Recently, the CEO from Commonwealth Bank announced an acceleration of the organisation’s digital strategy to provide customers “with one of the best digital experiences of any company globally.” Similarly, Woolworths Group CEO promoted the digital upskilling of staff to meet the technological advances in retail, including AI and cloud computing.
For IT and digital management, this kind of executive attention and visibility is a holy grail, and yet it’s also one that will become more prevalent.
Indeed, one report found that 80 percent of CEOs have changed how they use technology after last year. Over three-quarters “increased their companies’” adoption of new technologies; the same number expect their technology investments to continue increasing.” Another large-scale survey found top CEOs are now “technology-obsessed”.
As CEOs take a more active interest in their IT and digital practices as financial growth vehicles for the organisation, one might expect that visibility to translate into increased technology budgets. We are already seeing this firsthand in Australia, with CEOs now wielding substantial power over the digital purse.
It’s worth looking at why this has happened and how it is likely to develop further in Australia.
First, IT’s and digital’s improved visibility with the CEO is no accident. They were, after all, powerful enablers for getting their organisations through some rough times last year.
But there’s more to it than that.
IT has traditionally had an ‘explainability’ problem. Its benefits are often wrapped up in technical metrics that aren’t easily correlated with a broader business benefit.
Top CEOs are cutting through that. They’re making the translation, at least publicly. In doing so, they are shifting IT’s status internally from being seen as a cost centre to a profit centre. Digital technology is relevant to the CEO’s interests, and they are getting fully behind it.
There are multiple ways CEOs can determine - or receive - that value or benefits translation.
Traditionally, part of the CIO’s role was to act as a translation point between IT, Executive Committee and the Board. But as more CEOs and directors with technology experience - or an interest in digital - are appointed, they are taking on more of this translation effort themselves.
This trend hasn’t gone unnoticed by the makers of technology. Behind the scenes, metrics and monitoring tools that traditionally sat in technical domains are evolving into ‘translation’ engines, matching performance with productivity and tech spend with savings.
These types of monitoring tools were used by network teams to measure the availability and performance of applications and the duration of downtime. As technology professionals, we understand all these things impact productivity and have some sort of flow-through financial impact, but this translation isn’t readily done in the tools, nor is it accessible to the Executive Committee.
That’s changing.
Businesses are rapidly adopting digital solutions to improve how they go to market, innovate, and connect with their customers. To quantify and facilitate that improvement in digital experience in your business context, you need to be able to monitor and measure. As a result, the more traditional approach of reporting purely technical metrics needs to change, and monitoring tools are now being configured with CEOs and Executive Committees in mind. They take an end-to-end view of a business process and define what would constitute an improvement to that process - and therefore to the business.
What would faster initiation times for a popular application do for staff productivity? How does process maturity or minutes saved in one aspect of a process correlate with financial growth? What collective benefit might be finding five extra minutes per customer service agent per day produce for the company and its goals?
For the CEO to spearhead digital efforts and drive digital improvement from the top, this data is an invaluable reference point. For digital and technology teams wanting their CEO to become more of a digital evangelist, this type of translation tool’s emergence is equally exciting.
More than ever before, organisations are judged on customers’ digital experience and as such, user loyalty will be influenced by a company’s cloud-based apps and services. In this new reality, application availability, ease-of-use, and speed will become business critical. Whether you’re a company focused on e-commerce or a professional services company with global operations, insights into digital experience represents an opportunity for IT to shake the internal perception of being a cost centre and to establish a new status as a profit centre in overall organisational support for sales, workgroup collaboration and customer experience. Digital experience is the IT outcome that matters most. By tracking performance data that matters, IT can empower CEOs to see that too.