This paper presents a personal perspective on important technology trends and dynamics that have implications for those charged with the digital world agenda inside businesses today and describes the imperatives for a relevant and actionable agenda.

1. 2014
Surfing the ‘Digital Tsunami’
Leadership imperatives for the CIO
This paper presents a personal perspective on important technology trends and
dynamics that have important implications for those charged with the digital
world agenda inside businesses today and describes the imperatives for a
relevant and actionable agenda.
Charles Forte
CharlesForte Solutions Limited
1/15/2014

2. This paper is a personal perspective exploring some of the emerging challenges and opportunities
facing today’s CIO’s and offers a point of view on the resulting implications and imperatives for the
successful application of digital technologies for sustainable business competitive advantage and
business innovation.
The tsunami of technology change – surfing the wave
The world we occupy is increasingly non linear and
the ‘tsunami’ of technology change being generated
heralds both great opportunity and great risk for
businesses.
The rate of change is accelerating and the digital world is an increasingly inherent part of everything
and encompasses every part of our lives, the products and services we consume and how we
interact and work in a connected and communicating network. The consumer world and the use of
social media has created new cultural norms and ways of thinking that are revolutionising both the
marketplace and the workplace creating a huge world of new business application possibilities.
These trends ensure that the world of corporate IT is no longer in the ‘safe’ technology territory of
traditional IT systems and the already difficult challenge of leading business change and innovation is
now significantly more complex.
Looking inside to the IT delivery world we see corporations hungry for more and more digital
capability and this is driving unprecedented consumption demand for the CIO to manage. This
growth has to be handled preserving both quality and cost. Front office demands are increasingly
driving a need to enable, absorb and integrate new systems in ever faster delivery cycles. The
advent of new ‘cloud services’ offer help in meeting speed, flexibility and cost outcomes but what is
the right way to safely access this new opportunity? The IT supply side, including the major service
vendors are facing new challenges and the emergence of skills and experience gaps in the ability to
manage this supply effectively.
These demand and supply side changes create opportunities and risks for business and for those
charged with leading the business digital agenda. It is a wave that even the most technology
conservative businesses can’t ignore. To many of today’s CIO’s who have been wrestling with
integrating back office systems and dealing with business cost pressures it can appear a daunting
task to take the innovation leadership tsunami head on, but for those who have ambition and energy
it is a wave that can create exciting surfing!

3. Trends and the resulting implications and leadership imperatives
1. The pervasiveness of connected digital capability is driving a need for a new approach to
business innovation leadership
Digital capability is pervasive and increasingly an inherent part of everything we use. The pace of
technology innovation is ever increasing. Augmented reality, visualisation, recognition, gaming
simulation, wearable devices, health monitoring, personalised environments are all examples of
innovations entering mainstream.
All of it is connected and communicating
and generating data that can be
analysed, integrated and applied to new
business opportunity. A good sense of
this direction becomes clear in looking at
recent Google acquisitions which some
have described as ‘the emergence of the
new GE’. Estimates on the size of new
revenue that will be generated by 2020
from ‘the internet of things’ are in the
range $10- 20 trillion.
This increasing pervasiveness creates a new challenge for businesses to understand what is out
there, assess and assimilate it in their business context to improve existing products and services
and create new business opportunities. To see what is possible and bring it to bear internally and to
see the new business models possible, can no longer be fulfilled in the single provenance of one
business function area. Rather it requires multi discipline teams and experience to come together
from disciplines right across the firm to see what is possible and together to generate ideas that
make ‘1 + 1 = 3’. This is a new leadership challenge to open up the world of possibilities, to connect
minds and ideas and to drive the collective innovation agenda across marketing, engineering,
manufacturing, operations and IT.
Who is going to lead this? There is a clear opportunity for the CIO to step up as the ‘Chief
Connecting Officer’ showing what the digital world can do and bring the right people together to
spark the corporate innovation genes, creating the passion and energy that drives realisable and
deliverable new business opportunities.

