The white paper “Game-changers: CIOs on digital transformation” has been written by Peter High, president of Metis, a boutique strategy and management consulting firm based in the Washington D.C. area, and author of “Implementing a World Class IT Strategy”. It provides some of the highlights from the discussions around these topics and around how CIOs are shaping the digital agenda of their organizations, taking advantage of technologies like Cloud, Big Data, Security and Mobility to drive better business outcomes.

1. Business white paper
Game-changers:
CIOs on digital
transformation
A report from HP CIO Summit Barcelona 2014

2. Table of contents
1 Introduction
1 Drive change, create opportunities
3 Put yourself in your customers’ shoes
4 Own it
5 Design to compete in the future
6 About the author
Business white paper | Game-changers: CIOs on
digital transformation

3. 1
Business white paper | Game-changers: CIOs on
digital transformation
IT is moving at light speed. The pace of change in IT has never
been faster. And CIOs are playing a greater role than ever.
Introduction
At the HP CIO Summit in Barcelona, December 2014, more than 130 industry-leading CIOs from
businesses and governments across EMEA and the globe gathered to discuss how they are
capitalizing on the New Style of IT to enhance their customers’ experience, enable a mobile and
efficient workforce, and drive new opportunities and revenue streams through IT.
CIOs today are in to driving innovation, seizing opportunities, and creating new revenue streams
for their organizations. Competitive edge is becoming increasingly dependent on the innovative
use of technology to differentiate the business. As a result, we must now ask what this
enhanced role will look like and how we, as business leaders, can perfect it.
Succeeding with the New Style of IT involves combining staples of the modern technological
terrain into comprehensive, multifaceted solutions that can be applied to address three core
business drivers:
• Employee empowerment—Empowering employees with access to the right tools,
connectivity, and mobility will require innovative technological and organizational solutions.
How can IT help retain the most talented workers and enhance workforce productivity by
getting them the information they need, where and when they need it, and in a timely manner?
• Customer experience—Keeping pace and staying ahead of competitors requires a renewed
focus on the customer experience as a core business driver. How can IT impact how the
enterprise interacts with its customers, create client intimacy, and open up new revenue
streams? How can we begin to augment this impact?
• IT-enabled transformation—Maintaining an agile organization in an evolving environment
also requires transformation enabled by IT. How can IT leverage technology’s potential to
transform the way our businesses and governments work?
Drive change, create opportunities
So how can IT leaders and their organizations successfully navigate through these challenges
to reap the rewards of the opportunity, capitalizing on the New Style of IT to achieve desired
business outcomes? This paper explores the answers to these questions and provides
actionable steps that every CIO can begin taking immediately to drive change today and design
capabilities for tomorrow.
Employee empowerment: Perfect the basics by building and maintaining a strong IT core
No IT department can become a source of innovation if the leaders do not manage the basics
effectively. If email is not working or if projects are regularly delivered over budget, overdue,
and of a lower value than expected, IT will never be considered a source of innovation. The
ability to innovate is not a right; it has to be earned.

4. 2
Often, perfecting what already exists requires opening new lines of communication between
IT and the business to ensure both sides are structuring the change to be mutually beneficial.
Doing so will empower colleagues in other parts of the organization to do more impactful work.
When a highly-regarded CIO joined a $14 billion European telecom equipment company in 2011,
the department she inherited was not viewed as a source of innovation within the enterprise.
Referring to the steps taken as “chapters” in her journey, the IT leader’s story provides a
valuable roadmap for transforming IT to better enable its internal customers:
• Chapter one: Sit down with business leaders to understand their challenges and how IT can
begin to address them.
• Chapter two: Look to the cloud as a means of rendering IT more flexible while reducing the cost
base. Provide managerial emphasis on maintaining service levels and security during this time.
With this example we begin to see how maintaining the IT function and perfecting its core
capabilities are imperative to a CIO’s ability to push the function into a new, transformative
domain, serving as a stepping stone to innovation.
“When I reflect on the situation we were dealing with, we had a
lot of dissatisfaction from the user community. I had an IT
organization of very capable, senior IT people, but very
demotivated, and they felt undervalued … The first action for
me was to meet with the business and spend a lot of time
listening to understand their needs and priorities. Then sitting
with my team and saying to them, ‘So how do we need to
reorganize to meet the needs and capabilities of the business
but also to give you an opportunity to increase your skills and
capabilities for future steps?’ With the IT transformation, we
had a great bedrock to deliver the change and become a
strategic enabler for the business.”
- CIO, Global Telco Company
Customer experience: Remember there is only one customer—the end customer
Too often, when an IT leader references the “customer”, he or she is referring to colleagues rather
than the people who directly provide the firm’s revenue. This has multiple negative implications:
• It suggests that IT is subservient to the rest of the organization rather than an equal partner.
• As the saying goes, “the customer is always right.” If your colleagues are the customer, then to
what degree are you positioned to counsel them, tell them when you disagree with them, and
push them to draw different conclusions than the ones that are first apparent to them?
• It declares there is a distance and even a filter between IT and where business is actually done.
For IT to be involved in activities that might grow revenue, it is essential that IT has direct links
to customers and that the entire department understand how value is created.
Business white paper | Game-changers: CIOs on
digital transformation

