Is it too soon to announce the arrival of integrated corporate technology leadership? We don’t think so.
We’ve already had several years of debating the merits and distinctive qualities of digital strategies, CDOs (digital), CDOs (data), the reinvention of the CTO and the rise of digital architects. Regardless of where they began corporate life (reporting to the CIO or CMO) we are quickly moving towards a world where some form integrated corporate technology is essential and integrated technology demands a new breed of integrated corporate technology leaders.
We are recommending that we move beyond obsolescent concepts like IT professionalism and IT Executive Leadership to embrace and integrate the newer concepts of agile and lean and new methods like DevOps to keep up with the disruptive strategies of our born on the web and faster competitors.
How can we develop this new breed of corporate technology leadership? We’ll be announcing our way shortly and we’d love to hear about yours.
Corporate Technology Leadership – CIO Development
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Easter Post – Response from Corporate Tech Leaders
Wow, we asked for feedback and comment on our corporate tech leaders blog post and that’s what we got, from some very eminent corporate tech leaders themselves. The comments chain below and my efforts to respond tell the story:
- Corporate tech leaders are at their best when they can blend technology specialism with a deep understanding of your customers and a wide appreciation of your industry.
- To create these corporate tech leaders of the future we’ll have to establish an environment where people can continue to learn and move beyond traditional organisation structures.
- Business unit leads and middle managers must become digitally savvy and learn to manage information and technology in the same way as they manage budgets, and HR.
- From a product or service development perspective digital needs to be front and centre. You must understand digital and your vertical.
- Tech leaders need to shift from delivering IT as a service provider into technology as a driver of business results.
- The next generation of business leaders needs to be technology leaders, and vice versa. This is going to be a key area of how we organise our teams in the future.
- Corporate tech leaders need to understand the business to become true business partners. But it is far more important for business leaders to understand corporate technology. It is as critical as being able to read a P&L or a commercial contract.
- Companies able to break silos and get beyond current organisation structures, reporting lines and titles to get people truly collaborating will win in the long run.
These are excactly the kinds of sentiments we’ve been picking up. After Easter we’ll be announcing our new Digital Leaders Academy programme, which has grown out of three previous Academies designed to get corporate tech leaders up the digital learning curve. We’re there now and we’re in it together.