2021 CIO Study: The CIO Revolution

During a period of widespread anxiety and workplace disruption, technology leaders have been central to addressing their organizations’ most pressing needs. Citing examples from tackling supply chain issues to helping ensure business continuity to enabling remote work, 77% of the CIOs in our study report that their teams played a vital role in their organizations’ response to the pandemic.

Furthermore, according to IBV research, the pandemic has prompted 55% of organizations to permanently course-correct their strategies. This includes accelerating the pace of digital transformation, adjusting the approach to change management, and shifting to more cloud-based business activities.

Given these changes, organizations that innovate and iterate deftly can gain decisive advantage. Case in point: CIOs report that 20% to 40% of organizational business processes have been automated. This automation helps drive intelligent workflows, which in turn create a “golden thread” of value, enhancing connections both within the enterprise and across its ecosystem.

With the increasing prominence of the CTO role, CIOs have crucial allies within the technology function. And while organizations may have unique combinations of technology needs, at a high level, the technology function has a common set of responsibilities that are typically distributed between CIOs and CTOs.

Steve McCrystal of Unilever emphasizes this big picture. “We get so good at creating these islands because we’re trying to create accountability in the right way. But we lose sight of what the CTO and the CIO are actually there to do, which is to use technology to drive business value. That’s something they have to work on together.”

One might generally characterize CIOs as operating across the organization, often in a “diagonal” sense of interfacing at different levels of the organization. Their success depends on their proficiency in doing so. On the other hand, there is a general consensus that CTOs focus on a more defined set of responsibilities—anchored by technology strategy, operations, and architecture. Yet it is this focus that enables CTOs to address the most strategic opportunities and the most pressing challenges influencing their organizations’ use of technology.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume any given organization is structured precisely this way. In fact, our analysis finds that allocation of responsibilities varies greatly based on industry, organizational structure, and reporting relationships. And while the responsibilities of CTOs tend to be more consistent across organizations than those of CIOs, both roles show meaningful variability.

Our analysis indicates that organizations reporting higher technology maturity, effectiveness, and ROI achieved better business performance. In particular, we discovered financial gains accelerated during the pandemic—organizations with higher technology measures built a substantial advantage over their peers.

CIOs are leading the transition to hybrid cloud technologies. Consider this: cloud, when implemented in conjunction with organizational and operational enablers and enhanced exponential technologies and data capabilities, has the potential to unlock significant revenue growth upwards of 13x.

Nearly three-quarters of workloads now reside in cloud, suggesting the relative efficiencies afforded by cloud. But this also hints that, as cloud-based technologies—especially those related to hybrid cloud—mature, cloud may consume additional workloads. The data, integration, and orchestration layer inherent in hybrid cloud designs are key to delivering value across functional areas.

A number of executives indicated their ability to provision cloud capacity, applications, and services on demand has become integral to how they do business. “The transition to digital has been swift and accelerated as a result of the pandemic,” says Avinash Raghavendra of Axis Bank. “We need to constantly reinvent ourselves to stay relevant. What’s most important is to learn as fast as possible.”

Many CIOs are re-orienting IT operations around the ability to capture, analyze, and enrich proprietary data insights. 74% of CIOs reported they are proficient in integrating data from sources inside and outside the organization, while 87% of CIOs indicated they occupy a leadership role in their organization’s data strategy. This sea change in thinking is recognizing that data value is not one-dimensional, but rather about serving a specific need to a specific user at a specific moment in time.

CIOs have front-row seats to digital transformation, serving both people-centric requirements for emerging skills and adaptive solutions, as well as technology-centric requirements for scale and speed. In light of this, CIOs can play an instrumental role in enabling extended workflows based on emerging “threads of value.”

Indeed, the most impactful opportunities for value realization come from connecting different layers. Complicating this, however, is a reality that many CIOs contend with: a combination of legacy infrastructure for critical applications and a diversification of workloads for new applications. Though legacy solutions may require disproportionate amounts of support, many CIOs are leery of trading paid-in-full solutions for recurring line items that may never go away. As Angus McCallum, formerly of London Metropolitan Police, describes it, “I’m reluctant to trade technical debt for supplier debt.”

Amid these challenges, automation holds great promise for reducing the overhead associated with routine business processes. Among CIOs and CTOs in our study, 77% say their organizations are effective in terms of automating business processes. CIOs report that the greatest use of automation is in IT, finance, and manufacturing—at 40%, 35%, and 35% of workloads, respectively. And overall, 37% of CIOs cite process automation as the top opportunity for positive impact within their organizations.

These CIOs represent about half of our global survey sample. They operate as innovators across functions, with the most diverse set of responsibilities and broadest range of success factors.

While their responsibilities are broadly defined, Cross-functional Facilitators rate their organizations’ technology maturity as significantly higher when compared to those of the other CIO mandates. Perhaps because of their broad scope, they have achieved the highest level of collaboration with CTOs in their organizations. With an extensive range of constituencies, these CIOs may realize they can benefit from the vision and expertise of a peer focused on many of the same objectives.

The broad scope of responsibilities for these CIOs means they may struggle for resources, contend with conflicting priorities and difficult trade-offs, and may not always be fully recognized for the breadth and reach of their accomplishment. Yet many CIOs tell us that this expanse of responsibility and the inherent challenges of serving many constituencies are significant aspects of why the role is appealing to them.

This group of CIOs, representing just under a quarter of our survey respondents, has a focused set of responsibilities very different from the other 2 mandates. The top responsibility, cited by 96% of them, is advising the C-suite and the Board. In effect, Visionary Builders combine traditional CIO duties with CTO-type duties. They have relatively low levels of collaboration (perhaps because they can function as both CIO and CTO) and operate more independently from business counterparts. However, they reported significantly better returns on their technology investments than the other groups.

These CIOs have a great deal of vested authority over technology strategy and operations, and exercise comprehensive authority over the technology function. They have a broad sphere of influence over technology strategy and decision making at the senior leadership level.