Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 37 | Page 29

+ EDITOR’S QUESTION /////////////////// CLINTON SCOTT, MD AT TECHSOFT INTERNATIONAL C Collaborate with business leaders and expand your audience Aside from reviewing the impact of IT on key enterprise projects and determining how the IT department can best be deployed to support the organisation’s future goals, IT leaders need to go beyond the comfort of engaging with their internal customers alone. In order to realise the full potential of digitisation, they have to expand their audience externally and devote time to addressing the needs of an enterprise’s external customers too. Further, CIOs must challenge their team’s understanding and assumptions of how well they are supporting business leaders, meeting product and/or service priorities and goals. This will help them better define how to get the most out of digital strategies and enablement. Prepare your team to cope with change IT teams are already struggling to keep pace with next-generation technologies and other emerging trends. Added to this are numerous variables, including the outcomes attained from collaborating with business leaders and expanding an audience, that introduce even more change into the processes needed to be undertaken by IT departments. www.intelligentcio.com In this environment, IT leaders must be sure to enable their teams to better map and understand the rapid technological changes that are re-forming their learning spaces. They must instil a culture of learning that embraces change and that can adapt to an ever-changing environment. Change must become a cultural norm and your teams must have the tools to cope with it. “ Adopt a data driven strategy and centralise data analytics MORE AND MORE CIOS ARE EMBRACING THE EMERGING TREND TOWARD MOVING TO A MORE CENTRALISED DATA ANALYTICS APPROACH. As technology and business activities continue to align, and as our ability to collect and mine data continues to grow, it will become increasingly important for IT leaders to double-down on performance metrics. More and more CIOs are embracing the emerging trend toward moving to a more centralised data analytics approach. Especially in light of the fact that analytics is increasingly performed on a much larger scale, and in real time. IT engineers, data scientists and individual business units will have to work together more closely to ensure that business investments are delivering insightful, actionable insights that propel the business forward. Data is the key to unlocking digital success. It is in a CIO’s best interests to make sure his teams are addressing and facilitating its use in business. n INTELLIGENTCIO 29