The CIO Role Post-Pandemic – Top Trends

While COVID-19 was clearly a massive challenge across all consumer organisations, the CIO function in those businesses was particularly hard-hit. Enforced shifts in business models, for example B2C companies transitioning overnight to D2C, employees abandoning their offices for remote working, the scarcity of supplies and the impossibility of effective inventory planning – all, to a greater or lesser degree, fell squarely on the shoulders of the CIO. Post-pandemic, the thirst for transformation seems to have accelerated rather than abated, so it feels like an apposite time to share the key trends that we are seeing in the function:

1 – Success Has Many Parents The complexity of the technology organisation in consumer companies is at an alltime high, with a plethora of new titles (Chief Technology Officer, Chief Data Officer, Chief Digital Officer etc) and a spreading of ‘technology’ responsibilities across the business, particularly in terms of digital transformation. There is an increased need for functional leaders to be broader influencers and enablers, recognising that they cannot do everything themselves, but also ensuring that any local tech initiative or digital advancement in another function fits into the overall technology strategy.

2 – Thinking Long and Short While increased automation is clearly still high on the CIO agenda to provide longterm savings, free up time for more value-added tasks and increase the attractiveness of roles, there is also now a real need to embrace more short-term technology solutions. Rather than only trying to find enduring additions to the tech stack, there seems to be an acceptance that short, sharp interventions and quick wins can often be more valuable, even if the technology needs to be replaced sooner than would previously have been acceptable.

3 – Prepare for The Top Job We are still some way from CIOs regularly stepping into the CEO role for consumer companies, but the trend is definitely in the right direction. Given that technology is now at the heart of most business transformations, the focus of the CIO role is shifting significantly away from IT operations and pure technical know- how, towards broader company strategy and enterprise-wide growth. Conversations with CIOs confirm that their softer skills - relationship-building, influencing without direct control and developing teams - are now equally, or sometimes more, valued than their tech skills.

4 – It’s All About The Numbers In recent times, CEOs have recognised that a large part of their successes or failures came down to the quality of actionable data in the business. Most transformation programmes, for example process automation, have data as their backbone. This is reflected in the rise of the Chief Data Officer role which has moved from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have” and has now reached a status close to that of the CIO. While FMCG companies were mostly behind the curve on data pre-pandemic, only having isolated advanced analytic initiatives or spending more time on lower-value programmes like data cleaning, they have been catching up fast in the last two years.

5 – Leave It To The Geeks It goes without saying that, to get the best out of a high-class CIO/CDO function, the rest of the organisation needs to work closely with it. However, there is still an innate barrier to true partnership, with other functions typically having much stronger bonds between them. This often stems from a historical mistrust of the IT function or a lack of knowledge/confusion over new technology and what it can do. Since many of the decisions needed to make a success of technology projects, for example a new ERP system, are taken outside of the CIO function, it is vital that key technology projects have Board focus and sponsorship.

From our recent conversations with technology leaders, it appears that raising the technology capability of a business steadily across all areas – data, the tech stack, digital transformation etc – is a reliable path to success. This can take a little more time (and be a little more low-key), compared to putting all your investment in one, attention-grabbing area but will typically pay dividends.