I joined my current company as CIO then added responsibilities as the COO. Pretty soon I may add Chief Transformation Officer to my title as well.
I’d say that this thought process is a reflection of the CIO’s evolution in general, because digital consumption and transformation are everywhere. Just look at the big five consulting firms. They are all asking the same kind of questions: “What’s your digital framework? How can we help your company go digital?”
Digital is a fundamental evolution driver across my industry, from technology to process to operating model. This is true not just in terms of the change we want to see, but also where we want to see it, and to what degree we need to make those changes.
I believe that CIOs are the most well positioned to lead this charge. What many lack, though, is a seat at the C-level table to effect the change. Technology becomes a stronger enabler of business every day, but that seat at the table is still vital. You have to have an understanding of where the business is going, where the business wants to go, and what advantages technology can give the company.
True innovation is not simply about technology. It’s about the integration of business opportunity and technology enablement. Digital is the best thing to happen to CIOs in a long, long time, especially if you have a legacy business. We’ve always said that technology advancement flew past business advancement, and that technology paradigms change much faster. They offer businesses huge upsides, but if – and only if – the businesses are willing to re-look at their existing operating models and processes to take advantage of it. The same is true of digital, and in that sense it coincides with exactly where CIOs have always been.
Example transformation: CRM
A recent example of a digital transformation at NN Life Insurance was our CRM system. This was a true collaboration between sales; what we call distribution planning, which works with our independent agents; and, of course, IT. The starting point was that we had 15-year-old technology deployed. We had security vulnerabilities. It was not a mobile solution. Moving from conception to deployment took a lot of work between IT and those business partners. It required understanding how much existing functionality sales needed, as well as capabilities that we could turn on as they became more IT savvy.
In the end, execution of our solution saved at least three and probably four months, because IT understood what sales needed before we chose a solution.
