RANCHOS PALOS VERDES — Evidence that IT has turned into a customer-driven enterprise abounds, as changing customer preferences continue to blur the line between the physical and digital worlds. What customers do in your retail stores they also want to do from their mobile phones. That means that the CIO role has moved from the back-office to the front-office.
This year’s CIO 100 theme, “Customers in control: The race to innovate,” acknowledged the shift. Customers are demanding to not only access digital information and services from mobile devices, but to increasingly conduct transactions while on the go. Businesses must understand how to interact with their customers on several new fronts.
CIO must also have the wherewithal to analyze the massive amounts of data generated by these transactions, ideally to harness customer insights that can enable the business to better individually target products and services. CIOs who participated at the CIO 100 at the Terranea Resort demonstrated how they are using anything from mobile and cloud software to analytics and the Internet of Things to serve their employees and customers.