In 
Industry is rife with rumours and speculations of the changing role of CIOs. I would not call it a change in role, but an evolution. This evolution makes more sense in the current environment, particularly when the enterprise is going through a transformation with regard to its regulatory, governance, information management and other functions.
The CIO plays an important role and so will senior IT managers, as they are expected to bring in speed and agility and acquire the tools necessary to bring in the required transformation.
Les Bonney, Chief Operating Officer, Qlik Innovation is Inevitable
When one argues about innovation and its nuances, it manifests in different forms. The CIO and his team need to view innovation in whatever they do and find ways to bring in novelty to make a difference. For instance, innovation could be in bringing in simplicity of use of technology, creating an easy, agile and powerful enterprise, bringing in effective collaboration within teams and overall transformation within the system.
Analyse information for innovation
What is the relevance here? Any kind of innovation solicits sufficient action which reflects a notion of business outcome and creates enough appetite to deploy good technology to meet business needs. CIOs are required to take the most pertinent approach to achieve business outcome and drive transformation.
What is most critical for the IT teams now? It is the data or information available within the organisation. One way is to work out a scientific way of analysing data combined with good practices which will result in understanding the domain better. The historical data needs to be systematically analysed with various forms of analytical tools and under different formats of analysis.
Data literacy is most critical for business functions as well; CIOs need to adopt safe harbour privacy principles to play with data and analyse the use of data by the IT and business groups on an ongoing basis. Besides, the IT teams should analyse data from the operations and business side as well, to derive better intelligence of the data and put it into effective use. It is a question of survival of the fittest in the industry, given the current economic scenario.
I would recommend senior IT leaders to empower their employees and equip them with appropriate analytical and intelligence tools that can help in analysing appropriate market data and create a robust platform to be ahead of the competition. This would help in survival in the competitive market place.
Creating agile enterprise is vital
Transformation for most should mean creating an agile enterprise with a couple of imperatives. The agility comes through making the environment risk-free, and to ensure this, a certain level of micro management is critical.
CIOs need to bring in a cultural shift in the organisation by involving the management and also enabling them to see a larger picture of the organisation.
It is a pre-requisite for the IT teams to take control of the data and business to have a cleaner and agile organisation. What does this mean? It means creating clear and accurate information management systems, developing data mining capabilities for positive business outcomes, focusing on real issues of customers and creating a single version of truth by making the analysis process simple.
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