CIOs and the Shifting Role of Software Within an Organization

Over the past decade, CIOs have been required to embrace a significant mind shift: viewing IT decisions as a source of strategic advantage rather than one of operational control. Consider the three evolutions that the corporate view of IT and the role of software within an organization have undergone:

• Cost Center: First, IT was required to ensure operational functionality, and the CIO was the buyer.

• Operational Empowerment: Later, IT decision-making was still centralized, but as business units began taking greater control of their own needs, end-to-end solutions became more focused on how they fit with the infrastructure backbone rather than one-size-fits-all approaches. The CIO became the gatekeeper.

• Source of Strategic Advantage: Today, thanks to the democratization of IT, employees expect to have access to the same software they use at home, and most enterprise software is purchased without the CIO’s knowledge. Because employees choose software for its functionality rather than its interoperability, the CIO’s role is to make sure IT can be integrated and that the company doesn’t get burned by a cyberattack. As a result, the entire process in which users find, test and buy software has been turned on its head.

What does this mean for those in the software business? Solution providers now have to appeal to multiple customers within a company, each with its own priorities that drive decision-making:

• The CIO cares about overall IT strategy and infrastructure.

• The CFO cares about return on investment.

• Individual business units care about the actual software that will empower them from the standpoint of their own business and are responsible for selecting the tools that are consistent with both business strategy and the IT/infrastructure strategy.

For most solution providers, the individual business units – not the CIO or CFO – represent the new customer within the company. And that customer wants speed, ease and access to their own information. The cloud has created greater flexibility, allowing business units to choose best-of-breed solutions.

But the decisions they make are not permanent. For that reason, solution providers must think as much about the individual pain point and allowing the user to be the IT professional as they think about selling a company-wide package.

Another seismic shift in the industry is the massive customization of software by end users, or what makes a software solution “sticky.”

The next wave of “sticky” – which has been called “insights as a service” or “cognitive computing” – will show customers both the best practices and results of their own work, as the software becomes capable of analyzing past results, giving an organization more actionable insights to make better informed decisions.

Imagine software as a highway. The focus used to be on making sure different roads connected; now it’s on the individual cars with the global positioning systems always on. In other words, software needs to progress from showing customers information about what they’re doing to acting on that information. And the more information that software can provide to the customer about its own results, and optional routes they can take to improve results, the more it increases its value by the nature of having more data and more from which to learn.

In today’s on-demand world, where technology has become an integral part of nearly everyone’s life, it’s not surprising that the new IT customer is an employee who wants to buy the software she needs, when she needs it, and without having to go through the procurement process. Given the immense advancements in personal technology over the last decade, it also stands to reason that this customer will continue to demand more capabilities from enterprise software. With a broader selection of highly educated users, software vendors and solution providers must keep up with these changing tides.