5. 3
IT-enabled transformation: IT should partner, to a greater extent, with customer-facing
functions to inspire innovation
With a solid grasp on its core services and a renewed culture surrounding the customer, IT
is now in a position to innovate. Fueling the introduction of successful, unique solutions will
require structured processes that equip the IT organization to fully leverage a partnership
with the business.
As stated, the end goal is to impact the organization in ways that grow IT’s influence in the
business and enhance the customer experience. IT is at the pinnacle of this opportunity, as it
is tasked with enabling the transformation of business processes. When polled, 51.5% of IT
business leaders participating at the CIO Summit identified IT-enabled transformation as their
current top-priority business driver.
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes
At the HP CIO Summit, we polled the audience of over 130 CIOs, asking, “How much time do you
spend with your company’s customers?” The majority of IT executives polled (62%) spent less
than 10% of their time with the customers, with 23% spending no time at all with customers.
(See Figure 1.)
This must change for IT to garner the insights to develop top-line and bottom-line impacts to
the enterprise. IT should push to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the rest of the business,
increasing its presence as a driver of value and, ultimately, revenue. At the summit, CIOs
contributed some of the steps they are taking to make this change:
• Using mobile to deliver information about the business to both IT and business functions
• Being the best partner to the line of business; having individuals within the IT function shadow
a leader in “the field” like those of sales or product development
• Brainstorming the collection of new data to give the business and IT enhanced knowledge of
their end customer
• Remaining steadfast in one’s vision throughout the early, most challenging stages inherent to
cultural change
Business white paper | Game-changers: CIOs on
digital transformation
Figure 1.
23%
0%
19
Total: 82
32 14 10 7
1%-10% 11%-20% 21%-30% >30%
39%
17%
12% 9%
How much of your time do you spend with your company’s customers?

6. 4
Though managing this shift presents a significant challenge for business leaders to overcome,
there may be evidence of the cultural tides already turning. Participants in a series of
roundtable discussions at the HP CIO Summit described this phenomenon, noting that IT-
enabled transformation is increasingly being viewed as more of a business issue rather than
solely IT’s issue within their organizations.
As such, IT departments managing large transformations must once again stand shoulder to
shoulder with the business to understand what information it needs and how technology can
provide that. This means pushing technical specialists to think about the end customer, working
backwards from that perspective to enhance the organization’s understanding of its clients.
Own it
Another question during the session revealed that at least 14% of CIOs own their organization’s
customer experience strategy. This is a positive sign for the function as a whole, as it indicates
that at least 14% of those CIOs no longer refer to colleagues as customers. More importantly,
they are already finding ways to partner with leaders in their business to deliver value.
Nonetheless, the fact that 86% of respondents indicated that another functional head owned
that relationship still indicates the imperative for change. (See Figure 2.)
Business white paper | Game-changers: CIOs on
digital transformation
Figure 2.
One way to enable transformation by engaging leaders across the business is to implement
Innovation Labs. In these labs, individuals across various functions form temporary teams and
“sprint” to create a solution during two days of dedicated collaboration. Firms that have used
similar techniques have found that teams often added value as incubators of new, primarily
mobile technologies—many of which were previously being outsourced.
Another way to build relationships with other parts of the organization is to institute the role of
business information officer. The BIO functions as a liaison between the business and IT. Key to
this role is the newfound capability of IT to innovate as a partner to the business.
Knowing the challenges and goals of the various business functions gives IT a holistic
information advantage. CIOs should leverage this shared information to create an environment
where IT, partnering with others in the business, can brainstorm, test, and implement solutions
for constituents.
How to institute a BIO within IT
Have someone from IT who stands in between the functions of the business and technology who,
through embedding into the business, works to understand the needs and future goals of the
different business units (especially, though not limited to, customer-facing ones) as they relate to
those of IT. A diverse array of companies have employed a BIO or business technology officer role.
These include PNC, New York Life, Freddie Mac, Kaiser Permanente, Siemens, and Capital One.
14%
Chief Information
Officer
11
Total: 79
4 34 30
5%
43% 38%
Who owns customer experience strategy in your company?
Chief Digital
Officer
Chief Marketing
Officer
Other

