With wheels up and the neon lights of Las Vegas behind me, I reflected on two days spent with nearly 80 global CIOs at EMC’s fourth annual CIO Summit. Whether in our panel discussions, collaborative breakout sessions, or during the networking breaks, we tackled a variety of timely topics for CIOs.
Of course, it would be overly ambitious to say we collectively solved all that ails CIOs because we have just scratched the surface. However, faced with pressure to provide our businesses and users with agile, elastic and contemporary IT services, we only saw an opportunity to unlock more value. Here are some takeaways from the Summit conversation:
Be a catalyst for driving agility and value. By partnering closely with your business, you not only secure their buy in and better understand their needs, but you identify ways that IT can help monetize big data and analytics to accelerate growth.
Focus on your core competency, not the commodities. As a broker of services, you should provide your business with the speed and capabilities it needs while focusing on furthering innovation in your organization.
Be more contemporary. Listening and capturing your user expectations and sentiment is much more critical as you embrace and offer more mobile, social and digital services.
Get the most out of your environment. Manage your costs and increase the performance and utilization of your infrastructure en route to the software-defined enterprise with virtualization, automation and the hybrid cloud.
Don’t wait for the technology or it will pass you by. Continue to redefine how you do IT to stay ahead of the ever-changing technology landscape, as well as the security risks and governance guidelines you may face.
Challenge your people and processes. CIOs must continually streamline existing processes to improve service delivery and up-skill employees to tackle third platform initiatives, such as cloud, big data, mobile and social.
Clearly, this is easier said than done. However, being more value-driven and contemporary will help CIOs remain relevant and keep our seat at the table in a world of ever-increasing IT complexity and competition. How are you staying relevant?
