Management expectations of CIO & IT team

In this smartbits video “” Zulfikar Deen

( In this SmartBits, Zulfikar Deen outlines  “  Management expectations of CIO & IT team “. The video is at the end of this blog)

Whether the end-user organization is small or large, the challenges remain the same for both of them. For a large multinational multi-billioncorporation, or a smaller organization challenges are very similar. They could be related to security, adoption, consumer understanding, delivery, timeline or quality.

The difficulty for a smaller organization is that IT team is much smaller, not an army of people. They do not have a huge budget to ensure the same challenges are tackled better. With small and shoestring budgets, it is difficult to bring in newer technology and solutions into operations. Not having an appropriate budget is an important challenge, but that doesn’t mean that they will be left far behind. They still have to adapt, invent and have to move at the same speed.

The next challenge is that business leaders come across sound bites (for example Blockchain) from meetings they attend and are keen to implement. Our role is to ensure they distill it correctly and make sure they are used appropriately in context to the business, in relation to the readiness of the systems and ensure they don’t fall too far behind.

Another aspect to be looked at, is the level of board and the top management  CXO organization’s ability to look at technology. Often, CXO’s would neither be a risk-taking forerunner nor they want to lag behind. We need to understand what level of comfort the management has and then we need to play along with that. One needs to watch for a technology shaping up and as soon as it is ready for usage in the system they should start putting it in place.