7 Steps You Can Take To Become The Best CIO

CIOs have a lot on their plate and companies have high expectations from them. From having in-depth knowledge of the business to managing change, clearly communicating with the team members to closely collaborating with key project stakeholders, all comes under the responsibility of CIOs. The broad spectrum of skills required to fulfill the CIO role makes it one of the most challenging C-suite roles.
Don’t expect this to change anytime soon especially with businesses heavily lying on technology and technology becoming an integral part of their business. In fact, the role of CIO will become even more daunting with new emerging challenges coming in front of the CIO. Digital transformation, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things will complicate things even further for IT leaders.
How can you do justice to the CIO role? By developing and polishing specific skills required to fulfill the role of CIO effectively.Wondering how you can become a better CIO for your company? Here are seven steps you can take to become a CIO that your company would love.
7 Steps You Can Take To Become The Best CIO
Here are seven steps you can take to become the best CIO.
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Enhance Your Business Knowledge
One area where CIOs lags behind is in depth business knowledge and understanding. They might be great at technology but fall behind in terms of deep understanding of how businesses operate. If you want to become a better CIO, you need to overcome this shortcoming.
Having basic business knowledge is no longer enough. You need to go above and beyond to dig deeper and understand the nuances attached to business operations. That is why more and more businesses are seeking CIOs with an MBA degree and are prioritizing candidates with some non IT experience for CIO roles. These professionals have a better understanding of business as compared to technology professionals and understand business in a much better way.
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Financial Results Visualization
With economic headwinds negatively impacting businesses around the world, IT budgets are either shrinking or remaining stagnant. Board members are looking to extract more value out of every dollar they invest and ask CIOs about the return on investments on their IT investments.
This means that CIOs might have to work harder to get the required budget approved. Requests for adding more Seattle dedicated servers, buying more storage, increasing the network bandwidth will be treated with demands for proving the return on investment.
As a CIO of the company, you should be able to prove the worth of IT projects and investments to board members. You can do that by visualizing financial results and raw data. This not only makes it easier for board members to understand your point but also makes your presentation more engaging and interesting for them.
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Master The Art of Change Management and Agile
Whether you are integrating a new technology or acquiring a new company as a new acquisition or merging with a new company, all this requires careful change management. Integrating the new technology, data of all the new employees after a merger and acquisition into your ERP system is no mean feat. Businesses who can quickly and seamlessly integrate new entities into their systems can easily succeed with change management.
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Communicate Clearly
Technology is full of jargon and technical terms and businesses people struggle to wrap their head around these terms. It is your duty as an IT leader to explain everything from how to login to cPanel to more sophisticated tasks in plain and simple language.
Make them understand what each term means and how each technology works. Avoid going too deep into technical details of the technology and try to use simple examples that business professionals can relate to and understand to get your point across.
This not only makes it easy for you to get buy-in for your technology initiatives from C-suite executives but also allows you to pitch your IT projects more effectively. Once they truly understand the real benefit that these technologies offer, they will start supporting your initiatives instead of opposing them.
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Collaboration Is The Key To Success
Gone are the days when CIOs used to work in isolation and only had to interact with the IT team. Fast forward to today and they are actively involved in strategic business decision making as well. They work together with different stakeholders to make technology integration seamless.
That is why you need to work on improving your collaboration skills.The better you can collaborate with the key stakeholders, the better your organziation will function. Lack of collaboration between IT leaders and other C-suite executives can have devastating consequences for your business.
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Develop Your Interpersonal Skills
Focus on improving your interpersonal skills as it can come in handy during change management, agile, communication and collaboration. Negotiation skills can come handy when negotiating with vendors when you Budget Vps server. Your presentation skills can make or break your prospects of securing the desired IT budget.
Writing and speaking skills can help you with verbal and written communication. Empathy is also crucial for a successful CIO. It enables them to understand where someone is coming from and the pain and suffering they have gone through.
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Ditch The Superman Syndrome
As mentioned above, CIOs already have too much on their plate and most of them think that they possess superhuman capabilities to perform hundreds of different tasks in a day. In reality, that is not true. They are also humans just like you and me. They also have attention spans and limited focus.
They also get tired and need some rest. That is why it is important for CIOs to ditch the superman syndrome and wear their human hat. Instead of trying to focus on dozens of different tasks at once, it is better to narrow them down to two or three every day.
What skills do you develop to become a better CIO? Share it with us in the comments section below.
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