COVER STORY – MEET THE NEW CDO
Given that digital is here to stay, who in your organization is best placed to play this role? Can the CIO play the role of a CDO? This cover story explores some of these fundamental questions.
There is a fundamental shift in the way business operates today driven by social dimensions of the workplace and related transformations. This is consequent to a shift in stakeholder expectations with respect to how they engage with an enterprise. While these social dimensions always existed in the past in form of real interactions, it has now moved to a completely new level as a result of increased consumerization via online engagements including social and mobile.
Automating existing process is now a thing of the past. Enterprises are fundamentally re-thinking their business models and stakeholder engagements using digital technologies to innovate, grow, differentiate and achieve business goals. Digital disruption is the new mantra for success and has been successfully proven by several companies including Burberry, Gatorade, Caterpillar, Sanofi, Nike etc.
It is however important to recognize that leading a digital business is much more than just technology implementation. It requires a much deeper change management that entails adoption of a new culture, stakeholder engagement and new skills by the enterprise. This is by no means a small change. As more and more enterprises get onboard with digital, there is a growing need for seasoned professionals who have excellent networking skills coupled with a blend of technology and business understanding to lead the digital strategy and execution elements.
As the digital era progresses, it will create a completely new set of information leaders who will not only predict and capitalize on insights from unstructured content but importantly leverage this insight to produce actions that have measurable impact to the advancement and growth of a business while being in line with compliance and regulatory requirements.
The Chief Digital Officer’s (CDO) job is to create a unified digital vision, act as information custodians, and support the organization not only with insights but also with an execution plan to innovate and grow. Most organizations that are serious about providing a great digital stakeholder experience should have someone who holds the responsibility to deliver this job well. So what does it take to be a successful CDO? Amongst other factors, successful CDO’s are marketing-technology change agents who believe that they are good at the following:
- Change Management: They drive cultural change within the organization to adopt digital as a way of work. They have deep respect for the inherent challenges in making fundamental behavioral change across thousands of internal and external stakeholders. This requires a lot of collaboration, negotiation and capturing stakeholder interest to make the change happen. Not only is the CDO required to have a good understanding of the business, latest tools and technologies but the CDO also focuses the discussion on value creation vs. cost cutting. Amongst other traits they believe that good humor and lots of patience works in favor of enabling smooth change management. They have high emotional energy that will keep overcoming the continuous “fatigue and resistance to change”.
- Good understanding of the business: They lead from the top and also understand how business works at a very fundamental level. They have led multiple projects and have a good learnings as a result of both failures and successes. They know how to get things done.
- Sound technology understanding: Successful CDO’s have a good understanding of technology solutions that will act as business enablers. It is not as much important for a CDO to be a technical person, but rather the individual should be able to put together a technology blueprint based on business needs. The CDO should have a good understanding of all aspects of digital including unstructured content management, web, social, CRM, analytics, mobile, applications to support business etc. Technology should be combined with rich content to ensure a memorable user experience.
- Agile decision making: Successful CDO’s drive decisions based on data and therefore invest in the best of tools that can gather structured and unstructured data and present it in a manner that enables rich analytics. The CDO should be able to provide the right information to the right person at the right time within the security framework. This forms the basis of sound and agile decision making. Analyzing historical data is a thing of the past-they look at predicting trends and requirements operate with agility and are prepared to respond to the future needs today.
- Creative and highly driven: Successful CDO’s are creative who looks across organizational boundaries to solve complex problems. They are highly passionate and driven by a sense of purpose and deeply connect to the digital vision of the enterprise.
- Good network : They have multiple years of rich experience working in large enterprises and start-ups and have built a strong social network of business leaders and innovators.
In several organizations, CIO’s with good business and technology understanding have been pretty successful in playing this role. A Gartner survey indicated that close to 20% of the CIO’s are indeed playing the role of a CDO and they’re quite optimistic about the ability of a CIO to step up to the challenge.
In fact, there is hardly any function that isn’t someway related to digital. A business leader who is passionate about digital, has demonstrated strengths required for this role and has confidence from the CEO and the Management is the clear candidate for the role of the Digital CEO.
