Struggling with outdated technology? Many Romanian CIOs are. We explore the challenges of legacy systems, as well as the key skills Romanian CIOs need to navigate digital transformation and become business co-creators.
Analyzing the Deloitte’s 2016-2017 CIO Survey results, the interesting conclusion that CIO personalities are fairly similar has been found. More interesting is that this is not the key for their success!!
Seventy-five percent of CIOs share the top seven CIO personality traits/working styles. These include:
– adapting easily to new environments (90 percent)
– focusing on the objective rather than the emotion when working with others (81 percent)
– being early technology adopters (81 percent)
– taking charge (78 percent)
– thinking big picture (76 percent)
– tolerating confrontation (75 percent)
– tolerating risk (75 percent)
Strong majority of CIOs share similar personality traits and working styles. Thus, the findings suggest a CIO’s “nature” does NOT determine a CIO’s ability to create value !!
In addition, successful CIOs have the ability to adjust their personal style based on context. They are versatile in adapting to the needs of the moment.
Key to their success may be the ability to assess themselves and their teams in the context of driving business value. This allows them to better respond to changing business needs.
Deloitte’s 2016–2017 global survey of CIOs collected the opinions and insights of more than 1,200 CIOs across:
- 23 industry segments
- 48 countries
I came across some particularities for CIOs in Romania, which I share bellow:
1. Beyond Legacy Systems: Romanian CIOs Chart a Course for Future Success
Romanian CIOs grapple with the current perception of their roles while facing a disconnect between future goals and existing skills.
Current Perception of Romanian CIO Roles
Majority of Romanian CIOs see themselves as Trusted Operators (ensure operational excellence). Whereas a third see themselves now as Business Co-Creator (business leaders first). They work with the other executives to shape, refine and execute business strategy. At the same time, they juggle competitive priorities and balance cost and efficiency with revenue generation, innovation and customer imperatives.
More than 75% see themselves to become Business Co-Creators in the future
Romanian CIOs seem focused on delivery and favoring attention for technology vision and leadership and their teams.
More than half of IT managers see their role as:
- providing the technical vision and evolution direction to their technical teams
- motivating and retaining their teams,
- ensuring an attractive and safe environment for them (Attractive with respect to projects interesting for their teams. Safe as in shielding them as much as possible from the office politics. Consequently allowing them to concentrate on technical work)
They deal with the internal image of IT in influencing stakeholders, comprehending and communicating to the business the financial impact of IT. Thus, they communicate using their interpersonal skills.
The Disconnect Between Future Goals and Current Skills
Although ability to influence internal stakeholders is positioned as an enabler for success in the future by majority of Romanian CIOs, ability of comprehension of market and disruptive business forces does not seem to be one for future success, except for a quarter of them.
Romanian CIOs favor with large majority technology vision and leadership as enabler for their future success, backed by their future ability to attract, motivate and retain talent.
The human resources focus might be seen as a particularity for Romanian market. Consequently, competition on IT resources has steeply increased in the last years, once with opening of IT services centers by global Technology companies or banks.
Their focus on the two abilities above is very similar with doing more in the future of the same today and that is not leading to future Business Co-Creator role.
Building new abilities like comprehension of market and disruptive business forces or being versatile and adaptable to context might be in the blind spot for some.
2. Retooling for Transformation: How Romanian CIOs are Hiring to Overcome Legacy Systems and Drive Business Value
The most important organizational capabilities essential to Romanian CIOs success are:
(1)-Alignment to business & performance goals and business engagement
(2)-Project execution and solution delivery
(3)-Innovation & disruption – enable business innovation through technology and identify emerging technology to disrupt the business
Interesting to note is that (1) and (3) are business related and (2) is execution of business transformation programmes, all somewhat in area of change – its initiation and delivery – and outside the Business As Usual.
The current status though is that 50% of Romanian CIOs do not feel comfortable with (1).
75% do not feel comfortable with (2).
Great majority of Romanian CIOs dissatisfied with (3) and 15% of them indicating that this capability does not exist.
Therefore, Romanian CIOs recognize the existing gap and the significant room for improvement in these areas enabling their success.
To some extent, this is also seen in the skills, the large majority of Romanian CIOs intend to hire, i.e. Analytics & Data Science, Systems Thinking & EA, Customer & Digital Experience, Project & Programme Management.
3. Beyond Replace or Repair: Romanian CIOs Chart a Course for Legacy System Evolution
Romanian CIOs face a modernization imperative for legacy systems, while exploring effective approaches to system management.
Legacy Systems: A Modernization Imperative for Romanian CIOs
There is a clear expectation for 75% of Romanian CIOs that legacy systems modernization will have the most impact on their business, in the near future. This is followed in opinion pf 50% of them by analytics & BI, digital (mobile, social, web, IoT) and cybersecurity
Core systems currently driving current organizations’ business processes. Majority of Romanian CIOs find that these are :
- first, challenging for business to operate
- and second, stable, but difficult to update/enhance
This might be one potential reasons for which Romanian CIOs find that their organizations lack capabilities in (1) and (3) above.
Approaches to Legacy System Management
In this context, 50% of Romanian CIOs expect to replace and swap existing systems for new ones with more functionality and flexibility, 25% to revitalize legacy systems (enhance usability/design, digital extensions to core processes, add analytics) and 25% re-platform them (upgrade underlying infrastructure).
Accordingly, it is interesting to note that none from our sample is consider to retire existing system and look for alternative solutions in the cloud. Legacy systems are here to stay in various forms.
Zooming on analytics and BI
- 50% of Romanian CIOs see the area benefiting of most significant investments to be visualization, aggregation, reporting and acting on business operations data.
- A third of them indicate customer data (experience, engagement, retention) and a quarter indicate large quantities of data (IoT, Big Data) through machine learning and cognitive computing.
The scope of digital activities of Romanian CIOs is diverse:
- more frequent occurrences for technology enablement (mobile roll-out, social collaboration tools), business model innovation, customer engagement and employee empowerment
- fewer for new product development and marketing communication.
I turn what I go through into experience I can use.
I turn these experiences into wisdom, a kind of learned understanding.
This wisdom helps me make better choices.
Sharing this wisdom helps others navigate their own experiences. Thus, by teaching them, I solidify my own knowledge even further.
It’s a continuous loop of growth.