The CIO's role in business transformation

But all that's changed. Today's business success story is old news by tomorrow's papers. Today's small player is just one good idea away from next season's big score. And business �turnarounds� that saved companies in the past require the kind of time, effort and expense that can easily undermine consumer loyalty and investor confidence.

This isn't bad news. Greater change means greater opportunity. But to take advantage of it, you'll need to change your business model. In fact, you'll need to build change into your business model, to create an organization flexible and resilient enough to reinvent itself continuously as it works to seize opportunities and dodge obstacles.

Because in the on demand era, companies succeed only as long as they can transform themselves—quickly, consistently and with the bare minimum of layoffs, write-offs and uncertainty.

Flexible business models are at the heart of this new, resilient organization. They allow companies to seize new opportunities and dodge incoming threats with minimal trauma to employees, stockholders and business partners.

Why transform or why change?

Why change the way you do business? Because everything around your business is changing. And because the list of things that are changing, is changing. The constant that you take for granted today—that supplier, that foreign government, that pricing structure—might be gone tomorrow. That means that you have to build flexibility into your business processes. Found a cheaper supplier? Move quickly enough and you can cut your own prices. Government upheaval? Get into a new market. Prices jumping? You need to cover your costs now.

It's not an easy task. But it means the difference between staying in control and getting overwhelmed by a fast-moving world. Manual processes, inflexible organization and sacred-cow-based strategies will forever impair a company's competitiveness. But a business that changes gracefully will avoid a world of trauma. Through disasters, disruptions and economic downturns, it will continue serving its customers, delivering value to stockholders and holding on to valued employees.

Here are just a few of the challenges that business transformation can help solve:

• Consumers are growing more demanding
• Profits matter more than ever
• Productivity is growing
• Threats are unpredictable

Now the question is who is going to derive this change?? May be the top person or the CIO.. However, some might ask why an organisation would want to promote an individual to a wider role when the IT products they currently deliver are subject to such criticism. Perhaps this perception of failure is in part caused by the restrictions of the CIO's role maybe a wider remit would increase the benefits gained from IT change.

So what are the options for the CIO wishing to embrace transformational change? One option is to become the organisation's transformative officer, a "superstar" role with a board position. Another option is to become a supporting act in managing a collection of outsourcers working for the organisation's chief transformation officer.