The CIO's Role in Enabling InnovationThe CIO's Role in Enabling Innovation

Creating Company Value

Aligning technology architecture with business strategy and leading the way for collaboration technologies to enable growth and innovation will define IT as a value center for any corporation. Positioning IT as a value center as opposed to a traditional cost center in the minds of the executive suite, as well as the IT organization itself, is essential to encourage the investment that enables sustainable growth and innovation. IT must become the synchronizing force between technology roadmaps and the strategies they enable, and this means developing new communication skills for many organizations.

Enabling business strategies requires IT to function and communicate effectively in all aspects of running a business. First, IT must measure its success in terms of supporting the operational functionality of the business, while driving sustainable productivity and resilience into processes as fundamental as ordering, shipping, and billing. This continues to be the price of admission for a successful IT function, but it is not enough.

IT needs to consistently deliver business capabilities to support scale or new business models with shorter timelines and improved experiences. Ultimately, IT leaders need to prioritize work and communicate progress in terms of the company’s growth strategies. The technology available today makes this an opportune time for IT to drive a transformational shift from a budget focused primarily on operational efficiency, to a budget evenly allocated to operations, new capabilities, and investment in growth and innovation.

Company innovation, then, requires CIOs to utilize three strategic levers: Embrace and lead the enterprise transformation enabled by collaboration technologies; plan and implement a renewable architecture that enables both personalization and secure scalability in alignment with business strategy; and position IT as the value center it can be within your business. When it comes to innovation, these will be the hallmarks of successful CIOs for years to come.

Chief Information Officer Rebecca Jacoby has more than 12 years of experience at Cisco in a variety of operations and IT leadership roles. She is responsible for making the Cisco IT organization a strategic business partner, and for producing significant business value for Cisco in the form of financial performance, customer satisfaction and loyalty, market share, and productivity.