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The State of the CIO

Jonah Kowall

Today’s CIOs face a daunting task: They must move their enterprises from a traditional organization, with some degree of optimization and automation, into the digital business age. Digital businesses are software-defined — dependent on or driven by software, and leveraging software-derived data to drive decision-making. In order to move businesses into the digital age, much needs to evolve, including innovation, leadership, organization, and culture within IT.

These changes often are driven by a chief digital officer or a digitally savvy CIO. There is no doubt that CIOs and CEOs have a close relationship, which is bound to become closer as businesses digitize. According to Gartner’s CIO survey data, 41 percent of CIOs are reporting to their CEO. This is a return to one of the highest levels recorded by Gartner CIO surveys, a result of the digital narrative gaining prominence in the boardroom and on the executive committee. Even stronger evidence of opportunity for CIOs is the fact that the survey reveals that CEOs expect them to lead the digital charge during this critical transition period.

Tenure for CIOs is normally short due to high expectations from CEOs and demands from business unit leadership for IT execution. There does seem to be a disconnect between CEO expectation and what the CIO is executing upon. The level of communication and trust between executives must improve. What this indicates is that higher prioritization is required not only for digitizing the business, but for creating business transaction and impact visibility through data collection and analytics.

These business model transformations require a much greater degree of experimentation and agility, and the understanding and meaning of failure must be re-examined. Although human nature makes us fear failure, some degree of failure should be accepted, especially when experimenting with new capabilities that must be learned. Experimentation should take the form of smaller bets, which can be adjusted and changed quickly, without stringent processes inhibiting the experimentation. If these experiments are successful, they may become strategic initiatives.

Metrics are critical to measuring the success of IT. In the Gartner 2015 CIO Agenda, the following indicators are most often used:


The top IT performance metric is cost, which shows the need to constrict IT spend. Normally this takes the form of data center efficiency gains and running as lean and automated as possible. This frees up dollars for innovative experiments, versus day-to-day operational work. The use of better data and advanced analytics will create new cost savings and opportunities. IT operations analytics will play a big part in this, as the ability for people to manage operational efficiency is becoming too difficult with the complexity in environments today.

The number two metric is service levels, which are a constant struggle due to the way service levels have been measured. In Accenture’s Business Technology Trends Report 2015, experience matters most: 89 percent of business leaders surveyed by Accenture believe that customer experience will be their primary basis for competition by 2016. In my regular discussions with CIOs, ensuring service levels is an issue. Before undergoing any kind of change or improvement, the quality of IT services must be measured properly. Most CIOs have been trying to understand why IT isn’t the first to know when there is a system degradation or outage. This can be most often attributed to two things, one being a focus on infrastructure instead of applications, and the second being a limited view of the end-user experience. End-user focus is key in order to measure business differentiators. Users do not exercise infrastructure specifically; instead, they conduct transactions which traverse infrastructure components. The transaction should be the unit of measure of business, and employees should be bonused and tied to those measures. These issues most often lead towards APM discussions to help solve both of these service level gaps.

I hope this post was helpful and thought-provoking. Future blog topics for the CIO include driving business decisions off data, changing sourcing strategies, innovation and bimodal IT, mobile-first, and a focus on some high growth geographies.

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The State of the CIO

Jonah Kowall

Today’s CIOs face a daunting task: They must move their enterprises from a traditional organization, with some degree of optimization and automation, into the digital business age. Digital businesses are software-defined — dependent on or driven by software, and leveraging software-derived data to drive decision-making. In order to move businesses into the digital age, much needs to evolve, including innovation, leadership, organization, and culture within IT.

These changes often are driven by a chief digital officer or a digitally savvy CIO. There is no doubt that CIOs and CEOs have a close relationship, which is bound to become closer as businesses digitize. According to Gartner’s CIO survey data, 41 percent of CIOs are reporting to their CEO. This is a return to one of the highest levels recorded by Gartner CIO surveys, a result of the digital narrative gaining prominence in the boardroom and on the executive committee. Even stronger evidence of opportunity for CIOs is the fact that the survey reveals that CEOs expect them to lead the digital charge during this critical transition period.

