As businesses look at making better use of existing systems, it was found that CIOs spend 17% of their time in formal and informal discussions with top executives on business strategy and transformational change in a recent research by networking organization CIO Connect.
Many board members are increasingly turning to the CIO for insight and leadership in business change, the study indicated.
Nick Kirkland, chief executive of CIO Connect, said they are seeing CIOs taking a leadership role in driving business change within their organizations, as told to vnunet.com.
“The role is pivotal, and no more so than today with so much business turbulence. The CIO is well positioned to interpret how their organization best addresses the complexities of an economic downturn, the avoidance of disruption in any resulting organizational restructuring, the challenge of globalization and the sustained business and social changes forecast for the coming years,” Kirkland said.
Among the issues CIOs raised were acceleration of retirement of legacy software assets and continuation of specific cost reduction programs around infrastructure platform consolidation with greater use of techniques such as virtualization.
The survey indicated that CIOs would take a leadership role in driving business change within their organizations and an active role in contributing to the bottom line, while the wasteful ‘rip and replace’ culture adopted by many IT departments is seen to become outdated.
According to service-oriented architecture firm Software AG, the wasteful ‘rip and replace’ culture adopted by many IT departments will be wiped out in 2009 as businesses concentrate on making better use of existing systems.
The days of IT departments that deliver only technology are numbered, according to Jim Close, UK country manager at Software AG.
“Boards and shareholders need chief information officers (CIOs) who can contribute hard cash to the bottom line,” Close said during their annual UK Business Innovation Conference in London.
“This can only be achieved by extending value from existing systems, liberating corporate information via flexible service-oriented business infrastructure, and focusing on significant improvements in process efficiency,” he added.
Rather than simply implementing new technologies, the focus is now on the benefits of application modernization, service orientation and business process improvement, said Close.
Earlier this year, a Gartner study that polled 1,400 CIOs around the world found that businesses are looking for broader skills as technology moves more fully into the business sphere, indicating that the need to add non-IT skills to their portfolio has become more urgent than ever.
