In his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz explains that there’s no recipe for starting a business from scratch, creating path-breaking differentiators or establishing a consistent competitive advantage. The hard thing about hard things is that no set formula exists for dealing with these parameters.

A similar situation has emerged in the case of CIOs. As data grows exponentially in volume, variety, and complexity, spurred on by technology-led innovations, CIOs are caught between two contrasting objectives:

1. Establishing, managing and governing a robust tech & data foundation.
2. Leveraging information to generate business value.

Today, the CIO’s responsibilities have grown to include building a core set of capabilities to sense and respond to the hyper-dynamic business and technology ecosystems. This includes modernization, monetization and change management. We often term these mandates as “offense” or “growth” objectives.

Contrasting objectives and the natural course of evolution is taking the CIO role globally through a “lessons learned and scars earned” maturity journey. However, the multifaceted and amorphous scope of the role often leads to high turnover.

As mandates for the CIO evolve, this is the hard thing about hard things. It’s difficult for one person to gather the competency and experience spanning business process familiarity, technology thought leadership, architecture know-how, talent magnetism to build high-performance teams and drive change management to reap long-term benefits.

The Daily Grinds

Many companies underestimate the effort and collaboration required to derive value from data, while CIOs combat the following daily challenges across three discrete, interrelated dimensions: business, technology, people.

Business Challenges:

• Balancing enterprise and business unit goals for data as a service.
  • Complying with the demanding data/privacy regulations.
  • Monitoring data management investments.
  • Tying technology-business data strategies to deliver competitive advantages.
  • Delivering positive incremental results.

Technology Challenges:

• Strategic technology modernization while remedying legacy systems’ complexity and limitations.
  • Managing the data operations while provisioning business data demands.
  • Defining and justifying investments in a future-ready technology roadmap.
  
  

Organizational Challenges:

• Educating decision-makers about the CIO’s true role, value and challenges.
  • Building trust and effectively resolving data ownership conflicts.
  • Elevating data literacy and socializing data-led successes.
  • Hiring and building multifaceted teams to drive the CIO change agent agenda.

Clearly defining what an organization expects of its CIO and then matching capabilities with those expectations is critical to longer, effective and sustainable CIO tenures. Here are five best practices to manage a CIO’s conflicting objectives.

1. Business-Led Data-Driven Strategy

It’s time that the data strategy formulators (the CDO/CTO) bring in their CIOs to collaborate on a cross-functional charter that clearly defines priorities, measurement criteria and outcomes.

CIOs must understand investment synergies across short- and long-term initiatives. Business stakeholders think short-term gains, so CIOs must establish regular cadences about short-term achievements while drawing a clear road map for long-term initiatives toward the organization’s data-driven agenda. CIOs must draw rationally from both time-tested legacy technologies and modern technologies to ensure inclusivity and future readiness.

2. Balancing Priorities: Data Management And Governance Vs. Data For Business Growth

Both data protection and democratization should be taken into account to ensure that neither the data infrastructure is overcomplicated nor does the business compromise on agility.

3. Accelerate cost optimization through modernization 

With inflation and recessionary economy looming, it is natural that most enterprises will look for opportunities to unlock value through cost take-out initiatives. The savvy CIO will find ways to build a business case for technology modernization (such as cloud data stacks) which are inherently variable cost in nature. CIOs will also use a data drive approach to identify opportunities for self-funded cost reduction opportunities.   

4. Manage an ever-complicated landscape of tools and technologies

AI has reached a stage where this blog could have been written by ChatGPT. While this blog was still written by a human, CIOs need to assess the value and the impact of such tools – across data engineering, AI, and functional requirements, to arrive at an informed decision. The hype cycle is real, and to sift through the mud to acquire the required capabilities, CIOs will need to arm themselves with knowledge to navigate through this ever increasing set of technologies. 

5. Be A Change Agent And Emphasize Data Literacy

As organizations prioritize technology over people, they underplay the importance of data literacy in driving business-IT collaboration. Significant efforts must be devoted to improving the data literacy index: organizations’ data, how to access it, data management and enrichment, data monetization, transparency, data-driven success stories, self-serve capabilities and data value delivery.

The CIO must reinforce the strategic importance of data across the organization, marketing in a way that establishes risk/reward engagement models with the business and technology functions.