This week I am leading a discussion with 
Topic 1: Redefine: The Digital Enterprise
• What are your successes in building a roadmap for a digital strategy?
• How do you secure organization-wide support for digital initiatives?
• How do you demonstrate ROI on digital initiatives?
Topic 2: Redefine: Innovation in a Digital Space
• How do you balance the day-to-day while creating innovative practices?
• What is your strategy on innovation — buy or build?
• How do you steer your organization toward new technologies (AI, machine learning, smart devices)?
• What talent skillsets are needed in the new digital environment?
Topic 3: Redefine: Customer Engagement in a Digital World
• What partnerships within the business are you leveraging to build a customer experience?
• What are you doing to understand your current and prospective customers?
• How can you influence the business to meet the needs of the digital consumer?
The role of CIO has been shifting for a long time. In many cases, the “Digital” concepts or technologies are treated as strategic tech as opposed to operational tech. This logical separation is creating more costs overall. Business leaders in many companies are making technical decisions on the promise of cloud technologies that are self contained and self sustaining. Unfortunately, the promise of cloud doesn’t mean untethered technologies. The responsibilities for data management, security, compliance, sanctions and EA still reside with the company. Historically speaking, CIO’s have been prepared to deal with the many challenges companies face with tech but they can’t fight for the corporate cause in an ungoverned wild west state of digital. The business often times finds itself in trough and when in pain goes back to IT for help. Since IT never knew that the business was going all in on platforms and services on their own, the CIO never had a chance to prepare and budget for core service support. The end result is more cost, more pressure, slower time to realize delivery. Finally, the rush to get experts and high value talent in play to recover and save projects from the downward spiral.
I will post some reflection on this discussion. It feels normal now to hear that CIO’s expect to be on the job for 3 years or less. It feels normal to also hear them talking about how their roles are shifting to something for of CTO as the cost centers are drained by the credit card happy business leaders that have an itch to get what they want, when they want based on the promises of the cloud.
The Cohenization Project 