinction, and here in 2015 we find that the best CIOs are not only alive and well and far from endangered, but are indeed creating more business value than ever before by collaborating eagerly and openly with those supposed forces of opposition. World-class CIOs and IT organisations have never—ever—worked in isolation, and in today’s dizzying high-change business environment, the collaborative approach is paying huge dividends.

In 2015 and beyond, as the full impact of digital disruption takes hold across all industries, the winning organisations will be those in which the CIO engages relentlessly with the CMO, the CFO, the chief revenue officer, the CHRO, the heads of product development and manufacturing, the data scientist, the heads of service and support, and every other line of business leader to help conceive and create the digital enterprise.

Because without that type of collaboration, without that infusion of strategic business-technology capability into every facet of the organisation, businesses will simply be unable to keep pace with the rapidly shifting and escalating wants and needs of customers, whether consumers or businesses.

In that context, I’d like to offer my “Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2015.” And I’d like to begin by sharing my Top 10 lists from the two previous years to offer a sense of continuity and perspective that, in combination with the 2015 list, reveal a profession and a corporate asset that are more relevant, more valuable, and more strategic than ever before.

The Top 10 Strategic Issues for 2013

Simplify IT and Transform You’re Spending: Kick the 80/20 Budget Habit.
Lead the Social Revolution: Drive the Social-Enabled Enterprise.
Unleash Your Company’s Intelligence: Create the Enterprise-wide Opportunity Chain.
Embrace the Engagement Economy: Merge the Back Office and the Front Office into the Customer Office.
Future-Proof Your IT Architecture.
Upgrade “Cloud Strategy” to “Business Transformation Enabled by the Cloud.”
Transform Big Data into Big Insights, Big Vision, and Big Opportunities.
Preside over a Shotgun Wedding: Systems of Record Marry Systems of Engagement.
Lead with Speed: CIO as Chief Acceleration Officer.
Bend the Value Curve: More Innovation, Less Integration.

Next, The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2014

Drive Customer-Centric Innovation Throughout Your Organisation.
Why the Internet of Things Will Turn Your Business Upside Down.
Shatter the Legacy Model of IT Budgeting and Expectations.
Dazzle Your Customers—Make Them Love Your Company!
Who’s on First? It’s a Mobile-First, Cloud-First, and Social-First World.
Blending Art and Science: Why Product Development and IT Must Collaborate.
Don’t Fight Tomorrow’s Wars with Yesterday’s Technologies.
Embrace Your Ultimate Metrics: Customer Loyalty Moves to the Front.
Tie IT Compensation to Knowledge-Worker Productivity.
Design and Deliver the Transparent Enterprise.

Clearly, all of those initiatives from 2013 and 2014 need to continue into 2015 and beyond, but for this year’s top CIO imperatives, I’ve broken the list into four categories that reflect the multifaceted capabilities the modern and business-driven CIO must have, and the wide-ranging responsibilities such executives deserve to have.

As you’ll see below, those four subsets are Business Transformer, Customer Expert/Advocate, Business-Technology Visionary, and Culture Warrior.

Here’s the 2015 Top 10 list, followed by an overview of each item.

The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues for 2015

The Business Transformer

1) Be the joyful digital disruptor, not the hesitant and befuddled digital disruptee.

2) Accelerate insights, decision-making, and operations: function as the Chief Acceleration Officer. Yes, this is the same as #9 on the 2013 list, but it not only bears repeating, but deserves a promotion up the list.
3) Forge strategic and deep relationships with the CMO, CHRO, CFO, and beyond.

The Customer Expert and Advocate

4) Harness the enterprise-wide power and potential of customer-centric big data and analytics.
5) Unlock insights and capabilities that let every employee contribute to customer loyalty.

The Technology Visionary

6) Modernise and simplify: Exploit cloud computing to help achieve each item on this list.
7) Re-imagine your security strategy as globalisation and mobility redefine privacy and risk.

The Culture Warrior

8) Be the strategic evangelist for turning social from tactical sidelight to strategic growth engine.
9) Embrace new HCM outlooks and tools to make your department—and your entire company—a high-demand destination for world-class talent.
10) Transform the IT organisation and reputation from no to yes, from SLAs to revenue growth, from obstacle to accelerator, from passive to opportunistic.

To carry on reading this piece, please visit the original article here.

