In the age of the customer, the focus of technology management must shift toward winning, serving and retaining customers. Understanding how and where to prioritize this shift is a critical aspect of technology leadership. This report describes the landscape of options CIOs must navigate—options that both simplify existing information technology services and accelerate new business technology. Key takeaways from this report: focus scarce resources on Business Technology (BT) initiatives, reduce complexity by simplifying Information Technology Legacy and prepare the technology organization with new skills.

As CIOs scan the age of the customer landscape and envision the role they’ll have to play for their businesses to win, they’ll need to navigate two overarching challenges: Legacy IT money pits to avoid and BT hills to climb. These technologies are typically in areas that directly impact the customer experience, like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), order processing, mobile applications and customer analytics. These initiatives require different skills, new technologies and a partnership between CIOs and business leaders.

In efforts to address these issues, the CIO strategy is to simplify legacy and embrace business technologies. To free up resources to improve customer experience, CIOs are simplifying legacy systems and services while redesigning systems of engagement. Specifically, they are:

• Reducing legacy complexity and increasing legacy access through Application Programming Interface (APIs): Complex legacy systems are a barrier to BT; they increase costs, reduce flexibility and increase the difficulty of new projects. Forrester’s Survey of 2016 stated it to be top priority of US software decision-makers to update or modernize key legacy applications. Another common tactic is to implement services in layers and provide APIs to these services. By doing so, CIOs reduce the connectivity complexities of their legacy IT systems, making them accessible and less of an obstacle for BT innovation.
• Expanding relationships with cloud infrastructure suppliers: Suppliers of cloud infrastructure services use increasingly common hardware components, interconnects, system software and management interfaces to offer true substitutes for generic capabilities.
• Adopting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications: According to Forrester’s Survey 2016, 45% of US enterprise respondents said that increasing the use of SaaS is a “high” or “critical” priority. Many enterprises are looking to SaaS Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to better meet the needs of their subsidiaries or smaller business units.
• Upgrading systems of engagement and insight: To win in the age of the customer, you’ll have to systematically understand and serve increasingly powerful customers. The mechanisms to do that are your company’s systems of engagement and insight that apply social, mobile, big data and other digital technologies that empower customers.

CIOs are also transforming their organization’s culture, role with the business, skills, structure, and methods. To reorganize for growth and customer obsession, these business transformations include a redesign of all or major parts of their technology organization. As part of these redesigns, they are: shedding technology obsession in favor of customer obsession, becoming an assertive business partner, transforming their organizational structures for speed and reskilling their organizations. As technology organizations shift away from back office functions to client-facing ones, new skills are required. At the top of that list are data analytics, digital vision and strategy and culture change/change management. Interviews with firms transforming to be more customer oriented highlighted skills in security, enterprise project and program management, integration and architecture as high priorities. Similarly, skills in design thinking and customer journey mapping are on the rise as CIOs learn from their customer experience peers to build customer empathy and embrace a disciplined approach to digital customer experience design, development and delivery.

Going forward, the recommendation for CIOs is to connect your BT agenda to CEO’s Customer Obsession. This includes helping define the firm’s operating model for customer obsession as well as redefining the role of CIO to enable BT.

Hear more about how organizations are becoming more customer centric by adopting SaaS applications at COLLABORATE 18, April 22 – 26, 2018. Register before March 8, 2018, to save up to 40 percent. Stay up to date with the latest conference news by following @QuestUserGroup on Twitter and look for the official COLLABORATE 18 hashtag, #C18LV!