Blurring the Lines Between CEOs, CTOs, CFOs, and CIOs in the Digital Age

With the rise of the Digital Age and the Internet of Things (IoT), the business environment is going through a series of disruptive changes that seem to alter the most fundamental aspects of the economy. It would seem that almost nothing will remain as it was before. The traditional hierarchical system begins to break down, as seen with most of the start-ups today.

These examples presented here are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the disruption brought forth by today's technological revolution.

The implementation of new technologies has taken center stage, as of late, meaning that the bridge between business and IT is closer than ever. And as a consequence, the lines between CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs are also beginning to blur. So, what are the responsibilities of these three positions?

CEO - As the most senior corporate, executive, or administrative officer, the CEO is tasked with looking at the big picture items regarding company growth.

CTO - The chief technology officer, or sometimes known as the chief technologist, is tasked with all technological and scientific issues regarding the organization.

CIO - The chief information officer, on the other hand, works with traditional information technology (IT) as well as all computer systems that support the enterprise's goals.

CFO - The chief financial officer is responsible for financial affairs within the organization. The modern CFO is using emerging technology for more strategic planning.

Does your business plan for 2019 include how your organization can best leverage technology? With technology becoming so prevalent in companies and their successes and growth, the relationship between the CEO/CTO/CIO/CFO etc is growing stronger.

The Merger of Roles

Looking at these simple definitions and together with what we mentioned previously, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that these three roles within an organization begin to overlap. As technology is becoming a significant factor in an organization's growth and efficiency, it only stands to reason that the CEO will also have to consider it.

Similarly, the CIO and CTO positions are also evolving in response to this digital transformation of the business landscape. This shift is represented by how CIOs view their roles within a company. In 2017, for instance, only 20% of CIOs still saw themselves solely in their traditional roles of managing IT operations. That number was down from 27% the year prior.

By comparison, around 50% of CIOs are more focused on implementing new systems and aligning them with the company's business goals - a figure up from 45% in 2016. Also, 31% lean towards a more strategic focus, spending the majority of their time on various business innovation and growth activities.

At the same time, however, the business side of an enterprise is becoming more tech savvy. With an overall increase in digital literacy and programming skills, it's becoming increasingly apparent that these roles are overlapping in certain areas. It was Brook Colangelo, EVP, and CTO at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who once said in a tweet that “Everybody is a technologist and everybody in technology is in the business.”

In other words, these business leaders need to forsake the traditional way of doing things and take advantage of these skill sets. They need to create an environment in which employees are empowered to innovate, thanks to today's many digital technologies.

 

Talk About Tech Trends: Local Information Executives Discuss Emerging Strategies and Tactics From a Technology Perspective

