FEATURE
The best CIOs I know are already thinking less like engineers and more like productobsessed founders.
Balancing‘ now’ with‘ next’
One of the complexities of being a CIO is the management of two opposing aims: flawless stability and bold innovation. If you over-optimise one, you risk starving the other. The only way to sustainably manage this tension between short-term and long-term is through a ruthless commitment to data-driven prioritisation.
At Riverbed, for example, we run a dual-track portfolio which involves 60 – 70 % of our capacity going into protecting and optimising the current business – focusing on our resilience, costefficiency and regulatory compliance. These are the operational foundations that we rely on every day.
The remaining 30 – 40 % is ring-fenced for transformative bets, which we would typically describe as initiatives with the potential to measurably change the value we offer customers, our employee workflows or the income we generate. These percentage allocations prevent us from basing decisions on our gut feelings, which would almost certainly make innovation a casualty of urgent operational pressure.
Again, preserving visibility is key to this approach. Our executive team reviews a transparent‘ innovation backlog’ report every quarter, which gives them insights and forecasts into possible areas for investment. This process gives senior leadership permission to challenge and reprioritise our strategies, fostering a culture of collaboration when preparing for AI and automation deployments.
It also reiterates that innovation isn’ t something we only do when we have the time. Embedding Digital Transformation into your operating model reassures everyone involved that long-term ambition will never be compromised by the effort of endless firefighting – and helps all major stakeholders to feel equally as confident that every decision is backed by real data.
Technology objectives are business objectives The best way my team has found to articulate the connection between technology and impact is to trace a clear line from every dollar we invest to a business KPI within 12 – 18 months. The trajectory of every single initiative we pursue – architectural changes, cybersecurity defence reinforcements, automated workflows or increasing the capability of our AI – has to eventually improve a benchmark the business already cares about.
In order to achieve this level of cost-efficiency, we’ ve baked business metrics into our
26
INTELLIGENT CIO NORTH AMERICA www. intelligentcio. com