Full credit for the article to Bob Evans, SVP and Chief Communications Officer for Oracle

The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2014

By Christian on 11th January 2014 in CIO, Leadership, Strategic, Strategy, Thought Leadership, Transformation

CIOs have never had such a glorious—and challenging—opportunity to deliver significant, enduring, and transformational business impact and customer value as they do today.

But it’s not a job for the faint of heart. Any CIO pining for a return to the good old days of bonuses based on server-uptime and SLA enforcement should consider swapping out the CIO title for a new one: senior director of infrastructure.

Continue Reading →

The Top 10 Strategic CIO Issues For 2013

By Christian on 2nd October 2012 in Budgeting, C-Level Executives, CEO, CIO, CIO/CTO, Cloud, Collaboration, Engagement, Enterprise, Executive, Innovation, Innovative, IT, IT Director, IT Process, Leadership, Management, Predictions, Social Media, Strategic, Strategy, Transformation

Perhaps no C-level position has undergone as many changes in expectations, approaches, and philosophies during the past few decades as that of the Chief Information Officer.

And the turbulent forces shaping businesses in today’s always-on global marketplace promise to accelerate that ongoing evolution. In that context, I’ve put together a list of what I believe will be the top priorities for strategic CIOs in the coming year.

As you’ll see, each of these 10 is rooted in change, and calls for the CIO to be a leader instead of a follower; a disrupter instead of a go-alonger; and a business-driven executive instead of a tech-focused manager.

Several themes reverberate throughout: analytics, breaking down silos, social, the cloud, and particularly customers, opportunities, growth, and innovation. I hope these prove helpful, and please share your feedback in the comments section below or on Twitter at @bobevansIT and @christianmcm.

1) Simplify IT and Transform Your Spending: Kick the 80/20 Budget Habit. While surely not as sexy as Social and Business Analytics and Cloud, this bold decision to take an entirely new approach to IT infrastructure is the one and only way CIOs can unlock the funding necessary to pursue those snazzier and unquestionably vital new initiatives. Far too many companies today find that they need to devote 70% or even 80% of their IT budget just to run and maintain what they’ve already got, leaving as little as 20% for innovation. And if you wonder sometimes why you’ve got precious little IT budget available to fund growth-oriented innovation, the answer becomes pretty clear by looking at the list of usual suspects that have brought us to this point: server sprawl, massively underutilized storage resources, unproductive data centers, labor-intensive integration requirements, and a near-endless list of “strategic” vendors. The IT policies of the past that resulted in the 80/20 trap are simply no longer able to meet the needs of today’s intensely demanding and always-on business world, and are indeed becoming liabilities not just because they’re inadequate but also because they suck up vast percentages of the IT budget and make it almost impossible for CIOs to fund essential new efforts in analytics or cloud or mobile or social. CIOs need to determine which vendors are only exacerbating this problem, and which ones offer modern alternatives that are cheaper, faster, and smarter. My POV: CEOs should tie most or all of the variable compensation for their CIOs to changing that deadly 80/20 budget ratio by 5 percentage points per year. The CIOs willing to tackle this huge issue will not only earn some nice bonus dollars but will unlock huge value for their companies as well as for their own careers.

2) Lead the Social Revolution: Drive the Social-Enabled Enterprise.When social media began to invade the corporate world some years back, the traditional border-collie behavior of many CIOs triggered immediate and unconditional opposition to social tools on the grounds of security challenges, lack of familiarity, and unproven value. As social’s ability to forge new and more-immediate relationships with customers became more clear, some CIOs grudgingly agreed to let down the drawbridge (but they drew the line at removing the alligators from the moat!). Today’s business-technology leaders must go well beyond that passive acceptance and become passionate and unconditional zealots for the social-driven revolution and its ability to help their companies grow by providing real-time customer insights, engagements, and processes. Beyond customers, the social revolution is also becoming indispensable internally for motivating existing employees and recruiting great new talent, and in forging deeper and more-valuable relationships with partners. My POV: CIOs who fight this trend will be pushed aside by CMOs and LOB heads who understand social’s potential and know they can’t compete unless that potential is harnessed by the company for competitive advantage. And what does “pushed aside” mean? At best, temporary embarrassment, and at worst, demotion or even unemployment.

