How a CIO can have the CEO’s ear

Here is how a typical introspective conversation plays out inside a CEO’s head:

“I wish my Chief Marketing Officer knew where those marketing budgets are going. What is working and what is not? I am sick of the ‘gut feel’ answers every time I ask her/him this question”

“I wish there was a way of knowing beforehand which of my customers are not likely to renew their subscription, so that we could do something about it. My sales team really does not understand our customer well”

“Our long term enterprise value would drastically improve if we can just identify those customers that have higher life time value and treat them differently. Unfortunately today we focus on the big spenders of today who may not provide the best value over their life compared to some of the new customers who can probably stay longer and generate more value. I wish my customer service team could identify this group and treat them better”

“If only we had a better forecast of spare part needs, we could manage our inventory better and add a few critical basis points to our bottom-line”

Indecisive mode There are several business leaders today who get into an indecisive mode when they are not sure about their ‘gut feel’ and end up not making any decision and staying with the status quo. This typically leads to a missed opportunity or decline in business.

How often as a Chief Information Officer (CIO) would you say it is your responsibility to get answer to these questions? You said: ‘Always’, is it? Great! I wish every other CIO was like you, but unfortunately we find comfort in our technology backyard and believe these are questions and headaches of the business groups and not ours. The truth is, the CIO’s team has the ability to answer these questions way better than any of the other business team could.

No-rocket-science approach To be your CEO’s best friend, understand the basic business issue from the CEO’s vantage point, for example: “Our shareholders are in alignment with the slowdown in our industry and are okay with the topline growth we are doing but are expecting more margins by streamlining our internal operations” vs “It is all about market share by grabbing customer’s mindshare. Once we are sizeable, we can drive margins by higher operational efficiency” scenarios.

Break down high-level issues to smaller ones that may manifest in the different functions within the organisation such as: how would it affect marketing?

How should sales react to it? Where will those operations guys go and hide? They are already under so much pressure to cut costs.

Check with function heads to see what their experience tells them- through their ‘gut feel’, it is how experience manifests in most business leaders. Now come back to your floor and look for data that can help validate/invalidate the ‘gut feel’. If data supports the ‘gut feel’ then the functional head should feel more confident in the decisions they make based on this validation of their gut feel.

Today most CIOs consider themselves a ‘support’ team within the organisation and are more than willing to be ‘led’ than be part of the ‘leadership’ team in the organisation. If the CIO team instead identifies itself as part of the problem and also part of the solution, they could get into the ‘friend’ list of every CXO including the CEO.

The writer is the Executive Director, Sunstone Business School.

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