Tenure for CIOs is normally short due to high expectations from CEOs and demands from business unit leadership for IT execution. There does seem to be a disconnect between CEO expectation and what the CIO is executing upon. The level of communication and trust between executives must improve. What this indicates is that higher prioritization is required not only for digitizing the business, but for creating business transaction and impact visibility through data collection and analytics.

These business model transformations require a much greater degree of experimentation and agility, and the understanding and meaning of failure must be re-examined. Although human nature makes us fear failure, some degree of failure should be accepted, especially when experimenting with new capabilities that must be learned. Experimentation should take the form of smaller bets, which can be adjusted and changed quickly, without stringent processes inhibiting the experimentation. If these experiments are successful, they may become strategic initiatives.

Metrics are critical to measuring the success of IT. In the Gartner 2015 CIO Agenda, the following indicators are most often used:


The top IT performance metric is cost, which shows the need to constrict IT spend. Normally this takes the form of data center efficiency gains and running as lean and automated as possible. This frees up dollars for innovative experiments, versus day-to-day operational work. The use of better data and advanced analytics will create new cost savings and opportunities. IT operations analytics will play a big part in this, as the ability for people to manage operational efficiency is becoming too difficult with the complexity in environments today.

The number two metric is service levels, which are a constant struggle due to the way service levels have been measured. In Accenture’s Business Technology Trends Report 2015, experience matters most: 89 percent of business leaders surveyed by Accenture believe that customer experience will be their primary basis for competition by 2016. In my regular discussions with CIOs, ensuring service levels is an issue. Before undergoing any kind of change or improvement, the quality of IT services must be measured properly. Most CIOs have been trying to understand why IT isn’t the first to know when there is a system degradation or outage. This can be most often attributed to two things, one being a focus on infrastructure instead of applications, and the second being a limited view of the end-user experience. End-user focus is key in order to measure business differentiators. Users do not exercise infrastructure specifically; instead, they conduct transactions which traverse infrastructure components. The transaction should be the unit of measure of business, and employees should be bonused and tied to those measures. These issues most often lead towards APM discussions to help solve both of these service level gaps.

I hope this post was helpful and thought-provoking. Future blog topics for the CIO include driving business decisions off data, changing sourcing strategies, innovation and bimodal IT, mobile-first, and a focus on some high growth geographies.

Hot Topics

The Latest

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Despite the frustrations, every engineer we spoke with ultimately affirmed the value and power of OpenTelemetry. The "sucks" moments are often the flip side of its greatest strengths ... Part 2 of this blog covers the powerful advantages and breakthroughs — the "OTel Rocks" moments ...

OpenTelemetry (OTel) arrived with a grand promise: a unified, vendor-neutral standard for observability data (traces, metrics, logs) that would free engineers from vendor lock-in and provide deeper insights into complex systems ... No powerful technology comes without its challenges, and OpenTelemetry is no exception. The engineers we spoke with were frank about the friction points they've encountered ...

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The power of Kubernetes lies in its ability to orchestrate containerized applications with unparalleled efficiency. Yet, this power comes at a cost: the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral nature of its architecture creates a monitoring challenge akin to tracking a constantly shifting, interconnected network of fleeting entities ... Due to the dynamic and complex nature of Kubernetes, monitoring poses a substantial challenge for DevOps and platform engineers. Here are the primary obstacles ...

The perception of IT has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. What was once viewed primarily as a cost center has transformed into a pivotal force driving business innovation and market leadership ... As someone who has witnessed and helped drive this evolution, it's become clear to me that the most successful organizations share a common thread: they've mastered the art of leveraging IT advancements to achieve measurable business outcomes ...

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