EY-CIOs-Born-to-be-digital

Accordingly, digital-ready CIOs are keenly aware that they can addvalue by analyzing and innovating existing business processes.Seventy percent of digital-ready CIOs see this as the area in whichthey create the most value for the business, ahead of 61% ofIT-intensive industry CIOs. Furthermore, in considering where CIOsought to create value for their business, 68% of digital-ready CIOspoint to the need to support growth through product innovation,compared with just 51% of IT-intensive industry CIOs.Of course, all this is also a challenge, as EY’s David Nichols warns:“The questions these CIOs are asking are: how best to handle therapid pace of innovation going through the rest of the business,what it means for them, and how to build an IT organization thatcan react to that. These are the key themes that the digital CIO isgoing to have to be concerned with.”Case studyWhy CIOs and CMOs must learn to loveeach other — not only at SAPMichael Golz, Americas CIO, SAPMichael Golz and Jonathan Becher,respectively the Americas CIO andglobal CMO at SAP, believe theirfunctions have changed sofundamentally with the advent of digitaltechnologies — such as big data, mobile,social media and cloud — that marketingand IT have no choice but to forge evercloser relationships. Becher cites theadage that marketers know that halftheir marketing investment is wasted,but do not have any idea which half.“But there’s no excuse any more. Weknow how to measure the return oneverything we do. The single biggesttrend for marketing is to be verydata-oriented,” he says.Of course, this raises specificchallenges in the interface betweenmarketing, which is seeking this insight,and the IT team delivering it. “ITtraditionally comes from theperspective of improving a businessprocess with an implementation over alonger cycle,” reflects Golz. “Now we’rein a world where things are instant —whether it’s data consumption,acquisition or analytics, people expectanswers immediately. To deal with this,IT and marketing must get closer.”To achieve success, IT and marketingmust learn to communicate moreeffectively and collaborate moreJonathan Becher, CMO, SAPclosely. “There are so many differenttechnologies that I think one of IT’sbiggest contributions right now is toguide on how to integrate these all, andbring these pieces together,” says Golz.Unsurprisingly, this requires a far closerCIO-CMO relationship, so that IT cantruly understand what marketing isaiming to deliver, and ensure that this isproperly joined up with the rest of thebusiness. This is especially true asCMOs spend an increasingly largeproportion of their budgets ontechnology. For most, this is now15%-20%, according to EY research. 615%-20%, according to EY research. 6 23Born to be digital |