CIO Forum: Talk more about business, less about tech

CIOs need to talk less about technology and more about business if they want a bigger role in influencing their organisations.

Speakers at the silicon.com CIO Forum agreed that the responsibilities of IT chiefs now extend much further than just delivering technology to the business.

Reuters CIO David Lester told the event that the responsibilities of the CIO are changing: "If you go back 10 to 15 years, the role of the leader of the IT function was to focus on costs and do more with less. It was about automating things people did in business. I think the responsibilities have shifted towards creating value and transformation."

Lester said the emphasis was no longer on simply making processes faster and cheaper, and that the CIO has to keep their eye on driving revenue and creating new markets.

"I think evolution is fundamental; to move from productivity to value creation and transformation. And you have to be able to speak the language of business. CEO's don't want to talk to you about technology," he said.

He added: "The key thing is to move away from the promotion of IT for IT's sake. What you need is a business strategy informed by the possibilities of IT."

But this doesn't mean that CIOs can ignore the basics of delivering robust systems, warned Brian Jones, global CIO at Allied Domecq.

"Influence grows as a result of delivering recognised value - that's the way it works," he said.

Jones said one of the key skills is to manage the huge amount of information on offer: "As we look at the innovation that technology is bringing the trick is to move from providing information to providing the right actionable information," he added.

Cadbury Schweppes CIO Christine Connelly said the trick is understanding the business well enough to know of the 20 things you could do today, which is the right one.

"You have to know which of your company's products you have to work on more than others and which market you have to support more than others. Doing everything else very well won't get you very far if the things we should have done fall by the wayside," she said.