Talk about Tech Trends

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About These Excerpts
San Diego — Local Information Executives Discuss Emerging Strategies and Tactics From a Technology Perspective
Excerpts were selected for publication by the San Diego Business Journal from interviews conducted with local industry experts as part of a survey by Managed Solution, a San Diego-based full-service technology firm. These excerpts have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Alex-Bates_t180Alex Bates
CTO Mtell
On leveraging big data: Some customers are more paranoid about hoarding their own data and others are more open to sharing it because they get greater benefits.
Offloading a lot of the IT support, I think that everyone is warming up to the idea in the industrial realm. For big data, the costs are still a little bit high, to truly host that in the public cloud. The best scenario would be to use public cloud for elastic computing, scale it back down, figure out how to transfer the data.
But I definitely think it’s the wave of the future.
On customer-focused solutions: For us, our customers, we travel out and get a whole new appreciation for the challenges they face. When you meet them on a drilling rig, you get a whole new appreciation for what they face.
The movie Deepwater Horizon showed how their lives are on the line. People are responsible for many lives, and for us, our software is supposed to help reduce risks and predict catastrophic incidents. For us to deliver value, we have to have state-of-the-art monitoring capabilities and integrate with their work so things don’t slip through the cracks. We have to deliver value for improving efficiency with equipment.
Joe-Beery_t180Joe Beery
SVP & CIO ThermoFisher Scientific
On the role of IT in corporate strategy: My CEO is looking to move to cloud strategy faster. The CEO never thought we would say this, but we’re the competitive advantage for the company. It’s an incredibly target-rich environment because we can do things better than we’ve done before.
In the next five years it’s going to be drastically different. You won’t have silos. The question is what do we go after first that’s going to drive the best amount of value?
The speed we can move is so much faster, you don’t want to make mistakes; you want to invest in the right things.
We are connecting all of our sales force around lead management. We did a lot of work crunching our CRM data and systems to better enhance our sales agents to manage leads. As we continue to roll out the cloud it gets us closer to the customer.
On real impacts: When you look at what we do, the mission is to make the world healthier, cleaner, safer, and that is all digital. So this is going to change the way we live.
I have two kids alive today because of what the company does. They were both born with a rare genetic disorder, and because of our instruments (the rare genetic mutation was found and treated). (The kids) take medication three times a day now, and it was this digital answer.
When I think of the future of big data, you see a future that is really different for everyone.
Johnathan_B_t180Jonathan Behnke
CIO City of San Diego Department of Information Technology
On what IoT means to operations: We hear from a lot of vendors in the technology sector and when we talk about it as a local government, IoT is discussed alongside Smart Cities. There is a lot of discussion about improvements to transportation, development, and energy.
We see a lot of potential for the city and surrounding governments to partner and make life better for our residents, neighbors, and community members. The city announced a partnership with Google Waze, and we are looking at how we can use that data to really improve transportation. Our traffic engineering department can take that data and potentially implement changes.
The city also has a project to deploy LED streetlights, and some will have sensors to generate new data and drive analytics that the city can make improvements from.
If the regional governments can take advantage of IOT and aggregate that information into a single source, there are some great possibilities. You can take analytics and data from multiple organizations and aggregate it and put up a heat map, and so some really cool things.
The city has an open data portal releasing a lot of data sets to the community. As we look at IOT, we really look at a lot of future potential, data and analytics, which could ultimately bring improvements to the everyday life of citizens.
Ken_Lawonn_t180Ken Lawonn
SVP & CIO Sharp HealthCare
On how IT is helping drive revenue through the company: We are looking at taking our current assets to expose those services to more through things like telehealth, video-based, online services which allow us to extend services without having to build new buildings or have people come to us.
Using technology makes things more convenient for individuals. We use technology to understand if we are providing the best treatment, and make sure we are not penalized or making sure we are effectively leveraging our payment process. That’s how we are effectively leveraging technology to help increase
On the role of IT in corporate strategy: We’ve gone from IT being a back-end service to being partners with the business. It is the engine for business transformation and growth.
There is hardly anything we look at that doesn’t have technology involved in some way. There is so much technology available, pick the right technology and hold people accountable to leverage it and provide value.
We have to think about how we bend the cost curve. We can’t keep increasing the spend if there isn’t some return. Everyone likes to add stuff, nobody likes to take things away.
CIOs are becoming more like change agents and transformational leaders. The message is we’ve got to be nimble, faster, more accessible.
Todd-Stewart_t180Todd Stewart
VP, Global Infrastructure and IT Operations Western Digital
On the public cloud: Public cloud is one of several tools for corporate computing, but not one
that solves every need — or will ever solve every need. This is a hybrid world.
Public cloud isn’t cheap. Some things run cheaper on premise. Sometimes you have capital to spend, and public cloud is only OpX. Fit the right tool to the right job.
On the role of IT in corporate strategy: Our company views IT as a key enabler for marketing, sales, manufacturing, business intelligence, supply chain, and productivity.
This change occurred because our CIO and his team set out to understand every facet of our business, and then focused on delivering innovation at every opportunity. “Keeping the lights on,” low-value work was moved to SaaS and cloud, allowing our internal resources to focus on innovation and delivering value.
Patrick-Tinkleberg_t180Patrick Tinklenberg
VP of Information Technology Sycuan Casino
On how IT is helping drive revenue through the company: A lot of people think of IT as being a cost center. We really tie every initiative we do in IT to some business initiative. Sometimes those initiatives are not specifically a revenue target. We don’t always look at return on investment, sometimes the focus is return on objective.
When it comes to truly revenue focused goals we do a lot of projects for marketing and for finance that drive revenue back into the casino.
We also take some of the things we do really well that other casinos don’t do and commercialize them. As an example, we are commercializing a process we developed in-house for transferring data in real time to analytics providers. We are the only casino that does that for this provider, and now they want to commercialize the product and offer it to other casinos.
On IoT: We are expanding, so we’re looking at smart building technologies. You’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of thousands of end points, from lighting, to fans, to temperature sensors, to valves for sprinkler systems, all can be tied together and integrated to a system that controls everything.
We have a little over 2000 slot machines on our floor. Each of them sends us all kinds of data, being able to mine all of that data, being able to grab all of that useful data, and process it with streaming analytics is going to be very important for us.

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