CIO OPINION
Why you should involve CIOs early in business dialogue
Elias Aad, Partner, Kearney Middle East and Africa
Dennis Hell, Principal, Digital and Analytics
Practice, Kearney Middle East and Africa
Early engagement of the CIO is not just about smart governance; it is a strategic move that unlocks hidden savings across the technology stack. Early CIO engagement represents more than procedural diligence; it delivers measurable efficiencies across IT staffing, infrastructure, and cybersecurity investments.
Organisations that include technology executives at planning inception transition from perpetual problem-solving to strategic value creation, effectively transforming digital capabilities into genuine business performance catalysts.
The challenge of exponentially increasing IT personnel expenditures remains a consistent burden for technology and IT leaders. Especially the shadow IT phenomena, the existence of hidden and duplicated IT roles within business and IT functions, is a large contributor to inefficiencies.
Based on insights from 50 + client projects, shadow technology and IT functions cost organisations on average US $ 1.5 million per year due to duplicated roles, responsibilities, and limited value creation due to duplication of effort.
CIOs and their technology strategy teams must be involved in as early as the programme ideation phase to carefully plan and deploy mission-critical technology and IT resources. Taking a proactive position and defining the technology and IT workforce across the overall organisation will allow CIOs to link personnel expenditures to digital value delivered to the business.
Being in the stretched position to run operations and transformations in parallel, systematic skills and capacity development are needed to deliver the best value and effectiveness from the CIO organisation. The power of AI and automation must also be embraced to automate and optimise IT operations at scale, while shifting the workforce focus from transactional tasks to value delivery.
One of the most successful client stories is IBM with Lee Ji-eun, Chief Technology Officer at IBM, stating, we have achieved a productivity improvement of $ 3.5 billion over the past two years by applying AI to more than 70 business areas.
With the rise of AI and multi-domain technology and IT solution needs, computing and storage capacity
Organisations that include technology executives at planning inception transition from perpetual problemsolving to strategic value creation.
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