7. 5
Advantages of having a BIO:
• It opens a new line of communication between the business and IT that will become the
foundation of the partnership into the future.
• It gives IT the newfound ability to get a read on demand at the point at which it is generated.
• It enables IT to make direct suggestions about how to solve a need or seize an opportunity.
• This stands in contrast to those scenarios where IT receives fully realized requests from
leaders of other functions and are asked to simply go create or buy it.
Design to compete in the future
As one contemplates the so-called “SMAC” (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud) IT trends, it is
apparent that today’s leading technology trends are actually business trends; each presents
profound top-line and bottom-line implications for the enterprise. The New Style of IT seeks to
capture the advantages of each.
In adopting such trends, here are some tips that modern CIOs like you can use to design your
organization for the future:
• Encourage IT leaders and staff to add other business disciplines to the team to develop an
organizational structure that reflects the increasing pace of business. This will place the
function in the conversation where and when demand is created.
• As IT engages the rest of the organization and its customers to a greater extent, it must
involve them in developing and testing ideas.
• IT must adjust its processes to be more nimble and agile, enabling itself to adapt to the rapid
pace of change as business needs evolve.
• CIOs should instill a deliberate, pragmatic shift in thinking of the IT function’s customer—from
that of internal employees to the business’ actual end customers.
• IT must adjust its technology footprint to be more flexible. The cloud is a big part of that
picture, as it promises more flexibility, fewer fixed assets to manage, and the increased
possibility that technologies can be integrated more easily.
• IT should install processes that equip the organization to leverage a partnership with the
business to innovate in ways that grow IT’s influence while enhancing the customer experience.
• CIOs should consider the potential value to their organizations by adding a BIO or BTO role.
• The IT function should never stop building and maintaining security capabilities, as this
represents a growing and dynamic threat that will continue to outpace its defenses.
Each of these steps will ensure that IT is built for speed. Moreover, it will ensure that a greater
percentage of dollars and people are focused on truly strategic items for the enterprise. With
all the talk of other divisions taking over the more important aspects of IT (marketing being the
most prominent example of this), these steps, enabling the New Style of IT, are the best ways
for IT to maintain a strong and strategic foothold in the corporate hierarchy.
For more information on the HP CIO Summit, visit hp.com/go/ciosummit
For up-to-date and relevant information regarding the issues that all IT organizations are
facing, visit Enterprise Forward. This is HP Enterprise Services’ global platform for forward-
looking thought leadership on business issues, industry trends, and client successes. To learn
more, visit HPEnterpriseForward.com.
Business white paper | Game-changers: CIOs on
digital transformation

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About the author
Peter High, moderator of the HP CIO Summit in Barcelona, December 2014, is the president
of Metis Strategy, a CIO-advisory firm that he founded in 2001. He has been a counselor and
strategist to a great number of CIOs of multibillion dollar companies around the world. Peter
is the author of Implementing World Class IT Strategy (Wiley Press, 2014). He also writes the
“Technovation” column in Forbes and has written a widely read series on “CIO-pluses,” including
“Five Things Successful People Do Before They Go To Bed.” (Access his columns at forbes.
com/sites/peterhigh.) Peter is also moderator of the “Forum on World Class IT” podcast series
(forumonworldclassit.com).
Business white paper | Game-changers: CIOs on
digital transformation
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