Interview with Bill Briggs, Chief Technology Officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP
O
ne irony of the digital transformation movement sweeping through dozens of industries today: While technology has never been more crucial to business success, thanks to the rise of IoT, machine learning and AI, the talents needed to succeed as a CIO in 2018 aren’t rooted as much in tech and IT expertise as they are in organizational leadership and strategic thinking.
According to a survey of CIOs by Forbes Insights, today’s CIOs see their most important role as contributors to corporate strategy. That’s a significant development: Just five years ago, most CIOs said technological know-how was at the top of the list. Today, 40% of CIOs see their most important job functions as orchestrating customer-facing solutions, developing new revenue streams and shepherding innovation in their companies.
To learn more about the changes affecting CIOs in the age of AI, we spoke with Bill Briggs, Deloitte’s chief technology officer and co-author of Deloitte’s 2018 Global CIO Survey, to get his insights.
If CIOs are now expected to drive AI and IoT initiatives within their firms, what skills are most critical?
A lot of what they need falls on the softer skill side. CIOs have to become advocates for new technology, and get buy-in from other leaders. That doesn’t mean technical acumen isn’t valued, but the greater need is for fostering broad organizational change.
Three skills that the CIOs we surveyed felt would contribute most to their personal success in the future were not deep tech skills. They were things like creativity, emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility. The old model was you were a tech specialist and that was it. Now, the ability to look into adjacencies and learn new things is what’s important.
But I don’t want to lose the narrative that CIOs need hardcore technology skills. Adopting AI, for example, is less about things like new programming languages and more about a broader category of skills around technology architecture and design.
So business savvy matters as much as technical chops?
It’s technical fluency, but across the business. Historically, we’ve told technology teams that they need to become more business-savvy. Now the flip side has become true: The business side has to become more tech-savvy and understand the value these technologies represent and how we can bring them into the company.
As CIOs look to build out their teams, what skills should they recruit for to align talent with strategy?
In our survey, 60% of CIOs said their biggest talent challenge was finding the right mix of technical and soft skills. With IoT and AI, the ability to integrate, architect and analyze large quantities of data from disparate sources and the ability to present, secure and manipulate this data is very important. But equally or arguably more important are soft skills like creativity, cognitive flexibility and emotional intelligence.
How can CIOs influence others in the organization to embrace the change brought on by IoT and AI?
First, CIOs need to shepherd this change collectively, and push the entire organization to take advantage of tech opportunities. Second, they need to help the business reimagine IT as being organized around products and business lines, instead of being defined by operations. Third, CIOs need to link the first two things to some hard and not-sexy investments they need to make, like migrating infrastructure to the cloud and putting together a better data management framework.
What kinds of things should CIOs be doing to capitalize on AI and IoT?
CIOs can build expertise and an understanding of AI in their own shops before they take it out to the business at large. We’ve worked with a lot of CIOs who decide to prove the value of AI in their own departments before they take it to other places within their companies, like billing and underwriting.
With IoT, there are billions of connected manufacturing lines that aren’t being fully harnessed today. That’s something CIOs can look at strategically and ask, “Can we make sense of all the sensors we have in order to do more with them?” The company might need to modernize to take advantage of them. Core modernization is necessary, but it doesn’t have the allure of other emerging technologies like AI and virtual reality.
How can CIOs win over their counterparts in the C-suite and with boards?
We’re seeing an interesting appetite for CIOs to tell stories about technology investments in ways that resonate with CEOs and boards. This is a great opportunity because it’s how CIOs can shift away from reporting on bits and bytes, and toward something more meaningful and impactful. CIOs have to shape the narrative in such a way that the business isn’t left to the mercy of consultants talking about the new shiny objects to buy.
This is a “nurture not nature” skill. We talk about CIO pattern types in our CIO survey—how CIOs have to learn to move from “trusted operators” focusing on efficiency and cost to “change instigators” and “business co-creators.” In previous years, we’d have said none of the pattern types were right or wrong. Now, and looking into the future, if all the CIO is focused on is being an operator, that’s not enough.
Learn more about how companies are leveraging AI today.
CREDIT: iStock / Yagi-Studio
