CIO Career Coach: Change the culture in IT

Welcome back to CIO Career Coach, a video series I created with CIO.com and IDG.tv. This season, we’re discussing the skills that top CIOs are developing and leveraging to be successful in the new era of IT. 

In episode one, we talked all about how to take a leadership role in your organization’s digital transformation. Today, we’ll discuss ‘Changing the Culture in IT.’ 

Over the last ten years, IT’s role has been to support or enable business strategy. CIOs needed people in their organizations who could understand a set of business requirements, translate those requirements into technology solutions, and deliver those solutions on time and on budget. 

Business Acumen Critical to IT

But in the new era of IT, when IT informs, or even defines, business strategy, CIOs need a different kind of IT professional. They need to transform their teams from order takers into order shapers and cultivate a new mindset in IT.

In order for IT to deliver on the promises of technology in the digital era, IT professionals need to have better business acumen. In other words, they must understand the business context in which they are working. 

How do you take a team of technologists and give them business acumen? It’s not easy, but it’s a challenge that today’s successful CIOs are working hard to figure out, as you will see in this video. Enjoy!