A lot has happened over the course of Industry 4.0: In the past, IT was solely responsible for ensuring that a company’s information technology worked. Now the Chief Information Officer (CIO) has much more complex responsibilities. Today, their job is mostly to push the digitalization of the company forward. This includes leading the IT staff both strategically and operationally, while also getting the entire company on board. This makes the CIO more of an interface between the IT department and the specialist departments and less of a pure service provider for provisioning information technology.

The US research and advisory company Gartner recently published a study: CIOs were asked about their willingness to make digital efforts, which had increased among 33 percent of the respondents.[1] The primary goal is that more and more users work via digital channels. But how can these pure efforts be turned into productive progress?

Rethinking your own area of responsibility

It’s long been the case that an IT department head is solely responsible for their own area. With regard to digitalization, IT is largely responsible for a company’s progress. Thus it is also the task of the CIO to enable growth, profitability, and innovation and no longer to “merely” provide information technology.

This goes hand in hand with bringing colleagues from all areas on board, which demands a high degree of communication and negotiation skills from the CIO. Cross-departmental work should be implemented as early as possible so that goals can be set in a timely fashion and so that changes can be taken into account. Leadership qualities are extremely important, but a certain sensitivity to find out what drives employees and what has a positive effect on collaboration is as well. Possible methods include Design Thinking techniques, i.e. agile project management tools such as workshops and feedback rounds. In the digital age, the CIO is therefore not a pure task distributor, but is involved in the individual processes much more deeply and across departments.

Everyone pulls together

These days, every C-level role, from the CMO to the CEO, has a share in a company’s digital success. Are you already familiar with the CDO, the Chief Digital Officer? Many companies have already created a new position for their digitalization. This shows how important digital progress has become. CDOs often have different job profiles, but they usually involve developing technology-based business models. Of course, the CDO won’t take away the CIO’s job. It is much more about having a neutral position between the individual departments. The CIO thus has a better chance of significantly determining the direction in which technology will develop in the company. The primary goal of the collaborative work is to consider all possible risks and to avoid them as much as possible. A modern, agile approach is expedient, and the activities that harbor the greatest risk should be located in the project as early as possible. This way monetary damage in the form of project failure, due to wrong tools for example, could be contained relatively early.

Relying on new technologies

Unfortunately, the lack of IT talent shows no signs of decreasing in the future and is already leading to companies having to automate their processes. This primarily affects simple, repetitive activities in infrastructure management. At the same time, IT will face increasingly complex tasks. New applications are needed that are developed promptly and adapted to individual needs. New applications are needed that are developed promptly and adapted to individual needs. The objective is not to ignore the real need, but to make the entire process of design, development, and maintenance more flexible than was previously thought possible. So only what is really needed is developed, which leads to an enormous increase in efficiency.

Taking a holistic approach is a huge asset, both when working with Low-Code technology and when it comes to project management as a whole. Strategy, structure, and the individual processes should be constantly challenged and spontaneously optimized. The focus is on direct users or employees and managers.