To fully grasp how to measure success and gauge progress toward goals in any digital transformation, it’s important to understand the shifting expectations of CIOs who must report these objectives and outcomes. The pandemic has substantially changed the role of the CIO, giving them heftier goals and a shift away from IT.
Today’s CIO is no longer solely responsible for the IT department. Instead, the expectation is for them to have a greater influence in solving strategic business challenges. CIOs are now held to higher standards and have great responsibilities, with the assumption that they excel at communication and facilitation. Today’s CIO role also includes business planning and monitoring, transformational development, testing and security and compliance.
Gartner states that, in a technology-driven workplace, 41% of tech producers are within other business units, not in IT. Solutions are being created from those in charge of the bottom line, who make organizational and business decisions. Further, the rise of low-code platforms has accelerated the shift from IT to the business. Finally, as Generation Z moves into the workforce, there will be a significant shift in what this workforce wants and needs to be their most productive and fulfilled. Typically, this generation of workers are masters of autonomy and they strive to impact everything they touch and have greater control over what they handle and take on.
Within this shifting landscape, it can be difficult to understand how to measure and set goals.
Acquire the Right Tools and Frameworks
The first thing CIOs need to provide to this decentralized organization is the right tools and frameworks. These tools, such as value stream delivery platforms (inclusive of CI/CD, testing, artifact management, etc.) coupled with agile frameworks like SAFe provide a consistent method to deliver apps within the organization.
CIOs need platforms that allow them to visualize, manage and monitor progress on an ongoing basis. While this was largely a manual process before, solutions have vastly improved and, luckily, we no longer need to sit in a room and manually whiteboard progress.
Leverage Value Stream Management
This is often new territory for CIOs and can be daunting. CIOs need to be able to protect the organization, facilitate the quality of its solutions and take accountability for the tools being used and sold to its customers. Fortunately, this new power and influence can be managed with value stream management. It is what allows CIOs to keep track and monitor the bottlenecks in the development process. Further, the CIO can provide collaboration tools to help connect users around common processes.
Value stream management can be a powerful improvement tool for organizations. It can serve as a material and information flow map that helps workers and executives continually view their performance and improvements. “Value” emphasizes that the purpose of the work process can prove the value and worth to the customer, while the term “stream” means that the flow of this value is being measured throughout the process.
Set Business Goals, Not Just IT Goals
Digital transformation success for the CIO not only means that technology works, but that it works for the business. That means the goals CIOs set for technology need to meet whatever bottom-line goals are set for the business, too.
Define KPI objectives that align specifically with the business’ goals and focus on relevant metrics that matter. There are a number of types of metrics that CIOs should consider, but each organization will have to choose which are most relevant to their unique business, industry and their business goals: User engagement, customer experience, reliability, availability, active usage (think: Conversion rates, repeat customers/users, daily active users) are all examples.
When choosing your metrics, find those that you can accurately benchmark against past performance. A baseline will prove your worth; without it, it’s difficult to understand value gained. Ultimately, the CIO must ensure that these metrics are valuable to everyone, and stakeholder buy-in is critical. Finally, everyone in the organization needs to be on board with these goals and metrics.