3) Unleash Your Company’s Intelligence: Create the Enterprise-Wide Opportunity Chain. Building on but transcending existing notions of supply chain and demand chain and data warehouses and data marts, the Opportunity Chain transforms that internally oriented information into the customer-centric and growth-driven language of opportunity. New prospects, new market trends, new chances to engage, new insights for new products, new demographic patterns: information and insights about all of these probably exist somewhere within your corporate IT maze but are almost impossible to find because we cloak them in IT-specific terminology and then trap them in incompatible silos. But today’s new and always-on global marketplace requires new insights driven by the social revolution, and many of our old and trusty systems and approaches are simply not suited to the new realities demanded by our customers and by our times. In addition, the Opportunity Chain concept provides a market-facing framework and context for richly exploiting the potential of business analytics and Big Data. My POV: Whatever it’s called, this idea of the Opportunity Chain gives CIOs a fantastic, well, opportunity to drive high-value new information assets throughout the company and demonstrate again that when business technology is aggressively imagined and led, it drives growth and sparks new and deeper engagements with customers.

4) Embrace the Engagement Economy: Merge the Back Office and the Front Office into the Customer Office. One of the most-valuable perks of being a CIO is the ability to be involved with and understand not just some but all of a company’s end-to-end processes. From manufacturing to marketing, from procurement to product development, from finance to Facebook, the CIO and the business-technology team have tremendous insights into how a company’s operations, its priorities, its vulnerabilities, and its opportunities. So today, as our systems of record become systems of engagement, and as the social revolution opens up all facets of our enterprise to customer interactions as well as customer scrutiny, isn’t it time to bulldoze the internally constructed silos separating the folks that have traditionally touched the customer (the “front office”) with those that were never allowed to—or at least supposed to (the “back office”)? Shouldn’t we try to engage our customers in product development? Engineering? Service plans and operations? Marketing? Pricing options? My POV: While traditional systems reinforce the notion that only the privileged few get to interact with customers—and while that might be convenient for us internally—today’s socially powered consumers want access beyond the sales team. The question is, are you able—and willing—to grant that essential access?

5) Future-Proof Your IT Architecture. Think back just three years to the state of your business and the state of your IT strategy: the cloud was still mostly conceptual or isolated out on the fringes, social was a minor but persistent irritation, Big Data was mostly an egghead conversation and not likely to get beyond that, “engagement” was something you hoped your daughter would not get into with her goofy boyfriend, business analytics was all taken care of by a big team of specialists serving a small team of executives, and the iPad was still blessedly nothing but a rumor. The CFO badgered you every month about your endless demands for more real estate in which to put endlessly growing racks of servers requiring endlessly growing volumes of electricity and air conditioning, but what else could you do? The data explosion required a parallel explosion infrastructure growth, right? But the physics and the finances of such an approach no longer work, and the new business demands of today must surely be met with more-innovative tools tomorrow.My POV: Businesses need fresh thinking about the architecture of tomorrow because merely rehabbing or adding on to the existing plan will simply not meet the wildly different and more-demanding requirements of tomorrow. Cloud, social, mobile, engagement, Big Vision (formerly Big Data), and a greatly accelerated pace and scale of global business require modern apps, optimized systems, fault-tolerance, full support across cloud and on-premise and a mix of both, and built-in BI and social capabilities.

6) Upgrade “Cloud Strategy” to “Business Transformation Enabled by the Cloud.” Without question, CIOs must have detailed strategies and plans for cloud computing and many already have those in place (to those of you who don’t, well, did you ever get that high-school teaching certificate?). But the strategic CIO will use the next several months to collaborate with the CEO in upgrading that tech-centric plan into a broader vision for a sweeping business transformation of the entire enterprise. If you’re still viewing your cloud strategy based on a tech-driven plan written a year or two ago—before the ascendancy of social, customer engagement, Big Data, and business analytics—you’re going to miss the boat. My POV: Cloud projects will not be judged on their technical merits or on hitting their go-live dates, but rather by how deeply they impact essential business-transformation initiatives, and by how much business value and opportunity they unlocked. In the process, CIOs will segment themselves into two groups: IT leaders who focus solely on the tech aspects of cloud deployments, and business leaders who ensure that cloud projects are conceived and executed in the service of customers, business execution, and engagement.

