At least 76% of CIOs in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) need to adapt their leadership style in the next three years to fully embrace digital business, according to a Gartner survey of 1 034 CIOs in the region.
“Command-and-control leadership doesn’t suit this digital world,” says Dave Aron, vice-president and Gartner fellow. “In fact, it can be an obstacle. Vision and inspiration are typically the most powerful attributes of digital leaders. CIOs must accept to flip from ‘control first’ to vision first. In EMEA, 65% of CIOs said that they need to decrease their time on commanding IT, while 45% of them said they need to increase their visionary leadership.”
Being a powerful leader and influencer takes time. Running an IT organisation is a complex business, and when the CIO survey results from 2011 are compared to the 2015 CIO Agenda, the findings showed that the average CIO is spending 5% more time (an extra day per month), running the IT department.
“CIOs must make time for leadership,” says Graham Waller, vice-president and executive partner for Gartner Executive Programs. “We found that CIOs with higher performance as IT leaders appoint a deputy responsible for running the whole IT shop day to day. This gives them an extra 5% of time (a day per month), to engage with the board, senior leadership and external customers. In EMEA, 51% of CIOs have such a deputy.”
As well as running the IT department, CIOs must be aware of digital trends on the horizon and even participate in digital experiments and innovations.
“Digital has moved to centre stage, so is the opportunity for CIOs to flip their digital leadership from ‘legacy first’ to ‘digital first’,” says Aron.
The survey found that EMEA CIOs believe they have 42% of the digital leadership responsibility in their business. CEOs see the digital change as more of a team game. Being a powerful digital leader and influencer takes time. CIOs must not view the Nexus of Forces (cloud, information, mobile and social) as the end of the journey to digital business and they should invest in a new set of digital technologies.
In EMEA, 74% of CIOs said they have the Internet of Things on their radar or are experimenting with or already using it.
Seizing the digital opportunity also requires the evolution of information and analytics in the organisation.
“Given the levels of change, backward-looking reporting is less and less valuable. CIOs are shifting the centre of gravity from backward-looking reporting to forward-looking data-led experimentation,” says Aron. “Eighty percent of EMEA CIOs said they are shifting their focus to forward-looking predictive analytics, and 77% are shifting their emphasis to active experimentation informed by data.”
In addition to the opportunities afforded by digitalisation, 91% of EMEA CIOs agreed that the digital world is creating new types and levels of risk for their business, and 61% said that the discipline of risk management is not keeping up.
“CIOs need to work with their chief information security officers whether risk management is adapting fast enough to the digital world,” says Aron.
“To fully grasp the digital opportunity, businesses and CIOs need to ‘flip’ long-held behaviours and beliefs,” he adds. “These are not small changes. They demand commitment and focus from the CIO, and it is critical for CIOs to partner with their most important business stakeholders to develop a shared understanding of digitalisation and what it means for the business.”