4. 2. The rise of consumerisation & the social media culture is driving new radical ways to engage
customers and staff. CIO’s must partner and experiment and not simply wait.
The consumer technology world has helped drive us into
new territory of expectation on variety, choice and
personalisation and the use of social media tools is driving
new cultural norms of behaving and communicating.
When the toddler we have seen trying to swipe a magazine
page grows up how will she want to engage? This is true for
all our customers and for all our work colleagues too.
These profound changes present both upside opportunity and downside risk for engaging the
market as well as new ways that the CIO has to take on board in supporting how people work and
collaborate internally, creating the toolset of a productive workplace environment.
In the external market place the CIO must partner effectively with other parts of the business to
experiment boldly as customers increasingly see multiple aspects of social media marketing as a
compulsory way of engaging. Location based social networking, leveraging the ‘crowd’ and the
blurring of the virtual and physical worlds using simulations and virtual reality will all be big themes.
The important thing is not to wait for a perfect solution but to get experiment with speed and
confidence, it is not enough to sit, watch and take only baby steps.
Internally the CIO has to move to bring the way people engage and communicate outside into their
work experience and will increasingly be an important element of staff attraction and retention. It
has to move quickly beyond simple themes of BYOD to encompass ways of collaborating, engaging
and communicating and finding elegant ways to manage any inherent downside risks of security and
compliance. Get engaged in using social media tools to promote internal idea generation, the
formation of ad-hoc interest and collaboration groups, connecting scarce skills. Incorporate video
and most importantly get it out onto mobile devices to accelerate adoption and test customer facing
options.

5. 3. There will be growth in the data analytics services world with an attendant new hype. CIO’s
need to create a relevant business exploitation strategy to create benefit from ‘big data’ and a
supply side plan
The unprecedented growth in data and data integration, as well as the desire to access available
information outside the boundaries of the enterprise will continue and the pace will quicken as more
sources of data from non traditional ‘IT’ sources continues to gather pace. Making sense of this data
and using it to create new insights and opportunities is a huge opportunity as well as a source of
competitive risk to existing business models.
‘Big Data’ and creating the right initiatives that begin to make
sense of the opportunities is an un-escapable theme for CIO’s
in 2014. Developing the right skills and the right strategy to
begin is vital and again an important theme in creating the
right ‘exploitation’ approach is how to involve the right people
across the organisation. New skills to manage the new analytic
toolsets, new skills in understanding data context and business
relevance and new skills in creating exploitation insights and
opportunities will need to be built. There will be human,
cultural and political challenges working across organisational
boundaries and the technology, experience and political
challenges are likely to be inherent in equal measure.
In the face of this new opportunity we will see a growth in the number of specialist consulting and
service organisations keen to help and exploit a new business growth are. This will be attended by an
equivalent rise in the ‘hype’ that is generated. Likely targets of those selling these new skills will be
the C Level business executives across the firm and a potential sidelining of the traditional IT
community. It will be important ahead of time to develop an internal approach to ‘Big Data’ and to
get a head start that minimises wasted time, energy and money.

6. 4. Demand growth, the polarisation of the front & back office IT needs and the emergence of
radically new but fragmented cloud services are driving a need for CIO’s to overhaul internal
supply models and skills
IT is increasingly the backbone of business and the task of maintaining current IT operations is vital
to meet the revenue, reputation, reliability, performance, security and compliance needs of
increasingly ‘always on’ businesses. There is unprecedented demand for more and more IT and the
demand growth faced by the CIO is incessant.
The challenge is to absorb this growth but to maintain cost and quality performance. Large scale,
integrated information systems of record are the backbone of business and the back-office demands
are for integration, standardisation and stability. At the same time there is an increasing need for
front office flexibility, faster delivery timeframes and solutions that may have short life spans versus
back-office integration systems. The CIO has to satisfy these polarising needs to avoid business
frustration and an inevitable fragmentation and decentralisation of the IT delivery landscape which
is likely to open up future information integration risks.
The IT supply side has seen progress with the advent of new ‘cloud services’ which are predicted to
be 20% of the global IT services market by 2016. The technology is proven and offers flexibility,
speed and cost advantages. However ….it is not a panacea. This new market place is likely to be
more fragmented and will drive a need to organise, manage and integrate these services effectively.
Without care the benefits will not materialise and worse will create further integration complexity,
cost and compliance issues.
In the face of these challenges current delivery and supply
models are often falling short and there is an emerging skills and
experience gap, including in the IT outsourcing vendors.
This drives an urgent need for a radical overhaul of supply models
and to re-focus on strengthening internal integration and
leadership skills.
The critical first step is to overhaul the service integration and management function with three
areas of focus : bring key skills in-house to strengthen integration ownership and visibility, articulate
a strong supporting technology architecture and re-define the ‘end to end’ operations process
framework which needs to be independent of supply vendors and owned internally. Doing these
three thing will create the right internal skills to sustain change, make it easier to handle the polar
needs of front and back office change delivery and provide a contracting framework into which
selected vendors can be better integrated and in which future vendor switching costs can be
minimised to retain competitive edge and avoid vendor lock in.