7) Transform Big Data into Big Insights, Big Vision, and Big Opportunities. In the past year or so, much of the talk about Big Data has obscured the fact that the real issue is enabling intelligent and instantaneous analysis to provide optimal insights for business decisions. CIOs need to ensure they’re looking at these high-volume, high-velocity challenges in the right way: as business enablers, not tech projects. For example: What if you could enable dynamic pricing of your company’s products around the globe? What if you could perform fraud-detection analytics across all of your transactions in real time, instead of across just a random sampling of only a few percent of all those transactions? What if you could analyze three years’ worth of customer data in minutes, rather than only the past three months in hours? In the meantime, we can be certain that the scale and speed of this current challenge will only increase as CIOs must rapidly and seamlessly enhance their traditional corporate data with vast new streams of social and mobile data to realize the full potential of these strategic Big Opportunities.My POV: Some forecasts say the CMO will soon be calling the shots for IT; while I don’t buy into that, I do agree that CIOs who choose to sit back and wait for “the business” to tell them what to do will end up reporting to the CMO within a year or two. But companies will fare much better if their CIOs eagerly and rapidly begin framing Big Data challenges and opportunities in terms of customers, opportunities, revenue, and business value.

8) Preside over a Shotgun Wedding: Systems of Record Marry Systems of Engagement. Your traditional back-end systems might be sturdy and proven workhorses but they’re simply not equipped to handle the vast new streams of data and information from social, video, Customer Experience, and more. Conversely, while those new engagement tools and solutions are fabulous gateways into the real-time wants and needs of customers and employees, they lack the historical and institutional breadth and knowledge of your trusty ERP systems. The strategic CIO will find new approaches and/or solutions to rapidly and seamlessly tie these separate worlds together. This strategic integration will become the cornerstone of the Opportunity Chain described above in #3, and also of the consolidation of the archaic front office and back office into the modern Customer Office as described in #4. My POV: This union of social/mobile with transactional capabilities will give companies a new way to move at the speed of their customers, new methods for engaging with customers to build multifaceted relationships rather than linear transactions, and the ability to avoid getting stuck in the tar pit of siloed systems designed to meet internal requirements rather than enable the co-creation of value with customers.

9) Lead with Speed: CIO as Chief Acceleration Officer. I first suggested this aspirational model about 18 months ago when I wrote the following http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/global-cio-my-farewell-column-10-big-thi/229300888?pgno=2 , and the rationale for the CIO to function as chief corporate accelerant is even more true today: “If you could promise your CEO that you could shorten product-development times, reduce days-of-inventory turns, accelerate deliveries to customers, cut or eliminate the wait-times customers endure on your support lines, and shorten your order-to-cash cycle, is there a CEO on planet Earth who wouldn’t idolize you? So why not embrace that as a new mission for your IT organization and think of what you do as being the Chief Acceleration Officer, the exec who leads the company’s efforts to do everything it does not just better but faster? Give the gift of speed, and see if anyone in your company or among your customers wants to return it.” My POV: While I’m surely not proposing that title as an official thing, businesses in every industry will find in 2013 that, more than ever before, speed kills—the only question will be whether your company’s going to be the victim or the perp.

10) Bend the Value Curve: More Innovation, Less Integration. For the past 30 or so years, tech vendors have generally introduced streams of new products that were not only increasingly more powerful and capable, but also increasingly more complex, requiring ever-greater volumes of integration, testing, tuning, modifying, patching, upgrading, monitoring, etc., etc. Back when viable alternatives weren’t available, that was an okay model—IT teams specialized in stringing together piece-parts from hundreds of vendors and somehow managed to figure out ways to make it all work together. But today, that model is ready to begin making the transition over to the Computer Museum. Customer-side CEOs in particular are growing increasingly fed up with the apparent black arts of IT operations that require larger and larger budgets without predictably delivering more and more business value. For CIOs, the answer is simple—not easy, but simple: they need to begin rapidly withdrawing themselves and their business-technology teams from the integration business and begin devoting more and more of their time to growth-oriented and customer-centric innovation. In the past few years, a handful of IT vendors have begun offering a new breed of engineered systems or optimized systems designed to offer pre-bundled and pre-tested purpose-built machines that free customers from the drudgery of endless integration busywork. Oracle led the way at the high end with Exadata, Exalytics, and Exalogic, and Apple’s iPhone is on its way to becoming a $100-billion example of the core concept: more innovation and less innovation. IBM followed Oracle’s lead a few months back with its Pure Systems, and even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, in introducing the new Surface tablet, said it was time for Microsoft to try to optimize the hardware/software interactions.My POV: While not the answer (yet) for every question, engineered systems give strategic CIOs considerable latitude to devote more people and energy toward innovative customer-facing initiatives, and simultaneously alleviate the need for CIOs to pour so many budget dollars into low-value integration work that generates little or no competitive advantage.

So there’s my list of priorities for the strategic CIO—how about sharing yours, along with your feedback on the list above?

Authored by and reproduced with full permission of Bob Evans, Senior Vice President, Communications at Oracle